What An African Woman Thinks

Up in Arms: Some Follow-up Thoughts on the Arms Trade Treaty

2009-10-20T18:04:00.004+03:00

I spent a decent chunk of last week skirting around, hovering above and peering into the subject of calculated self-interest. While I was at it, and, perhaps because my antennae were up, I stumbled upon two articles that considered how that very idea may play out on the global stage.

The one was an article about world hunger in which the argument was advanced, with qualification, that it is ultimately in the self-interest of the developed world to combat world hunger and that this is the case that should increasingly be made to the citizens of the more developed nations because framing the fight against hunger as a social justice issue has failed, in large part to galvanise them. I’ll leave you to make of that what you will.

The other was a critical piece in Time magazine about why this was so not the year to award Obama a nobel prize. I borrow a line from that article in Time by Nancy Gibbs to lead you to where I’m standing:

“peacemaking is more about ingenuity than inspiration, about reading other nations' selfish interests and cynically, strategically exploiting them for the common good.”

Calculated national self-interest then, is at the heart of every negotiation on the global stage. In diplomatic circles, it may well be considered coarse to call it what it is, but that doesn’t alter its essence.

Right.

Now that we’re here, where I’ve been standing these past few, let’s usher the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) into the room, shall we?

At the risk of grossly oversimplifying that which stubbornly defies simplification, I see three major trans-national groupings based on standing in the arms trade which then cluster somewhat differently based on their current stance toward the ATT.

Based on standing in the arms trade, those major groupings are:

• those a control arms report refers to as “the big five arms exporting countries” namely the Russia, the UK, the US, France and Germany, which, per 2005 data, accounted for 82 per cent of global sales in conventional weapons;

• the emerging players in the arms export market including countries such as Turkey, Pakistan, India, South Korea, Israel, China, Brazil, Singapore and South Africa, each competing to secure a slice of the conventional arms export market and;

• the rest of the world.
(Of course, in the space marked ‘the rest of the world’ it bears noting that there are currently some 92 countries producing some component or other for the small arms and light weapons industry, including my native Kenya. But the major players in the export market which is the domain in which the ATT are those outlined above.)

Clustering based on stance towards an ATT as demonstrated in how nations voted on the 2006 UN General Assembly resolution to work “toward an Arms Trade Treaty” yields a slightly different map, although most places where the boundaries fall are familiar.

There was one outright nay. There is no prize for guessing that it came from the US.

An overwhelming majority of 153 states voted in favour of the resolution, including three of the big five conventional arms exporters, namely Germany, the UK and France (indeed all of Europe excepting Russia voted in favour of the resolution), a number of the emerging exporters including SouthdEfrmga,dWingepove, Fvazml, tlusdwubmWahevandEfrmga,dWoutl Amerige and tle Cevibfeanldindthedmainn dM Tlosedwhodebsteined ingluded mostdof tle mmddle eewt,dwomedofdnortl Afvicel the Indian sub continent and Russia. Plus a few other countries whose abstention rings contrarian more than anything else, like Zimbabwe and Venezuela.

This is where it gets interesting. (Read: complex).

Three of the major small arms and light weapons exporters namely France, Germany and the UK stood right along some of the countries worst hit by the proliferation of illicit weapons, many of them in sub Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America in calling for work to begin towards an Arms Trade Treaty.
In fact, the UK, along with six other nations, last week presented a draft resolution to the First Committee calling for negotiations on the ATT to begin forthwith and be completed by 2012. Emerging exporters such as South Africa, Singapore and Brazil also voted in favour of the resolution.
I’m going to go out on that shaky limb and reiterate, here, that everyone brings self-interest to the table.

Everyone.

I’m not student of diplomacy or international relations, but as I’ve observed it, positions at the international stage are arrived at based on a sophisticated template honed over time for calculating self-interest. Nations choose from a long list of available components the exact mix of factors to combine in order to arrive at a position on either side of the aisle or to decide to sit, once in the odd while, stark in the middle.

Strategic national interests such as self-defense or the desire to position themselves as a force to reckon with, may be a strong consideration. Political survival may come into play for some and not for others, and may incline some strongly one way and others strongly in the opposite direction. The national bottomline is almost always a consideration. And where there is little or no impact on it, then a nation’s self-interest may be swayed by a desire to support a key ally in the clear if unspoken expectation that when the time comes (and the time always comes), the support will be reciprocated in kind.

This is the raging whirlpool into which the ATT will be flung, the one side cheering it on, the other, willing it drown and die a quick death already so that life might return to an acceptable kind of normal.

So we’re at the negotiating table. We’ve acknowledged that nations bring diverse interests to the table. It’s the way of the world. How does this play out in the ATT context?

As far as I can see, the interests at the table fall in three broad categories that are complicated by an age old twist.

First up are the ‘big five’ traditional exporters of conventional weapons who still control a big chunk of the global trade in arms and come from contexts where the rules of the trade have been tightened significantly in a bid to minimise the sale of weapons to groups who would use them to violate the rights of others, such as guerilla groups and terrorist groups. These high standards that have been imposed either nationally or regionally have had the effect of leashing the companies operating within their borders to a standard, which has had a direct impact on these companies’ bottomlines.

At the same time as they have been subject to these internal restraints, they have watched as emerging arms exporters roam relatively free about, supplying the demand for conventional arms in the ever expanding war zones of the world with seemingly little or no thought at all as to the consequences thereof. Naturally, then, the arms industries in these countries where strict rules now apply want the same stringent requirements to apply to the rest of the world so that balance may once again restored to the trade. (Read: so that they can once again secure their leading position in the highly profitable industry.)

Second are the newly emerging arms exporters. As you can imagine, new players in the export of arms would, all other things being equal, be inclined to recoil against an ATT. If you view it through your pragmatic lenses, you can very well see why.

As I’ve come to understand it, manufacturing weapons is an expensive undertaking, requiring significant investment. Nations who nurture the industry for strategic national defense and security reasons, and because, in order to be a force to reckon with on the global stage you have to be a player in the war industry, soon find that, in order for such a venture to be financially feasible in the long term, they need to grow their market beyond their borders, to become arms exporters.

So there’s a space where the arms trade debate converges with the climate change debate. The newly emerging players could well accuse the traditional players of bringing rules to the table at this specific time in history simply to rein in the emerging competition, to keep it in check.

They might argue also, that by virtue of their geography and history as well as diverse political and economic considerations, the new markets into which they can sell their arms are likely to attract more suspicion on the global stage than the more established nations into which the big five would sell their arms and that therefore they would be the bigger losers in a new stringent global ATT environment. And they might have a point.

Into these muddy the waters, toss in a twist in the form of longstanding distrust and other issues long simmering, yet unresolved. Between the west and the bulk of the middle east for example. In doing so, you may begin to despair about an ATT ever being able to swim to shore while retaining a decent amount of robustness.

But, let’s set all that aside for a minute and consider the third interest cluster comprising Africa, the Caribbean and parts of Latin American where the impact of the illicit trade in conventional weapons has been, in a word, devastating.

Long debilitating wars across the African continent from Sierra Leone to Liberia, DRC to Sudan, have been fed by a steady, unrelenting supply of illicit weapons to rebels who have wrought havoc on entire populations. The loss to lives in the past decade alone is counted in the tens of millions. And then there are those who have been wounded, those who have been bereaved, those who have been raped and otherwise violated, and those who have been brutally robbed of their livelihoods.

The internal discord and intercommunity tensions that flare up into open conflict in these war zones are often home grown, but easy access to weapons prolongs them unnecessarily and aggravates their effect multiple-fold. I need not paint a picture. You have glimpsed it over and over again.

Take the DRC for prime example, where in the last decade, 5.4 million people have lost their. Consider what havoc small arms and light weapons have caused there, in the brutal hands of unscrupulous gangs and militia who have little regard for human life and are only concerned with selfish personal gain.

Take Jamaica, across the world from Africa, for slightly different example, who murder rate is 61 per 100,000. The police are fighting a losing battle there to restore the peace against heavily armed gangs who are holding the country at ransom with illicit weapons. It’s proximity to the politically unstable Haiti, from whence a good proportion of its guns come, according to Novelette Grant, is the bane of its existence. But its gun trade is intricately tied also, with its drug trade, the one feeding off the other, and vice versa.

Take also my own country Kenya. According to a recent report by the BBC, rival communities in Kenya’s Rift Valley province, the epicentre of the post election violence that nigh brought the country to its knees in 2008, are rearming.

Except the word rearming doesn’t tell it quite as ominously as it is. In fact, what they’re doing, per the report, is upgrading their weapons.

Last year, the crimes were in large part committed with crude weapons: bow and arrow and machetes. This year, machine guns are all the rave.

As one man is reported to have told the BBC’s Wanyama wa Chebusiri:

"Before we were using bows and arrows to fight the enemy but changed to guns following the post-election experience because we realised, compared to guns, the arrows were child's play."

Supply is high, the article says, and the price is low.

In his brief address at the launch of Oxfam’s Dying for Action report just over a week ago, Mutuku Nguli, CEO of Peacenet, a Kenyan grassroots organisation, tagged the price of an AK-47 in the Rift Valley at a very accessible $230.

Why is supply high?

Partly because Kenya’s borders are porous and controls are weak. If people with criminal intent want to smuggle weapons into our country, they likely can and they likely will.

Partly, also, because neighbouring states such as Somalia are unstable. Weapons are getting from there into Kenya even though there’s a UN embargo on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to various warlords and warring clans in Somalia.

To hear it from the horses mouth, in this case Florella Hazelely, an activist with the Sierra Leone Action Network in Small arms, as she is quoted in the Control Arms report, Arms Without Borders,
“We don’t manufacture these guns, yet they end up in our country, erode our security and have terrible consequences for our development.”
This is nothing short of a gross injustice on a global scale. It will not do.

But, before I climb onto my soapbox, allow me to make a comment about the US position.

Per intelligence I’ve gathered, the US’ reluctance to wholly embrace an ATT is not so much driven by economic considerations as by strategic ones. US arms sales have historically been closely aligned with its national strategic interests and its foreign policy objectives.

Consider for example how it recently supplied 40 tons of weapons to the fragile Transitional Federal Government (TFG) in Somalia in a noble bid to strengthen it against increasing attacks from militia groups in the country. Now, you’ve probably read that there’s a brisk arms trade in Somalia, complete with a specialised market where guns can be bought off the shelf or ordered in bulk. It’s a lucrative business, is what it is, and if you’ve got money in your pocket, it’s as good as a gun in your hand.

I read, also, that some of the weapons supplied by the US to the Somalia TFG found their way to this market through unscrupulous means. It is not inconceivable, then, that some of the weapons on sale in Kenya’s rift valley may be these very weapons, supplied by the US to a legitimate government in Somalia.

In its brief address to the First Committee, week before last, the US insisted that no nation had done more than it had done to stem illicit trade in weapons. I have no reason to dispute this. But, by the brief illustration above I mean to advance the argument that more is needed than a unilateral effort—a comprehensive global standard is necessary.

Which is what brings me full circle, to that thing I was going on about, about the world really needing an Arms Trade Treaty. (Or hadn’t I gotten to that already?)

Well then, climbing atop my soapbox now, thanks much.

As the negotiations for an Arms Trade Treaty begin, it is clear, nay inevitable, that there will be posturing.

The stakes, after all, are extremely high. There are national strategic interests on the line. And national bottomlines as well. There’s prestige, also. And ego. Not to mention old scores yet unsettled.

But over and well above all this, there are human lives at stake, and human lives are the highest stake of all.

There is, as Debbie Hiller of Oxfam International so compellingly put it, “a humanitarian imperative,” and that red card, legitimately pulled out of whatever back pocket, silences all other considerations except those equal to it.

So if the way you calculate your self-interest yields a negative value in the event that an ATT comes into force, while I sympathise with you, I urge you to consider the humanitarian imperative. For those who had rather say no and who, in glancing across the aisle, have just cause to call into question the underlying motives of some of the aye-sayers, I should like to sympathise, but I’m compelled by a humanitarian imperative.

Oxfam International and the Control Arms coalition have put a number tag on that humanitarian imperative: 2,000 people. Every day. Meet their death through small arms and light weapons. 2,000 people.

It will not, it cannot, it must not do that in some lofty political somewhere, old bulls and new bulls lock horns in a power struggle while 2,000 innocent people lose their lives every day.

Do we need a global, legally binding treaty to minimize the extent to which small arms and light weapons are used to fuel conflict and human rights abuses?

YES. WE. DO.

*Disclosure* I had the privilege of attending a couple of days worth of meetings at the UN on the arms trade treaty as an independent blogger, at the invite of Oxfam International. I learned a great deal. I experienced a great deal. I interacted a great deal. But what I say here is what this African woman thinks, about what she saw and heard and read. I have a great deal more to say, which shall be said in due course. Hopefully.

Who Needs an Arms Trade Treaty Anyway?

2009-10-07T19:04:00.008+03:00

Does the world need an Arms Trade Treaty?

There is no doubt in my mind that Africa does, and because Africa does, the world does.

In fact, if I had it my way, we would set in place an effective, transparent global mechanism to regulate the entire conventional weapons supply chain, not just the distribution end of the arms trade continuum such as is the current focus of the Arms Trade Treaty. We need it strong, we need it binding and we need it now.

There is no getting away from it: unfettered access to illicit small arms has wrought great suffering on Africa. Few have suffered the social and economic cost of the flaws in the current system as Africa has.

Tens of millions of lives have been lost and millions more have had their lives and livelihoods shattered in protracted armed conflicts across the continent. Certainly, access to weapons is not the whole story—conventional weapons do not in and of themselves cause conflict—but, it is an important part of the story because these weapons aggravate conflict multiple-fold.

The centre spread photo montage in the western magazine of red-eyed African boy soldiers barely into their double digit years posing for the camera with deadly weapons slung nonchalantly over their shoulders may draw the wince out of the depth of us, but we cannot afford to look away: it’s our mirror and it’s on our wall.

In his submission to the First Committee yesterday, the Kenyan representative made two thought provoking statements: one, illicit weapons and the heightened state of insecurity they cause forces governments to divert funds that would otherwise be applied to development projects towards securing itself; two, there is no development without security and no security without development. All which doesn’t augur very well for us, does it?

And when you consider that 95 per cent of the weapons most commonly used in conflict in Africa come from outside the continent, you begin to see how patently unfair it all is.

It brings to mind the very colourful Assistant Commissioner of Police from Jamaica, Novelette Grant, who’s frustrated no end by the devastating effect access to illicit weapons by criminal elements continues to have on her country as guns slip in through the island nation’s porous borders and lead to a murder rate of 61 per 100,000—alarmingly high for a country that has never been in conflict.

The police force does best it can, but it is increasingly overwhelmed.

Oftentimes, the illegal weapons they seize are a trickle compared to the flood coming into the country and their efforts are complicated by the fact that there’s a symbiotic relationship between the narcotics trade and the illegal trade in firearms. The gangs they encounter, she says, are often much better armed than they are. What’s a police force to do when this is what it comes to?

Efforts such as these at the tail end of the supply chain where human and capital resources are in limited supply are a little like standing in knee-deep in water in a flooded house and trying to drain the water with a tea cup while the taps responsible for all the flooding are in somebody else’ house and are still turned on to full gush.

Somebody do something at the tap already. That’s all we’re saying.

It’s not that we’re resting on our laurels in Africa, mind you, waiting for our knight in shining armour to come to our rescue. Far from it. Three regional blocs in West, East and South Africa, already have in place legally binding agreements that seek to control the proliferation of small arms within their borders. The problem is that their success in this regard is limited by the fact that their outermost boundary,wherever it might be, is porous and vulnerable to undetected illegal penetration of arms.

It’s the way of the world. We’re connected. We have to deal with it.

Ergo, a global solution for an increasingly globalised world.

The good news is, the stars may be lining up. As John Duncan, the UK ambassador for multilateral arms control and disarmament said in a conversation about the Arms Treaty, “We are at a shifting point.”

It’s an interesting “shifting point” this, no doubt. Because the world is shifting in its perception of itself and its conception of power, this is an auspicious time to embark on negotiations on the arms trade treaty. Because the world is shifting in its perception of itself and its conception of power, the negotiations on the arms trade treaty will likely be more complex than they might have been at another point in history.

But, we are at a shifting point. What we’re going to do with it is what remains to be seen.

Talking About Guns in New York

2009-10-06T14:53:00.005+03:00

So this slackvitist has rocked off her chair, donned her bright red bata moccasins and made the trek across seven time zones to New York to participate in a series of events around the Arms Trade Treaty negotiations beginning at the UN this week.

It’s about time and whatnot.

In December 2006, an NGO-led movement that began agitating in the 1990s for a treaty to regulate the global arms trade based on universal principles scored a significant victory when the UN General Assembly voted by an overwhelming majority for negotiations to begin on what would be a legally binding universal Arms Trade Treaty.

Fast forward to this, the week when the negotiations begin.

The devil, as we well know, often crashes the party late, making a grand entrance just when the details are being served up.

This is what I have come to see and hear, ever so briefly, firsthand.

I’m very curious to witness, up-close, what major interest clusters have formed or will emerge to coalesce around which different positions and why. And to learn a little more about who’s got their foot on the accelerator and who’s got their foot on the brake and who will bring more pressure to bear to win the day.

As usual, I make a commitment to listen and engage with all sides of the debate, but I make no claims of neutrality on this issue.

States may have the right to produce or procure arms for self-defence and law enforcement but with that right comes the responsibility of ensuring that those arms do not slip out of the legitimate channels of distribution and cross porous borders so that the next thing you know there’s a story on my national television about heavily armed cattle rustlers in northern Kenya making away with thousands of heads of cattle, leaving a trail of death and destruction of livelihoods in their gun totting wake and; there are scores of teenagers wielding deadly weapons running around Nairobi in gangs, wreaking terror on our night life.

Yes, what the raingods conjure up in these lofty parts rains down in torrents where I live. Often with devastating effects.

This then, is personal. (As are most things, in the end.)

So, here I am, to listen and to learn, to ask and to blog.

Let the negotiations begin.

Caster Semenya Vs EveryWoman

2009-09-09T13:25:00.003+03:00

I totally fell in love with the South African media when they fiercely came to the defense of Caster Semenya as the rest of world ever so subtly (not!) scorned and mocked her for not fitting neatly into their definitions of who a woman is and what a woman should look like.

But now here comes YOU Magazine.

They have taken the emerging athletics star, run her through their elaborate glamour lifestyle operation, dressed her in stilettos, manicured her and pedicured her, done her hair and made her up and presented her to the world as a glamour girl. Tada!

Well alrightie then.

I think.

It’s a little too so-there!-like for my fancy, frankly.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m the matron saint of ‘I’m every woman’, I am. You don’t know the half. (Or maybe you do.)

But is Caster Semenya more of a woman all dolled up and ready to pose than when she’s puffing and panting and pushing herself to her limits on the track?

Let Caster Semenya dress up if she wants to. But don’t make her dress up if she doesn’t want to.

Let her be the woman that she is and the woman that she wants to be. She doesn’t need to apologise, to posture, or to defend herself.

That’s all I’m saying.

Of Blog Block, Aid thoughts and Being

2009-09-02T14:12:00.003+03:00

I went and suffered a blog block. I did. And then a mild case of the twitter jitters too. My online life went into sympathy drought, shrinking from a steady river to a ‘there used to be a river here once upon a time, we think, we seem to remember...’

It’s how life gets. Or maybe, it’s how we allow life to get.

I’m now living, (temporarily, I hope), how the other half lives. I envy what my life used to be. And I look forward to what it will be soon.

In the meantime, I’m learning to be rather than to do.

So when I can sneak a moment all to my lonesome, which really isn’t often, I don’t ask myself what I will do, I ask myself what I will be. Creative maybe? Or Adventurous? Thoughtful? And then I go and do the thing that I’ve decided to be. It’s fun. And exciting. And oh-so-soul opening.

Anyway, just thought I’d dust off my keyboard and show up in these parts and beat my digital chest a little just so folk know I’m not gone forever ever. Although when I’ll be back is anyone’s guess.

In the meantime, I’ve lately discovered an interesting new place with some interesting thoughts on development: AID THOUGHTS. Quite, erm, I’ll go with irreverent. And you know how that totally sweetens my coffee.

Picture of gloom, pattern of discontent

2009-08-05T08:45:00.007+03:00

They call themselves Boko Haram. Literally, 'the latin alphabet is forbidden'. Symbolically, down with western education and all of that. (Because in the end, what has it brought us but exclusion?)

In the press, they go by various religious and criminal stereotypes. Islamic extremists. Violent terrorists. It is true, their actions can be poured into these well-stacked boxes. But, they also pour out.

They will not fit tidily. They will not, they cannot.

I stare at the images splashed across newspaper pages. It startles me how closely they resemble Kenya's own Mungiki. The same hardened faces, the same hopeless stares.

If Africa's young people are her future, then her future has no hope. We continue to 'manufacture' them by the million, but once they are all grown up and ready to do life, such as we have taught them they must do, we do not know what to do with them.

Our frail economies are creaking under the bulging weight of them. We find that we cannot admit them into core of our economic life; there simply isn't enough for everyone, you see. Unemployment is soaring. They find themselves abandoned at the fringes of society, struggling to survive, grasping for what straw will come.

Enter cause célèbres.

Kenya's Mungiki. Nigeria's Boko Haram. Somalia's shockingly youthful pirates. South Africa's township union protests.

All of them can reliably trace their roots to a rising discontent among Africa's youth, a growing rage at their marginalisation.

I think back to when I came of age. There were stirrings of discontent back then, certainly. A mild resentment, even. My country was headed in a direction that did not inspire confidence. Our future was looking increasingly dim.

But it was nothing then like what it is now.

Perhaps back then we still had a memory of a better time to keep us hoping that it would come around again, sometime.

I could still reasonably dream of becoming whoever I wanted to be. The playing field was already becoming overgrown, certainly, but I still had the sense that it was, for the most part, level.

One generation down the line and there's no living memory in our youth of a better time. It is what it always was and it's getting worse. Nothing to live for, perhaps even, something worth killing for.

I do not condone criminal behaviour of any kind, whoever perpetrates it, wherever they perpetrate it, you understand.

But I do think Africa needs to think long and hard about her youth, her future. We must come up with a plan, and fast, to restore a future and a hope to our young people. That's a thing we can unite around, surely. That is something that should galvanise us all. Before it is too late.

Else.

Why Must Obama's Cousin Bribe for a Job?

2009-07-12T10:13:00.005+03:00

It's very curious to me the way everyone who's a fan of Obama (such as I am), tends to behave as though they're about to fall off the earth's edge when suddenly they find that they disagree with him on a thing.

Just because we admire someone doesn't mean we will automatically agree with them. (I most certainly hope.) I for one reserve the right to criticise Obama as and when I feel it is necessary, even while I continue to admire him and consider him a great man and leader on the whole.

That said, once Mutuma Mathiu gets past the puzzling “I disagree with the man so the sky is probably going to fall on my head” introduction to his Sunday column, he makes some valid points about nuance and back story.

The contentious issue is what Obama, whom I count among the precious few public figures able to apprehend and communicate nuance on the global stage, said in Italy about his cousin in Kenya not being able to get a job without paying a bribe.

I agree with Mathiu that we’ve been standing at this corner for way too long and we need to move this conversation along already.

According to ABC News, Obama told African leaders who attended the latter part of the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy that, "his cousin in Kenya can’t find a job without paying a bribe, and that’s not the fault of the G-8. And when companies can’t operate without paying, in some parts of Africa, without paying the 25 per cent fee off the top in bribes, that’s not colonialism."

Mutuma argues that whereas the anecdote is open to the (stereo)typical interpretation that Africa is steeped in corruption and that this is the explanation most western commentators (well-meaning or otherwise) will arrive at, there are other more accessible explanations.

"Why must young Africans pay a bribe to get a job? One possible explanation is that Africans are bad, corrupt people who cannot rule themselves. That is the subtext of international discourse on "governance" in Africa.

The more accessible explanation is that families pay bribes simply because there are too many people and too few opportunities. The reason for that is that our economies simply aren't growing. And, yes, part of the cause of that is corruption and stupid leaders."

He then goes on to say that:

“If you reduce the competition for jobs by creating more opportunities, you reduce corruption exponentially, and you can take that to the bank.”

I even take to heart his indignation with

“these Kenyan generalisations of how corrupt and tribal we are,” and ask alongside him, “what about me who has never taken a bribe, who puts in many hours every day, loves my country and desperately wants to fix it? What about the many Kenyans who are like me, are not in it just for money but because we want to build a country we can take pride in?”

I’m not asking that we as Africans (or our leaders) be allowed to abdicate our responsibility, you understand. I’m just engaging in some wishful thinking here, I suppose.

I wish that when the world tells Africa’s story, rather than confine it to the briefs where complex issues are simplified into attention-grabbing anecdotes, it would assign it adequate column space, so that there would not need to merely be a squeaky clean Ghana and a murky messy Kenya, but there would be room to discuss the range of nuance, to grapple with the back story and the complexity of it all.

With the Saturday speech in Ghana, I was pleased, for the most part. Maybe I’ll get around to blogging about that, but not today.

Voice of the Digital Class, Voice of the People

2009-07-05T08:39:00.007+03:00

So, about the Iranian election aftermath and the role of social media:

I (may) have said before in this space that one of the challenges of assembling a balanced view of any country, especially a developing one, based on non-traditional media such as blogs, twitter, youtube, etc, is that the more powerful/sophisticated tools for gathering and disseminating information are still largely concentrated in the hands of a particular class of people whose views are legitimate, certainly, but are not necessarily representative of all views, and may not even be the majority view.

In Iran and in Kenya, an urban technosavvy middle class with reasonable access to diverse online tools makes full use of these tools. This is a good thing, a great thing even. Bully for us. I do not mean to suggest in any way shape or form that the views we express are not heartfelt or legitimate. I do however deign to suggest that they are oftentimes only a small part of the picture, like looking at a portrait and staring fixedly at the nose while determinedly (and a little curiously) ignoring the rest of the face.

The fact that any one person is in possession of, or has access to a microphone or other amplifying device doesn’t make his or her view more legitimate than that of the next citizen. I say this as one who has the platform that is this blog and who has been known to differ significantly on matters political et al with her equally opinionated rural cousin of a proximate age. If he and I were to lock horns in this space it would make for a very lively exchange, trust me. You do not know him. He does not blog. He does not twitter. He is not on facebook. All these technological ‘shortcomings’ notwithstanding, his opinion is no less legitimate than mine.

In this scenario, traditional media sources must continue to play a pivotal role in amplifying the voices of those who do not have their own platforms/microphones to reach the rest of the world. They must play a role in distilling fact from fantasy and rumour from reporting, and in making the best attempt they can to serve up a balanced news diet.

Yes, they’re imperfect and our antennae should always be up, always alert to bias, but we must acknowledge that often times they have the resources, the contacts and the operational capacity to dig deeper and go further in sourcing and verifying the news and that they are bound to some extent by professional rules of practice and conduct and our high expectations. (Even though they constantly fall short, at least we hope they aim.)

They cannot afford to sulk and walk away in the face of the emergence of new media sources. Never has it been more crucial for them to penetrate the places where ordinary folk do not yet have the resources at their disposal to make themselves heard and to enable those people have their say.

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to slip into an ‘either or’ view of things on a wide range of subjects when a ‘both and’ perspective makes so much more sense.

In the case of the Iran election, it was useful to hear from individual Iranians on the ground about what was going on inside the country and to watch them leverage social media so effectively to rally the world to their cause. At the same time, it took a great deal of time and effort to filter the signal from the sheer volume of noise. This is why I really appreciated the reporting on Iran of such Middle East veterans as Robert Fisk.

Speaking of keeping our antennae up and being alert to bias, I really appreciate this post by Hamid Tehrani, journalist, blogger and Global Voices Iran Editor. While appreciating the pivotal role social media such as Facebook and twitter have played, he also points out that

“Twitter is both a source of information and mis-information”

and that

“Most Iranians who tweet are activists supporting the protest movement and promoting a cause. Their information should be double-checked and not be accepted at face value, or as an eyewitness observation.”

I wholeheartedly agree. I believe the onus is on the prolific user of social media to take personal responsibility for proactively assessing/evaluating what information comes her way before passing it on. In the absence of a paid/dedicated gatekeeper, Craig Kanalley over at Twitter Journalism is right in suggesting that we are all gatekeepers. We all must be the social media equivalent of ‘active listeners’, interacting rationally with what we’re receiving, triangulating the information with other sources and making the best judgment we can of the value of what we receive based on what we already know, who the information is from and whether is corroborating evidence.

Likely, even with the best of intentions, we will get it wrong some of the time, but if we are alert, we are more likely to be right than wrong.

Everything is Not About You

2009-06-01T16:15:00.003+03:00

** This post comes as a respite from some of the really heavy stuff I've been inclined to blog about lately. It also speaks to one of the best lessons I ever learned.

Everything is not about you. Really, it isn’t.

There’s a striking anecdote I stumbled upon once, in a booklet on Eastern Religion. I remember the concept better than the detail so I proceed to adapt and embellish.

You are walking down the street going from place A to place X. Suddenly someone comes out of their house carrying a bag of garbage, and places it along your logical path. You’re puzzled. Why would he do that, you wonder? Nonetheless, when you get to where he has dumped the bag, you pick it up, swing it over your shoulder and onto your back, and continue on your way. As you walk down the street, various other people come out of their houses and do the same thing. They put their garbage out on the street, along your path. You obligingly go picking it up and carrying it with you.

Soon, you’re walking down the street weighed down to a bend under a load of other people’s garbage.

You happen to bump into a friend who raises a quizzical eyebrow and wants to know, “what’s up?” Naturally.

You attempt an explanation:

“People seem to be determined to give me all their garbage today,” you say. To tell the truth, you’re upset, and you’re puzzled, and you’re more than a little insulted.

“Eh?” She’s responds. She’s not getting it. You need to pad that explanation a little, details please.

“Well, I’m walking down the street, going from A to X, as usual, and everybody’s coming out of their houses and giving me their garbage. I’m tired, and weighed down and the garbage smells, it really does, but what am I to do, they gave it to me.”

Your friend, who’s sane, which you clearly aren’t, folds her arms, takes a deep breath, and speaks to you slowly, clicking deliberately on the consonants, to be clear.

“Have you considered that people are putting out their garbage because it’s garbage day and the garbage truck is coming?”

All together now: Duh.

In case you’re wondering, this is one of those anecdotes that comes complete with moral. Package deal and all of that. You’re welcome.

The moral of the story is that sometimes people will put out their garbage because it is what they do, and then some other crazy people who don’t have enough trouble of their own will go right to where it is and pick it up, take it personally and own it, bank it, copyright it even.

Some people, we’ve all come across them I’m certain, are just plain nasty. They’re just as nasty to you as they are to the next person. It’s equal opportunity nastiness. They do nasty, they say nasty, they are nasty. But still, you take that nastiness to heart and cling to it and waste precious hours holding it against them when really, it’s their garbage.

They’re putting it out there, true, but you can just cross the street and walk on the other side of the road. Or bar that, nimbly side step it, honouring it with nary a glance and keep whistling down the street because you’ve got your own life to live and you’re not responsible for other people’s garbage, in the end and it’s not about you.

Other people are just having a bad day when you happen to stroll by and they have neither the self-restraint nor the courtesy to put the bad day away when you come by. So you walk into a colleague’s office and they’ve just come off an irritating half hour conversation and you ask something, all polite and friendly, and they snap at you impatiently and you recoil and go away and smart in your corner wondering what you did wrong when all the while, it’s not about you.

It’s quite possible you didn’t do anything to make your partner angry, he is just fuming because he got stuck in traffic for forty-five minutes which ate into the time he’d set aside to do the final work on that presentation before the meeting, which meant he wasn’t as confident as he could have been when he made the presentation and he sort of botched it and now there goes the prospect of that promotion he’d been angling for and all you did was try to have a conversation about what baby girl
did in school today and how you’re going to deal with it and he snapped. It’s not about you.

Really, everything is not about you.

The waiter’s being unbelievable gruff manner and he shouldn’t be, of course, but in the end it is not an indictment on your hairstyle, even though he did appear to do a double-take when first he glanced at you. It’s just that he’s just had a run in with the chef behind the revolving door about the special order he just brought in and he’s still smarting from that.

Again I say, everything is not about you.

You are under obligation to take responsibility for your own actions, certainly. But, you do not have control of other people’s reactions.

You need to learn not to go around picking up all the garbage that people put out, because really, it’s not about y

The Dialogue on Development: Heart, Mind, Hand

2009-05-20T09:10:00.007+03:00

If you manage to read all the way through my long (loong) review of Michela Wrong’s book, “It’s Our Turn To Eat”, somewhere near the end, you’ll find this statement tucked in:

“it’s not the heart that is in the wrong place, it is the hand that is responding in the wrong way. In this respect, aid idealists and aid sceptics ought really to dialogue as on the same side, wanting the same thing, giving benefit of doubt, assuming goodwill unless proven absent. But that is another article, for another day.”

I inserted it in there to compel myself come back to the subject because sometimes I mean to come back to a thing and then I get distracted and I don’t. So now I’m coming back to it. Sort of.

At the weekend, while thinking about how best to approach the subject, I thought back to that opinion piece by Paul Kagame published in the Financial Times week before last in which he argues that Africa has to find its own way to prosperity. If you still haven’t read it, you should read it. It’s encouraging to see an African president engage proactively in the aid debate.

What I want to zero in on for my purposes here is this statement he made early on:

“We who live in, and lead, the world’s poorest nations are convinced that the leaders of the rich world and multilateral institutions have a heart for the poor. But they also need to have a mind for the poor.”

While I read this, I had in mind what I had written earlier about the hand responding in the wrong way.

It occurred to me that we’re both agreed on the fact that the hearts of donors, aid and development agencies/workers are in the right place, for the most part. Or, if they’re lost, they’re not terribly so—it would not take a long haul flight, a train and a bus to get their heart to the right place. (Yes, I know everywhere there are bound to be exceptions, but I speak in the main.)

However, there was also an interesting difference in our diagnosis of where the problem might lie. I suggested that there was a lack of forward integration—that whereas the heart is in the right place, it is not moving the hand to do the right thing. Kagame for his part called donors and aid/development agencies on their lack of “a mind for the poor”.

This difference interested me and gave me pause. I was intrigued specifically by the phrasing:

A mind for the poor.

Naturally then, I googled it, interested to track its most recent usage.

Google led me to some interesting places: the NextBillion.net blog, on a review of the book “In the River They Swim” which features essays about poverty reduction, sustainable development and entrepreneurship by influential people around the world, including President Kagame of Rwanda; a commentary by Michael Miller, Director of Programs at the Acton Institute which made reference to the dichotomy between “good intentions” and “good solutions” published early last year that quotes an official of a Rwandan agency promoting investment in that country calling for more business investors and less philanthropist and; a FastCompany article on Rwanda.

Interesting: what all these sources have in common with the FT.com article, apart from the phrase “a mind for the poor” is Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda.

(Note to self, must buy, must read: In the River They Swim: Essays from around the world on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty. Does anybody else know of another genesis of this specific phrasing, another context where the term “a mind for the poor” is used widely? Do share.)

In the opinion piece published in the Financial Times, President Kagame makes a valid point about the place of mind that fills the lack in mine when I argue that it is the hand that gets it wrong.

In fact, the essence of the Make Poverty History Campaign is to compel the heart to move the hand in what Kagame describes as believing that we can solve the problem of poverty with sentimentality.

To be fair, to be deeply moved to do something, to do anything, to do what we can, when we encounter human suffering is natural, and in this respect Bono and Bob and Blair are not acting out of sync with their humanity.

What is harder is to develop the discipline to route the things that the heart feels compelled to do through the mind, to subject them to scrutiny for all the assumptions that they make about what it is fitting and right to do and how best to go about doing what needs to be done. It takes discipline to put a long enough pause on impulse in order to engage broadly and meaningfully with those to whom the hand will eventually be extended but in doing so you give yourself the opportunity to grapple with difficult questions such as: how do the poor see themselves and how is this different from or similar to the way we see them; why does poverty exist such as it does in that particular place and; how will the action that we are taking today serve to empower or emasculate in the short, medium and long term.

But. (Yes, there is a but): I’m betting my bottom dollar that all the thinking that leading development agencies have done on poverty and development and aid since their inception can fill multiple terrabytes of electronic space. Further, this thinking is done by some of the world’s best minds, whether motivated by the opportunity to do good and make a difference in the world, or lured by, among other perks, business class travel.

Yet we have not got it convincingly or steadily right.

Which is why that phrase that Kagame et al employ intrigues me:

A mind for the poor.

Definitely worth investigating further.

From Idea to Implementation: Let There Be A Do-Pipe

2009-05-11T15:24:00.006+03:00

Last week, while watching the Citizen TV Louis Otieno-moderated debate between government officials and a panel drawn from Strathmore University about the state of the nation, I tweeted that it was clear that there was no shortage of thinkers or of good ideas for that matter, in this country.

I was struck by the exchange between Kwame Owino, of the Institute of Economic Affairs, one of the Strathmore University affiliated panellists and Cecily Mbarire, MP and Assistant Minister for Health, for prime example. In the course of making a particular contribution to the debate, Owino mentioned that he sits on a non-governmental think tank whose responsibility it is to think through the issues that ail Kenya and how best to solve them. Mbarire remarked that he had some excellent ideas but he needed to talk to her and other members of parliament who could push these ideas and influence their implementation. Or something like it.

The whole debate in general revealed high calibre thinking on the part of the panellists on both sides. By the end of it, however, I was furrowing my brow, wondering why none of this thinking had been converted into measurable progress on a broad, scalable basis and why as a nation, we were not feeling the positive effects of these sometimes excellent, and always at least good, ideas.

This is why I come to propose a solution to Caesar:

We need to construct an effective Do-Pipe (©Rombo 2009) that connects the best ideas and solutions with the problems and issues they address as a matter of urgency. The Do-Pipe should serve as the essential infrastructure that connects resources with markets, potential buyers with sellers. As it stands at present, we have a glut of ideas on the one hand, and a dearth of action on the other, and ne’er the twain shall meet.

This is simply unacceptable.

Let there be a Do-Pipe.

The Do-Pipe should be a brutally pragmatic, highly efficient channel that:

Skims the best of the best ideas from the expansive think tank industry, packages them appropriately and palatably, refines them if necessary, and feeds them directly to those who would benefit most from them;
Identifies and/or creates what incentives (or even penalties for non-action) are necessary to compel those who would benefit from these best of the best ideas to at least attempt to implement them in a reasonable way within a reasonable time frame as well as to incentives for those who create the ideas to come up with ideas that work;
Measures the efficacy of these ideas as they are implemented to see which ones fall apart and which ones hold together at the execution, developing an understanding of why this is so and feeding this information back to the think tanks to complete the solutions circle and in so doing, developing solid best –practices and best-thinking expertise as well as ensuring reasonable turnaround speeds;
Becomes the ultimate measure of the value of any think tank initiative for any would-be funders. Those think tanks whose ideas are not flowing down these Do-Pipes to the Implementation Centres would need to justify their continued existence with the caveat that not all ideas generated by a specific think tank must work for it to be feasible but some at least must be able to rise to the top as cream.

So there.

Let there be a Do-Pipe.

Goodness me: I want to run the Do-Pipe.

Michela Wrong's "It's Our Turn to Eat"

2009-05-04T15:54:00.012+03:00

A New Beginning?

Kibaki’s inaugural declaration: “corruption will now cease to be a way of life in Kenya” made to roaring applause one hot December day at the tail end of a dramatic election year back in 2002 now reads like a line of pure comedy penned by a cynical scribe scripting the great African leadership farce. If they replayed that clip on television today, you would likely choke on a chortle for how far the present reality is from that lofty ideal to which we attached our national hopes.

This was not always so.

Once upon a time, we were true believers, high to delirious on hope.

Michela Wrong begins by reminding us of that time, a time when we polled as the most optimistic people in the world.

I remember the time. I remember the feeling. There’s a word for it: euphoric. We were euphoric.

Enter into this euphoria a relatively young man, a couple of years shy of his 40th birthday, invited to be a part of shaping the new Kenya by taking up the position of anti corruption tsar. His name: John Githongo.

It was a momentous task to be sure, but in the end, there were a number of reasons that compelled him to take the job. One, he was an idealist, understandably seduced by the opportunity to be the change he hoped to see. Two, his acquiescence was practically taken for granted by the men who nominated him, his father’s contemporaries, men he held in high regard, men he trusted. Three, we were in a state of euphoria, remember?

So he took the job.

It was an auspicious beginning.

During his confirmation interview with President Kibaki, Githongo had been forthright with his future boss:

“Sir,” he had said, “we can set up all the anti-corruption authorities we want, spend all the money we want, pass all the laws on anticorruption, but it all depends on you. If people believe the president is ‘eating’, the battle is lost. If you are steady on this thing, if the leadership is there, we will succeed.”

He was certain he had been heard.

Same Old, Same Old

There was every suggestion of 180-degree change in direction in those early days. As Permanent Secretary in charge of combating corruption, his office was located within State House, down the corridor from the president’s office giving him unprecedented access to the president and making him extremely powerful in the scheme of things. He formed his team, drawn for the most part from civil society rather than from the ranks of the civil service. He said ‘thanks but no thanks’ to the dark-blue BMW assigned to him as an official car. He set to work enthusiastically, participating in the new government’s effort “to carry out a detailed public tally of Kenya’s corruption problem.”

He immersed himself into the system and applied himself wholeheartedly to the task as he envisioned it. He grew fond of his new boss, President Kibaki, might have been star-struck even.

Alas the honeymoon was doomed to be shortlived.

Soon, he became painfully aware of an ethnic polarisation taking place around the seat of power. Whereas Kibaki had won his handy election victory surrounded and supported by people from diverse parts of Kenya, slowly his inner circle distilled into one constituting mainly fellow Kikuyu and their allied tribes. The State House became increasingly mono-ethnic. Although Githongo was a Kikuyu, he was young and urban-bred, his ethnicity was far from his primary identity and this scenario discomfited him greatly.

Further, it dismayed no end that this new grouping was almost singlehandedly responsible for delaying the process of drafting a new constitution, despite a clear election promise to deliver a new constitution to Kenyans.

Then, persistent rumours of “new graft, of dodgy procurement contracts and lavish spending by members of the NARC administration,” began to waft his way, corroborated by a sophisticated network of informants he had cultivated. It turned out that the high level operatives within the NARC government were responsible for the signing or approval of 18 procurement contracts which would cost the taxpayers three quarters of a billion dollars, easily outstripping aid to Kenya in that year which was pinned at circa half a billion dollars.

Valiantly he tried to do his job—to identify the culprits and help bring them to book. Miserably he failed. Sensing resistance from his boss and fearing for his life, he fled.

Anti Corruption Tsar Turned International Fugitive

On 6th February, 2005, he showed up at Michela Wrong’s doorstep in Camden Town, London, lagging a load of luggage, come to stay a while. The anti-corruption tsar had turned international fugitive.

He had determined to resign. His life, he felt, was in danger. He had with him a secret arsenal of documents, diaries and recordings meticulously accumulated in the course of duty. They were highly damaging to the government in general and to specific highly-placed individuals in particular. They were also his reputation insurance policy. If he had attempted to make the claims he made about what he had seen and heard without this indisputable evidence, he would have been dismissed a madman.

This book, “It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower” turns on these somewhat dramatic events, hovering over them broodingly, occasionally darting backward a generation or two in an attempt to gain perspective and forward a few years to show context and consequences.

All the while it forces us to retread painfully familiar, garbled territory: the “unbridled greed” that comes accompanied by an irrational sense of personal entitlement at the expense of all others and what it has wrought in Africa and why it has wrought it in Africa. The central theme as suggested in the book’s title, then, is the politics of consumption. To hold the reins of power in Kenya is to be custodian to the key to the national pantry. (I wonder whether Amartya Sen meant a double entrendre with his assertion that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy,” or that’s just the way the chips happened to fall.)

In the end, in this book, tribalism and corruption stand together as two vices that hover ominously over Kenya’s future, threatening her wellbeing, indeed shaking her very foundations. We always knew that these were our most pressing problems, but what Wrong has succeeded in illustrating is the way in which they are inextricably intertwined. If we create a system in which equitable access to national resources is guaranteed regardless of any form of affiliation, then people will no longer feel the need to fall back on these affiliations either defensively or offensively and political leaders who then seek to exploit our differences for their own ends will find themselves without followers. If the system is fundamentally flawed, malevolent, then people will be forced to look for crutches to help them navigate its turbulent waters. One such crutch is tribal patronage.

The Man Behind the Drama

I had always wondered what made Githongo tick, why he chose to do what he did in exactly the way he did it. This book attempts to provide answers to these questions.

The Githongo depicted here is hardly all saint and no sinner. He may be the hero, the protagonist, but he is humanised by his flaws. For prominent example, he has the irritating knack of overpromising himself and then under-delivering—he is well-known for standing people up. So much so that in his circles, the synonym for being stood up is being Githongoed. He is also, per Wrong’s description of him, an “inveterate conspiracy theorist intrigued by tales of plots and subterfuge.”

Wycliffe Muga, a journalist, disparages him a coconut, black on the outside, white on the inside, while, David Ndii, prominent in the Kenyan civil society, muses in retrospect that, he was patently unsuitable for the role to which he was assigned by dint of his personality: “he probably didn’t have the right character for the job,” and “he went in with a lot more idealism that I thought warranted.”

Opinions abound about how Githongo should have responded to the circumstances in which he found himself. Perhaps he should have persevered, been more pragmatic—African politics are what they are. How did his dramatic exit serve, in the end?

On the other hand stand those who wonder at how long it took Githongo to catch on to the fact that he was being used.

It is on this side that Wrong appears to stand. At the outset, the portrait of Githongo that she paints gives off more than a whiff of the naïve. We read a barely concealed incredulity in the subtext:

“Tracking John’s itinerary, there’s something mystifying about the sheer time it took him to recognise the obvious. The dossier he eventually produced can read like a log of a year-long refusal to face the truth. How many times did John Githongo, a man of no mean intelligence, need to be told that his closest colleagues had hatched Anglo Leasing on the pretext of election fundraising before he believed it?”

This bent is particularly striking because not more than six months before Githongo showed up at her doorstep, Wrong had written an article for the New Statesman brimming with her own enthusiasm, celebrating a new Kenya. The ugliness that came to blight the NARC administration was already bubbling to the surface, and while she acknowledged these flaws, her tone was determinedly optimistic. She too had embraced this notion of ‘a new wind blowing.’

I mention this to lead into the fact that I too was duped, in the beginning. Many of us were. And perhaps on account of the high hopes that we held, we were frozen in a particular place of disbelief for a moment too long.

Like Githongo, as things fell apart at the beginning, I too was reluctant to lay the blame squarely at Kibaki’s feet. He was not himself, following the accident and the stroke, I rationalised. In my mind, therefore, someone else was taking advantage of his weakened state, to wreak havoc on the country. Wait till he got better, I told myself, reminiscent of my adolescent days when the do-gooder’s last resort was always, “wait till daddy comes home.”

So I read with a sense of resignation Githongo’s damning indictment made in retrospect: as he (Kibaki) got better, things got worse.

Soon enough, Githongo had to bow to a different wisdom:

“If a leader is surrounded by shifty, money-grabbing aides and family members, it’s because he likes it that way. These are the people he feels at ease with, whose working methods he respects. Far from being an aberration, the entourage is a faithful expression of the autocrat’s own proclivities.”

I reach back in memory and have to concede that certainly things did not get better.
So, again, why did it take him so long to jump ship when at last it dawned on him beyond reasonable doubt that the government for which he worked was hopelessly dirty? The answer, we find, is twofold:

One, it is about the circumstances he was in.

He “had been too close.” As Wrong paints it, once he was in his job, he became a prisoner to it. He could not do his job, but he could not easily quit it. So the option available to him was to stay as token, “a pet monkey performing tricks to reassure the regime’s critics,” or to flee as he did.

Two, it is about who he was.

In this instance, character proved to be destiny. “When John trusted someone, he did it completely. And when he was disappointed, he flipped completely.”

And then when he finally admitted to himself that something was horrible wrong, he procrastinated, but then again, “John was always ready to admit that procrastination, which follows on from the need to control events as night follows day, was one of his character flaws.

The Swing of the Pendulum

Once, however, a certain bridge had been crossed, there could have been no doubt that he was going to leave. David Ndii describes Githongo as having a “conviction” type of personality, one prone to “emotional volatility” and prone to the “melodramatic.”

Githongo’s style, it appears, harkens unto Obama. He confessed of himself: ‘I try and dot all the “i”s and cross all the “t”s. I do this excessively, it’s been my style throughout. And then, when I move – BOOM!’

His initial inaction could be attributed to a propensity to over-examine. Mwalimu Mati, another civil society luminary in his own right explains it with: “No mistakes are tolerable to him, and that accounts for the inaction”

But when at last the pendulum swung the opposite direction, it was a dramatic and complete swing. He burned his bridges as he advanced. There was no going back.

No matter if you think it took inordinately long or he was too quick to judgment, there can be no diminishing the significance of what he did:

“I thought for a bit, but couldn’t recall a single occasion in which a government official of John’s stature had blown the whistle on an African administration,” Gitau, Githongo’s brother remarks to Wrong. Wrong agrees. Not that she can think of, there isn’t.

In my experience, earth has no torment like an idealist disillusioned.

Wrong puts it this way:

There is such a thing as “the fury of frustrated zeal,” and unscrupulous persons seeking to misuse the idealist to achieve their own ends ought to be very wary of its manifestations. When at last he was done with the NARC government and all its cheating ways, he was done with it, he was furious at it and he was bitter.

Judging the Book by More than Its Cover

The story itself is definitely worth telling, and Wrong has proved a worthy custodian.

I approached the book with a defensive scepticism, antennae up, mind braced, expecting a predictable caricature of an African nation in broad strokes of pitch black and sparkling white. She makes no sweeping indictments in the tradition of Kapuscinski and Naipaul before her. Where she feels a need to cluster, and a number of times she does, she goes to reasonable extents to corroborate, to defend, to illustrate. I do not always agree with her, but I recognise the effort she makes to deliver nuance, and applaud her effort. Except that one time when she ruefully remarks: “Working in Africa, I’d grown accustomed to compromised friendships, relationships premised on wilful ignorance on my part and an absence of full disclosure on my friends’.” But I chose to forgive her that.

This does not mean that I did not find much that was wince-worthy. It’s hard to read about all the different ways in which a thing that you cherish is broken. Even when you know full well that it is broken. To think that Kenya, in the early days of the NARC government, was the first country to ratify the UN Convention against Corruption. Irony of the highest order. Irony that ought really to be feted and knighted. Maybe even crowned.

Sometimes, I bristled. As against her contention that tribe and tribal affiliations define the Kenyan landscape and predominate. But I concede that she is justified and that in light of recent of events, it is hard to argue now: we as a nation do suffer from “an acute ethnic self-awareness”.

In the end, Kenya’s recent political history can be summarised thus:

The ethnically-based white settler tribe was kicked out (or reluctantly relinquished power, depending on who’s writing the history) to be replaced by a Kikuyu president who inherited a system and abused it to serve his own people, and then when he died, was replaced by a Kalenjin president who promptly followed in the footsteps of his predecessors and so on and so forth. What saddens is that everyone plays this as a zero sum game in the name of “restoring balance” by overcorrecting past partisanship.

While she’s at it, Wrong finds the time (and space) to insert her voice into the aid debate, appearing to side with Dambisa when she notes that “Western donor governments, their media and their expatriates, had become the ultimate, trusted arbiters of Kenyan reality.” By this she means that aid was a stick that western governments had and they could use it and that their money bought them the right to an opinion that could be heard whereas “ordinary Kenyans, thinking the same thing, with a hundred times more intensity, could do nothing about it, and there lay their ultimate emasculation.”

Wrong also contends that aid is self-serving. Realpolitik. It is not free. There are reasons that funds flow to certain coffers. But then she turns the corner, perhaps in a quest for balance, and suggests that there was also the case of the gaze trained brutally on the long term, because instititutions, checks and balances, civil society, etc, take time to build.
There are other questions that arise around aid in this particular story that should give us pause. For example, how, even after Githongo’s damning dossier had been made public, the aid for the most part, kept flowing:

“Demonstrating a truly remarkable sense of timing, the World Bank chose to announce $145 million in new loans to Kenya – the first credits approved by the executive board for fifteen months – just three days after the leaking of John’s dossier, signalling that, as far as this institution was concerned, a $750-million procurement scandal was no grounds for querying the wisdom of re-engaging with the Kenyan government. The same emollient message came from DfID, which had announced a £58-million grant a few days before John’s leak, and saw no reason to reconsider.”

I sent a text message to one of the people I do life with who also happens to work with a World Bank affiliated institution asking her what she thought of how the World Bank had been portrayed in Wrong’s book. She responded by conceding that oftentimes, they murk up implementation and they end up botching things seriously, but nonetheless, the people she works with are some of the most idealistic people she knows, and they are honestly committed to make our world a better place.

(Which echoes a rising sentiment in me: it’s not the heart that is in the wrong place, it is the hand that is responding in the wrong way. In this respect, aid idealists and aid sceptics ought really to dialogue as on the same side, wanting the same thing, giving benefit of doubt, assuming goodwill unless proven absent. But that is another article, for another day.)

As for the writing: on occasion she gets mired in descriptive terrain but most times, she moves the narrative along at a brisk lyrical pace, drawing you into the vortex of the story. Her language is elegant and her imagery vivid, as when she writes that “centralised systems of power are like onions: each layer faithfully mimics the core,” or when she describes those who “belong to an international elite that automatically turns left on entering a plane.”

To her credit, she is astute at sending subtle signals that are bound to alert the Kenyan reader as to her intimacy with the context. She sprinkles her book with familiar anecdotes: I relate immediately to her description of how we Nairobians drive at nervous speed past the woodland on Ngong Road on our way to Karen for fear of carjackers. I smile as she remembers to me the first escalator in Nairobi, at Yaya Centre, in the eighties. (I remember taking two buses to get there to ride it.)

If these particular signals do not resonate, the book is replete with others, I am confident you will find ones that do. This is the detail, but it speaks volumes, as I’m sure she knew it would. (I was amused that she baptised South C as scruffy as against the more pristine parts of Nairobi, of course, Muthaiga and Runda for example). The message is clear: she is foreigner, but she is not stranger. She has reported on Kenya for a dozen years. She worked, once, at the Standard Newspaper.

Is There Only Elijah Left As A Prophet in Israel?

You will have to judge for yourselves, on the reading, whether indeed the forces shaping John Githongo were “calculated to produce the perfect whistleblower” as is Wrong’s contention. I for one am uncomfortable with the notion that some among us were predestined to blow the whistle, that there is a specialness, a set-apartness, a one in every ten million-ness about Githongo.
It carries a faint echo of Elijah’s episode of self-pity in the desert, cast as sole crusader in a world where Jezebel’s tentacles reach wide and deep and she had sworn to kill him.

For those not familiar with the story it goes like this:

Elijah had long been standing up against King Ahab for all his injustices against the people of Israel and finally Queen Jezebel, had had enough. She swore by all that she knew that she would kill him if it was the last thing she did. Elijah fled to the desert, with a death threat from no less than the King’s wife hanging over his head and in the days that followed, he became increasingly depressed. When God came by and asked him what the matter was, he was quick to grouse. He was being zealous for God, doing what God wanted him to do and everybody else had either abandoned the task or been killed on account of it but here he was, sticking with it, and now look, he too was in danger of being killed. God gives him a long answer, but the part of that answer that interests me is the “hey look, you’re actually not the only one left, there are seven thousand others out there.”

Talk about putting things in perspective.

The point I make is not that Githongo does not deserve our admiration, respect and applause. He does. I mean, he really does. He stood up against a formidable system that tried to bring him to heel. He chose to do what was right when there was tremendous pressure to do otherwise. In a country, indeed a continent, that suffers a dearth of political heroes, he stands out, and for good reason.

The point I make, though, is that we need to make every effort to identify Kenya’s seven thousand, to encourage them to continue to be strong and not to give up the good fight and to empower them to rise up and make their difference. That in the end should be the skew of this story at the re-telling. If there is an Elijah there must be seven thousand. The country that raised Githongo could not have raised Githongo alone. Ergo, there is hope.

Tomorrow Has Come

What has become of John Githongo? Well, these events have changed him. Life has happened to him. He has developed the cynicism of a jaded idealist. Words such as calculating and ruthlessness and self-serving pop up in Wrong’s description of the latter day Githongo, and indeed, are implied in his own evaluation of who he has become. Perhaps it is a good thing, a necessary thing.

But the idealist in him continues to lurk just beneath the surface. He has been back to Kenya for a visit since. He is considering relocating back to Kenya, to live in Mathare, to interact with the young people who are the country’s future and maybe to run for political office.

In the meantime, he has become the global courier of a sobering missive: “systemic corruption, is the most efficient poverty factor on the continent.” Like it or not, if they do not pay it heed, it is a message that threatens to ground the ship that ferries Bob, Bono and Blair’s determinedly sanguine Make Poverty History campaign, not because their hearts are not in the right place, but because they fail to diagnose the underlying condition correctly.

UPDATE: You can now buy a copy of the book at The Kenya Shop

The Other One About Talking About Corruption

2009-04-27T09:36:00.003+03:00

I know corruption isn’t funny, but this quote from Chris Blattman’s blog, quoting Betsy Paluck, tickled me some:

Everyone is talking about corruption in Southern Sudan. It's on the radio; leaders talk about corruption. But it's not clear that people understand what it means. When it rains too little, you'll hear people say, "well that is just corrupt."

So, we are not the only ones talking (and talking and talking) about corruption.

Post the comic relief moment, though, it did raise important questions in my mind: when we’re talking about corruption here in Kenya, are we all talking about the same thing? Are we all being flagged off at the same point? Are we navigating the landscape with the same map? It might actually serve to go back to the basics, to drill down to the definitions, to painstakingly spell out the “this is what corruption is.”

Which persuades me to pull my tongue out of my cheek about that handbook on corruption developed by the National Anti Corruption Steering Committee. Maybe they were onto something with that. Again, important to note, to underscore, to emphasise that this is not a book on how to be corrupt. (Yeah, so it takes a while to pull the tongue out of the cheek.) Speaking of which, did someone ever obtain a copy of that? I haven’t.

As long as we’re still talking about corruption, I’m not eligible for it, (my time, it appears, is long come and long gone sigh) but I’m certain that many of you are eligible for this World Bank essay writing competition on corruption. Specifically: Fighting Corruption through Collective Action in Today’s Competitive Marketplaces

Got thoughts? Put them down and send them along to those World Bank folk. More about that here. Hurry on over, the deadline’s looming.

Dambisa Moyo Talks Dead AID on Norwegian TV

2009-04-22T02:41:00.011+03:00

Dambisa Moyo to a well-meaning politician in Norway which gives 1% of its GDP in AID:

“Africa would like to be like Norway, would like to be able to stand on its own two feet, would like to be able to participate as an equal partner, not as a junior partner, not as a beggar on the global stage.

As we know, Norway did not become Norway today from sitting back and relying on other people to provide education, healthcare, security and infrastructure.The government in Norway provides an environment where entrepreneurs and private sector Norwegians can flourish and develop…

The fundamental problem is that AID allows African governments to take a back seat. They don’t have to encourage Africans. They don’t have to report to Africans as the government in Norway reports to the Norwegian people. That’s not the case in Africa. In Africa the government can sit back and allow the Norwegians to provide us with healthcare, the Americans to provide the infrastructure, the Chinese to provide electricity or whatever…”

I love her tone. It rings to me as firm but at the same time quite gracious. She's got something to say but she's not dressing up in full combat gear and brandishing an AK47 to get it said. She's assertive but not combative. Just what the doctor ordered.

PS It’s not a hefty clip and it’s well worth a watch, both to place the above quote in context (to see for example how she isolates three types of AID and speaks here for the most part about Bilateral government to government AID) and to listen to the comeback arguments of the Norwegian politician who, as far as I can tell, goes only be the name Raymond.

I'm now about to finish reading the book.

Sure, she makes some sweeping statements where more nuanced arguments might be made, and perhaps it's all been said before, but the conversation she has revived (or at least inserted a young African woman's voice into, which in itself is refreshing)is an important one. Hopefully we are on the brink of a time when the people standing on opposite sides of this 'great question of our time' can drop their defences and engage in earnest, neither squirming uneasily or unduly defensive, each giving as good as s/he gets.

Mungiki: Dispatches from the Eye of the Storm

2009-04-21T17:29:00.008+03:00

*same post, different title

A couple of carefully selected stories about some of what is going on in central province. These are of the mild variety just to hint at some of what is going on far from the limelight.

The first story is of a young man trying to go about his business who encounters a force greater than himself:

A young man in a certain village in central province is going about his own business, trying to make a living and all of that life consuming stuff. Then one evening a friend invites him to go for a walk or for a visit.

Why not? So, off they go together.

Next thing he knows, he’s walked right into an oathing ceremony. Just like that. It had all been staged, apparently, and his friend knew right where he was leading him. Once you’ve walked into one of those ceremonies, they say, the only way you can leave alive is to take the oath.

This happened to a particular young man who decided he wasn’t going to give in so easily. He thought his best escape was religion. So off to the most Pentecostal local church he went, to stage an encounter with the lord and become a born again Christian because everyone knows you can’t serve two masters, right?

As the story was told to me, the Mungiki on hearing of his newfound faith, sent him a congratulatory note for his newly pledged allegiance and then appended a reminder that once he belonged to them, there was no way out, really, he was theirs.

In the end, he stole away in the middle of the night to somewhere else he judged to be safer. Nobody knows where. A few nights later, his wife and child followed.

The second story is of a rural town that depends on agriculture:

There were Lorries that regularly went into a certain rural town on market day to buy farmers’ produce for transportation to Nairobi. One day, as the Lorries approached the town, they were stopped by the Mungiki, who demanded payment before they could do business in the town. The payment was made, but come the next market day, and the next, and the next, there were no Lorries. Farmers stood forlornly by the wayside, as their produce went bad.

Finally, for lack of options, they negotiated with the Mungiki: “we’ll pay you,” they pledged, “but please, don’t harass the people who come to buy our produce, else we’ll starve, you and us, both.” The agreement thus reached, business unusual resumed.

*Update. A third story is found here.

Residents have, since August last year, been forced to pay Sh15 a day for semi-permanent homes, Sh100 for timber-structures and Sh800 for permanent stone buildings. Those residents who do not pay are raided, their homes broken into and property stolen, or even killed. Many of the motorcycle taxi owners became angry when the sect members decided to levy a Sh300 per person a day "fee." The boda boda operators, like other residents, were expected to deposit their "fee" at strategic places at Kerugoya Stadium.
Several holes had been dug and a plastic bag was inserted inside and held down by a stone. You were required to stuff money inside the bag and walk away. Some of the sect members are located at strategic places within the area and take note of all the people who have paid.

The question is, do these things matter when they happen to other people, far away from where we are, or has it all become too much to care about?

At the tail end of the Allafrica.com story, you will find what is the alleged explanation for why Police are not acting in the face of the growing Mungiki menace, or, as it is known in other places, why they are not doing their job:

Last week, area police boss Herbert Khaemba told the vigilante group that the police were unwilling to take any action because of accusations that they were carrying out extra-judicial killings.

In plain English: they are sulking as people are suffering, killing and being killed.

But hold on there's more:

Police joined the convoy of vigilantes riding motorbikes at Kagio and followed them as they moved through the different towns.

So the Police, having miserably failed in keeping the peace, have morphed into a vigilante support squad?

He [one of the vigilantes who was interviewed] claimed that they had been allowed to carry out the operation by the police.

"They [police] have given us a paper to say they are supporting us. They are helping us. They have given us recognition and they know what we are doing and are behind us," Maina said at the end of the operation yesterday.

In other words, a complete breakdown of order. Which has led, in the end, to this kind of madness.

God. Help. Us.

Let's Talk About Celebrities and Africa

2009-04-17T02:07:00.003+03:00

I have been following the spectacle of the race to a million followers on twitter between Ashton Kutcher and CNN since very early Wednesday morning (or very late Tuesday night), depending on where you’re located.

I first caught wind of it when Kristie Lu Stout reporting on CNN from Hong Kong announced that Kutcher was looking to beat CNN to the 1 million followers mark and that when he did, he would pull a prank on Ted Turner. Soon after, Larry King threw back a taunt, and an appearance on Larry King Live entered into the bargain. There was mention, also, of a prize for the millionth follower. I don’t have a sense of how much buzz all this created.

Somewhere along the line, however, probably an hour maybe two after this announcement was made, suddenly, he added the Mosquito Nets for Africa angle. Even that evolved. First he said he’d provide 1,000 Mosquito nets if tweeps helped him cross the 1 million follower mark before CNN. Then someone told him he really should be donating 1,000 nets anyway, which he promptly conceded and on account of which he raised that number to 10,000 nets. That finally seemed to win him the kind of attention he was looking to garner and today, as I understand it, the race is tighter than it was on Wednesday and the tape at the finishing line is in sight.

So, it’s official: Africa trumps pranking Ted Turner, a head to head between Larry King and Ashton Kutcher and a mysterious prize to the nth follower for garnering attention. Because, let’s face it, it’s about the publicity. The race to get to the one million mark came first. The mosquito nets for Africa were an afterthought. It was about figuring out, by trial and error, what would move the tweeps into action. He tried this, he tried that, and finally, he hit on the magic formula.

As @remarkabletweet succintly put it, it’s “Classic PR Genius.” Which @itsjustmimi heartily agreed with, tweeting enthusiastically: “The man's a business/pr genius.”

Oh but we already had a clue about the power of Africa to sanitize a reputation or a cause. Remember Lindsay Lohan announcing her post-rehab plans a couple of years ago to go on a humanitarian mission to Africa?

My only response is to harken back to this post from my past. And point you, also, to the thoughts of fellow afrophiles.

NCCK: Be the Voice of Reason

2009-04-15T10:33:00.005+03:00

So either it’s calmer now, or all the burying my head in the sand has paid off. Because there was a week back there, the post-Kilaguni-talks-fallout week, when I thought the politicos, who had long ago hit rock bottom, had finally received the heavy duty equipment they’d ordered (with tax payers money, of course,)and began to drill downward. And no, this is not a search for black gold.

(Eish. Please. Wharrr? And all of that other exclamatory jazz.)

But me I can’t rant about the politicos right now, imagine. I’ve been digging deep inside to find the rant but the rant is gone. There is no more rant.

But I can rant about the NCCK.( To the non-Kenyans, that would be the National Council of Churches of Kenya). And, I will.

What have THEY been smoking? So they stumbled and fumbled when the nation needed them most at the beginning of last year, so they’re desperate for atonement, so they are desperate to be relevant again in the national scheme of things, so they’re speaking up and speaking out.

Good for them.

Methinks, though, that they haven’t thought through their call for new elections and they’re just rushing into the melee spouting what words will come. Harsh indictment, I know.

But.

I put my ear to the ground to find out whether the churches, which have been the indisputable kings at the grassroots these many years, have instituted any new electorate education campaigns this past year or so. Nada.

I made enquiries about which new, different, possibly promising new candidates for parliamentary office are popping out of the woodwork. I heard a few names, but word is that these people are building/consolidating their base in readiness for 2012 and are far from ready right now.

On top of that, we do not yet have that new constitution and the Electoral Commission has yet to be overhauled and restructured to a reasonable level of effectiveness.

All of these factors give me to understand that elections held at the end of this year would only serve to wind us all up again, use up our scarce national budgetary resources and at the other end of the process, churn out the same old crop of people to jostle for position and ignore us all over again, and perhaps even result in some of the election ugliness that we’re still struggling to recover from.

What’s the use, I ask.

Things that the NCCK should be doing instead:

Educating voters nationally on their rights, creating spaces where people on the ground can discuss in detail how to hold their current leaders to account, what qualities they want in the leader who will represent them in parliament in 2013 and what specific deliverables they want out of their leaders. (Because God help us, come 2012, we have to grab this nation by its collar, drag it kicking and screaming if we must, and set it on the path to becoming the nation we know it has the potential to be).

Being the voice of reason, sticking their noses in the business of our political leaders, calling them on their missteps and excesses, reining them in as best it can, holding them to account and fearlessly speaking the truth at the pulpit and in the public space and doing best it can to live up to that truth, therefore reminding Kenyans who they are at their best.

Refraining from speaking when it has nothing of value to add.

The 100th Monkey Syndrome

2009-04-07T19:46:00.014+03:00

We live, we learn.

I’ve never heard of the 100th monkey syndrome before today. I was chatting with a friend, yadda yadda yaddaing about the same old thing: what will it take to turn our beloved country around, when he pulled something he called the 100th monkey syndrome out of his back pocket and flashed it at me. I drew a blank. As in I did not have one and a half clues to rub together.

The 100th monkey syndrome? Now who is that and what does he have to do with the length of Pinocchio’s nose?

Soon enough, off I went to the interweb(s), to find out.

(Note to self: have to have a conversation with DaddyCool, the father, about what his process would have been in finding the answer to this question way back when he was my age.)

In the meantime, here’s what I found out:

The 100th monkey syndrome is a theory about how learned behaviour spreads within a given population. It was popularised in a book titled the 100th Monkey by Ken Keyes. Here’s the excerpt I found at WowZone.

(Keep in mind as you read this that Ken Keyes offered it as a parable/legend and that there are disputes about whether the experiment actually took place and whether, if it did, its results were authentic. Still.)

The Japanese monkey, Macaca Fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkey liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant.
An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too. This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists.
Between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes.
Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes -- the exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. Let's further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.
THEN IT HAPPENED!
By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!
But notice: A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea. Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes.
Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind. Although the exact number may vary, this Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the conscious property of these people.
But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

Interesting, theory/parable/fill in the blank, eh? Very Tipping Point a la Malcolm Gladwell-ish, actually. I'm especially fascinated by the idea that the adults learnt from the children. What do you know.

Food for thought if nothing else. So, application time. How many monkeys do you think have learned how to wash their sweet potatoes in the stream in Kenya? How far do you think we are from the tipping point, from the 100th monkey? Is there a fastforward button? How do we expedite the process?

Africans Talking: Random TV Moment

2009-04-02T10:43:00.003+03:00

So this morning, as a conscious act of procrastination, I switched on my television and stumbled upon the tail end of an interview of two West Africans by Janet Mbugua on KTN’s Sunrise Live. Although interview is really what it should have been, not what it actually was. Somewhere along the way one of the interviewees grabbed the show and literally ran away with it.

Let’s start by giving the interviewees the descriptive names Cool West African #1 and Cool West African #2 because the KTN editors didn’t think to do a simple thing like keep their names onscreen while they spoke just in case, you know, we didn’t recognise them or something and we weren’t in at the beginning of the interview when they were, presumably, introduced.

Anyhoo. Apparently this was a conversation about what the G-20 summit has to do with you (and me). At least this helpful bit of information was on screen.

Cool West African #1 was really fired up and going going gone. Seriously, we were choking, cough, cough, in his dust, cough. Like I said, I caught only the tail end of the session during which he made two very interesting points with gusto and a smile. (I’ve paraphrased here a bit, and perhaps, maybe, added my own emphasis).

Point number one in reference to Aid to Africa: Say between you and your wife you make 50,000 Ksh a month and you have three children you have to feed and educate and cloth them as well as take care of all the other expenses that come with your life and lifestyle. Does it make sense to budget for 100,000 Ksh every month in the hope that that friend there will plug in an extra 10,000 Ksh and the bank will give you 20,000 Ksh and so on and so forth? Who anywhere in the world encourages any family to do this? Isn’t the common sense thing to do to buckle down, eat the cake you’ve got while all the while doing what you can to increase its size?

Point number two in reference to Corruption in Africa: To aggravate matters in Africa, corruption is a serious leak in our bucket so that even if additional funds are being poured into it, a significant portion of them are just leaking out and going to pad secret Swiss bank accounts. So Cool West African #1 strongly suggests that corruption should be treated as mass murder, because when you think about it, when you steal maize destined for the marginalised and as a result, people starve to death, or you build bad roads in order to pocket some of the allocated funds and people die on those roads, aren’t you committing an act of mass murder?

Cool West African #2 and Janet Mbugua tried to get a word in edgewise during Cool West African #1’s totally awesome extended rant but they just ended up being background noise, poor folk. You should have seen it. You would have enjoyed it.

OK, end of procrastination already. Off to do the thing that I’ve been dreading all morning.

Moyo Vs Bono on Aid to Africa

2009-03-30T17:54:00.004+03:00

Dambisa Moyo continues to do her counter-Bono rounds, articulating the message of her book which boils down to, half a century and at least one trillion dollars later, it should be clear to everyone that something’s wrong with the AID picture, because on multiple fronts, things aren’t getting any better, in fact, they’re getting worse.

According to Steve Hamm of GlobeSpotting, Moyo spoke at NYU recently and characterised Bono & Co as “misguided,” claiming “they paint Africa and Africans as victims rather than countries and people with capabilities and promise.” And, on top of that, they usurp the role of African leaders, who really ought to be the ones who speak for Africa.

Hamm reports that she compared it to “having an International musician like Amy Winehouse commenting on the US debt crisis rather than Obama. It makes no sense."

On the one hand, I really feel badly for Bono and Blair and their ilk. They see a problem and they’re compelled to do something. It’s hard to fault them on that ground. There are too many people all over the place doing nothing when they should be doing something.

On the other hand, it’s clear that AID has not worked/is not working as it’s supposed to, unless of course, it had the subversive objective all along of perpetuating dependence, in which case, it’s truly a work of genius. As Moyo says, “giving aid to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time,” which is puzzling no end because all the evidence suggests is that it’s an idea that has failed miserably.

Calling contemporary thinkers to proffer new ideas, please.

I leave it at that. If you’re not new here, you already know I can go on and on and on about this subject. I feel it in a deep place in a deep way.

It would be interesting have Bono and Moyo discussing/debating this before an audience. So, who’s putting that together already?

*

In a maybe perhaps couldbe related development, Partnership for Change, a Kenyan lobby group comprising organisations from all over Kenya posted an open letter to the IMF Chief today, asking him not to grant the Kenyan Government’s request for a 100 million dollar loan until the government became more accountable to Kenyans. The letter is posted on the Marsgroup blog here.

*

In other news, times, they are a-changing. The incoming British High Commissioner to Kenya has a blog where we can interact with him should we so choose. That should be interesting. Or maybe not. Maybe just different. We wait to see.

Poetry Meets Technology Meets the Strength of the Human Spirit

2009-03-16T22:52:00.003+03:00

I was having trouble summoning sleep late into last night so I thought I might as well dispense with long overdue business like listening to some of the latest talks posted up at TED.

(Although, as well I should have known, this is not the cure the doctor prescribed for insomnia.)

So I bumped into Aimee Mullins.

Maybe you’ve heard of Aimee Mullins. Maybe you haven’t. She had both her legs amputated at the knee while she was still an infant. Despite this major setback so early in life, she went on to become a Paralympics record breaker, a model and actress. And might I add, motivational speaker.

Her story, as she tells it here, is all about the triumph of the human spirit in the face of overwhelming odds. It’s about how one woman looked the very thing that threatened to hold her down squarely in the eye and by sheer force of will, transformed it into the thing that held her up.

At TED, she spoke about the potential for the disabled to design their bodies for their own empowerment. She herself has 12 pairs of prosthetic legs. Each pair gives her a distinct identity. With each pair, she describes how she consciously makes a choice about who to be. She smiles as she recounts how, on one occasion, someone whose own legs were intact expressed genuine envy about this ability she had to continually transform herself. Genuine. Envy. Of someone who would normally be an object of pity.

All because this amazing woman has focused her creative energy on her prosthetic legs to such an extent as to help transform what once was a disability into a super ability, and in doing so, is challenging the very nature of the conversation about her place and the place of those like her in the scheme of things. It was once a conversation about deficiency. It has become a conversation about potential:

“People that society once considered disabled can now become architects of their own identities…by designing their bodies from a place of empowerment.”

In one instance, she collaborated in the creation of prosthetic legs merely “to provoke the senses and ignite the imagination,” in what she describes as the process of combining emerging technology with age old poetry.

That’s the thing that resonated most with me. She made me marvel anew the place of the creative enterprise in everyday life:

“Poetry matters. Poetry is what elevates the banal and neglected object to a realm of art. It can transform the thing that might have made people fearful into something that makes people look, and look a little longer. And maybe even understand.”

Poetry. Art. Music. The creative enterprise. This is their finest moment—when they give people the courage to look and the eyes to see the layers of meaning and the wide swath of possibility present in a given thing, in a particular moment, in a very specific idea. This is the poetry of everyday life. When we write stories, when we compose songs, when we make art that enables people grapple with ideas that they do not have the courage to confront raw, we build a bridge, we make our difference.

In the comments, there are those who point out that there are thousands of people around the world who cannot even afford one pair of basic prosthetic legs. This is true. This bears keeping in mind.

Also, another voice adds, how far ought we to push this, really? Because once you have cheetah’s legs, where do you leap to from there? What will it mean? Which is a reasonable question—is there a line? Can it be crossed? Who’s to say when it’s been crossed?

Me? Right here, right now? I’m just amazed at the strength of this particular human spirit. And reminded about the potential that lies within each one of us.

Bravo, Aimee Mullins.

Second Chances

2009-03-15T22:26:00.001+03:00

So I’ve been thinking lately about second chances.

They don’t come served on a silver platter. There are no drum rolls, there is no music.

You can’t wait around for them at the bus stop.

If you want them badly enough, you have to go out and grab them, no matter what anybody else says or thinks.

The thing about second chances is that although most people say that everybody deserves one, few people are willing to give them.

Out of my way people, I see my second chance and I’m chasing it down to the ends of the earth. I can live with failing but I refuse to live without trying.

Who’s anybody to tell me what I can or cannot do, who I can or cannot be, where I can or cannot go?

There’s nothing as personal as a second chance.

It's the Simple Things and the Difference they Make

2009-03-10T10:43:00.006+03:00

It’s the simple things and the difference they make.

I now concede that I have been complicating things unnecessarily.

(I do not know why I felt compelled to add unnecessarily at the tail end of the sentence. Isn’t complicating things always unnecessary? Oh well.)

I have had this dark ominous cloud hanging over my head about what my country is coming to and all the ways in which I am helpless, and I have sort of got myself all worked up about it, knots in my stomach, weakness in my knees and all of that.

So then when I was up to here with all of it, and edgy and distraught, I sort of, kind of, took my misery to a cyberfriend who, God bless him, helped set me straight.

I’ve been missing the point. It’s about the simple things. What difference are you making in your community? How are you using what is already available to you?

Duh. I used to know that. I used to have a list of simple things.

Note to self: find the list, already. Or better still, make a new one.

In the end, it’s about what we can do, not what we can’t do, and it starts with the simple things and the difference they make. I’ve got to believe that all our little pushes will yet heave this giant obstacle standing in the way of The Kenya We Want right into the sea. I need to believe this.

In the meantime, all I can do is my simple thing. I must stop despairing and start keeping the faith that all our little things heaped together make something big and beautiful and meaningful even though I cannot, do not see what and how right now.

Speaking of the simple things:

There’s this thing that we can do, right here, right now. We middle class Kenyans think we’re champions of human rights and social justice but so many of us pay our Househelp Ksh 150 or Ksh 200 for a full day’s work and in the same token spend Ksh 600 on a meal at a restaurant without batting an eye and we don’t see the disconnect, we don’t realise all the ways in which we participate in a system that oppresses the poor and downtrodden and keeps them down.

What a big difference it would make if each of us upped that miserly pay by Ksh 100 or 200 a day. Suddenly, Mama Nani who lives in Kibera or Kawangware or Kangemi would have a little more money in her hands, not a lot, you understand, but at least it would be something and it would mean any number of things.

Perhaps it would mean that she could take her sick children to the neighbourhood clinic rather than just wait out the persistent cough and hope for the best, or that they would be able to afford that secondhand pair of shoes so that her intelligent little girl who’s been sent home from school because she went barefoot, or in bedroom slippers, which is unacceptable, because uniform is uniform is uniform, could have a shot at an uninterrupted education.

Best case scenario, it might mean that she could put aside 50 bob a day and in about a year’s time start a small business hawking this or the other and then suddenly she could start dreaming about taking her children to secondary school, which she had never imagined she could do. But, most likely, it will mean that her head is above water again because she’d been drowning under the burden of increasing food prices coupled with a static wage.

This is not charity, this is justice. It’s not about doing everything, it’s about doing something. And it’s the simple thing that’s right before us.

Think about how much you pay your Househelp today, and how long it’s been since you gave a her or him a raise.

Think also of five simple things that you can do to help push this gigantic obstacle that stands in the way of our attaining the Kenya We Want out of the way.

(written while humming India Arie's It's the Little Things)

Muthoni Wanyeki on the Killings of King'ara and Oulu

2009-03-09T11:17:00.004+03:00

I haven't been able to unravel, in my mind, what might, could, would have been going on behind the scenes to lead to the high drama massacres of Oscar King'ara and Paul Oulu.

Muthoni Wanyeki, writing for Pambazuka News, presents a fresh and interesting perspective. Or maybe that's just me. She's well worth a read.

She's right also, about the continued existence of the Mungiki and other militia groups in the country:

If armed groups, criminal gangs and militia still exist in this country, they do so because of their relationships—complex and ever-changing with the political powers that be and the security services that those political powers control. This is obvious. This is why disarmament and demobilisation is so apparently difficult to achieve.

Hardwired for Faith?

2009-03-06T20:27:00.001+03:00

The Scientists are talking about religion. Some interesting excerpts from an article at the New Scientist website:

“Religious ideas are common to all cultures: like language and music, they seem to be part of what it is to be human.”

“some of the unique cognitive capacities that have made us so successful as a species also work together to create a tendency for supernatural thinking. There's now a lot of evidence that some of the foundations for our religious beliefs are hard-wired”

"Children the world over have a strong natural receptivity to believing in gods because of the way their minds work, and this early developing receptivity continues to anchor our intuitive thinking throughout life," says anthropologist Justin Barrett of the University of Oxford.

“Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain. Education and experience teach us to override it, but it never truly leaves us,” he says.

“Though she doesn't yet have evidence that this tendency is linked to belief in god, Kelemen does have results showing that most adults tacitly believe they have souls.”

“Even so, religion is an inescapable artefact of the wiring in our brain,” says Bloom. "All humans possess the brain circuitry and that never goes away."

Yes, guilty as charged: this choice of excerpts is heavily biased toward my personal belief system. I’m feeling very “it’s my blog and I will post what I want to”.

But, but, but: if you want to read all this in context, you can find it here.

As the author, Michael Brooks rightly points out, the gist of this article stands in direct opposition to the Richard Dawkins claim that religion is propagated through indoctrination.

Which in itself makes it very interesting indeed.