ALC Africa's Debates

A must to attend... There is also online streaming on the 24th of June.

African Leadership Centre Public Lecture, Nairobi

Africa Leadership Centre Public event on the 24th of June at the University of Nairobi where real issues on Global Militarism and the Resilience of Women in Africa will be discussed by no other than the erudite, Prof. Amina Mama; the director of Women and Gender Studies, University of California. Be there

 

‎"Africa: A Continent of Beggars - Anonymous

What is going on? Why have we turned into a continent of beggars?

Our leaders go abroad to beg for “aid” to support the national budget or else they can’t run our countries. They beg for loans, grants, and experts to develop Africa. It makes no sense, when you have everything you need at home to cook a good meal, to go begging your neighbour for their food."

What is going on in Africa? From Burkina Faso to Madagascar, from presidents to street children, I have never come across so much begging in my life. Every single day, no matter which African country I am in, I am accosted by beggars. And I don’t just mean the regular beggars we see on the streets everywhere in the world. No. The African culture of begging permeates all spheres of life–from extended family members to the young bank teller; everyone seems to think begging is okay. In fact, some of us have even become professional beggars and live solely by this way of life. Can you imagine the frustration of arriving in a country and dealing with immigration staff that are nothing more than beggars in uniform? I have known situations where immigration officers, on the pretence of checking for contraband goods, have rummaged through my belongings and begged for whatever item catches their fancy.

Recently, on arriving at the airport in Accra, Ghana, I was disgusted when an immigration officer actually begged that I give him the biscuits I had bought for my children. Just ordinary biscuits, which he could easily have bought on the streets of Accra! Naturally I refused. Can you believe another young officer escorted me to my waiting car, all the while trying to convince me to part with the biscuits? What kind of begging is this? After extracting myself from that irritating situation, it was time to go home. But not before the hangers-on at the airport had demanded I give them “pounds or coins”. All across the continent, you see young men standing at the airports, ready to help you push your trolley to your car for some “small change”. Whether you seek their assistance or not, everybody is keen to “help” you.

But of course you soon find out this “help” comes at a cost. These days, one of the biggest beggars (like our immigration officers) also comes in uniform. I am talking about African policemen and women. Even if you are the victim of a crime, the police have no shame in begging you for money before coming to your assistance. Right now, drivers in Ghana are being accosted every day and night by these “beggars in uniform”. Because of the high incidence of robberies in the past, the Ghana police started mounting barriers at night, as a way to protect innocent members of society. The idea really is for the police to search each vehicle to make sure it is not full of robbers carrying dangerous weapons such as guns.

Instead, when a driver gets to a barrier, the police shine their pathetic torch lights in the car and, sometimes, ask for something “small for iced water or Fanta”. I mean, what kind of life is this? Why should policemen and women turn themselves into professional beggars? I know they are underpaid, but come on, begging for money from the populace is not cool. These “beggars in uniform” are all over the streets of West Africa and travelling by road from say Ghana to Benin is no laughing matter. You will come across so many barriers and you know at each one, a beggar in uniform will demand something from you. For doing their job! That is what gets to me the most. The majority of people begging in Africa are in full-time gainful employment.

Yet they beg for money from you for them to do their jobs! Can you imagine, after withdrawing your money from a bank, the bank teller begs for “something” from you? I have heard of secretaries who, no matter how many times you visit their offices, will tell you their boss is unavailable. Yet the same secretaries have no shame in begging you for “something”. “Something” which, when it materialises, guarantees you a meeting with the “absent” boss.

This culture of begging has permeated the whole African social order, from our governments down to every sector of society. In the classrooms, teachers beg schoolchildren for their “luxury foods” such as apples which they cannot afford on a teacher’s salary. Pathetic but true! Visit any establishment and the security officer will act as if he is helping you to find a parking lot. The minute you step out of your car, the begging starts: “Oh madam, I dey ooo!”You stop at the traffic lights and young children who are supposedly trying to earn a living by cleaning your car windows or selling chewing gum, all of a sudden turn into professional beggars. These days, many of our young men are creating work for themselves by filling in the potholes on our roads, whilst at the same time begging for money!

What is going on? Why have we turned into a continent of beggars?

Our leaders go abroad to beg for “aid” to support the national budget or else they can’t run our countries. They beg for loans, grants, and experts to develop Africa. It makes no sense, when you have everything you need at home to cook a good meal, to go begging your neighbour for their food. You may not be a good cook, but once you have the ingredients, surely you can only try? For as long as we keep begging foreigners to produce for us, we will never know how to manufacture anything. We may not know how to mine and polish diamonds, but how can we know when we do not learn? We would rather beg foreign investors to come and do it for us, on their own terms! "

I WILL EAT WHAT I WANT by Donald Molosi

I WILL EAT WHAT I WANT

Driving from Phikwe, the mining town where we lived, to our home village of Mahalapye in Eastern Botswana, my face was always pressed against the back window. I was fond of watching greener-than-green mophane trees dotted with women’s brightly colored headscarves. The women in the trees were from nearby villages close to the big road and they were shaking mophane caterpillars off tree branches to the ground for harvest. Despite being an inquisitive child I could only squirm at the thought of eating these tough yellow and green caterpillars, and so eventually I would extract my face from the window.

Today I do not live in Botswana but I encounter many Western tourists who have explored Botswana and one way for them to lament my lack of exoticness is always to tell me, very seriously, that mophane caterpillars are a Botswana delicacy. And truth be told, I was willing to try mophane before but now that they are litmus for Tswana authenticity even to BaTswana themselves (thanks to poisonous Western travel literature) I have no desire to snack on the lovely caterpillar.

The African’s palate is always called only “cultural” and his taste understood as only “tribal” thereby leaving no room for the African’s individual taste. So, I write now of the truth that I am a proud MoTswana man but I will not force himself to eat mophane caterpillars. Simply because they have thorns growing from their body.

Donald Molosi 2012

THE COMING ANARCHY

by Robert D. Kaplan
February 1994

The Minister's eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. "In forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse—the revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring up children in a modern society." Then he referred to the recent coup in the West African country Sierra Leone. "The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come from houses like this." The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal shack teeming with children. "In three months these boys confiscated all the official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road." The Minister mentioned one of the coup's leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who shot the people who had paid for his schooling, "in order to erase the humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him."


Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was what my friend—a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened were I to identify him more precisely—really wanted to talk about. Crime is what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.


The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world. Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. "The government in Sierra Leone has no writ after dark," says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the capital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the house of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of value. Forget Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed Airport, in neighboring Nigeria's largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for "extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials." This is one of the few times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote d'Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding guards who walk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the ambassador's residence. After university students in the Ivory Coast caught bandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by hanging tires around their necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorian policemen stood by and watched the "necklacings," afraid to intervene. Each time I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanning eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding "tips" for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities in six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere—hordes of them. They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was clearly on the verge of igniting.


"You see," my friend the Minister told me, "in the villages of Africa it is perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal process."


"In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another." Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have "a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she could cross to the army's positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels' chances of success."


Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while desertification and deforestation—also tied to overpopulation—drive more and more African peasants out of the countryside."In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa," he continued, "there is much less crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination. Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against another." Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to have "a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her invisible, so that she could cross to the army's positions and there bury charms . . . to improve the rebels' chances of success."


Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in West Africa told me that they were from "extended" families, with a mother in one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose family structures are largely responsible for the world's highest birth rates and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while desertification and deforestation—also tied to overpopulation—drive more and more African peasants out of the countryside.
.....................................................................................

Here is the link to continue reading this interesting article: http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/archive/kaplan-2.html

The brains and the bruises: meeting the girls of Malava Girls High School Kakamega

As part of the Women Bloggers Deliver contest, and the Carbon for Water campaign, I am excited to be traveling around the Western Province of Kenya, meeting women and girls who are hard-hit by the issues associated with the Millennium Development Goals. Yesterday, I got the chance to visit the Malava’s Girls High School -- a reaffirmation time that the Millennium Development Goals are so important, especially the goal addressing women and girls’ issues.

Team Vestergaard Frandsen and Women Deliver (consisting of Janna Oberdorf, Elisabeth Wilhelm, Rachel Cernansky and I) visited the Malava Girls High School to demonstrate how to use the LifeStraw Family water filters, a water purification tool that is being distributed to 900,000 Kenyans in the Western Province. The findings about water borne diseases and lack of safe water were very revealing -- teachers told us about how they have to use some form of chemical to purify their water or boil the water for drinking. While some of the girls mentioned that they often went home thirsty and empty-handed after spending a whole day in a very long queue to get tap water (where available). They said they would just let the stream water settle and drink, or their family would use firewood to boil the water thereby adding to carbon emissions in the atmosphere. A few of the girls who shared their experiences with us during questions and answers time, explained how some of them have suffered some form of water borne disease ranging from typhoid fever to diarrhea or having their family members suffer bilharzias.

The female students, who were up to 500 in attendance, believed in healthy living and safe drinking water as a disease free mechanism. The discussion took a turn as the girls began to trust in the team, and they spoke in confidence to each member of the team about prevailing issues affecting them as a girl-child, affecting their family and their development. It was an electrifying moment of revelations and counseling. It was not so long ago that I was in this stage of life too, with issues so germane to me I wish I had trusted and knowledgeable people to share them with. I was glad that I am part of a team with whom these brilliants girls can share their bruises, their concerns and their struggles in an unequal world.

Interacting with us were some of the female students who had to contend with different life issues – from physical and sexual abuse in the home to questions of sexuality and sexual health. Many more girls gathered around us in different groups to recount different stories of their young but bruised life. Beatrice suffers extremely painful menstruation (Dysmenorrheal) and her mother has prevented her from using the oral contraceptive that the doctor prescribed for her without any other alternative, she goes through pains for more than 10 days as long as her bleeding last to the point paralyses! There was little we could do to attend to all the needs of these brilliant girls but to exchange contact with promises to refer them to organizations and individuals within Kenya working on these issues of concern to them.

In less than one hour, discussions had gone around empowerment of girls and their family, provision of safe drinking water, and even though the female students are not having children yet nor are they children themselves, they were able to discuss the challenges around child mortality and maternal health. They also know a lot about the recurring danger of climate change and global warming if no intervention is offered by all of us. Just in one meeting MDGs goal 3- Promote gender equality and empowerment of women , 4- Reduce Child Mortality Rates, 5- Improve maternal health, 6-Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases and 7 – Ensure environmental Sustainability were discussed!

We have all started on the right path; supporting each other, educating each other, demanding that quality of our lives are improved and that we have access to basic amenities of life. I had a wonderful time with these incredible girls.

The Emusanda ‘Straight from the heart’ Global Partnership

In the cause of making a scheduled trip to Rhodericks Maliatjo house, to carry out ‘fencing’ for the protection of his cows- this is to test the potency of the new project of Vestergaard Frandsen on Food Security- we met Mr. Mathews Olumatete Ofuwamba. Before I share the story of Mr. Mathews, I will quickly touch on the ‘fencing’ method in relation to food security. While skype talking with Torben Vestergaard Franden, he had elaborated on the company ‘fencing’ project in Nigeria, Kenya and Ghana. This new project aims at preventing tsetse flies from killing off livestock’s of famers’ especially those that are into husbandry. The ‘fencing’ is a net system; the net which is black in colour has the potential of keeping off and killing off flies that could pose imminent dangers to the livestock. Live stocks are important food in many places in Africa and farmers who have being struggling to keep their animals disease free, have little to worry about if they can surround their animals space with the nets.


Across Maliatjo fence was the Emusanda Health Centre built by Vestergaard after their 2008 HIV/AID project in Kenya- called the “Integrated Prevention Demonstration”. The history of the health centre was better appreciated when heard from the local who not only donated the land but also believed strongly that Vestergaard has indeed saved lots of lives via this project. According to the down -to-earth, Mr. Mathews Olumatate Ofuwamba who I spoke with, he lost two sons to malaria as a result of lack of medical centre at Emusanda in Lurambi District of Kakamega. The first son died before they could found vehicles or any other means of transportation to take him to the far distance city hospital and the second died on the arrival at the far distance hospital. Both cases where too late and could have being prevented if there were existence of medical centre in their district. Mr. Mathews met Mikkel Vestergaard, the CEO of Vestergard Frandsen during the 2008 HIV project in Kenya and told him about his late son and the burden of taken care of his 10 grand children. That was how what I would love to call ‘Global Partnership” for saving lives began between the man who wanted a change and a company who is ready to offer one.

Emusanda Health Centre is now going on phase two development project of providing maternity centre in the district as Vesteergard Frandsen partners with Women Deliver to address goal four and of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – improving maternal health and reducing child mortality rates. As reported by Women enews Kenya ‘the best estimates for Kenya suggest that approximately 14,700 women and girls die each year due to pregnancy-related complications’. In Mr. Mathews own word, some pregnant women at Emusanda had died at home due to long distance to get medical help during labour and also due to lack of medical facilities for women. He is so happy and optimistic that a maternity centre is going to be built in Emusanda. The cost of this project is estimated at 70,000 US Dollars.


I am one of those who critically look at the motives of help coming from abroad but having seeing on ground what it is like for many to have access to basic amenities of life and access to services that keep people healthy and alive, then I would say it is high time for many government to see how their priorities can be rearranged and how they can’t partner with organizations and companies home and aboard to earnest resources to address what matters. There is no nation that can boast of good standard if its people are suffering and if its women are worst off.

SPEAKING IMAGES, THE LIFESTRAW FAMILY WATER FILTER DISTRIBUTION AT WESTERN PROVINCE KENYA .wmv

The carbon for water project and distribution of Lifestraw Filter by Vestergaard Frandsen.

Carbon for Water, the first taste of a visiting Blogger in Kenya

As I rode through the city of Kisumu, as jet-lagged as I was, I was kept awake by a fun-loving driver who thought it was imperative to get to know Kisumu. As we journeyed through the Western Province, I began to imagine how many of the township people have access to safe drinking water. By the time we arrived in at Kakamega, I had stored in my ‘brain document' questions to ask, contributions to make, and how to satisfy my curiosity by interacting with the many people that are benefitting from the Carbon for Water project.

Carbon for Water—nice concept! LifeStraw Family—fantastic idea—but how do they all fit in together? How do they work? How will the people of Western Province, especially the women, feel about not having to boil water using firewood and purifying with a filter instead? How would they feel the impact of LifeStraw water purification on their health and time? How involved is the government of Kenya through its Ministry of Public Health? How do carbon credits work? What does this initiative mean to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals? How can we connect all the dots of all the MDGs in relation to global partnership, environmental sustainability, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, gender equality and women empowerment, maternal health, reduction of child mortality, education, and poverty alleviation with safe drinking water and reduction of carbon emissions as public health issues?

In Kakamega with Rachel Cernansky, the other Women Bloggers Deliver winner, we worked through the details of the campaign as we were debriefed by Elisabeth Wilhelm. The Carbon For Water project in Kakamega will cost over 30 million USD with distributions of LifeStraw water filters reaching nearly one million people in five weeks with 4,000 community workers and 4,000 transporters involved. All in all, 4.5 million people will benefit! This project will be run for ten years and families will be offered free replacement of the LifeStraws when they wear out. Vestergaard is committing all these efforts and finances without collecting a single dime from the beneficiaries but with the hope that carbon emissions will be drastically reduced and Vestergaard Frandsen gets paid through carbon credit!

Today is a beginning for me: to learn more, to work with this amazing team, to critically look into how deforestation of local forests will be addressed, how carbon offsets will pay off for the entire planet, how linking public health with carbon emissions by Vestergaard Frandsen will change things for the better here in Kenya, and how it will improve the quality of women’s lives and their families.

Tomorrow is when I join the Vestergaard Frandsen staff on the campaign trail, and it will all start at 6:30AM in the morning, time to get some sleep.