Now this from Jim Daye surely sums up how “insane” regulations can be as well as anything you have read recently:
• Pythagoras’ Theorem–24 words.
•The Lord’s Prayer–66 words.
•Archimedes’ Principle–67 words.
•The 10 Commandments–79 words.
•The Gettysburg Address–286 words.
•The US Declaration of Independence–1,300 words.
•US Constitution with all the 27 Amendments– 7,818 words.
•The European Union’s Regulations on THE SALE OF CABBAGES--26,911 words!
Bodies of civilians killed in renewed attacks lie along a road in Bentiu–some had their feet cut off
ONE OF THE HORRIFIC photographs of the recent ethnic slaughter in Bentui, capital of South Sudan’s Unity State, showed the bodies of four men lying near a mini van
It seems they were travelling in the vehicle, and were stopped and murdered by one of the factions in the ugly war in South Sudan.
Two of them had their feet chopped off, and it seemed the other two had their Achilles tendons severed. Days after I posted the photo, apparently taken by Reuters, on my Twitter timeline, a tweep asked whether the feet had been cut off as some kind of “fetish”.
It might look like it, but it probably isn’t. Cutting the Achilles tendon, and immobilising people by shooting them in the legs or cutting off their feet is a gross tactic of war…at least in the Eastern African region.
It was used on an industrial scale during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which nearly one million were killed. Killing people is difficult business and hard work. The killers get tired – especially when they are using machetes, axes, and clubs – or are simply thrown off their game by the grim undertaking.
In Rwanda, cutting the Achilles tendons meant the victims would just lie on the ground, unable to escape, the energy slowly sipping out of their bodies. That would allow the killers to take a lunch break or catch a nap and return to the kill when they are fresh and re-energised.
Also, when the rebellions in northeastern and northern Uganda were at their worst in the late 1980s and early 1990s, rogue warriors on each side used rape as a weapon…and recreation. Their problem, and there is no pleasant way to present this vile crime, is that they could only rape one woman at a time. Or, sometimes, they wanted to rape the women, but first they needed to fight off or kill the men.
It was therefore common to shoot women who were fleeing in the legs. That way they would lie there in the bush, or if they crawled away it wouldn’t be too far away. In any case, it was easy to find them by following the blood trail. The men of war would thus return to find them, and rape them at their leisure.
In a violent conflict when you see a foot cut off, or hanging loose because the Achilles tendon was sliced, trust me you really don’t want to know what happened.
WARNING: This blog has been written in anger.
Rape victim in DR Congo (BBC)
I REALLY HOPED I WOULDN’T HAVE TO WRITE ANOTHER BLOG AGAINST RAPE SO SOON: I don’t quite understand why, but the story of the rape of those two teenage Indian girls (cousins Murti and Pushpa), who were then murdered and left hanging from a mango tree, disturbed me like few such vile crimes have done before. I was so angry, I couldn’t even write about it until now.
India, and the world, have been rightly horrified. India for one is getting horrible at these barbaric acts of sexual violence against women.
Then there was that story on the BBC today, “Rape ‘routine’ in DR Congo prisons”.
DR Congo has been dubbed the “rape capital of the world” with good reason. Rape has been refined into a weapon of war, and in the eastern DRC, even UN peacekeepers became sexual predators.
Quoting a report by the rights group Freedom From Torture, the BBC reported; “One woman, named as Faith in the report, said security agents raided her home in early 2013 after she organised an anti-rape protest in the province of Bas Congo, west of Kinshasa.
“One of them said: ‘You are talking about rape, now we’ll show you what rape means’. They raped my niece in front of us. Then they took me to prison.”
If you are a man/father with daughters, sisters, and female friends and care about them, you cannot help but view a world in which the penalty for being a woman is so high with revulsion and shame.
It is time for more of us to speak up and act. I have a desperate proposal. I think we can no longer consider the penis (Johnson) as benign.
It is a dangerous weapon like a gun. True, not all people who own guns go about killing people with it. But because a few do, we licence them.
I suggest that all men should get a licence for their Johnsons. But like a gun, it is not the finger that pulls the trigger that is to blame. It is in the mind of the gun holder where the terrible things start, which is why a background check and, sometimes, psychiatric test, is given before one is issued with a gun licence.
Likewise, once men turn 18, among other things, they should undergo psychiatric evaluations before they get their Johnson licences. It will not stop rape, but if it keeps even just a handful of women out of harm’s way, it will well be worth it.
I have been studying photos of the Sunni jihadist group, Islamic State of Iraq, those these militants who are trying to establish a caliphate in Iraq and Syria – to begin with.
On June 10 last week, they made some mind-blowing military gains, capturing Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, and most of the surrounding province of Nineveh. Buoyed by their victory, they headed south towards Baghdad, the capital, taking several towns on the way.
Some 30,000 of Iraq’s US-trained soldiers just dropped their guns and uniforms, and took off for the desert. How many ISIS insurgents were they faced with? Just 800!
The virulently anti-western ISIS is so extreme and violent, even Al Qaeda distances itself from it. However, they were carrying AK 47s, and wearing sneakers. The people benefitting from the sale of the AK 47s are actually some infidels and aetheists in the west and Russia.
And American “imperialist” firms like Nike, and Germany’s Puma are the ones cashing in on the sneaker sales.
Anti-capitalist demonstrator arrested being arrested in New York—her top and jeans were made by the very capitalists she was opposing.
It is a scene repeated in most places where workers and students are staging anti-capitalist demonstrations, occupying financial districts, burning American flags, or fighting a rebellion. They mostly help swell the coffers of the very capitalists they are raging against.
Unable to organise freely because the Police will crack their skulls, or their supporters are scattered around countries or the globe, activists and terrorist need three things most today – broadband, the internet, and cellphones.
There is no extremist mullah who has an ISP company in the back of his mosque, or who manufactures jeans in his basement, and no radical environmentalist who owns a cellphone company.
Digital anti-establishmentarianism therefore serves to bring more people to the Internet, and put more money in the pockets of companies like Google.
And that militant who needs a robust pair of jeans to last him days and practical sneakers that he can use to outrun the police after hurling a Molotov cocktail at a fast-food restaurant, helps enrich shareholders at Levi and Sketchers.
It is an intriguing relationship. Activists and militants need greedy corporations, and the sometimes-deleterious consumption that they spawn, to rally their cause. The corporations need the demand the activists create for their products and services, to continue growing richer.
It is a war that, in the end, I think the capitalists will win because they are smarter. The capitalist understands first and foremost, that rebels, suicide bombers, and demonstrators of all ilk, need one thing – to feed. Food costs money.
They understand the anti-establishment business cannot survive without networking and mobility; so they provide cellphones, cars, fuels, and broadband. So they provide them. These things cost money.
The radicals can break away from this dependence on capitalism, of course. However, to do that, they need one thing more than anything else – money, easily the greatest “invention” of capitalism.
AS Africans, we have every right to hold a grudge (even hate) the west: They colonised us and, worse, subjected Africans to the worst form of degradation and exploitation – slavery (though, of course, our chiefs were deeply complicit in this crime).
Yet, hate it as we might, the West keeps throwing stuff at us that we can’t ignore, and that forces us to think deeply about our own political societies work – or don’t.
Let us start with the small one. A few days ago US President Barack Obama visited a Washington DC school, where he and First Michelle took part in an event, filling schoolbags with toys for homeless children.
This is how the BBC reported what happened in a story entitled “President Barack Obama puts brave face on schoolgirl’s Beyoncé snub”:
“A Washington DC schoolgirl has prompted laughter from the US President after admitting that she had hoped the special guest visitor to her school was going to be Beyoncé.
“Barack Obama seemed understanding, admitting that his daughters would prefer a visit from the singing superstar. First Lady Michelle Obama also agreed that she would “rather see Beyoncé.”
The little girl pressed on, saying that now that the special guest turned out to be Obama, she was glad it was he.
Obama laughs, and continuing the joke, says he thinks she was saying that for the press, and didn’t mean it.
It is not so much what the schoolgirl said, but how she said it. She was totally unafraid, and didn’t seem even vaguely aware of a remote possibility that what she was saying might cause offence, or that she shouldn’t say something like to the world’s most powerful man.
Secondly, not a step was missed in the schoolbag filling exercise, and no one seemed bothered.
The thing is that I have read, and even reported, my fair share of stories about not just school children who say “embarrassing” things to African Big Men being arrested, but even their parents being questioned by security officers!
Sometimes the madness gets twisted horribly. Central African Republic’s “Emperor” Jean-Bedel Bokassa, for example, in the 1970s had schoolchildren clubbed to death because their parents refused to buy uniforms from a factory that he owned!
The second one is the September 18 referendum on Scottish independence.
It is a long and complex story, no doubt, but the short of it is that Scotland’s First minister Alex Salmond
decided it was time for Scotland to end its 300-year-old union with Britain, and he forced a referendum on it.
Not a shot was fired, nary a stone thrown. And in the debates for and against, we have not seen the kind of destructive hate speech that attends African elections. And what does British Prime Minister David Cameroon, who is campaigning for a “No” vote, do?
Instead of arresting Salmond, he instead shakes his hands, has tea with him at the PM’s official residence, and smiles for the cameras with the chap!
Well, South Sudan eventually voted to break away from Sudan in a referendum in 2011, but it took a war of nearly 30 years and over 2.5 million deaths.
Eritrea voted to leave Ethiopia in a referendum in 1993, after a long war and a new regime in Addis Ababa that had lost appetite for a fight to keep Eritrea. Eritrea’s war of independence lasted from 1961-1991, all 30 years of it.
It is estimated that the casualties on both sides could have reached 570,000.
Yet, here are the modern Scots getting a referendum vote, without a single body bag.
We cannot just sneer at that stuff. However briefly, we must ask why we don’t conduct our business with at least half that level of equanimity.
-Twitter@cobbo3
AS presidential term limits collapse in the face of attacks by big men in Africa, a seemingly difficult question has taken root: Britain, Germany, Israel and other successful nations in Europe and Asia don’t have term limits. So why is it being touted as the magic elixir for Africa’s politics?
It’s a valid question, and the fact that it has been asked so often, and those of us who support term limits feel we have to answer it should tell us that that we have lost this argument.
It is like explaining to someone why they should not steal, or why in this age it is bad science to marry their sister (let’s not even talk about the morality of it).
Liberia’s president William Tolbert (L) with his wife and US president Richard Nixon in 1973. Tolbert fell to the term limit devices of the coup and assassination.
Many of Africa’s presidents and prime ministers are set to become kings, and I am ready to accept that only in the next set of mega crises in Africa (from about 2020 on), as leaders confront the army of restless unemployed young people, environmental problems, and spreading violent extremist politics, shall term limits again be accepted by the dominant political classes and their intellectual wings as legitimate tools for stabilisation.
It is, after all, the period following the economic collapse and state failure of the 1970s through the early 1990 that knocked enough sense into heads and led to term limits being written into constitutions around Africa in the 1990s and early 2000s. It was perhaps inevitable that the same reforms would be cannibalised in the current “Africa rising” euphoria.
So this is really a sour parting shot. A small story will help us here. In 2005 Uganda scrapped its presidential term limit. Later in the year a short opinion article by a good public servant Nathan Odoi (since deceased), a former ambassador and Permanent Secretary in Uganda’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was published in the Daily Monitor.
Those Britons and Israelis
I was surprised to see the article because, knowing Odoi, he was not the type of man to get into a political argument so publicly, let alone pen an article for a newspaper. Boy was I glad he had.
Odoi argued that Britain and other democracries have term limits, just that they were not written into constitutions and laws – because there was no need. He noted that it was nearly 100 years before Margaret Thatcher became the first British prime minister to win a third term in 1987. She didn’t serve all of it, the party ousted her three years later.
It would be another 18 years before Tony Blair led his Labour party to win a third term in 2005, but even he didn’t see it through. Like Thatcher, he was kicked out in 2007. (sorry, can’t find a link to the article to post here).
In short, the British have a more powerful term limit than any Africa country can ever write into a constitution – it is called the British voter!
What about Israel? Well, Benjamin Netanyahu is the only prime minister in Israel’s history to have been elected three times in a row. But that fact masks something even more telling. Since the founding of modern Israel in 1948, no single party has ever won an outright majority.
All party leaders have had to negotiate with others to form a majority to govern, and having got that they become prime minister. So the Israelis, have never elected anyone clean right out as prime minister even for one term – let alone three.
The Israeli voters are, therefore, meaner than Britain’s.
Treachery, rebellion, and treason
The other matter we need to dispose of is the argument that term limits are “foreign” and “unAfrican” things, brought in by the meddling and arrogant west.
Again, wrong. Even ancient Africa had term limits, but they were not written in statute books (we were always an oral people). They were secured by practice – through treachery, rebellion, and treason.
For example, today Equatoria Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is Africa longest-ruling dictator, having been in office for 36 years. However, even in Ethiopia that was not formally colonised, there were very few of its absolute emperors over the centuries who reigned as long as Nguema has in Equatorial Guinea.
Why is this the case? Well, because the rule of ancient African big men was cut short by many devices. Like in other parts of the world, many chiefs and kings were poisoned by relatives, mistresses, or wives; killed in battle; or murdered in conspiracies. Few got to rule for even half as long as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe has.
But the golden age of unwritten term limit “laws” was the military coups era of the 1970s and 1980s.
Except with slain Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and the long-fingered Mobutu Sese Seko in (now) DR Congo the soldiers overthrew and murdered presidents rather frequently, few getting to enjoy the equivalent of two terms today before being carried off in the night by mutinous sergeants, then tied to a drum and executed by firing squad at dawn.
In that sense, the current anti-term limit wave is, ironically, the product of a good thing – stability! We don’t poison, murder and rarely oust our leaders in coups any more, allowing them to realistically seek to rule for long without fear that they will end up impaled on a stick. They have returned the compliment by biting the hands of democracy that feed them.
The very low African standard
Yet, there is still something understandable about that, particularly if we look even deeper into the tragic African condition feeding it.
For many Rwandans life without Kagame is too much to ask.
For a long time now, it has been fully expected that an African government will, by definition, be cruel in its rule, corrupt, incompetent, and generally feckless. That view was born partly out of reality, but also as a coping mechanism, a way of managing expectations and insulating ourselves against national heartbreak.
So while a regular day at the office for a Norwegian or Swedish government means delivering on its promises and doing well, the African one it is expected to flop.
Because performing well had become very rare, and our record is still mostly bad, we think the leaders who do the excellent job they are elected to do need to be rewarded with a big political bonus – a longer term in office, even if the constitution forbids it.
We see this kind of thinking in Rwanda today, where the country is in a fit, unable to contemplate life without president Paul Kagame at the helm, the man who led them from the genocide hell to a fairly well run and functioning place where they are at today.
But the Rwandese are not alone. Thus in Africa most people don’t write wills, either because of a superstitious belief that doing so brings on death much earlier, or out of the fear of confronting the possibility of the inevitability of their death.
But when all is said and done, when (guided by their invisible hands) we reward “good” leaders with presidencies for life, it’s the equivalent of giving your local police a sack of money in gratitude because they caught the thieves who robbed your home.
That’s what they are supposed to do, possibly even stopping the robbery in the first place, no?
PS: After this blog was first published, a friend told me of how during a lunch conversation former Uganda president Godfrey Binaisa summed up the question of power in Africa. “The problem with Africa”, Binaisa said, is “that kings want to be presidents, and presidents want to be kings”.
-Twitter@cobbo3
I GOT a call from one of my favourite cabbies in Nairobi a short while ago, wondering why I had’t given him business for some weeks.
Nairobi City centre: If the streets could talk! (Photo/Ninara/Flickr).
He is the ultimate chronicler of urban life, a man with a remarkable mind for the juicy tales of the city, and I chuckled when I remembered the recent ones he regaled me with.
The funniest were both about corrupt cops.
He told me that not too long ago, a police officer flagged him down for a debatable traffic infraction. At the time he had two “mzungu” (that’s East African for white folks) passengers in the back.
The cop asked him for Kenya Shillings 500 (just under $5) to let him go. As he haggled, in the back his passengers were fretting about “these African ways”.
He decided to pay the bribe and end the fracas, but he had only a Sh1,000 currency note.
“No problem,” the cop told him, “give it to me you will collect your change later”.
He took the policeman’s mobile phone number, and drove off.
After dropping the passengers, he called.
The cop told him he was still where he had left him.
He drove there, and sure enough, the law man had made change. He took his Sh500 bribe, and gave the cabbie back Sh500.
But even he told me the case of a friend of his takes the biscuit. Like many African cities, Nairobi has few public toilets along the streets.
So the men, infrequently the women, often pee in the alleys. His friend, also a cab driver, was caught in the act by two policemen one day.
They said they would drag him to the police station to charge him with conduct that was harmful to public health, unless he paid up.
They settled on Sh300.
Yes, you guessed right, he didn’t have that precise amount. He had Sh500.
An argument ensured; he wanted his Sh200 change.
One of the policemen thought for a while, and came up with the perfect break to the impasse.
He told him; “Since Sh300 is the price of peeing once on the street, I suggest that you urinate a second time and finish your money”.
Unfortunately for him – and fortunately for Nairobi’s streets – he had no pee left in him.
A FEW days ago, Africa’s first biogas plant connected to the national grid started producing power in Kenya.
That was a big deal for green energy. Then it occurred to me that one of the best lessons the world can learn from Kenya in these Mother-Nature-cuddling matters could be missed – unless someone makes a little noise about it.
It is a lesson about how to get Africans, especially in the countryside, who are not environmentalists, to grow trees without coercion or cajoling.
The story is hidden in plain sight, in Kenya’s central Gatanga electoral constituency.
Peter Kenneth: Would-have-been “green” president, but he still left us with some important lessons. (Photo/PK/Facebook).
Between 2002 and 2013 Gatanga was represented in Parliament by Peter Kenneth. In 2013 Kenneth made an, ultimately, unsuccessful bid for the presidency. His supporters said the fact that he polled so poorly, suggested that Kenya was doomed.
Kenneth won a basketful of political points for what he achieved as MP for Gatanga. His constituency was praised as the model example of how to use the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), which was pillaged in many other areas.
An uninhibited traveller wrote in one of Kenya’s dailies that moving through Gatanga and then driving into the next constituency was almost like crossing from Africa to western Europe. There was supposed to be a big compliment somewhere in that sentence.
Even Kenneth’s critics agree that no politician did as much to strew his constituency with trees and other green things like he did.
So how did Kenneth make Gatanga so green? First, he tried very hard. Secondly, he won the “unintended consequences” lottery.
In the early period when he was pushing tree planting in his constituency, they would be planted along roads and other places on Day One, and on Day Two Gatanga would wake up only to find the people had stolen the trees.
Eventually Kenneth figured he could put the thieves to good purpose; he would use them to do for free, and on a much larger scale, what he was spending money to achieve.
And so a race started. Many trees would be planted, and many of them would be stolen a few days later. Then more would be planted, and they do would be stolen, and on, and on.
Kenneth knew that the people were not boiling the trees for healing juices or throwing them away. They were planting them in their gardens and lawns.
The plant thieves of Gatanga stole so many of the trees, that when they were done, one Gatangan citizen told me rather hyperbolically that they had achieved the highest per capita tree-planting of any constituency in Africa!
And therein is the lesson. If your environmental project involves planting something, you are more likely to succeed if you pick an item that the people will want to steal.
-Twitter@cobbo3
Nigerian-born sprinter Femi Seun Ogunode competes internationally for Qatar. (Photo/IAAF).
AT the just ended World Athletics Championships in Beijing, I was again struck by the number of “former” Ethiopian, Nigerian, and Kenyan, athletes who now race for, especially, countries in the Middle East like Qatar.
A few European countries also have a couple of “ex-African” athletes.
The oil-rich Middle Eastern countries are fairly straightforward about it. They buy the athletes with citizenship and prize money, to put it crudely.
Buying citizens who excel in some field is not new. The Americans have done it for ages. The difference is that they buy rich ones. The British bribe them with long-term residency, thus attracting dozens of Russian oligarchs with their loot to set up shop in London (and buy football clubs too).
As we watched those bought athletic citizens perform in Beijing, thousands of people from the developing world fleeing war, persecution, and quite a few simply seeking economic opportunity, continued to rush European borders. Hundreds are suffocating to death in smugglers’ trucks and thousands have drowned in the Mediterrranean – over 2,000 so far this year.
Middle Eastern, African, and Asian countries where these migrants are coming from are largely mum. Hmmh.
Now, if you take offence easily, you should not read beyond this point.
I sense that all these events will soon be connected. Europe is ageing, and needs young blood that will produce citizens to keep their populations viable in future.
For despite all the technological advancements societies have made, for generations to come someone will have to work to pay taxes; young hands will be needed to be soldiers; and nations will require consumers to keep economies ticking.
Proponents of immigration say it is the answer to all these problems.
Yes, but perhaps it will not play out in the way we imagine it. What the case of African athletes who have been handed citizenships of countries that could not produce native sportsmen and women tells us, is that immigration could happen in future through some strange mechanisms like citizen exchange markets.
Matt Damon in a poster of Elysium: Prescient?
How might this work? Qatar or Italy could put out a tender for, say, 250,000 citizens. They might want to mix things up a bit, so they could ask for 50,000 from Asia; 50,000 from Latin America; 50,000 from the Balkans; 50,000 from Arab North Africa; and 50,000 from sub-Sahara.
They might require that they at least have a high school diploma, with those holding university degrees getting preference.
The adults must pass a fertility test, be of sound health, and have good eyesight. A quick test could be done to establish that they have a promising genetic profile.
I can see that a few African and Asian governments, for example, would be happy to trade off all the citizens who are taking dangerous trips on rickety boats to Europe.
After the leaders have pocket some (or most) of it, governments could use the billions collected from these sales to uplift the lot of the unsold citizens at home, and those who were too proud, nationalistic, or already successful to enter the tender.
This could solve the fear Europe has of being swamped by migrants, because they would have picked exactly the type they require, ensuring that the ones who could turn out to be vagrants on the streets or terrorists are excluded – or if they don’t want black, brown, or yellow people, they could leave them out.
It is a world that filmmakers have already imagined. To mention one, that is the plot of Elysium, starring Matt Damon, where in the year 2159 humans are divided into two – the rich and beautiful who live on a luxurious space station called Elysium, and the rest who scrounge and endure brutish lives among Earth’s ruins.
Elysium sees the two worlds as being in contradiction. Perhaps they won’t be. For starters, we would all probably be living on the same Earth, and governments that want a competitive edge in human exchanges, will actually invest in a better world for them than the wastelands in Elysium.
Things could get very interesting. Imagine, we get to a point where the majority of people in France – indeed the wider Europe – are of African descent, what do you think will happen?
I for one expect that at that point Europe would unify with Africa. And countries like Australia and New Zealand could be swallowed up by Asia, who knows.
Some of this is morally repulsive to contemplate, and would really be a new form of slave trade. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The current migrant crisis tells us that we are at the cusp of a major disruption in social organisation. Anything is possible.
It might turn out that Elysium put the timeline for its dystopian world too far out. It could happen by 2100.
-Twitter@cobbo3
SOMETIMES, it feels like the t-shirt was a greater invention for Africa than sliced bread – after all, as those who know about poverty on the continent better than I ever will say, many of them can’t afford bread.
Many can’t afford t-shirts either, but at least they are easier to get for free.
Yes, Obama visited Ghana in 2009. There is a t-shirt to prove it. (Photo/Monde Perso/Flickr).
For example, African voters have a very pragmatic attitude toward political t-shirts during election campaigns. They separate the t-shirts they wear from how they vote.
There are many reasons for this. First, is security. If you are walking through a stronghold of the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), its goons could attack you if had on the t-shirt of the Progressive People’s Party (PPP) candidate.
Or if you are a boda boda “taxi” owner with a DPP t-shirt, PPP stalwarts will boycott your ride.
The trick is to have a bag full of various candidates’ t-shirts, and you change them as the partisan colours of the neighbourhoods you are passing through change too.
But if you are a boda boda rider, there is often a lot of free campaign fuel to be pumped. When you get to a petrol station where the presidential campaign is giving free fuel to its supporters, all you need is the right t-shirt, really.
All this would actually be a good, if cynical political calculation was the only thing at play in this t-shirt saga.
Unfortunately, it is not. For many urban and rural voters, election period is also a time for a wardrobe upgrade.
If they can get eight free t-shirts of various candidates’ campaigns, they don’t have to buy a shirt until the next election in five years. They are also popular night wear when they grow old.
Still, not all of folks will be lucky to get eight t-shirts, and they can often be problematic even after the polls.
Not to worry, the supply of more neutral t-shirts never seems to end.
There is an environment day celebration? There will be t-shirts.
The president is dropping by to launch the “Acclereated Mother and Child Feeding Programme”? There will be t-shirts.
The First Lady is leading a walk for clean water? There will be t-shirts.
An immunisation drive? There will be free t-shirts handed out.
The minister is dropping by to launch “Phase 2 of the Agriculture Modernisation Programme”? There will be t-shirts.
Be it this, or that, there will be free t-shirts.
Many times, the only thing that gets done is the t-shirt. Where we can’t bite, the t-shirt is our bark.
In other ways, it is like the planting of a flag. The notch on the wall. A recording of history. Barack Obama came to Ghana or Kenya? Show me the t-shirt.
As our brothers and sisters in America might say, if it ain’t got a t-shirt in Africa, it ain’t got nothing.
It’s not the whole story, but it is a good start.
THIS article was first published in the weekly The East African, on April 4, 2005 with the headline “Uganda: Because Seremba Can Forgive, Obote is Able to Return”.
I have adapted here because the events leading to the February Uganda elections, especially the violence and polarisation, are an uncomfortable echo of the tragic past that inspired it.
All of 80% of Ugandans alive today were born after Yoweri Museveni became president in 1986 following a successful, but bitter, guerilla war.
Like most of Africa, Uganda today is a different – and in several respects better – country.
For Africans of my generation, our politics was framed differently than it is today. As young people, the choice mostly was to live in a one-party or a military dictatorship. Today, the vexing issue is if an election will be free or stolen (someone described most African polities to me as “electoral thievocracies”).
And most of the people I went to school with in Uganda, and several friends I made later in graduate school as a young journalist in Africa, are dead – several fighting heroically for freedom in Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.
Hard to imagine that it is barely 30 years ago, but when I was young, the options of a life as a refugee, an exile, or misery as your parents rotted away in a junta prison were a daily reality. Some of us survived.
And one of the greatest survivors is, without doubt, George Bwanika Seremba.
This – partly – is his story:
Seremba: A remarkable life story.
APRIL 4, 2005: In a 1997 review entitled “Delivered from Evil,” a Canadian theatre critic wrote: “There is a moment in George Seremba’s one-man play, Come Good Rain, when life tears through the illusion created by art. It comes late in the performance, after Seremba – who is both writer and performer of the drama – has portrayed certain events from 1980, when he was shot by the security forces of Ugandan dictator Milton Obote.
“The actor rolls up his sleeve to expose the deep scars left by a bullet near his right elbow. The scene owes nothing to make-up. The old gunshot wounds, livid on his dark skin, is real, and it shocks the viewer into a more vivid appreciation of Seremba’s tale. The man on stage is not merely acting, he is also bearing witness to a historical evil, and the evidence is nothing less than himself”.
Obote was deposed by the army, for a second time, in July 1985. The coup resulted partly from a crisis in the military, caused by its five-year war against rebels of the National Resistance Army (NRA), led by [President] Yoweri Museveni. Between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed during that war.
Last week, Obote’s party, the Uganda People’s Congress (UPC) announced that the controversial old man of Ugandan politics is returning home in May, ending 20 years of exile in Zambia. (Obote didn’t return to Uganda alive. He died in October 2005 in a Johannesburg hospital, where he had been rushed from Lusaka. His body was brought back home and he was buried with national honours).
Museveni once said Obote would be shot if he ever dared return to Uganda. Now, his government says he will receive all the benefits of a former president.
MYSTERIES REMAIN
It will be many years before the full truth of what happened in Luwero, where the Museveni rebels and Obote army fought most of the war and the bulk of the civilian deaths took place, is known.
And we may never really know the political calculations that led Museveni to change his position on Obote, and what had persuaded the former president agree to return while his nemesis was still in power.
Whatever the case, Obote’s era will remain a painful period for many, and it is probably at the personal level that his return can be best understood.
Seremba was a classmate and good friend. He was also a political activist linked to the Democratic Party (DP).
Some background will help here. Uganda military dictator Idi Amin had been ousted in April 1979 by a combined force of the Tanzanian military and Ugandan dissident exile groups.
A new governing coalition of the exiles, the Uganda National Liberation Front (UNLF) was formed and took power. Within 68 days, the first UNLF and national president Yusuf Lule was ousted in an internal feud on June 20.
His successor, Godfrey Binaisa, lasted a bit longer. But he too was ejected less than a year later on May 30, 1980.
The UNLF had several organs, but the most powerful one was the Military Commission. Most of the members, including Museveni, were leaders of the armed – as opposed to the purely political – opposition groups that fought against Amin alongside the Tanzanians.
However, the Military Commission was dominated by pro-UPC generals, because the largest Ugandan rebel anti-group group was Kikosi Maalum (“Special Force”), which was also the military wing of Obote’s UPC in exile.
When the election of December 1980 was held, the pro-UPC figures in the Military Commission rigged it for Obote’s party. It was the dispute over the UPC victory that finally drove Museveni to the bush two months later in February 1981.
SHOT IN NAMANVE
On December 10, 1980, the day of the fated vote, soldiers arrested Seremba on Makerere University campus.
He was taken away and tortured at a detention centre.
President Museveni launches a road construction project in Namanve: If only the forest nearby could speak.
Days later, soldiers drove him deep in the night to Namanve Forest to the east of the Uganda capital Kampala.
He pleaded with them not to shoot him in the back as they walked him inside the forest. They granted him his wish.
He also asked to be allowed to say a last prayer.
Then they shot him.
He fell back. They sprayed the area where they he had fallen with bullets, and left.
Seremba had six deep bullet wounds. That night it rained. In the cold mud, the blood on his wounds coagulated. The rain saved him, hence the name of the play. His play “Come Good Rain” is a celebration of that “miracle”.
He crawled to a nearby road in the morning. Villagers took him and carried him to a clinic, and several days later, he was smuggled out to Kenya.
After three years in Kenya, he emigrated to Canada, where he is one of the country’s most successful African playwrights.
But the painful past is still with him. He limps. His body is bullet-scarred, and the fingers of his right hand are frozen, as if in a clench of agony.
George told me that, despite his extraordinary experience, he had long forgiven his persecutors; “If I were given a gun and left in a room with them, I would not use it. Better that they are haunted by what they did.”
For people like myself, George’s fate remains one of the most powerful testaments of the trials of that time, and is what makes a great irony of Uganda’s slide into Big Man politics.
However, his attitude also explains why it is possible for Obote to come back home – or in this case, why he was buried with the dignity in 2005, that his soldiers never allowed George that cold night in Namanve Forest in 1980.
LAST year, I got into big trouble with my friend conservationist Paula Kahumbu.
Ahead of a big burn of elephant tusks in Kenya, I argued that it was time to explore market-based solutions to combat poaching. Selling the ivory to drive down prices, might be a wiser course than burning it, I opined.
Paula was outraged. In the end, she suggested we put the matter to the people via a debate. And so the Great Elephant Debate came to be.
Paula has put up a good conservation fight over the years, and so has honed her craft. Ahead of the debate she drew from tactics straight out of sports, trying to throw me off my game with taunts and social media jabs.
Once she asked on Twitter if I could sell my grandmother’s tooth, equating it to an elephant tusk.
Rod Waddington/CC Flickr
For a long time after that, that question kept coming back to it. I tossed it around in my head many ways, and finally I came to a conclusion I hadn’t expected I would.
Humans are on top of the food chain, and rule over the other creatures of the world. Over the centuries we have killed billions of animals, wiping out several species, in the drive to open up farms; to lay down our roads; to build settlements and cities; to feed ourselves; for profit; and for sport.
However, when a well-aged is cow slaughtered, its meat and some of its entrails will be eaten. Its hide will turn into expensive handbags and shoes. The horn and hooves will make bracelets and wall decorations. The tail will make a flywhisk. And the rest of its stomach contents and blood are great manure.
In many African cities the best organic manure is the soil from around abattoirs.
Yes, sometimes human organs (the heart and kidney) are harvested and used to save other people, when we die, but if you are old they are of little value.
Our teeth, in particular, are quite useless.
We are the creature that is least beneficial to enriching the earth after our lights go out.
In life, we tower over elephants, cattle, and most animals in the wild cower and hide when they see us approaching.
In death, we are worthless compared to them.
Nature really has a cruel sense of humour.
So grandma, take heart. Even I had I wanted to, I wouldn’t have sold your tooth.
I don’t think anyone would have bought it.
I FIRST published this nearly six years ago, as a bit of delightful, but nonsensical, coincidence. It was worth revisiting.
This is a mystery. The majority of the top 50 largest national parks are in Southern Africa. The rest are in East Africa.
Seems unusual that there are no large parks in west Africa and central Africa, although they are some of the biggest countries in size.
Even more intriguing, the countries that have Africa’s largest parks also have among the continent’s longest record of elective politics and democracy. In fact, of all big-park nations, only one, Uganda, has ever had a military coup.
This would suggest that there is some link between military rule, democracy, and national parks. I don’t see it, but it might be hidden somewhere. Maybe someone smarter can find it.
Couldn’t help notice that “park poor” central Africa, also has some of the worst governed nations on the continent.
Selous Game Reserve Tanzania: Africa’s second biggest. (Photo/Dave Stroud/Flickr).
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