Monthly Archives: March 2009

new Guinea-Bissau president sworn in

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Raimundo Pereira, former speaker of Guinea-Bissau, has been sworn in as the new president of the West African nation. As speaker, Mr. Pereira was next in line to succeed the president, who was assassinated on Monday by suspected agents of the military. President Vieira was assassinated only hours after the army chief of staff, his political rival, was also killed by a bomb in his office.

The new president urged the international community not to forget Guinea Bissau. The impoverished nation of 1.5 million has seen slow recovery from a disastrous civil war in the late 1990s. With a per capita GDP of $ 213 ($ 600, PPP) it still has a long way to go. It is heavily dependent on farming and fishing, with cashews being the major crop. One can only hope that the new president will offer some change. I doubt this though. After the circumstances of former president Vieira’s death, it is obvious that president Pereira will be beholden to the generals in the military, at least  until elections are held in 60 days – if they ever get held.

more on the kcse: PB-Riruta 1st, Mang’u 4th nationally

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Many thanks to the Nation. The newspaper reporters tabulated the mean scores of several schools and came up with a tentative list of the top schools in the country in last years KCSE exams. Top of the (unofficial) list  is Preciosu Blood-Riruta. In second place is Starehe Boys Centre. Alliance Boys is third. Mang’u High School, last year’s best performing school is in fourth place with a mean of 10.2350, a drop from the school’s leading average of 11.2634 (out of 12) last year. The other leading schools according to the Nation’s tally were Kenya High, Moi Girls Eldoret, Bahati Girls, Maseno School, Strathmore and Nairobi School respectively. Among the top ten schools, only one, Strathmore, is a day school. Four of them are girl schools and none is a mixed school.

As pointed out by Prof. Ongeri (edcuation minister), this year’s performance was less than ideal. The pass rate, those with C+ and above (hence technically qualified for university) was 24%. Only 0.27% scored straight As. 34 percent scored Ds and Es.Yes, 34%!!!

The minister for education blamed the poor performance on last year’s post-election violence and the strikes that affected several schools during the mock exams season.

I say this is hiding from the truth. The fact of the matter is education in Kenya continues to be grossly under-funded. I know this for a fact because even in my high school – a well regarded National School – the PTA had to step in through fundraisers to pay for improvements of the facilities and extra motivation allowances for teachers. You can only imagine what other schools without such enterprising PTAs have to contend with.

My question to the minister is: who should we hold accountable when a whole 76% of high school students cannot score C+s in the KCSE ??????

And here is a piece by Philip Ochieng’ on the Kenyan education system….

ICC issues arrest warrant for Bashir

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The International Criminal Court on Wednesday issued an arrest warrant for Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir. It is the first time that such a warrant has been issued for the arrest of a sitting head of state. The ICC is accusing Bashir of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his involvement in the genocide in Darfur.

This particular warrant will be a real test. Being a sitting president, it is hard to see how he can be arrest since the warrant itself will be delivered to the government of Sudan. Furthermore, al-Bashir now has every incentive to remain president and to clamp down on the opposition. Some members of the Sudanese civil society have criticized the idea of attempting to arrest al-Bashir, arguing that it will only make him dig in and reverse any progress that they have made in terms of being granted civil liberties and political space.

The government of Sudan is yet to officially respond to the arrest warrant although the BBC quotes a government official as terming the warrant as “neo-colonialist.”

President Kibaki: “I have only one wife”

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President Kibaki made a rare show by holding a press conference to dispel rumours that he has a second wife or mistress. With the first lady Lucy Kibaki by his side, the president pleaded with the media to stop peddling what he termed as “uongo” (lies) about his involvement with another woman. He warned that anyone continuing to spread “such lies” would see him in court. After the president made his remarks the stunned members of the press seemed unable to ask any questions. Mrs. Kibaki then had a tearful outburst, calling out Paul Muite, among others. Yesterday Mr. Muite said that the government’s raid on the Standard three years ago was to prevent the newspaper from running a story about the president’s alleged second family. Mr. Muite has refused to either retract his comments or apologise to the first family.

wambui2_2The woman in the middle of the controversy is one Mary Wambui (left), popularly known as a “Narc-Kenya activist.” Ms. Wambui first came onto the national stage after president Kibaki’s election victory in 2002. Back then the media started to inquire about her relationship with the president when a 24 hour security detail was sent to her house.

I commend the president for his bravery on this matter. Whatever his involvement is/was with Ms. Wambui, I am glad that he came out and unequivocally denied that he had more than one wife. The first lady – and by extension the women of Kenya – deserve respect and the rumours about the president’s mistress have not helped that cause. I hope this denunciation of mistresses does not just end with the president but permeates across Kenyan society. I say it is time Kenyan men closed all those “nyumba ndogos”. Kenyan women deserve better.

KCSE results reveal a drop in performance

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The (Kenyan) minister of education, Prof. Sam Ongeri, released the 2008 KCSE results today. This year’s results announcement was different in that it did not include the ranking of schools. Only students were ranked, with Mark Maugo and Velma Mukhongo emerging as the top boy and girl respectively. The top girl was fourth overall.The rankings also included lists of best students per subject.

The minister also noted a drop in performance, possibly related to the numerous strikes that rocked several schools mid last year. There were 460 fewer irregularities this year than there were last year.

While I appreciate the minister’s attempts to remove unhealthy competition among high schools, I still think that the ranking gave schools an incentive to make sure that ALL their students succeed. Now that only students are being ranked, we may end up with a case whereby schools only concentrate on their best students who will make it to the top ten lists of subjects nationally and forget about those at the bottom of the class. I think the media should do its job and find out which schools did better, to give parents a sense of where they ought to send their kids and to expose poor performers.

Competition breeds excellence, bwana Minister. And in any case you can’t erase the disparities between the ‘big schools’ as we know them and the smaller ones. The former still remain better funded and attract the best teachers. What the government should have done is not eliminate the rankings, but instead strive at improving all schools in the long run so that they can all compete fairly. Eliminating the ranking will not solve the problem, it is a shameful attempt to hide from the problem of inequality among Kenyan schools.

the strange…

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For some time now I have been following the absurd story of witchdoctors and ‘traditional’ healers in Tanzania who apparently kill people with albinism with the belief that their body parts can be used for medicinal purposes. No, this is not something that used to happen in the 18th century. It is happening now, in 2009. France 24 ran a story on this a few weeks ago. The BBC is reporting that the Tanzanian government has finally decided to do something about the killings – perhaps because of the increased international attention. But their solution is almost as strange as the killings themselves.

They are asking villagers to have a referendum-like affair in which they will ‘vote’ indicating who they suspect to be linked to the murder of albinos. Now I am no anthropologist or sociologist but what kind of law enforcement is this? First of all, the government should be ashamed that it did not sniff this out early enough. This is also a sign of a total failure of social education in Tanzania. These witchdoctors and ‘traditional’ healers, anthropologists and socialists will love this, ought to be required to get licenses and should be constantly monitored by the government to guarantee best practice – if that is ever possible (In my world they should be completely outlawed). No country in the 21st century should be tolerating such crazy things. And about the killers, they are common criminals who should be arrested and treated as such by law enforcement.

This story also raises the question of culture and tradition in Africa. As I have stated here before, I am no fan of blind traditionalism – a la Negritude. I think that for far too long we have continued to conflate culture and tradition with poverty and ignorance. Having witchdoctors is not traditional. Witchdoctors do the things they do because they do not have laboratories or the knowledge to package their herbs in more efficiently delivered capsules. They are not necessarily alternatives to hospitals as some apologists would have us believe.

And there is absolutely nothing fun about living a ‘traditional life’ as is often described by anthropologists. The “original affluent society”, as they call it, had a life-spun of 30 years and had a reciprocity-based economy that could only support a few dozen people. This will not work in a 40 million man society. Let us stop pretending, there are a lot of traditional practices all across the continent that belong in the dustbin of history. If we continue to bury our heads in the sand, occasionally the volcano will boil over and embarrassing stories like the Tanzania albino story will make it to the headlines of major news sources.

Guinea-Bissau president killed

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Joao Bernado Vieira, President of Guinea-Bissau, was shot dead today as he tried to flee his house. Earlier in the day the army chief of staff, Gen. Tagme na Waie, was killed by in explosion in his office at the army HQ. It is suspected that it is Tagme loyalists that killed the president. The two – the president and his chief of staff – had recently seen a deterioration in their relations. The Guinean (Bissau) army however claims that this is not a coup. It remains unclear whether the civilian government or the army is in charge right now.
The African Union has condemned both killings, stating that the latest turn of events is a setback to the peace building initiative in the poverty-stricken West African country (per capita nominal GDP is at a mere $213). Vieira himself came to power in a coup in 1980. He won the country’s first multiparty elections in 1994 before being ousted in a coup in 1999 and then being re-elected in 2005. In 1986 he executed his own vice president after a coup attempt.
This is the third coup in West Africa in the last one year. Mauritania and Guinea witnessed coups in August and December of last year respectively. It is a shame that in 2009 West African Generals still see coups as acceptable means of power transfer. The region has seen the most coups on the continent of Africa. Since 1955 there have been 49 successful military led coups among the 16 West African States. Unsuccessful plots approach 100. A lot of blame also goes to authoritarian governments in this region that have denied their citizens of any means of loyal opposition. To paraphrase that old saying, those that live by the gun eventually do die by the gun.

who is funding this war?

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The BBC is reporting that the FDLR, a group suspected to include genocidaires from Rwanda’s 1994 disaster, has retaken positions it ceded a month ago to Rwandan troops. Earlier this year Rwandan troops had moved into Eastern DRC with a mission to take out FDLR positions. However, it is now emerging that as soon as Rwanda left, the FDLR moved back and retook their old bases.

congo-mine1These new developments just serve to illustrate how intractable the mess in Eastern Congo is. For years now Uganda, Rwanda and the weak Kinshasa governments of Kabila I and II have tried to restore order in this part of the vast central African country without success. It seems like the more the government tries to end the war the more rebel movements emerge. Which begs the question, exactly who is funding this war?

That foreign companies are accomplices in the Congo war is not a secret. The control of mines and trading centres (for tax purposes) seem to be the main motivations for the emergence of the numerous rebel groups. Someone is buying the minerals that come from these mines and someone is supplying the rag tag bandits with guns and ammunition. I am sure it is within the means of the UN and the many involved parties – if they mean well in their involvement – to expose the companies that are involved in this messy war, either as arms dealers or purchasers of minerals.

Just like it was in Sierra Leone with blood diamonds, the international community can shame the companies involved in this war to come clean and end the economic incentives for the proliferation of rebel groups and gangs in eastern Congo.

The following are some American-owned companies that were implicated in a 2002 UN report on the Congo war profiteers: Cabot Corporation, Eagle Wings Resources International, Trinitech International, Kemet Electronics Corporation, OM Group and Visgay Sprague …… and there are others.

The Congo war is a resource war and the sooner those trying to stop it acknowledge this fact and deal with it, the easier it is going to be to come up with modalities of how to end it.

is it really that bad?

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I just read a piece by Jeffrey Gettleman, the sensationalist East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times. From reading the piece one gets the impression that Kenya is nothing but a dystopia: There is corruption everywhere, ten million people face starvation and everyone seems to be a victim of the violence that rocked the country last year. To some extent Mr. Gettleman’s assessment is accurate and it would do us some good if our politicians read some of his work – the sensationalism might just embarass them enough to have them change their ways and start acting in the interest of Kenyans.

But are things really that bad? Are we really on the verge of total collapse as a nation state? I don’t think so. Yes, ours is probably one of the most corrupt countries in the world. Crime may be high in Nairobi and other urban centres. And it is true that millions of Kenya are currently dependent on government food aid. But these phenomena are not unique to Kenya. Other countries have or have had similar problems in their history without necessarily becoming failed states.

I say we stop all the negativity. Yes we can and should criticize the government and our politicians when they do things against our interests. But we should never buy into the idea that we are a society on the brink of collapse, as some journalists out there would want us to believe. Even in the midst of our woes Kenya is seeing some important progress – not just economically but also politically. No one can dispute the fact that the Kenyan parliament has become a stronger institution (and a better check to the executive) than it used to be. The private sector continues to grow and the Kenyan civil society remains strong and committed to its duty to point out the government’s failings whenever necessary.

I am not saying that things are not bad. They are, big time. What I am saying is that they are not too bad to be fixed.