Category Archives: africa

mbeki’s legacy

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Partial results of Thabo Mbeki’s beetroot response to the South African AIDS epidemic are out. Life expectancy in South Africa declined between 1990-2007 (from 62 to 50). It is expected to decline even further over the next few years. Read more about this here.

It is worth noting that the new South African administration took an about-turn from Mbeki’s bizarre AIDS policy, as was articulated by his health minister. The South African Ministry of Health has on its website an HIV and AIDS and STI strategic plan designed to tackle the HIV problem. Over 5 million South Africans, out of a total population of 49.3 million, are infected.

keeping them honest, Aid Watch style

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For those into famines and famine politics, here’s one for you…

And more of the same

And here is more news on Ethiopia’s second insurgency waged by the Ogaden National Liberation Front (ONLF). The Oromo Liberation Front in the southern parts of the country is the other major thorn in Addis Ababa’s flesh. For a man into military victories and invasion of other states I must say I am disappointed in how Zenawi has handled both so far.

football hooligans and diplomacy

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Both Egyptian and Algerian officials could have been classier in handling the mess that has resulted from their rivalry on the field. The two national football teams were competing for the last African slot in next year’s world cup in South Africa. Egypt won the second leg in Cairo, resulting in a deadlock in the group, which then necessitated a playoff in a neutral country. Sudan was chosen and Algeria won.

The fans of either team did not find it in their interest to keep things this simple though. From Khartoum to Cairo to Algiers to Marseilles they expressed their anger by rioting and setting business and boats on fire. FIFA is considering disciplinary action on Egypt because Egyptian fans pelted the Algerian football team’s bus with stones. In Algiers Egyptian businesses were raided by angry mobs. The running battles extended to France, where Algerian and Egyptian immigrants clashed in Marseilles. Egypt has recalled its ambassador to Algeria.

There is pride in making it to the world cup, but there is also sanity and diplomatic decency. This should not have gone this far.

my two cents on the new constitution

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What I liked:

  • The bicameral parliament. It is expensive but will serve to give the regions a voice.
  • The regional governments. Great idea, but how are they going to be funded? I would have loved it if there was a provision that each region should generate enough revenue to fund a fixed percentage of its budget. This way the regional governments can have incentives to promote economic activity in their regions. Better yet the central government should have been mandated to only issue matching grants to these regions – to spur competition among them for funds for such sectors as education, healthcare, infrastructure development, etc
  • Retention of the Kadhis courts. I am glad that sanity prevailed on this one. Kenyan Christians were being absolutely crazy in their opposition to this.

What I did not like:

  • The judiciary. Judges of the Supreme Court should have had life tenure. They should have created regional court systems. And they should have done away with the “traditional” court systems – whatever they are?
  • Traditional marriages should have been trashed. Marriage should be between two people. Polygamy is an affront on women’s rights. Period.
  • And about gay marriage, I don’t think it was necessary to spell out that marriage is between a man and a woman. These guys should have been open minded enough to allow for the possibility of Kenyans being more liberal than they currently are.
  • Vote share for Nairobi in the Senate. Nairobi should have had one of the biggest shares of Senate votes – by virtue of it being the economic hub. Instead the Rift Valley, with its many underdeveloped counties, has the largest share. Call it urban bias, but I don’t like the idea of rural non-tax-payers always having the biggest say on who gets to steal the money paid in taxes by Nairobians and other city dwellers.
  • The lack for autonomy of towns and cities. The counties idea is great, but we should have designated cities and towns that were autonomous  – with their own police forces and stuff. Security and Justice are political and should have been devolved too.

And in other news, Kenya is still among the most corrupt countries in the world. The new TI corruption perception index ranks Kenya at 146 out of 180 states. This is one more reason to fire Amos Wako, Kenya’s Attorney general since forever. And while we are at it we should also get rid of the Chief Justice. Mr. Gicheru has not lived up to expectations. He was appointed to clean up the judiciary but ended up in the pockets of the powers that be.

obscene, utterly obscene

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Stories like this drive me crazy.

Quoting the Guardian Newspaper:

“Little Teodoro, as President Teodoro Obiang Nguema’s son is known at home, appears to spend as little time as possible fulfilling his duties as the minister of agriculture and forestry in the west African state. Instead he flits between South Africa, France and the US, pursuing business ventures such as a failed rap label while acquiring property and a fleet of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Bentleys – all made possible by the discovery of oil in Equatorial Guinea’s waters a decade ago.”

further ahead…..

“President Obiang, who has ruled since seizing power in 1979, has decreed that the management of his country’s $3bn a year in oil revenues is a state secret.”

According to the CIA factbook:

Per capita GDP of Equatorial Guinea (PPP) is 37,300. Obiang (the elder) spends a paltry 0.6% of his country’s GDP on education. Almost two thirds of the country’s 633,400 people live below the poverty line. Meanwhile, Obiang – whose kleptocratic leadership has plagued Equatorians since he staged a coup against his own uncle (and then executed him) in 1979 – managed to win a seven year term in 2002 with over 97% of the vote. The next elections will be held in 2010.

TOTAL INSANITY.

kenya’s new constitution, who will pay for it?

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The document is here...

290 members of parliament. 100 Senators. Several regions and more than 70 counties. These are among the new burdens that will be added onto the load currently weighing down the Kenyan taxpayer. The draft constitution released today also proposes an executive Premier and dual citizenship.

390 elected legislators is a bit too much, if you ask me. Kenya is a country of 40 million in which only a small fraction engages in taxable economic activities. The rest are rural subsistence farmers who don’t earn taxable income and engage in the formal economy only through sales taxes. Because of this I find it too much of a burden to ask the average Kenyan worker to foot the bill for an unnecessarily bloated legislature. Kenyan MPs are among the highest paid in the world. Indeed they earn more in a year than US senators. And they don’t pay any tax!

I still haven’t read the document yet, after which I look forward to commenting on the devolution structure and the hybrid system of government it supposedly proposes.

Despite its weaknesses, I think this is a step in the right direction. Better this than being stuck with the “home guard” constitution that we currently have.

stop the blame game and move on

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I am no apologist for colonialism. I am also not a fan of blaming everything on colonialism. Arbitrary borders, neocolonialism, assassination of presidents, unfair farm subsidies etc etc are the usual things we hear as explanations to why most of Africa remains economically backward. I say it has been more than 50 years and its about time we moved on. Colonialism had its evils, no doubt about that. However, it’s enduring legacy on the Continent has been the fault of Africans and their leaders. There are numerous other countries that have managed to take off even though they were also colonized and for some time were heavily dependent on the industrialised West.

Mobutu, Amin, Bokassa, Moi, Mugabe, Nimeiry, Gaddafi, Doe etc etc were all Africans who deliberately chose to mess up their countries. Nobody held guns to their heads to force them to do what they did. Guinea – at independence – is a clear case that it was quite possible to break free from the former colonizers. All the above mentioned men presided over wasted dictatorships. They killed and maimed and jailed thousands of their citizens but never attempted to do what Pinochet did for Chile or the dictators of the Asian tigers did for their countries. Instead they stole everything they could from their treasuries.

The reason I bring this up is because I just attended a talk on the legacy of colonialism in Africa where the general consensus seems to have been that European colonizers were to blame for most ills on the continent. I find this track of thought wanting. African failure should squarely be blamed on inept African leadership.

what can ocampo do?

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Chief prosecutor of the ICC – Moreno-Ocampo – jets into Kenya on Thursday in his efforts to bring to justice those who planned and financed the murder of over 1300 Kenyans in last year’s post-election violence. It is not clear exactly what Ocampo will demand of the president and his premier. Both men have close associates in the cabinet implicated in the murder of Kenyans. It is highly doubtful that the ICC will get anything out of the current Kenyan government – I can’t imagine the Kenyan police arresting any of the powerful ethnic chiefs in the cabinet. Wanjiku may have to wait a little longer for justice to be served.

And in other news, Kenya’s demographic transition is here!! I have nothing against babies. But I was delighted to learn that Kenyan women are having less children – a drop of .3 children per woman – and that 9 out 10 consulted a health officer at some point during their pregnancy. The survey that generated these results is done every five years and included over 10,000 Kenyan households. Other positives include the fact that vaccination rates had gone up and that up to 90% of rural women received some form of ante-natal care while pregnant (urban figure was 96%).

This sort of demographic transition has positives in many ways. Women having less children means that they are freed to do more to increase the GDP bottom line. It also means that GDP growth will not be gobbled up by an increase in population size.And perhaps most importantly, it means that women are becoming more and more empowered – the fact that they are able to control their fertility is an indicator of this (kudos to women from Central Kenya, 67% of them are in charge of their own fertility).

internally displaced people in Africa

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“There are other questions too. Should IDPs stay in rural areas or be resettled in towns? Providing the right amount of assistance is tricky as well. Too much, and an African government risks turning camps into subsidised slums. Too little, and people die.”

The above quote is from this weeks Economist Newspaper. As I have argued before, I think that the move to come up with a framework to protect IDPs on the Continent is a charade. I don’t get how the likes of Mugabe (one of the chief displacers of people on the Continent) are supposed to be entrusted with protecting the same people. Having UNHCR do the job sounds good but is riddled with huge moral hazard problems – as illustrated by the above quote.

Meanwhile, this is the kind of life that many an African autocrat (and soon the effects of climate change) forces his fellow citizens to live.

malaria is still around, you know

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Researchers have discovered a trend in the habits of mosquitoes. The little insects are feeding on human blood earlier than they used to. This means that more and more people get bitten earlier in the evening before they get to sleep under bed nets – which in turn translates into higher malaria infection rates. Bed nets lower infection rates by a whole 40%. Now researchers are urging people to use mosquito repellents. Personally, I don’t think this will fly. I for one do not like the “tourist smell” of repellents (I still don’t get how tourists stand themselves smelling like that!). I would advocate for a more aggressive approach to eliminating mosquitoes. DDT is bad, I know. But can’t we find other means of doing this? Plus malaria deaths, lost man hours because of disease burden and expenditures on anti-malaria medication may outweigh the cost of eliminating mosquitoes – thereby making the latter the more rational option.

Meanwhile, the WHO in a 2003 report says that malaria is still alive and well and continues to kill 2000 African children every day. That translates to 0.73 million children every year. I need not even add the figures for people over the age of 5.

where is Nkunda?

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Laurent Nkunda remains imprisoned in Rwanda – at least as far as a google search can tell. This even as his minions – or have they taken over already, given the fractious nature of rebel movements on the Continent? – who have been integrated into the Congolese army issued a warning that they are going to resume fighting if Kinshasa does not control its “indisciplined” soldiers.

I keep thinking that the arrest of Nkunda might have done what taking out the Islamic Courts Union in Somalia did – it spawned a variety of splinter rebel groups each with its own litany of grievances, which continue bargaining with them even harder.

This may be counter-intuitive, but in the fight against rebel movements may be the protagonists – in this case Kinshasa, Kigali and other concerned parties – might find it more useful to strengthen the stronger movements and use them to take out the weaker ones with the guarantee that once they do this they will be given better terms at the negotiating table. This approach would eliminate “security dilemma” concerns since the governments would be supplying the strong rebel group with arms.

There are of course a ton of commitment problems that arise out of this approach. For one the government would not want the rebel group to get too strong. How to guarantee this is not very clear. Secondly, it would be hard to get guarantees from governments that they will not take out the rebel movement militarily in a more conventional attack after the latter take out the splinter groups who thrive on asymmetric warfare. May be a guarantee of integration afterwards? A cabinet job?

– if you think this is nuts, look at Iraq and possibly Afghanistan.

Marende needs to do more

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Kenyan parliamentarians are the highest paid in Africa. Indeed, the 222 members of the August House make more than US senators do in a year. Quite a job they have.

All they have to do now is do their job right. According to a Parliamentary Powers Index the Kenyan parliament has a score of 31%. The same score as Mauritania and Zimbabwe and lower than places like Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast. Even the Sierra Leonean parliament did better than Kenya on this index. This index is not the final word on parliamentary performance, but Marende and his team could be doing a better job. A stronger committee system, better laws, more transparency of parliamentary procedures and less sleaze could be good places to start.

A higher score on the index is clearly correlated with better government, with members of the OECD up top. Wake up Marende and Co.

Due credit to: M. Steven Fish and Matthew Kroenig, The Handbook of National
Legislatures: A Global Survey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

sunday editorials that I liked

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As usual, Mutahi Ngunyi has a provocative piece in the Sunday Nation. I am sort of sympathetic to his idea of ethnic suicide (by which he means dumping ethnic identities and what they stand for) – I was in Eldoret and Timboroa for two days this summer and saw with my own eyes the fruits of ethnic hatred. The short-term operationalization of the idea may be problematic though. To make Kenyans out of Luos and Kikuyus and Kalenjins will take time. Because of this the process of “ethnic suicide” ought to take place sub-consciously, for if it is “managed” the end results or the process itself may be nasty.

Gitau Warigi pours some cold water on Bethuel Kiplagat’s TJRC. I like his argument. I am always baffled by how much we spend on such useless commissions only to be rewarded with “classified reports” issued to the president.  Philip Ochieng‘ has an interesting piece on ethnicity and politics in Kenya. I wonder how many politicians read his column… And Kwendo Opanga just gave me one more reason to think that Vice President Kalonzo Musyoka is as misguided as ever. This is not to say that the alternatives to Mr. Musyoka in the post-Kibaki dispensation are any better. Woe unto Wanjiku.

And in other news, is this legitimising crime or what?

where are the african governments in this debate?

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I am a regular reader of Bill Easterly’s Aid Watch blog. I like his skepticism with regard to the efficacy of aid in the developing world. But every time I read something by him I am always left wondering; what do African finance ministers’ think? I would appreciate having some opinions from the people he keeps writing about – because otherwise he is no better than the WB or IMF clowns who conduct their business from a distance without local input. Easterly’s solutions-based approach could do with a little bit of input from third world government officials.

a case of gross state incompetence?

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Amos Wako should resign. Together with Keriako Tobiko. I used to think that the latter was dedicated to true justice but it turns out that he is also beholden to powerful individuals within Kenya’s upper class and emerging thuggish new upper class.

All I have to say is that this is a sign of gross state incompetence.

Who will stand for justice and the rights of Wanjiku? Have we gone too far into this culture of impunity that murderers are set free right in front of our eyes because of their connections?

But then again, who am I kidding? Is it not the government of Kenya that has a number of high ranking cabinet ministers who planned and financed the killing of ordinary Kenyans early last year? When will it dawn on Wanjiku that she is on her own?