Tag Archives: tanzania

only in Kenya: milk oversupply, even as some Kenyans starve

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So the government and dairy farmers are not too happy with the current milk oversupply. Prices have gone down dramatically due to the milk glut, causing farmers to want tighter regulation of the dairy industry to protect local dairy farmers.

First of all, advocating for a contraction of the industry in order to boost prices is a silly move. Why don’t we export that milk to Uganda and Southern Sudan instead, or even down south to Tanzania? And there is also the minor detail about starving Kenyans in the Northern arid areas (why doesn’t the Kenyan government treat food insecurity in these parts of the country with the seriousness it deserves???). Why not increase output in order to provide enough even for these people at a lower price? Falling prices can be mitigated through higher output. Scale might be the answer.

is it time we had fresh elections?

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So the weekend retreat in Tsavo of the big-wigs in Kenya’s coalition government failed. Instead of addressing real issues (reforms, corruption and Kenya’s land problem), the discussions veered into side-shows – like the Premier’s salary and the opening remarks of the president and his prime minister.

I am beginning to think that the coalition government has outlived its purpose. I am beginning to be persuaded by those who have been calling for fresh elections – most notably the clergy. The coalition government, as currently constituted, is dysfunctional at best. The prime minister and the president (and their respective camps) seem to be pulling in opposite directions on just about every issue. May be it’s time we went to the polls and gave a mandate to a single party instead of having the collective tyranny of ODM and PNU. I think we have a better chance with just one of these parties in power. May be then the government can act more responsibly on reforms instead of having cabinet ministers constantly pointing fingers at each other and blaming the other party.

On a different note, I hear rumours that Martha Karua might quit the government if she is not given more space in the Justice ministry. I hope she gets what she wants, i.e. more space to implement her brand of reforms in the judiciary. Hate her or love her, I think Martha Karua is one of the few Kenyan leaders who speak their mind and who have the balls to implement what they believe in. I remember reading somewhere that the problem with African politics is the lack of ideology. Many leaders act like blind men in the dark, constantly wandering around without any direction.

African social organization and politics have mostly been driven by contingency rather than ideology. The only country that ever produced a true ideologue on the continent was Tanzania. And for all its faults, Ujamaa helped Tanzania a great deal. God knows where the country would be had it not been for the commodity crises of the seventies and mandated structural adjustment programs of the eighties (yeah Gordon Brown, down with the Washington Consensus). I think Martha Karua may be Kenya’s real ideologue, and for that she is increasingly becoming one of my favorite politicians, even though she and I may not see eye to eye on her actual policies.

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.

a few stories that highlight just how bad things are for some people

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The BBC reports that women in Niger have a 1 in 7 chance of dying during childbirth. The report also mentioned that more than half of maternal deaths in poor countries occur in Africa. I have talked about this in the past but it still is saddening to see such statistics and know that there are real people, real human beings behind them. IRIN also has a slightly positive story on maternal mortality in Somalia.

Turning to the bizzare, The Economist reports that albinos in East Africa are facing constant threat of death in the hands of crazies out to harvest their body parts – to be used by witches. This is the 21st century? How do people still believe in things like this? The Economist may have hyped it a bit, but the mere fact that such crazy things are still happening in communities in East Africa is shocking, and quite frankly embarrassing for Africa. I think it is time governments stopped pretending that people don’t do such weird things and go ahead and outlaw certain practices – like witchcraft and the like. Of course this may be a problem if some law-makers believe in that stuff too. And I would not be surprised if it turned out that some do because we are led by a brood of half-baked adults without a scintilla of statesmanship but full of superstitious and anachronistic nonesense that they present as “traditions.”

And lastly, a positive story from Malawi. The authorities tthere have adopted the use of mobile phones to assist in data collection. This discovery might help improve the standards of data collection across Africa, a continent where planning has been seriously hampered because of unreliable data collection and record-keeping.

bush visit to africa

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President George Bush will pay his final official visit to the continent this coming week. According to the White House website the president and his wife will visit Africa between Feb 15 and 21 to see firsthand the impact of America’s aid towards prevention and containment of HIV/AIDS and other tropical diseases.

President Bush’s itinerary will include stops in Tanzania, Benin, Ghana, Liberia and Rwanda. Although Bush is wildly unpopular at home and in many other parts of the world, many Africans still view the president in a good light because of the visible impact that his aid policies have had on the continent’s struggle with AIDS. Mr. Bush launched the $500m aids fund for Africa in 2002 in an attempt to help many of the African countries struggling with high infection rates and lack of ARVs. Since then many of the countries that received the aid have managed to reduce the spread of AIDS and deaths due to the virus through the provision of affordable ARVs.

AIDS remains one of Africa’s biggest challenges. The continent has the world’s highest average infection rates and is faced with a crisis as millions of children continue to be orphaned by the scourge. A few countries like Uganda have managed to stem the spread of the virus while others have chosen to treat it as less of a threat. Yet others have even gone comical – South Africa and the Gambia come to mind. In South Africa, Mbeki insists that HIV does not cause AIDs and his health minister thinks that herbs would cure the illness. The President of Gambia on the other hand insists that he can cure the disease, but only on Thursdays.The church in Africa in its reluctance to endorse the use of condoms among the faithful is also playing a role in the spread of the disease.

I hope that Bush’s visit will be a wake up call to African health officials. The continent’s health services are in dire need of modernization since most of them lack equipment and drugs and cannot deal with even the simplest of illnesses.

when will africa get it right?

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A few months ago, after the Nigerian election, I read a piece in a leading international newspaper that said that Africa had yet again failed at democracy. The article infuriated me because it was a blanket write off of the entire continent as being undemocratic. I thought about Kenya, Senegal and Botswana as viable democracies that were capable of holding free and fair elections and which had freedom of the press.

But then Kenya happened. A country that was largely peaceful and with prospects of becoming a middle income country in the next decade and a half suddenly imploded and descended into never-before seen chaos. An election was stolen by a man who was viewed as one of the better behaved presidents on a continent infested with autocrats and dictators.

How, after all this, can we convince the world that Nigeria, Zimbabwe, the CAF, Equatorial Guinea, Sudan, Somalia, Chad, the DCR and all the others are isolated incidents? How are we going to convince ourselves that we are capable of running peaceful and prosperous countries when all that exist around us are chaos and murderous wars? Total failure?

It is true that countries like Botswana and Senegal still remain stable and democratic and also headed towards economic prosperity. South Africa is also doing quite well, although I am holding my breath to see what a Zuma presidency has in store for us. But the rest of the countries either have wars, or some form of instability and those that are peaceful have poverty rates that are utterly inhuman, to put it mildly.

It is extremely vital for the continent not to let a working model like Kenya sink into the same pit that has the Somalias of the continent. This is because many countries in East Africa depend on Kenya for their own economic success. A failed Kenya would mean no hope for Somalia and serious problems for Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Southern Sudan, Eastern DCR and Northern Tanzania. A failed Kenya will also mean a serious blow to the spread of democracy on the continent and especially East Africa. Besides Tanzania, Kenya was the only other democracy in the region. Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi all have autocrats who would happily use Kenya as an excuse for them to stay in power.