TIME for another Letter From A Friend. The last time I shared some thoughts from my friend MD in the Diaspora was in May. It is always fun discussing and arguing with MD…he is well read, and an extreme free thinker.

He’s back, contrarian, and controversial as ever.

MD emailed me to say:

I have just finished reading a book titled 12 Years A Slave by Solomon Northrup. There is a recent movie released with the same title [directed by Steve McQueen].  The story [is a memoir of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped, sold into slavery and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana before the American Civil War] is actually based on the experiences of Northup.

I am looking forward to watching [Kenyan actor and movie maker] Ms Lupita Nyong’o as she plays the role of Patsey (a very miserably treated black girl in Solomon’s story).

Anyway, there is a very terrible resemblance (at least in character) between the Kenyan MPs currently at The Hague and the last owner of Solomon Northup before his freedom is restored.  The greatest irony is that poor Patsey (played by Lupita) remains in bondage at the end of the story…

I REPLIED TO MD, noting among other things, that:

I have been reading rave reviews about Lupita Nyongo’s performance [and of optimists saying an Oscar is not inconceivable], and I was just happy to read about a Kenyan/Kenya in a different context other than ICC ad nauseam.

You should watch the documentary In My Genes, that she directed and produced, about what it means to

Lupita as Patsey in the film !2 Years A Slave.

be live with albinism in Kenya/Africa. You need to watch it alone if you don’t want anyone to see you crying at your age.

But what was striking was that a person so young, could look at society in such a different and compelling way. You should also watch Nairobi Half Life, a most dramatic shattering of middle class illusion about urban Kenya by  David “Tosh” Gitonga. I thought the South African award-winning movie Tsotsi had broken new ground, but Tosh takes us to very uncomfortable places and forces us to reboot seriously.

Even when Africa looks terribly depressing, these things give me hope—the young ones might, yet, redeem us all.

MD never disappoints, he replied with an out-of-the box take on the future of Africa:

I have come to a very unconventional conclusion about why even Generation Y or the

Digital Generation may not make a large enough impact on Kenya or African society at large.  The reason that might not happen is that we do not have a critical mass of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) citizens in influential positions.

Black youth at a LGBT parade in New York – is this where the future of Africa lies?

Traditional family life tends to tie people down.  But more importantly, family life has this strange way of appealing to our more conservative nature.  To the contrary, LGBT people are mostly free from the yoke of the old kind of marital bliss, or the bonds that bind parent to child.

Otherwise, as soon as mommy’s belly starts bulging, the family moves to the more “middle class neighbourhoods”.  They will start chasing after the “right schools” and the “right tutors”.  Career becomes even more important.  Hours upon hours are spent swinging golf clubs and pretending to be genteel, time that could have been devoted to a different way of thinking.

If you do pray, ask whoever your God is to give Africa its rightful share of LGBT people!

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In CRISIS IN THE GREAT LAKES 5: Circling The Wagons, And The Smell Of Diamonds, Oil, And Money In The Air, we explored the interests that South African President Jacob Zuma’s favourite nephew Khulubuse Zuma, and other entities linked to the ruling African National Congress (ANC) have in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The report below supports our own take on how  South African is playing in the DRC, and the growing fortunes of Foxwhelp and Caprikat, just two of the companies we reported as being owned by Khulubuse.

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The colourful and controversial Khulubuse Zuma has reason to do a jig: His companies just struck oil in DR Congo.

KINSHASA — Two Democratic Republic of Congo oil blocks on Lake Albert of which concessions were granted to South African President Jacob Zuma’s nephew Khulubuse Zuma could hold 2-billion barrels of oil reserves. But any confirmed discovery would require major investments for further development, said the head of the company operating there.

The potential for big finds along the Congo’s eastern border has grown since UK-based Tullow Oil struck oil on the Ugandan side of Lake Albert in 2006.
France’s Total and Chinese national oil company CNOOC also operate there and Uganda’s government has estimated reserves at 3.5-billion barrels.

Speaking on the sidelines of an oil conference in Congo’s capital Kinshasa, Oil of DR Congo GM Giovanni Pedaci said the company completed a second phase of seismic data acquisition on Congo’s Lake Albert blocks last month.

“We need to drill down, to be sure, but we have measured the volume of structures under the lake and it is very high — 2-billion barrels,” he said.
Oil of DR Congo operates on blocks 1 and 2 on behalf of Foxwhelp and Caprikat, two British Virgin Islands incorporated firms, which were granted concessions for five years in 2010 after being withdrawn from Tullow.

Foxwhelp and Caprikat are owned by Khulubuse Zuma, nephew of Mr Zuma.

Mr Zuma got the two concessions by a Congolese presidential decree. This was despite the government already awarding the blocks multiple times to other companies, according to investigative body Global Witness.

“These structures may be full of water or oil. We will drill next year to find out. But they are mirror images of structures on the Ugandan side of the lake, which have oil,” Mr Pedaci said.
Lake Albert, 160km long and 32km wide, is Africa’s seventh-largest lake.
It forms part of the border between Uganda and the Congo.

“We need a lot of investment to undertake the project. We need two, three, four billion dollars,” Mr Pedaci said.

With the war, sometimes DRC feels like a place that is descending into hell, but that has not taken away the shine of its vast mineral resources.

“Our shareholders are looking for partners to share the investment and the risk.” Mr Pedaci said any oil discovered on Congo’s side of Lake Albert would be exported via a pipeline through Uganda and Kenya to the Indian Ocean.

Tullow and its partners have already voiced plans to build a pipeline from Lake Albert to Africa’s eastern coast.
For its part, the Kenyan government said it was beefing up its infrastructure to allow for the passage of oil exports from Uganda and the Congo to the Indian Ocean.

Sep 19, 2013|Pete Jones

-Sapa-AFP

AROUND noon on Saturday September 21, a group of terrorists believed to number 10 to 18 stormed the Westgate Mall in western Nairobi.

By the third day, 69 had been killed during the attack, or died later in hospital. Another 175 had been injured. Today the crisis entered its fourth day. In the evening a downcast President Uhuru Kenyatta, came on TV to give heartbreaking news. The crisis had come to an end, but the three floors of the mall had collapsed from explosions, and the terrorists and an unknown number of people were trapped in the rubble.

Amidst the tragedy, we are about to forget that the first day of the crisis offered quite troubling insights about how we the media view the world.

Some Kenyan journalists, especially TV presenters, inundated their audiences with references to Westgate mall being popular with “wealthy Kenyans, expatriates and diplomats”. It was also referred to as an “upscale mall” “frequented by foreigners”.

Foreign media said the mall was a “hangout for Kenya’s middle class” was

The rescue broke down colour lines in dramatic ways.

“frequented by westerners”. On one TV morning show, a panelist who was honest enough to say he had never been to Westgate, claimed that a cup of coffee at cafes there costs Sh600 (US$7), and that the average cost of a meal at the restaurants there is Sh2,800. Not true. As of the time of the terrorist attack, the most expensive coffee at the “hip” Art Caffe was about Sh300 ($3.5) – and even that for a double Iced Cappuccino. And the average cost of a meal was Sh900 (three times less expensive than the commentator said it was).

Unsurprisingly several presenters and reporters also said the “radical Somalia group Al-Shabaab” had claimed responsibility for the attacks, and some referred to them as “Islamic terrorists”.

Men and women who are more educated and far cleverer than me about these matters, refer to this as “media framing” – how media perceive and report about an event, and the picture they try to paint in the minds of their readers and viewers about the event.

On the face of it seems there is really nothing harmful in this portrait of the crowd at Westgate. After all quite a few expatriates, diplomats, and middle class Kenyans do frequent the mall.

However late Saturday, someone posted a cheeky but telling tweet. He said something like “blessed are the poor, for they don’t go to Westgate”. The unsaid message there was that the privileged, who enjoy a good life, were the ones being hurt at Westgate, and those who are not rich should not bother sharing their pain – after all the wealthy don’t do much to relieve their suffering.

The western media were telling their audiences that, “well, it is Africa alright, and ordinarily we wouldn’t bother you with this story, except that this time you should pay attention because westerners could have been killed”. Indeed, they were, and that sent the western media to town with the Westgate story.

On Saturday evening our daughter came to me and said; “Americans are impossible, you should see what they are saying about the Westgate attack”. She showed me comments on the NBC TV website, where Americans were asking why the network was wasting their time with the Westgate story, “it is Africa after all”.

In common all these were narratives about them versus us, our “otherness” – our different cultures, possessions, religions, citizenships, languages, food,

Kenyan and non-Kenya security officers secure an area inside Westgate mall – when evil came calling, all took to arms (Reuters)

aesthetics, and the colour of our skins.

Debased “otherness” enables us to ignore the pain of others and sleep soundly at night; to discriminate against people who are different without having to trouble our consciences; to persecute those who are not our relatives, fellow citizens, not of our religion, or social station without being afflicted by a sense of injustice. This type of “otherness” is anaesthesia against having to be humane.

However, by the evening of Sunday, references to “Islamic terrorists”, to a Westgate that was “popular with wealthy Kenyans, expatriates and foreigners” had died out. Why did the media suddenly drop these descriptions?

Because reality challenged the media stereotype of the Westgate attack. There were several ordinary folks who had been killed, or were bloodied and injured. It didn’t add up, they were not supposed to be in Westgate. Then, there were too many children—surely, they didn’t deserve to be killed. And, there were a little many Asians and mzungus (Caucasians) helping black Africans into ambulances, and even carrying and running with them to safety.

And everywhere you looked there were many black Africans sprinting with

The pain touched people of all religions.

Asian and mzungu children and women to safety, and nursing the wounded ones.

And then there was an awkward wrinkle – Muslims too were among the dead. That was not supposed to happen, you know, how come “Islamist terrorists” were killing other Muslims? One of the survivors said he watched in horror when two terrorists asked some women to cite verses of the Quran to prove they were Muslim. They did…then the men shot them at point blank range. Some terrified people who were lying on the ground screamed; “why did you shoot them?”

One of the gunmen replied, “because they were not wearing the hijab”. So, it seems, misogyny and patriarchy trumped religion.

And Kenyans died, in the same way Ghanaian, British, and French nationals did.

Come Sunday, unbelievably long lines had formed in places around Nairobi where the Red Cross was taking blood donations. The city had never seen anything like this. Most of the donors were the “poor”, the humble, the working class, lining up to donate blood for the supposed upper class that patronises

New bonds were forged in moments of trial.

Westgate.

None of this fitted the script. Vulgar “otherness” had been put to shame by the people’s common humanity and decency.

So perhaps it is time to pause and reflect. The outcome of the Westgate terror attack seemed to tell that not all contests between those who have and those who don’t are a Lenist class war. Not every contest between cultures, religions, or races is a battle for conquest and domination. That they are well-meaning negotiations for space, for respect, for a little share of the pie, for some of the air, for a bit of the limelight, not a tango of death.

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THINGS ARE KIND OF LOOKING UP FOR FREEDOM IN AFRICA. More Africans today under elected governments than at any other time in recent history. And at first glance press freedom, where Africa used to score notoriously badly, seems to be in relatively good health.

Tanzania police pounce on journalist, and one of them is shown shooting him at close range.

The Arab Spring, which overthrew dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, has unleashed long-pent-up energies among the media there. And there are bright spots elsewhere on the continent, too. The recent Freedom House report on world press freedom, which was quite gloomy about other parts of the world, offered a surprising number of positive stories about Africa’s independent media.

A second look, however, reveals a different story. Take Tanzania, for example, one of the African countries that received a fairly positive rating from Freedom House on its general freedom record.  Tanzania is supposed to be on the march. Every big-time world leader who comes to our end of the planet, as US President Barack Obama did in July, must drop in on Dar es Salaam, otherwise the Africa tour would be incomplete. Yet that isn’t the whole story (as Freedom House noted).

Last year Police killed Tanzanian TV journalist Daudi Mwangosi as he covered

opposition protests. In March of this year journalist Absalom Kibanda was jumped by unknown assailants, who chopped off one of his fingers, gouged his eye, and broke most of his teeth.

Today the International Press Institute (IPI) expressed growing concern about press freedom in Tanzania following a government order suspending two newspapers in the country.

A pile of flesh (circled) was what was left of Mwangosi—and the Tanzania where this happened is a democracy touted by the likes of US President Obama.

The government last weekend slapped a two-weeks publication suspension on Mwananchi, the country’s leading Kiswahili daily. It also prohibited the Mtanzania, from publishing for 90 days, thus taking it off the streets until through end of December.

In July 2012, the Dar es Salaam government also invoked sedition allegations against the MwanaHalisi newspaper, ordering its indefinite suspension.

Surely these sorts of things aren’t supposed to be happening in a flourishing democracy. However, they are. Question is, why?

In the days when Africa was tormented by one-party and military dictatorships, the dividing lines were clearer. The bad guys were on one side, and the good guys on the other. Most people were against the dictatorships, and one of the key rallying points was the campaign for a free press. A free press was seen at that time as part of the wider democratic bargain.

But the arrival of the so-called “second wave” of democracy in Africa beginning in the 1990s has muddied the waters. One reason for the reversal in media freedoms has to do with the way African parties cultivate political support and seek votes. Most of them mobilise along ethnic, religious, and regional lines.

Societies that were once united against military tyrants are now divided along these partisan lines. And groups that vote for parties for parochial reasons tend to rally behind them while they are in power, even when they crack down on the media.

Consider the paradox of Uganda. From 1986 and 2001, the Ugandan government banned political party activities in the country. That was a bad deal for opposition politicians, who had to confront the hegemony of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) without any organisations of their own behind them. The regime of President Yoweri Museveni called this arrangement where opposition politicians had freedom to make noise and agitate, but act parties were banned, the “no party system”.

Protesting the two-week closure of Daily Monitor in Uganda early this year: When Uganda became a multiparty state, it also gave birth to a media-hating regime.

Yet that “no party” period was also one of freest periods for the Ugandan media. Eager to prove that the “no party democracy” it practiced then was actually democracy, the Museveni government gave the media greater space for independence. Why? Because it argued that the more important thing about democracy was the freedom to air divergent views, but it was wrong to organise a “sectarian” party to turn those views into practical politics. Therefore opposition parties and groups were free to have newspapers and radios, but they could not field candidates against the NRM!

To be sure, two publications were banned, and journalists were sometimes arrested and exiled. But by and large reporters managed to get their stories out. If for nothing else but to keep up that lie, the Uganda government had to allow free media to flourish.

In 2006, Uganda formally adopted a multi-party system. But press freedom took a dive. Now that it could point to opposition parties that were organising freely, it no longer needed independent media as proof that it was democratic, so it started to stick knives into it.

Not surprisingly, according to a report by the Kampala-based African Centre for Media Excellence (ACME) http://www.acme-ug.org, in 1986 at least one journalist has been charged with sedition or a related offence by the government every year. As a result between 1986 and 2010, at least 49 journalists were dragged before courts and charged for various offences including sedition, criminal libel and publication of false news. The worst period seems to have been between 2007 (after a return to multipartyism) and 2010 when 34 journalists were summoned by police and 25 of them charged.

Perhaps one of the best and most unlikely examples is South Africa, where the political divide and allegiances are also partly racial. The leading media in the country are white-owned. When they criticise the corruption and failures of the Africa National Congress, and particularly President Jacob Zuma, ANC often hits back with accusations that the critical reporting is rearguard action by people with an “apartheid mentality.”

In South Africa, media matters often take a racist undertone — with black journalists too afraid to join in a right cause, if their white colleagues are passionate about it.

Many South African black journalists and intellectuals agree with this media criticism of the Zuma government’s failures, but are reluctant to side with them openly out of the fear that they’ll be seen as betraying the anti-apartheid cause.

When the ANC introduced the Protection of Information Bill in 2010, it became controversial because it was seen as an attempt to shield government actions from scrutiny by citizens and media. However, there was ambivalence among black journalists and activists, who saw it a justified attempt to control “racist” media. That opened a door for Zuma to play hero recently when he rejected the bill and sent it back to Parliament because it failed the constitution test.

It can be puzzling why the wave of political reforms of the last 20 years brought into power in Africa governments that have carried out economic and social reforms, but remain hostile to free media.

Perhaps the most far-reaching root of this animosity to independent media has to do with what how political parties and political debate have evolved in most of the continent over the last 50 years. The independence parties in Africa were quite ideological and issue-based movements that brought together trade unions, traders, teachers, and farmers. They had to be; there were big issues like how to redistribute the post-colonial bounty, and assets like lands and farms that were being vacated by European settlers.

That now seems very long ago. Many of today’s parties are either regional, or based on single issues. This is one reason we have had the rise of coalitions.

National newspapers and TV are virtually the only independent mediums able to speak to all parts of countries. Muzzling them leaves the government as the sole institution that messages nationally, and hands regional ruling coalitions an advantage that they lacked organisationally to dominate opinion shaping. It is efficient, and low cost.

If rogue democrats and official censors were the only threat to free-wheeling media freedom in much of Africa, then one could hope that matters will improve where reformists leaders come to power.

However, there are structural changes in the entertainment and news markets that the media has to contend with. For decades, what most Africans heard on their radios and watched on their TVs were stories of politicians ranting against imperialists, or perhaps planting trees at funerals or Sunday mass.

When space started opening up in the late 1980s, the urban elite, designer democrats, celebrities, foreign soap operas, and news dominated the news. The regular folks still didn’t see themselves on TV or hear their kind on radio.

The first people to understand the demand for “local content” were the Nigerians, who started rather crude films full of venal polygamists, evil stepmothers, scary witchdoctors, and crooked pastors. Eventually they became a continental sensation known today as Nollywood (by some reckoning the world’s largest producers of film).

This craving for cultural representation and authenticity has given birth to dozens of local FM stations, TV, and even newspapers that don’t broadcast nationally in English, French, or Portuguese, the official colonial-era languages of many African countries.

Thus from Kenya to Nigeria, the number one soaps and dramas on TV in most countries are locally produced. Nearly all the No. 1 radio stations broadcast in local languages. This is understandable, and indeed elsewhere in the world, the winning content is usually local – until ones looks deeper. In countries like Kenya, which has one of Africa’s most mature newspaper markets, for the last 30 years newspapers have responded to this with regional editions.

Something is changing for the worse, though. The dozens of regional FM stations, and extremist bloggers and social media warriors have worked up political prejudices against national media that are viewed as critical of local politicians. Some media houses that have several radio stations around the country broadcasting in different vernaculars, have resolved this problem by adopting the “correct” political tone for the area it is broadcasting to.

Victims of post-election violence in Kenya, 2008: Even otherwise very educated people tend to “go native” during African elections, and the constituency in support of media freedom often collapses in the process.

Newspapers have started to go the same way. In the government that lapsed in March after the Kenya elections, the President was Mwai Kibaki from Central Kenya, and the Prime Minister was Raila Odinga from the west. Some newspapers would bury a story considered unfavourable to Kibaki in the copies they distributed in the Central region, but give it bigger play in the western areas. They would also downplay stories that portrayed Odinga in bad light in the western edition, but give them prominence in the editions for Central.

It is good for business, but it is a very slippery road when a newspaper or radio station takes different positions on the same issue in a country, depending on which region it is being read or listened in. In countries where voters don’t have to worry about re-electing their homeboy or homegirl, this kind of pressure will not be brought to bear on the media.

However, it happens in Africa because, even with the growth of democracy, since government is patronage-fuelled, the loss of power by a leader from a region could see that part of the country marginalised if the next Big Man is from another region.

Because political office comes with a lot of spoils, and losing it is punitive, to the extent that in this “democratic age” media scrutiny can shape victory or defeat, African politicians are not about to spare the rod in dealing with journalists. And they can depend on many of their supporters to understand, if not approve, the crackdown.

When it comes to media freedom, Africa is suffering the fate of Sisyphus, cursed by the gods push the rock up to the top of the hill, only for it to roll to the bottom of the ill, and he is forced to repeat the futile exercise in eternity.

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I HAD COFFEE AT at The Stanley Sarova today with a good long-time ‘mzungu’  (Caucasian) friend who is visiting Nairobi.

An African waitress making self-interested calculations about her future, can be expected to head for the mzungu tables first.

The coffee was on me. I requested for the bill, and when the waiter brought it she asked who of us she should give it to. I said to me, and she handed over the bill to me tentatively.

We laughed about it. I told my friend that the waiter was being progressive by not assuming that it was always the man, not woman, paying. That the restaurant must be used to people going Dutch.

She was not convinced, and suggested that I was in denial about what had just happened: “In many of these places in Nairobi they have a stereotype of the foreigner with money squeezing the local for something, and paying the bill”.

“No”, I said, “maybe they think I am arm candy for a visiting tourist”, I countered jokingly.

“No, with tie and geeky spectacles, and at your age, they must know that you are not arm candy”, she said.

“You want to bet that it is race at play”, she asked.

So we bet.

I got out my wallet, gave the waiter money and she went off. A different waiter brought back the change, and it happened —she gave it to my mzungu guest!

It was ridiculous, and again we fell into embarrassed laughter. It wasn’t funny. There was nothing about me that suggested that of the two of us, I was needy

Race contradictions are more often than not a manifestation of a struggle over something that can buy bread – money.

because there I was, quite sharp, complete with designer spectacles to boot. I had to agree with my friend; the issue seemed to be the colour of my skin.

I had the lost bet. However, I wasn’t convinced that that race was all that was at play.

I know that in many restaurants in Nairobi, and indeed other African capitals, waiters often give white Americans and Europeans preferential treatment. However, I have never quite bought into the idea that it’s because they think the mzungus are superior. It is economics stupid.

Race doesn’t pay matatu bills or buy milk. Money does. My sense is that our waiters prefer to serve mzungu’s because they are more likely not just to tip, but to tip better than Africans. Most Mzungus are societies where tipping for service has been institutionalised, to it comes more easily to them than us.

The first point to make then is that a waiter looking after his or her selfish interests will take home a lot more in tips serving mzungus than your traditional Kenyan, Ugandan, Ethiopian or whatever African customer. It is offensive if you are the African on the receiving end, and awkward if you are in the position my mzungu friend was in, but from the waiter’s point of view, perfectly and coldly logical.

Secondly, because I am attentive and I make a living paying attention to such things, I usually keep a mental record of how long the slender (usually darker skinned) pretty young women who are waiters in restaurants, cashiers at newspaper stands, and shop attendants, in malls like Village Market, and (the late) Westgate stay at their jobs.

The lights of New York: Many in Africa will find the most unconventional route to get there.

The average is 18 months. They will disappear from the shop front, but you will still see them in the mall—on the arms of older, often portly, mzungu men. For the waitresses, a marginalised group in our societies (a Nairobi newspaper last week had an article about how no “decent” man wants to marry them), the mzungu customer is a lottery – a possible husband, an American green card, or a visa to the west.

When I was an editor in Kampala some years back, I investigated the phenomenon of male hotel front office clerks and trainers in gyms targeting the female mzungu residents.  The same thing happens in Mombasa – in a more extreme fashion. These young men use these women as a way to get that prized visa to the west.

Your bishop or sheikh would never approve of this approach to digging one’s way out of a tough life, and there is indeed something cynical and exploitative about it, but I am also rational enough to understand the underlying reasons for it.

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Bernard Onyango: 1930-2013 (COO file photo)

WHEN I TURNED 18, my parents decided it was time for me to find my roots. They sent me to study high school in our hometown Tororo, the town on the great Rock in eastern Uganda.

Off to good old St Peter’s College (better known as Tororo College), I went. At Tororo College, I stayed in Bernard Onyango House. Bernard Onyango was one of the most famous old boys of Tororo College, and the first African to teach there in the 1950s. The story goes that he was unmissable in a “sea” of European expatriates (ah, we’ve come a long way).

Almost 15 years after I left Bernard Onyango House, I married his daughter. I figured later that the odds of my going to the same high school as my father-in-law, living in a dormitory named after him, and then marrying his daughter was one in several million. But there we were.

Bernard died on October 14, 2013, in Kampala. He was buried in the village of Kiyeyi Tororo district on October 19.

 He was a remarkable human being Bernard, and I say that not because he was also my father-in-law. All eulogies agreed on one thing – he was definitely the simplest and among the truly incorruptible Ugandans of his generation.

Bernard was many things. He was the first indigenous Ugandan from that part of Uganda to graduate from university; he was the first African Academic Registrar of the East African University, and its first Academic Registrar when it became Makerere University, Kampala (becoming its longest serving Registrar and notching nearly 30 years in both positions). And when he left Makerere, he became the founding Registrar of Martyrs University, Nkozi. And in between, he was a director on many Boards, including the Central Bank of Uganda.

However, here is the thing—you’d never have known any of this from him. He simply didn’t tell. He dressed simply, ate simply, lived simply, never raised his voice, and was always embarrassed about the fact that he was a “big man” and so world renowned in university circles. When his car was stolen in the chaos of the last days of the Idi Amin dictatorship, he never replaced it and from then on

The Great Tororo Rock: If only it could speak

until he fell sick walked to most places that he could.

One day, if my chi permits, I shall tell a longer tale about Bernard. For now, two stories will suffice to reveal the nature of the man.  One was told by my brother-in-law, the law don and human rights activist Joe Oloka-Onyango, at the requiem mass.

Bernard was more popularly known by his initials, BO. After Barack Obama was elected president of the US, Bernard joked to Joe: “It has taken me 78 years to become famous; and now I finally am thanks to the fact that I share the same initials with the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama!” He just could never bring himself to acknowledge that he was famous in his own right.

In the last three years in particular, Bernard really struggled with sickness, but his spirit remained unbroken. 

In his last months, a nurse was hired to keep an eye on him round the clock at home. Through most of this period, he couldn’t speak. The nurse, like most people who eulogised him, called him “Professor Onyango”. His son is a professor, but he wasn’t. A perfectionist and stickler for honesty, things like that riled him to no end. However, he was too feeble and sick to protest.

Makerere University: Here, BO plied his trade for nearly 30 years

One day, though, he found the energy to whisper a few words. He beckoned the nurse. The nurse, like most of the rest of the family, perhaps hoped that finally he would utter some last weighty words. What followed next was vintage BO.  He told the nurse in a very faint voice; “I am not Professor Onyango. I am just Mr Bernard Onyango”.

Of all the things that he would have said; of all the things that he wanted to put right on his death bed; that was it – he didn’t want to die and leave anyone thinking he was a professor, when he wasn’t!

And those too were among BO’s last coherent words.

He was 83.

And what a man!

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WHAT A MONTH OCTOBER was – great stories, tragedies galore, rumours, spy drama, Nobel Prizes dished out, Mo Ibrahim Foundation refusing yet again to dole out the African Leadership prize, name it.

So what should we we make of all the exciting – and for sure depressing – stuff? At one point, as I reflected on these events, my mind went to a tingly dark place, and came up with unholy thoughts, but gems too. I cannot keep the torment and the delights to myself, so here I shall share:

•South Sudan: The Kingdom Of Four-Wheel Drives

This how you ride if you are a Big Man in South Sudan…or else you don’t ride.

To begin with a fly on the wall and a bird from South Sudan both confirmed to me that that new African nation, South Sudan, is truly the Four-Wheel Drive Kingdom. Stand at any street in the capital Juba, and there will be more fuel-guzzling Toyota Land cruisers than you can throw a hat at.

But, I was told, in South Sudan, there are four-wheel drives and there are four-wheel drives. The massive UN compound in Juba has several Toyota Land cruisers that have been parked in a corner for sometime now, the fly and bird told me. Apparently bleeding-heart UN wanted to help South Sudan’s governors to get around more efficiently, as most of their states have no roads worth the name. So it decided to help out by buying them Land cruisers that would overcome the rough roads. The problem is that they bought your average Land cruiser Prado, not the top-end V8. The governors said “nyet”. End of story.

Sorry, did I mention that South Sudan is one the poorest countries in Africa?

•America, Iraq, Afghanistan: We Misunderstand War

Iraq, even by its own horrid standards, has witnessed some of the worst terrorist bomb attacks of recent years. The casualties have been shocking. So has Afghanistan.

A car bomb in Baghdad that killed several people: Maybe this mess is what Iraq was really supposed to be after the war.

The violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, tend to be viewed mostly as failure for the USA that invaded both countries supposedly to get rid of a murderous dictator (Saddam Hussein in Iraq) and Medieval-minded Islamist terrorists (the Taliban in Afghanistan).

Of course it would be better, especially for the women and children (many men seem to get off on war, so we will not bother with them for now) of Afghanistan and Iraq if the US had turned the two into peaceful rich countries.

However, that presumes that the US, like most invading/conquering powers of our time, does actually mean it when they say they are going into a country to “stabilise” it. If you think hard about it, it doesn’t make sense. A stable and powerful Iraq or Afghanistan is likely to bounce back, make deadly weapons, and seek vengeance.

As things are today, it will take a while for Iraq put together a huge army or manufacture dangerous chemicals to gas the Iranians, as Saddam did during the war between the two countries.

Afghanistan too will remain a basket case for many years to come. Terrorists and some nasty characters might breed there, yes, but they will not be able to build a bomb to nuke their enemies. I suspect, then, that the real objective of the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan was to leave them a mess. Maybe George Bush and President Barack Obama have been extremely successful in Iraq and Afghanistan, after all.

 •Africa’s Greatest  Heroes Lie At The Bottom Of The Sea Near Italy

Within two weeks in early October a boat, then a ship, carrying loadful of Africans capsised off the Italian island of Lampedusa.

Bodies of African migrants who drowned off Lampedusa: Their death was not exactly in vain.

The ship was carrying some 500 Eritrean and Somali migrants. When it went down, at least 300 people died. The boat was carrying around 250 migrants. When it capsized, 50 of them washed up dead.

The scenes were sad, and hard to watch on TV. Yes, these Africans are fleeing desperate conditions at home, and taking stupid risks to get to Europe.

But let us remember, they have been doing this for over 30 years, drowning or dehydrating out in the high seas in their numbers. The Europeans have built barbed wire fences,  strewn their shores with deadly dogs, built sophisticated surveillance, but Africa’s boat people are not deterred. The next lot of Africans just get on a rickety vessel and row to their death or try and breach the electric wire fences.

When I thought of these brothers and sisters dispassionately, I was very proud of them. They show the kind of spirit our continent needs if we are ever to rule the word. They are brave, and do not easily flinch in the face of peril. That is what great explorers like Christopher Columbus and Marco Polo did. These Africans who die off Lampedusa are our modern-day Columbuses. They refuse to accept their grim lives at home, and take a chance on checking out what possibilities lie beyond the horizon.

I think the real history of the world, its most adventurous and innovative peoples, actually lies at the bottom of its oceans and seas. The warriors who died in great naval battles, many lie at the bottom of our seas. The treasures seized in expeditions, the booty of imperial adventure, the loot lost by notorious pirates, millions of skeletons of African slaves, all are there. So are thousands of world citizens and their possessions swept away to see by storms, hurricanes, and tsunamis.

The boat people are great African explorers and adventurers. Their deaths are not in vain. And they are contributing Africa’s record to the archives at the bottom of the mighty waters.

•The US Budget Shutdown: America Is The Best Teacher When It Is At Its Worst

Glum-faced Obama and House Speaker John Boehner: The problem is that too few world leaders face the kind of hard time the US president does.

The extreme right wing Republicans, who hate President Barack Obama in a very African way (the irony of that is endless), and a bit of pig-headedness by the Democrats, caused a two-week shutdown of the US federal government after Congress failed to pass a law to fund its operations.

The world had America for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was no better than a Third World failed state; its politicians were idiots; and so on, the world said.

But I was really impressed that among the few things that didn’t close was the US Patent and Trademark office —hate or like it, America is the world’s most innovative nation. At least it had the sense not to shutter the goose that lays the golden eggs.

But I also think that no president in the world should have a free ride, or live with the corrupting knowledge that he or she will always get his or her way. In its madness and bitter partisanship, the US Congress reminded us that no modern leader should be an emperor.

The problem, then, was not  that the US had a budget shutdown and that its Congress is small-minded and mean. Rather, that too few other Parliaments in the world are able to shut down their government’s operations, and that there is hardly a leader anywhere else in the world who gets as hard a time as Obama does.

 •If You Want To Know The Future Of Journalism, Count Its Dead

French photojournalist Gilles jacquier killed in Syria: You have to give it to western journalists, as foreign correspondents, they die for the story more than anyone else.

So the last couple of years have been terrible for journalism. They have been killed in their dozens in Syria; they were beaten and shot in Libya during that chaotic war against the eccentric dictator Muammar Gaddafi; they have died in high numbers in Iraq; some have taken bullets in Afghanistan; they have been beaten and molested in Egypt; and of course in Palestine (by Israelis troops mostly); the list goes on and on.

But I looked the list of the dead journalists, and a curious pattern emerged. Either Kremlin thugs or criminal overlords kill most Russian journalists at home. Nearly all African journalists who have died in the last few years were killed at home by their governments, party muscle men, rebels, or criminal gangs. Same story in Asia, with a few exceptions.

Over 95 percent journalists killed outside their homes in the line of duty have been either American, European, or the odd Japanese. That simple fact alone tells you that for a long time to come, what the world sees of international news will be coloured by western bias and perspectives.

Indeed, as Kenya’s former anti-corruption czar John Githongo and now civil society activist wrote in Nairobi The Star newspaper, when the Somali Al-Shabaab terrorist attacked Westgate mall  in Nairobi on September and killed nearly 80 people and wounded close to 200, the Kenya media all but collapsed in sob and solidarity journalism. For the first two days, the really useful pieces of reporting came from Al Jazeera, New York Times, Mail Online (particularly), BBC, CNN, The Guardian, and Washington Post.

We can scream against western media all we want, but until we also accept to die in strange wars getting stories for cynical audiences in the numbers that they do, they will always own the hill.

 •The Mo Ibrahim Africa Leadership Prize: The Prize That Keeps Giving To Itself

Then, along came that wonderful Sudan-born telecoms tycoon, Mo Ibrahim.

Mo Ibrahim: He keeps returning his Prize money for African Leadership leadership home; a deficit of worthy winners.

For the fourth time in five years, his baby The Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership – the world’s biggest individual prize – had no winner.

The award, established by Mo in 2007, carries a $5 million prize paid over 10 years and $200,000 annually for life from then on, with a further $200,000 per year available for 10 years for good causes backed by the winner.

The award goes to a democratically elected African leader who demonstrated exceptional leadership, served his or her mandated term and left office in the last three years.

In a continent with a deficit of such leaders in power in the first place, one can’t help but wonder where Mo expects his retiring democrats to come from. Of course, if there is no winner, Mo does not throw the prize money in the River Thames. He (or his foundation for that matter) keeps it.

The result, is that every time there is no prize given out, Mo is the winner. And now a new narrative has emerged. Every year we look hoping to find that yet again, the continent has not produced a prizewinner. That non-prize story seems to be sweeter. We don’t want a winner anymore. Mo has truly rigged this thing.

 •IGAD-EAC Marriage: Proud Ethiopia Offers To Pay Bride Price As It Sees Fit

As the “17-out-of-54” (as columnist Muthoni Wanyeki of Kenya put it in the regional weekly The East African) African Big Men met in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa to do their anti-ICC dance on October 12, something really huge happened on the sidelines.

Beta Dance Troupe Ethiopia: They have attitude those folks in Addis Ababa

The Foreign Affairs  ministers of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the East African Community (EAC) went and talked many things. Key among them was regional integration. Burundi (represented informally by the Minister of Justice), Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, and Uganda were in the house.

Among other things, their carefully worded communiqué said that the ministers, “Welcomed the increasing trend of consultation and collaboration between member States of IGAD and the EAC on issues of common interest to the East Africa region and the African continent as a whole…

The meeting “mandated the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of IGAD and EAC to explore the possibility of merging these two Regional Economic Communities with a view to establish a bigger economic bloc to expedite the integration process and ensure greater economic development and prosperity to the peoples of the Eastern Africa region”.

Sudan applied to join the EAC. It was spurned. South Sudan asked in—it is being admitted slowly by stealth. Ethiopia has kind of been invited to join the EAC. Those who understand Addis Ababa’s body language, say it too has indicating that it wants a serious relationship with EAC. It is deeply involved with Kenya in doing joint infrastructure (and the have had a defence pact since 1964). It is hands-in-glove with Uganda and Burundi on Somalia against the Al-Shabaab militants.

But Ethiopia is a proud land. With a population of nearly 100 million, it is just 50 million shy of the EAC’s combined 150 million. Two years ago, it surpassed Kenya as the largest economy on Africa’s eastern coast.

Ethiopia considers itself the regional chieftain, and now we can see that it was never going to be “lower” itself to apply – like the two Sudans did – to join the EAC. That is now likely to happen through an IGA-EAC marriage. IGAD is Ethiopian-dominated and a tool for Addis Ababa’s regional geopolitical games. Ethiopia is set on coming into the “Eastern” (not East) African Community as the typical African groom, not the bride. I don’t think it will accept to negotiate the bride price.

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Traffic in Kampala…and this is not even on the worst days

SO WE RETURN with Letter From A Friend, this one a good buddy whom I shall refer to, according to the custom, by initials JW:

“The last few days have been hectic for [Uganda capital] Kampala’s residents. We have had the kind of traffic jams we never witnessed before, with motorists and commuters spending up to 2 hours to travel a distance that otherwise would have taken 30 minutes to cover with the ‘normal’ traffic jams.

“So I figured out that if a commuter spends 2 hours stuck in traffic each way per day, that amounts to 4 hours per day or 20 hours per working week of 5 days.

“Multiply that by 50 weeks and you get 1,000 hours per year. If a typical working day is 8 hours, that makes 125 days in a year wasted in the traffic jam.

“Add another 100 days for weekends, plus the official national holidays (about 10), that leaves us with only 130 productive days a year.

“That is if one does not attend the occasional funeral.

“So when do we Ugandans ever get to work productively long enough to become a middle class country?”

“Almost never these days.”

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Tracy Chapman: “Why is a woman still not safe When she’s in her home?” she sang.

TODAY was a difficult morning. I was dropping off our daughter to a study, on my way to work. As is the custom I had the car radio tuned to BBC news.

First, it was Syria. There, the news said, rape had been used as a weapon by both the Syrian government troops and the armed rebel groups.

The story quoted a rights group that reported that over 6,000 women had been raped in the recent months of the conflict there.Then it was on to the Central African Republic (CAR), that long-suffering land that is descending into hell. An epidemic of rape had broken out there as the international community warned that the conflict between Muslim and Christian Muslims risked ending in “genocide”.

We drove in silence. I tried to imagine what was going on in our girl’s mind as she listened to the bulletin, and the vulnerability she felt as a woman. I didn’t look at her; afraid I would say something that sounded too contrived just to reassure her.

You can make your home safe for your daughters, sons, sisters, wife or girlfriend (though sometimes, as Tracy Chapman sang, even home is not safe for them), but when they step out of the door…

Few subjects make me feel dirty, helpless, angry, and afflict me with bouts of loathing, distress and guilt like sexual violence. Rape has become a demon stain on MALE-dom. Why is it that rapists are like the monsters in the movies? They don’t seem to die off, or to go away.  

 *Twitter:cobbo3

And she does the boda boda in Kigali….how women ride tells volumes about a city (http://onetouchmedia.net photo)

IT HAS BEEN A WHILE since I did the morning jogger’s “dipstick index” of an African city.

The last two serious ones were of Bujumbura, and the Lesotho capital Maseru. It is a simple test, really. You go out running in the morning (or in my case, given that I no longer bubble with youthful athleticism, half-walking-half-trotting), and you see whether there is unbroken pavement on which you can run; whether the streets are lit; and what the people who out going or coming to work are carrying.

Kigali aces the pavement and streetlight section of the test easily…after all, it is Kigali, one of the cleanest and most orderly towns on this fair continent.

But one has to keep looking for new insights.  Lately I have been trying to understand something that is unusual about African cities. In the west or Asia, most street cleaners are men. In Africa, most street cleaners are older women. This is awkward because, as someone remarked to me, men are the ones who dirty the streets most.

Sure enough, most cleaners that I ran into in Kigali this morning were middle aged women. I was struck that they were out at work so early. They wouldn’t do that in Nairobi, for example. Then it occurred to me: if it’s women who clean our streets, then one trick to getting the city clean is to make the streets safe enough for them to come out and sweep when the rest of the town is still asleep, without the certainty of being mugged or raped.

So perhaps, what Kigali teaches us is that you don’t need to buy enough brooms and to have diligent municipal workers to have a clean African city. To be sure they are important, but the trick is to fix security first.

The other thing you should do when running at dawn, is to make a mental log of whether there are women out jogging too. But most importantly, whether the women who pass by have sweet-perfume or a working class sweaty smell.

On the face of it this might not mean much, but the African city where more of the women you meet at dawn have the working class smell will usually be richer – thus Nairobi is richer than Kigali.

But when middle class ones have the confidence to spot deodorant to go out for a dark morning run, then you can expect that that city’s air is refresher, its cleaner, and safer to live in.

Like many other peoples and cities, you can learn a lot about us from our smells, as from our sights and sounds.

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Museveni as guerrilla in the bush…that now seems so so long ago

THE LUWERO TRIANGLE , a heart-shaped fertile swathe of land to the north of the Uganda capital Kampala, was once the most famous stretch in Uganda.

It is here that Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army/Movement based their guerrilla war from 1981 to January 1986 when they rode victoriously into Kampala to take power—and have remained put for, by Uganda standards, a record 28 years.

Terrible things happened in Luwero. As a young journalist, after the war I spent some time travelling through Luwero. Once rich coffee plantations had grown into forest. Most homes were destroyed, and it was largely deserted. There was the smell of death everywhere. Behind every overgrown bush you would run into a pile of skeletons. In the rooms of abandoned buildings the horror and pain was visible on the faces of the skeletons. Some had machetes and axes skill embedded in their skulls or backbone.

Skulls in the Kigali Genocide Memorial – there is a reasons Ugandans don’t do memorials like this.

Museveni’s NRA/M was the first post-independence guerrilla movement to take power from a black African government, and to attempt to rebuild a war-shattered country. This fact is sometimes forgotten in the bitter debate about the dire state of democracy in Uganda today and the corruption of the Museveni government, but it was the first African regime to show that reconstruction was possible. Sometimes I wonder how much that lesson inspired the Rwanda Patriotic Army elements to leave the Uganda army in October 1990 and start their return-to-the-homeland war, a campaign that to many seemed “impossible”.

But unlike Rwanda where it is generally agreed that anything between 800,000 to one million people were killed in the 1994 genocide, there is no such agreement about the body count in Uganda. When the war ended, the working figure was 500,000 dead. Then no other than President Museveni revised the number downward to 300,000, and later even lower to fewer than 200,000.

Meanwhile, there are now neck and neck competing narratives about who was really responsible for the bulk of the killings of civilians in Luwero. Was it the Uganda state army then, or the Museveni rebels in a cynical move to portray the Milton Obote government in Kampala as murderous and to bolster support for its rebellion?

I tend not to be preoccupied with who killed whom, but I am fascinated by the fact that that debate takes place at all, and that as Ugandans we can’t agree on how many people were killed in Luwero—let alone during the military rule of dictator Idi Amin between 1971 and 1979.

The rather ordinary looking Luwero war memorial. Ugandans don’t like to make these things vivid

To understand why, one needs to appreciate the significance of the fact that there is only one proper monument to the Luwero war. In Rwanda, there are dozens of especially smaller sites. And unlike Rwanda where the remains and killing tools of the genocide are displayed prominently, the one in Luwero (built as a war, not a victims, monument) the skeletons are mostly hidden and the most prominent feature is the rather plain plank that rises above the ground.

This difference between how Ugandans and Rwandans wear their tragedies, tells a lot about the differences between people who are otherwise quite similar (the Rwandese are cousins of the people of western Uganda). Ugandans love the moral fudge, because it is a society – perhaps more like Kenya in that regard – where every type of political alliance and deal is possible, where every day history is rewritten to suit the need of the moment, and where the search for power opens up every type of betrayal.

The reluctance to agree on numbers of victims, to

Coffee in Luwero Triangle: Where it grows today, not too long ago there was death only

build Rwanda or South African-type monuments to bitter phases of national history, is partly to avoid the creation of a fixed profile of the hero and villain.

One of the unintended and laudatory results of this is that it makes it possible for life to go on with less public bitterness and anger (sadly it makes it easier to repeat past mistakes).

On the eve of this Christmas I drove in the evening to Luwero with our older daughter. The Luwero war started at a time when, as a young radical, I thought marriage was reactionary and I had sworn never to walk down the aisle. And it ended when I was still so resolved, and therefore it was nearly a decade before she was to be born.

She doesn’t understand Luwero at all, and I was not going to try and inflict it on her. Her duty on the trip was to help me on a project I have been working on the last two years – photographing sunrises and sunsets.

I had not been back to Luwero in nearly 14 years. How much the place has changed. For the first 100 kilometres out of Kampala the traffic virtually crawled. The towns along the long are frenetic. Everyone here is hungry and has a hustle.

We drove back to Kampala when it was dark. It was nearly 8pm and the salons (Kampala and its outskirts surely must have the most beauty and hair salons – and sports betting parlours – per capita than any city in Eastern Africa) still had long queues of women waiting to have their hair done for Christmas day. I guessed that by midnight many would still be waiting.

So, while stuck in the traffic, it came to me. I had always wondered why Christmas is so personal for Ugandans and indeed so many Africans. The religious holiday is a very small part. The bigger part is the feast, the Christmas dress, the Christmas hair do, the most special meal of the year…

I thought perhaps for most of these people Christmas is the birth of a new self. With all the deaths, the horrific histories of war, exile, life as refugees, the reality of current difficulties and poverty, Christmas celebrates the birth not so much of Jesus, but of hope for them. And the possibility that a birth can endure centuries later.

Outside the town of Wakiso, we had stopped. The setting sun looked awesome through the tree branches. In Katikamu we stopped to photograph a beautiful flock of white birds hovering over a field of cattle…

Briefly there, I could understand how many young people don’t know, and older ones have forgotten, that three decades ago, these were killing fields.

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Museveni on the campaign trail. He doesn’t take any of these people to the high table with him

FOR THOSE WHO LIKE TO VIEW AFRICA’S PROBLEMS THROUGH ETHNIC LENSES, there is always more than enough evidence to cast their outlook in doubt.

Take Uganda. Some people like to think that because President Yoweri Museveni is from the west, the people of that region, especially his Ankole region, are “eating” and having a party while the rest of the country is suffering.

It is true that sections of the elite from the west seem to have a leg up on the rest of Ugandans in public sector jobs, but it is important to look at the OUTCOMES for the PEOPLE. Northern Uganda (that for many years was at odds with the Museveni regime) might be the poorest region of Uganda, until you look more closely at the data. For a series of reasons, it has the country’s least malnourished children. On the other hand western Uganda, that is supposed to be doing well under Museveni, has pockets of the country’s most malnourished children.

Museveni’s own Nyabushozi backyard, actually has some of the highest rates of landlessness among peasants in the country.

Yesterday I had a sobering conversation on these poverty trends in the country with two Ugandans; one a Member of Parliament from Eastern Uganda, the second poorest region in the country, and the other a business

At $3 many rural Africans can’t afford the jerrycan

leader from western Uganda.

They were comparing notes, and both agreed that youth unemployment in the two regions was about the same – 70% to 80%!  The MP from the East told us of how he had travelled around his district, and while many boreholes have been dug, the people in the villages have a “new” problem; many can’t afford to buy the standard 20-litres jerrycan to draw water. The price of a jerrycan? Uganda Shillings 8,000 or US$3!

Then it was the turn of the businessman from the west. He decried the fact that illicit alcohol was destroying rural communities – as in the rest of the country, and Africa for that matter.

These “VIP” latrines are making strange journeys in Uganda

Then he said one of the most shocking things I have heard in recent months. In order to improve sanitation, many donors have helped build so-called “VIP latrines” around the country. In many parts of western Uganda, he said, the people are so poor they decided they could not “waste” the latrines by using them for the ablutionary purposes for which they were built. They cover up the holes and use the latrines as food stores – and continue to take to the bushes to relieve themselves!

The fate of  political leaders and  their followers in Africa is sometimes, tragically, the same. But what these stories tell us is that their fortunes never are.

 •twitter:cobbo3 

A Ugandan soldier and tank in South Sudan…there is more than meets the eye here (BBC photo)

DAYS AHEAD OF THE SIGNING OF A TRUCE by the warring South Sudan parties in Addis Ababa last Thursday evening (January 23, 2014), Sudan (Khartoum) and Ethiopia criticised Uganda’s role in the crisis.

It all started late December. As the East and Horn of Africa grouping, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) met to find a solution to the South Sudan crisis that broke out on December 15, Uganda President Yoweri Museveni rushed in his army.

Last Tuesday, a Uganda army spokesman said in Kampala that the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) had helped President Salva Kiir’s forces recapture rebel-held Bor and other key towns in South Sudan’s oil heartland.

However, a few hours after Ethiopia expressed unease at what it, Khartoum, and others saw as Uganda’s rash decision to jump the gun on the South Sudan meltdown, IGAD agreed to send a 5,500-strong intervention force to South Sudan.

What happened? Perhaps the surprise is that Addis made the criticism at all, given that, according to diplomatic sources, Uganda, the lead contingent in the African Union peacekeeping force in Somalia, had led the diplomatic effort to bring Ethiopian forces into AMISOM.

Ethiopia is deeply resented in Somalia, being seen as a predatory and brutal occupier. Ethiopia needed to join AMISOM first, because it gave its role in Somalia some diplomatic cover, but most importantly because it could no longer afford its unilateral expeditions.

It is therefore unlikely that it was throwing a co-conspirator in Somalia under the bus, and risking losing a key supporter in a project that will face criticism.

Secondly, this model of unilateral intervention, then getting an AU, IGAD, or UN Security Council anointment of your military action, seems to be becoming the new regional norm.

Uganda and Rwanda have done it many times in the DR Congo. And in the case of Uganda, South Sudan too previously. Kenya did the same when its troops invaded southern Somalia to hunt down Al Shabaab militants in October 2011. It became part of AMISOM nearly a year later.

In any event, the IGAD decision to send troops gave Uganda’s unilateral mission in South Sudan a belated blessing.

However, beyond this elope-and-marry-later approach, is something bigger. Until mid last year, the only East African Community member state that was not in this peacekeeping and rebel-fighting business was Tanzania.

Dar es Salaam lost its innocence when it took the lead in the UN Force Intervention Brigade in eastern DRC that is credited with helping beat back the M23 rebels.

So we have Uganda in CAR, South Sudan, Somalia, and DRC. Rwanda has just sent troops to CAR, but it has been in Darfur and South Sudan for a while. Kenya, Ethiopia, Burundi (and Djibouti) are in Somalia. And the latter two might well dip their toes in South Sudan waters soon.

Together, these eight countries have used their militaries to build a security wall stretching from the tip of the Horn, into Central Africa to the border with West Africa, and southwards to the border with Southern Africa.

If we focus on the single wars in Somalia, CAR, and South Sudan, we won’t see the forest — the most radical remake of the security architecture in Africa. What’s next?

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-This article is also published in The East African

“Mad Dog” who allegedly eats Muslims in revenge for the Seleka rebels killing his pregnant wife in Bangui! (AP/Daily Mail)

JUST WHEN WE THOUGHT THE CRISES in Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan couldn’t get worse, they did.

From CAR, photos of a man, a deranged  Christian called “Mad Dog”, cutting and eating up a dead Muslim in revenge emerged. There is a mob surrounding him, cheering on in approval. The “cannibal” is so confident, he didn’t even bother to mask his face.

From South Sudan, stories of ghost towns and villages in which either the Dinka or Nuer had been slaughtered to the last child in a furious fit of ethnic madness, were flowing freely. Photos showed us a people who might well be in the Stone Age… the pain and terror on their faces, deeply troubling.

And where there is war, there are soldiers and guns. More African Union troops arrived in CAR, and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) approved the deployment of a 5,500-strong intervention force in South Sudan.

In Addis Ababa, the talks between the South Sudan president Salva Kiir and his former vice-president Riek Machar, the two leading warlords in the current fighting, floundered. In part, Machar’s people were demanding that Uganda withdraw the troops that it sent there to back Kiir.

Meanwhile, in Kampala the Uganda army revealed that nine of its soldiers had been killed, and 12 injured. (A ceasefire agreement was finally signed last Thursday night).

South Sudan celebrates independence in July 2011: That now seems so long ago as president Kiir and his former deputy Machar’s fight over the spoils plunged the nation into violence again

Again, where there is war, there are losers and winners. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, observers say, is seeking to straddle the region like some Napoleonic figure. He has his army in CAR, northeast Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia and now South Sudan.

Many Ugandan soldiers have died in this imperial enterprise over the years, but if you want to know how the regional crises are also putting money in people’s pockets, the place to go is Entebbe, Uganda’s former capital, and home to the country’s only international

airport by the same name.

Entebbe used to be a quiet sleepy city, popular mostly with a small group of snotty and eccentric senior government bureaucrats, a few international organisations, and secretive businessmen who wanted to live far away from the madding noise of the capital Kampala.

The old Entebbe airforce base, was not busy. It was mostly a place where military transport planes, fighter jets and helicopter gunships went to die. The active planes were hidden in remote bases, far away from the eyes of the casual spy.

The war in Rwanda that brought the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Front to power in 1994, changed all that. Millions of Rwandan refugees poured into eastern DRC, and international relief operations quickly set up shop in Entebbe.

Down the road, DRC itself imploded, and more relief operations opened shop in Entebbe. Then South Sudan, where Uganda had troops before even its Independence, happened, and a lot of the international support activity for the new nation was managed out of Entebbe.

A section of the UN base at Entebbe Airport. Today the biggest such UN facility in Africa

A big UN compound started to spring up at the edge of the old airport. There were several UN helicopters parked there, and a car yard of over 100 new Toyota cars of all types sprang up.

There were all sorts of clean-shaven men in every type of military uniform in Entebbe. Uganda’s prostitutes made a beeline for the city to give comfort to these men. So did Rwandan, Burundian and Congolese prostitutes.

Beach volleyball in Entebbe…the costumes sometimes get very risque. The sport has grown dramatically

Stories started cropping up in the Kampala gossip press about Uganda prostitutes complaining of “unfair” competition.

A property boom followed as the crises in the region multiplied. A Somali businessman, a friend, invited me to coffee one evening in Nairobi not too long ago. He whipped out his laptop and showed me photos of a block of fancy apartments he was about to finish building in Entebbe.

I asked him how much he was going to rent them for. He didn’t say, just that the embassy of a powerful Western nation in Uganda had taken out a lease on the whole property for its people.

Banks — especially ATMs — mushroomed everywhere you turned in Entebbe. New hotels came up.

When the latest fighting broke out in South Sudan, the UN evacuated its staff there to Entebbe. Entebbe has beautiful beaches; today they are crowded. Photographs of curvaceous Ugandan women flopping about in the water are popular offerings in the lifestyle pages of newspaper.

Night party at Spennah Beach in Entebbe: When the beach parties are happening, you better leave Kampala very early to catch your flight in Entebbe

There used to be a small occasional Sunday sporting event, mostly beach volleyball, at a beach sports club. Now it is huge. The women play in the skimpiest bikinis.

The traffic jam on the day stretches nearly 30 kilometres from outside Kampala to Entebbe. It used to be that you needed to leave Kampala three hours beforehand to catch your flight in Entebbe. On beach volleyball Sunday, wise travellers now set out five hours before their flight.

The beach crowd is young, hip, drives fancy cars with open roofs, dresses to kill, and some of the women wear false hair a metre long, and there are designer sunglasses galore.

A high wall is now going up to shield the airforce and UN base. The giant tarpaulin UN tents are coming down, and permanent office buildings are replacing them.

Once all but abandoned, State House Entebbe got a make-over and was expanded for “Emperor” Museveni

For the Commonwealth Summit that took place in Uganda in 2007, the abandoned State House was refurbished and furnished at the highest cost ever for a building of its size in East Africa. Now it is a palace, with a vast, brightly lit compound that looks like an alien aircraft from a Steven Spielberg movie at night.

A totally new dual carriageway road which you will have to pay money to ride on, is being built to Entebbe — by the Chinese.

The old hippie slogan was: “Make Love, Not War.” For Entebbe, it seems the Great Lakes region needs to make war, so that it can make love. And that inconvenient fact — the fact that Uganda has been one of the chief architects of the crises it is benefiting from — understandably seems difficult to remember when you are in Entebbe with so much skin and beach partying around you.

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-This article is also published in the regional weekly The East African

A GOOD SOURCE IN STRIFE-TORN CENTRAL AFRICAN Republic’s (CAR) capital Bangui, tells me that early in the week the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) in the peacekeeping force there, set off on a dangerous journey of about 700 kilometres to the border with Cameroon.

Rwanda troops in the AU peacekeeping force in CAR remove juju ware from a Christian militia man who was found with various weapons in Bangui (VOA photo)

Their mission was to secure passage for about 100 trucks carrying humanitarian aid and other provisions to Bangui. Among the trucks were some carrying supplies for the French peacekeeping troops in CAR.

The RDF escorted the trucks all the way back, disarming some CAR militias along the way. They arrived back in Bangui on Wednesday. The French peacekeepers met them a few kilometres just outside the capital Bangui and rode in with them. Guess what, the French troops that didn’t have the stomach to make the dangerous 700 kilometres, were met by French TV crews in Bangui – who reported them to audiences back home as the heroes of the mission. The real heroes, the RDF, didn’t get any airtime.

Life can be cruel. And when nationalism meets journalism, strange things tend to happen (I know something about that).

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AND so it is time again for LETTER FROM A FRIEND. In keeping with custom, I shall describe my friend – who also happens to be a relative, by the way – by his initials OOWG.

He is a master of the tongue-in-cheek story…particularly the half-truth, half-fiction variety. This one, he swears, is (mostly) what he witnessed on his latest visit to the barbershop. OOWG reports:

I must narrate to you what I witnessed when I was waiting my turn at the barber shop this last weekend and a guy and his partner walked in. Each took their positions for their appointments.

First, I heard the conversation between the lady and her stylist. It went like this:

Stylist: Yes Madam, so what shall it be today?

Her: Well, please first of all wash the hair. The water should not be too hot. Last time you nearly scalded me. So, make sure it is moderate. And then you should hot comb the hair.  On the right side, the strokes should go from front to back. In the middle, separate the strokes from the middle to the sides. On the left side, please align the direction of the hair with my scar that you see there. After that we will then start the curls.

For the ladies, it is a study in attention to detail

Stylist: The curls?
Her: You remember how for my wedding you put on jumbo for me when clearly I had said I wanted a balance? You nearly ruined things for me. So, please use size 4 in  the front and for the back part it has to be size 3 and 2 for every half measure.

Stylist: Don’t worry, I can assure you that after that, you will walk out of here looking really smashing!

Her: No, but I also want a trim. You know: Make it flush at the edges using only the scissors there, then I want four of those staggers culminating in a centrepiece but remember that they have to alternate between free-flowing and edged. So, use only the machine on the outside and a razor only at the top.

Stylist: You mean…

Her: Yes. And take care when you start the darts and flashes after that. On your flyer the picture has two on each side of the head, but I will guide you on how to do the look with three darts and four flashes that I want.

Stylist: I really don’t think that…

Her: Tch! You are complicating things. If we do not get started now, we might not come to the part where I want you to add softening to the flashes!

In the barbershop, many a guy will dose off

At this point, my attention turned to the conversation which had just started on the other side between the husband and the barberman. In its entirety, it went like this:

Barber: Usual?

He: Uh huh.

THE END

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 So yesterday our (Nation Media Group) CEO Linus Gitahi, Online managing editor Churchill Otieno, Business Daily managing editor Ochieng Rapuro, and yours truly visited with IBM Research Africa lab at the Catholic University, in Nairobi’s Karen suburb.

Dr Osamuyimen “Uyi” Stewart, chief scientist, IBM Research Africa and Dr Kamal Bhattacharya, director of IBM Research Africa, in the lobby of IBM Research Africa lab in Karen, Nairobi (IBM photo)

How come Catholic University? Well, when IBM chose to locate its first research lab in Africa in Nairobi, it also decided that it should be in a university campus. It put out a courtship call, and nearly all Kenyan universities put in a bid.

Now you would think that Strathmore University or Kenyatta University (KU) that are very good at these kinds of new age things would have snagged the lab. They didn’t, because the more self-effacing Catholic University offered its old library building largely rent-free for the next five years. And I guess Karen is quieter, greener, and the air there must be cleaner than at Strathmore or KU.

It was an inspired decision, because the result is quite tasteful and ivy-leaguish. IBM kept the old school external look of the library building, gutted the inside, and built out a typical new tech look inside (complete with a gym).

None of this though is the reason I am bothering with this blog though. For me a few small things stood out. The solution that nearly all big companies have to power backups in Nairobi, Lagos, Kampala, or Accra (pick your African city) is to have a diesel generator. The IBM Research lab did something that really all firms should be doing in Africa – it went solar. Clean and neat, although if other companies took route my naughty side suspected it would mean that some procurement director somewhere wouldn’t get his kickback from buying a giant diesel generator.

Maddening congestion in Lagos: The future belongs to the people and companies who will create smart solutions to these kinds of problems.

There are more PhDs at the IBM Research lab than you can throw a hat at. And we learnt that they were working on all the big things that would change Africa – financial inclusion, health, traffic, education, name it.  When we were driving home, I wondered whether collectively, or individually, African countries have a group of people working together on future solutions as the IBM Research lab is doing.

In the years to come, this will have implications on how our lives play out in the rest of 21^st Century Africa. I see a shift in how power will be exercised in the years to come. It will not come from owning the largest fleet of jet fighters or the largest army.

I think the people with power in Africa will be those who provide learning solutions to the continent’s exploding population; the chaps who find new ways of eking out more grain yields from tired overcrowded soils; the companies that build smart networks; those that develop cost-effective treatments for all the diseases that are whacking us now as we grow richer; the people who will have the technologies to provide water in times when it is running out.

So if you asked me what I saw at the IBM Research lab, I would simply say; “those chaps in Karen know something we don’t”. Oh, yes, I nearly forgot. The fact that the Catholic University got the lab is a reminder that the shy girl at the back of the room gets the boy more often than we appreciate.

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Mutua g0t the media excited when he finally revealed the woman beside him is Lillian, the “Machakos County First Lady”

HE might not be universally liked, but there is no doubting that Dr Alfred Mutua is the most happening County Governor in Kenya today.

Previously a journalism lecturer, then Government Spokesman in former president Mwai Kibaki’s government, Mutua clearly learnt a thing or two about spin.

And his use of social media reveals a lot about how, in the hand of a shrewd operator, it can be used to control one’s image and exploited with deadly effect to go over the heads of traditional media.

Today, The Star went with “Machakos ‘Launches’ First Lady” on its cover. As happened, Mutua had posted on his Facebook page a photo of him “sharing a light moment with Machakos First Lady Lillian”.

The governor’s domestic situation has been a subject of speculation, and photos of him and the then mysterious Lillian were doing rounds in Nairobi newsrooms. Who was she? Were they or weren’t they an item?, the questions flew.

The couple in another of the many photographs they are shown together on Governor Mutua’s Facebook page

Many other photos of Mutua and Lillian litter his Facebook, so its significant that despite the fact that some have been there for months, no mainstream media went with the story—until today. All because he chose not to say who she was. The Star, of course, took the story where Mutua didn’t in his post. It revealed that there was a first wife, Josephine Mutua, apparently now estranged from “Alfie” as some wags in Nairobi refer to the governor.

Still, Mutua was in control of the timing as to when the media would report that he and Lillian were an item – with that post on his Facebook page.

The reference to him launching his First Lady, was a play on how busy he – and other governors – have been busy launching things. In his case 120 police cars, 70 ambulances, tractors, the Machakos People’s Park, a refurbished stadium, and so on. He has put other governors under so much pressure, in a desperate rush to be seen to be launching “development”, some have unveiled local choirs, village football teams, and other ridiculous things.

Mutua, though, takes the biscuit and has set the standard. Where he comes short on substance, he makes up very well with glossing. The Auditor General’s report, for example, suggested that all is not rosy in Mutua’s kingdom. That his bookkeeping has been dodgy.

The launch of 70 ambulances was an opportunity to bury awkward questions being raised by the Auditor General

It seems Mutua was aware of the potential of this to cause him a lot of bother. So when he did his post on the 70 ambulances, he wrote: “Aerial view of the 70 Ambulances that I launched this afternoon at the Machakos Stadium. The brand new ambulances have cost Kshs. 125 Million which is less than the Kshs. 140 million that was budgeted for in our estimates.”

“You see”, he is saying, “I don’t waste public funds.  On the contrary I spend it prudently and save taxpayers money”.  He has also used his Facebook to reposition himself a centrist – every post, every photo is well chosen. Elected on the now-Opposition Coalition for Reforms and Democracy (CORD) ticket last year, he has hanged out with President Uhuru Kenyatta, and sought to put himself above the political dog fight even in Machakos.

In all, with social media, a governor like Mutua doesn’t need to call a press conference. He flips it on his Facebook, and the media will jump for it. I sense the game has changed here. The people seem to like what Alfie is doing and he is controlling the story…and there is damn little we can do about until he falls flat on his face in public one day.

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Bones: Gays are good for heterosexuals because they reduce competition for mates

ONE of my favourite TV characters is forensic anthropologist  Dr Temperance ”Bones” Brennan (Emily Deschanel) from the series Bones – a super smart, rich, confident, and liberated woman.

Every time I watch the show, I wish that the real world were as coldly rational as Brennan views it.  With African big men, from Nigeria, Gambia to Uganda (and Arizona), having pulled out their spears, bows and arrows to chase down gays, I was struck by Brennan’s views on homosexuality a few nights ago.

She said that gay-hating is not rational at all. On the contrary, heterosexuals should be celebrating at the fact that there are homosexuals, because it “removes competition”. Every gay man, is one man less that heterosexuals have to compete against for the affections of a straight woman. And every lesbian is one woman less that straight women have to compete with the eye of an eligible male.

Makes perfect sense, except that we are not terribly rational—partly because it’s very hard work. So the great philosopher Aristotle was only half right – man is not always rational.

Secondly, we tend not to respond to things in linear ways.

High heels tend to go up when we expect them to go down, and to go down when we expect them to go up

I am reminded of those studies and reports that were popular three years ago on the heel height in women’s shoes, that rise in hard economic times as people seek escapism in difficult times and compensate with dramatic fashion. You would expect that in lean times, rational beings would be cautious and not splash money on flamboyant fashion. You would be wrong.

Thirdly, we are often foiled by complexity. The Turkana region in northern Kenya is  a harsh arid place that is often plagued by famine – as it currently is. But it also has its good fortunes. In the last three years, every hole exploration companies have dug in the area, has turned out to hold millions of barrels of oil!

The Nation Media Group (NMG) has had a long association with Turkana around the matter of food security. It does all sorts of things with communities there over the years. Just over two years ago, it brought a group of schoolgirls from Turkana to visit Nairobi on a project.

The girls were checked into a three-star hotel. On the second day the hotel manager called the Corporate Affairs manager at NMG. He was in a panic. “The Turkana girls”, he said, “have

A Turkana girl smiles: It is counter-intuitive, yes, but in famine-troubled Turkana, the survivors are the ones who eat the least

refused to eat”.

Alarmed, the manager quickly rushed to the hotel. In his mind, he was thinking that perhaps the girls found the hotel food too unfamiliar.

He found the girls in good cheer, not looking a single bit hungry. He asked them what was going on, why they were “refusing” to eat. They said they were not hungry. In Turkana, they explained, those who survive are the ones who learn to live on one meal a day. If you get used to eating two full meals a day, you will die.

Over time, some small-time evolution had worked its magic. The most successful Turkana folks are the one-meal-a-day types.

“There is a lot of food”, he pleaded. “You can eat as much as you like while you are here”.

“And what happens when we go back to Turkana at the end of the week?” they asked. The conversation ended there.  In this case, the Turkana girls were very rational. Eating two meals a day can be very bad for you – if you are from Turkana (and such harsh climates).

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Africa’s kings of Twitter (in yellow spots)

YESTERDAY the communications agency Portland released its second “How Africa Tweets” report.

The report studied “geo-located” tweets during the last three months of 2013.

For us humble folk, geo-located means our mobile phones or computer have an active thingy that makes it possible to locate exactly where we are using it from it…e.g. in Yamoussoukro, Cote d’Ivoire.

The Portland people found that the six most Twitter-active African cities are, from the top: Johannesburg, then Ekurhuleni (many people hadn’t heard of it before, but it is a little place 34 kilometres from Johannesburg), Cairo, then back to South Africa (Durban), and back to Egypt (Alexandria), and then eastward to Nairobi.

Portland is lucky. This is Africa. If it had been a South African or Egyptian company, we would have rejected these results as being “tribally motivated”. But now that it isn’t we can’t, we have to try and make sense of them.

Traffic jams in Africa are the secret friends of social media

I am as confused as anyone else out there, but that will not stop me from trying. The surest evidence that I am clueless about the meaning of the “How Africa Tweets” report, is that I came away with the impression that it is somehow significant that top tweeting African cities are in coastal nations, though not all the cities themselves (e.g. Nairobi and Johannesburg) are on the coast.

I am not sure about the rest of the world, but in Africa I have always been of the view that our coastal nations tend to be more broadminded because they spend a lot of time looking out to the seas and oceans, wondering what lies beyond the watery expanses. We Africans are not water people, so our response to seas is uneven. Many coastal nations get terrified by it all and shrink into small-mindedness – like Sierra Leone and Liberia in the 1990s. Others get excited and develop wanderlust (and a bit of piracy) like the Somalis, or a very global world outlook like the Nigerians.

 The general effect, from my sense of things, is that coastal nations tend to be more internationalist in terms of embracing the world. Hinterland ones on the other hand tend to be integrationist, cuddling up to their neighbours so that they can have access to the coast (as Rwanda and Uganda do with Kenya). In all, then, to the extent that tweeting requires a global mindset, in Africa the coastal nations will always come out on top.

The other surprise is, as the report put it, “football is the most-discussed topic on Twitter in Africa. During Q4 2013, football was discussed more than any other topic, including the death of Nelson Mandela”.

If you live in Nairobi, as I do, this is almost impossible to believe. That the main menu in African Twittterdom is sports, and not politics seems truly remarkable. It also speaks to the other thing that has puzzled many people; how come Lagos, or another city from Nigeria, by far Africa’s most populous and voluble nation, is not in the top ranks?

My uneducated guess is that if sports is the main traffic driver in Africa, then whether a country has a hotly contested local football league or not, will predict its Twitter rankings. And the most competitive leagues in Africa, which are occasionally fought with stones, knives and guns among the fans after matches end, are in Egypt and South Africa.

Granted, yes, the English Premier League is a big deal in Africa. But what happens in Kampala after a match between Manchester United and Arsenal, in which the Gunners beat currently hapless ManU 0-3, for example? The fans will exchange insults and mock each other for three hours, and by the following morning all is forgotten.

Local football enmities, on the other hand, never burn out and are often passed on from father to son. Thus after a match between Mamelodi Sundowns and Orlando Pirates, the feud over the game to run on for weeks and generate copious among of tweets.

Orlando Pirates: No one fires up the South African Twittersphere like they do

I remember some years ago holidaying with the family in South Africa. Football season was at its peak. The friend who drove us around had scarves and badges of different teams in the car. And on two occasions, when we were entering a football territory where a particular football club loyalty was insurance against attack or theft, he got out of the car and swiped the stickers. So again, there Twitter is a useful social statement.

I will end with the finding that Twitter activity rises steadily through the afternoon and evening, with peak volumes around 10pm. Could it be that Africans are heavy-fingered in the morning? Maybe, as some chaps have suggested, we are busy working in the morning, then begin to laze off as the day grows older.

But that would not explain why we would peak at 10pm. You know, by that time, we are at the pubs, watching football, and evening soaps. And for parents, there is the children’s homework to supervise.

Perhaps it is not a mystery, at all. Little that is worth tweeting about – except if you want to take revenge on your partner – happens between 10pm and 7am when we set off to work. So there is nothing much to say in the morning, and yes, there is work to do.

But that can’t be all. I suspect that because a lot of tweeting is done on mobile phones, we usually run out of airtime by 10pm and wait until we have gone to the ATM or something like that to juice up – which happens during the coffee break and lunch.

By midday frustrations are beginning to build up. You checked your bank balance and found you had no money. Your boss has rejected your application for a salary advance. In addition, some events have come to pass – the reports of a horrific accident that killed 35 came through the news. You have watched a live broadcast of the Parliamentary debates and have pulled your hair out.

With airtime topped up, you now enter the maddening evening traffic jam. You begin venting in traffic. You get home and it is quiet – or very noisy. You are either lonely, or don’t like the sight of your wife, hubby, girlfriend or BF. You take to Twitter in solace. That peak you see at 10pm? That is the Grand Africa Misery Index.

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