Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
100 years and going strong; But has the ANC-led government done enough for its people?
By Isaac Esipisu
Although the role of political parties in Africa has changed dramatically since the sweeping reintroduction of multi-party politics in the early 1990s, Africa’s political parties remain deficient in many ways, particularly their organizational capacity, programmatic profiles and inner-party democracy.
The third wave of democratization that hit the shores of Africa 20 years ago has undoubtedly produced mixed results as regards to the democratic quality of the over 48 countries south of the Sahara. However, one finding can hardly be denied: the role of political parties has evidently changed dramatically.
Notwithstanding few exceptions such as Eritrea , Swaziland and Somalia , in almost all sub-Saharan countries, governments legally allow multi-party politics. This is in stark contrast to the single-party regimes and military oligarchies that prevailed before 1990.
After years of marginalization during autocratic rule, many African political parties have regained their key role in democratic politics by mediating between politics and society. Multi-partyism paved the way for genuine parliamentary opposition and the strengthening of parliaments in decision-making. However, several shortcomings still remain: many African political parties suffer from low organizational capacity and a lack of internal democracy.
Dominated by individual leaders, often times lifelong chairpersons and “Big Men”, youth and women remain marginalized within party structures.
Will 2012 see more strong men of Africa leave office?
By Isaac Esipisu
There are many reasons for being angry with Africa ’s strong men, whose autocratic ways have thrust some African countries back into the eye of the storm and threatened to undo the democratic gains in other parts of the continent of the past decades.
For those who made ultimate political capital from opposing strongman rule in their respective countries, it is a chilling commentary of African politics that several leaders now seek to cement their places and refusing to retire and watch the upcoming elections from the sidelines, or refusing to hand over power after losing presidential elections.
In 2012 one of the longest strong men of Africa, President Abdoulaye Wade’s country Senegal is holding its presidential elections together with other countries like Sierra Leon, Mali, Mauritania, Malagasy, and will be shortly followed by Zimbabwe and Kenya.
Yoweri Museveni and Paul Biya of Cameroon , who are among the longest-ruling leaders of the Africa , won their respective presidential elections and continue to have a stronghold on their respective countries, albeit with charges raised of serious election malpractice. Eduardo Dos Santos of Angola, Denis Sassou Nguesso of Congo Republic and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe will in one or two years face the electorate in an effort to further cement their authoritarian leadership.
What happened in the second half of 2011 in North Africa and more specifically in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya does not seem to have had any kind of effect on other Sub-Saharan African Leaders. In fact, they have strengthened their stronghold on power and in some countries even harassed and jailed opposition leaders.
I relly am interested in the question of the effect or potential effect of technological devices in desposing the ‘unwanted’ regimes
Who among the seven longest serving African leaders will be deposed next?
By Isaac Esipisu
Several African leaders watching news of the death of Africa ’s longest serving leader are wondering who among them is next and how they will leave office.
Three of the ten longest serving leaders have fallen this year – Ben Ali of Tunisia ruled for 23 years, Hosni Mubarak of Egypt ruled for 30 years and the longest, the Brother Leader of Libya ruled for 42 years – all gone in the last six months.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema of Equatorial Guinea (32), Jose Santos of Angola (32), Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (31), Paul Biya of Cameroon (29) and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda (25), King Mswati III of Swaziland (24), Blaise Campore of Burkina Fasso (24) and still going strong, and must be wondering whose turn is next.
Teodoro and Jose Santos take the number one spot as the longest serving Presidents with 32 years of ruling Equatorial Guinea and Angola respectively and from what has happened in Africa this year and to Gaddafi this week, it is a post neither of them would be proud off right now.
Although the revolts have so far been limited to North Africa, increasingly there are protests against regimes in other African countries. Whether triggered by economic conditions—food and fuel prices, poor job opportunities or service delivery failures, the mass protests are becoming important and have forced policy changes. Slowly but surely, these revolutions are heading south and, unless Africa ’s long-serving leaders pave the way for inclusive governance and relinquish their power, they are increasingly likely to face the same fate as the North African ones.
Democracy is a culture that takes long to hold.African leaders whocame on power right after independance know nothing of democracy, governance and were mostly pursuing individual clanical of inner circle interest.The following generation is a bit better than the previous because of international influence. There si a hope that in the coming decade governance will improve in Africa. It is a process. It is taking longer in Africa because of our realities and the dirty hands of certains western leaders…
Were NATO strikes on Gaddafi’s home town justified?
Britain’s defence secretary, Liam Fox, sounded a little scripted in Misrata at the weekend when I asked him whether NATO’s airstrikes in Muammar Gaddafi’s home town of Sirte were staying within its remit to protect civilians in Libya.
“NATO has been extraordinarily careful in target selection.”
“NATO has been very careful to minimize civilian casualties.”
“NATO has stayed within its mandate throughout.”
It’s a mantra that NATO, and the countries that have contributed to its Libyan adventure, have had to learn well. They’ve been accused of stretching the legality of the mission “to protect civilians by all necessary measures” before.
But the problem with sticking to a script, is that the Libyan conflict hasn’t really progressed with any sort of predictable narrative since the fall of Tripoli on the night of August 23rd.
If the then rebels of the now ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) expected that internal insurrections would help them and they’d race into Gaddafi’s hometown of Sirte and the other remaining holdout, Bani Walid, to a hero’s welcome, they were mistaken.
“Were NATO strikes on Gaddafi’s home town justified?”
Of course. Unless Sirte was prepared to be starved into submission to protect Gadaffi’s miserable skin, and the moralisers willing to watch.
The revolutionary forces pleaded on behalf of the residents of Sirte with Gadaffi’s frontmen for months, but they made almost no concessions to the general welfare. Gadaffi’s neck was more valuable. After that, the sooner it ended the more lives were saved.
As for the bombing itself, the details are far from clear. Much o9f the so-called ‘residential’ areas struck were in fact either evacuated or not even finished. And the attack on Sima hospital is a legal minefield for Gadaffi aplogists, since his forces were installed within, making it a military target.
from Global News Journal:
UN tells Mbeki he got it wrong on Ivory Coast
This week U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's chief of staff, Vijay Nambiar, defended the United Nations' record on Ivory Coast. In a highly unusual public rebuttal, Nambiar told former South African President and African Union mediator for the Ivory Coast conflict, Thabo Mbeki, that it was he -- not the international community -- who got it wrong in the world's top cocoa producer.
In April, Ivory Coast's long-time President Laurent Gbagbo was ousted from power by forces loyal to his rival Alassane Ouattara, who won the second round of a U.N.-certified election in November 2010, with the aid of French and U.N. troops. According to Mbeki -- who has also attempted to mediate in conflicts in Sudan and Zimbabwe -- there never should have been an election last fall in the country that was once the economic powerhouse of West Africa.
Mbeki wrote in an article published by Foreign Policy magazine at the end of April: "The objective reality is that the Ivorian presidential elections should not have been held when they were held. It was perfectly foreseeable that they would further entrench the very conflict it was suggested they would end."
Ivory Coast was split in two by the 2002-3 civil war and the failure to disarm the northern rebels meant the country held an election last year with two rival armies in place, leading to a new outbreak of hostilities when Gbagbo rejected the internationally-accepted election results.
The solution to the conflict, Mbeki wrote, was not to insist that Ouattara take office as president, as the United Nations, France and others did at the time, but a political solution that would have satisfied everybody in the francophone nation. "The African Union understood that a lasting solution of the Ivorian crisis necessitated a negotiated agreement between the two belligerent Ivorian factions, focused on the interdependent issues of democracy, peace, national reconciliation and unity."
The United Nations took nearly four months to come up with a public response to Mbeki. It finally appeared this week in an article in Foreign Policy by Nambiar entitled "Dear President Mbeki: The United Nations Helped Save the Ivory Coast." In his rebuttal, Nambiar vehemently rejects the idea that that the world should have pushed Ouattara to negotiate a power-sharing deal with election-loser Gbagbo.
I doubt that election was kosher. It would be interesting to find out if the complaints against the UN election observers were credible… but I guess we’ll never know given what’s transpired.
The chocolate money must be considerable.
from Photographers Blog:
Me and the man with the iPad
By Barry Malone
I never know how to behave when I go to write about hungry people.
I usually bring just a notebook and a pen because it seems somehow more subtle than a recorder. I drain bottled water or hide it before I get out of the car or the plane. In Ethiopia a few years ago I was telling a funny story to some other journalists as our car pulled up near a church where we had been told people were arriving looking for food.
We got out and began walking towards the place, me still telling the tale, shouting my mouth off, struggling to get to the punch line through my laughter and everybody else’s.
Then there was this sound, a low rumbling thing that came to meet us.
I could feel it roll across the ground and up through my boots. I stopped talking, my laughter died, I grabbed the arm of the person beside me: “What is that?” And I realized. It was the sound of children crying. There were enough children crying that -- I’ll say it again -- I could feel it in my boots. I was shamed by my laughter.
Hi blairhickman,
Thank you for your feedback. Barry’s name is visible on the right-hand side of the blog post under Author profile, along with a biography and a portrait.
Cheers,
Corinne
Online Visual Editor
from Photographers Blog:
AUDIO SLIDESHOW: Two Decades, One Somalia
In the 20 years since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was toppled, Somalia has faced hunger, flooding, fighting, suicide attacks, piracy and insurgency.
Prevailing violent conflict inside Somalia makes it difficult if not impossible for aid agencies to reach people.
AlertNet brings you special coverage of the country which has struggled without a strong central government ever since.
Here is a selection of Reuters pictures from 1993 to 2011 on this war-torn country and failed state.
Is Africa drought a chance to enact new UK policy?
New ways of managing aid are being debated in Britain as global concerns mount over a hunger crisis devastating the drought-affected Horn of Africa.
Randolph Kent, director of the Humanitarian Futures Programme at King’s College in London, says the crisis provides a perfect opportunity for the British government to test its recent promise to reform how it responds to humanitarian emergencies.
The severe drought, caused by the driest weather since 1995 in East Africa, has affected an estimated 10 million people and is expected to continue to worsen into early 2012, according to the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
While Kent acknowledges the importance of a $145 million (90.2 million pound) injection of humanitarian aid from the British government, he says the money will not help prevent the next Horn of Africa drought and that the government needs to become more “anticipatory”.
“This disaster has to teach us that the ways we’ve approached such crises in the past is not good enough,” Kent said in a statement. “If we don’t want to be consistently on a back foot when disasters happen, then we need evidence of strategic planning taking place at an international and regional level now.”
The British government’s Humanitarian Emergency Response Review (HERR), released in June, recognises that as a result of the increase in the intensity and frequency of disasters – a trend expected to grow with climate change and population growth – preparedness must be a key goal.
There’s no secret about why these people are condemned to suffer as it’s a man made tragedy.
Bad agricultural practices, overpopulation and incompetent government, aggravated by growing climate instability, are its causes.
Migration and relocation can mitigate it. The question is will it be orderly or disorderly, particularly when it crosses Africa’s permeable borders.
Sad to say, on past experience it will be the latter as there is no longer any effective regional governance.
A ‘day of rage’ in Ethiopia?
Ethiopia’s handful of TV channels are not carrying much news lately. Instead, broadcasters are spending most of their time covering every phase of the construction of a new mega dam along the country’s Nile waters.
From mawkish ballads to patriotic poems and documentaries, programmes are waxing eloquently about how far the impoverished African nation has come since the dreaded Communist junta was toppled two decades ago, by defying Egyptian pressure and embarking on a massive project from its own coffers.
The long-standing rivalry with Cairo, fuelled by Ethiopian accusations it was meddling to stop any project along the river, has mustered up nationalistic fervour in the country. Most Ethiopians now say they are fully behind the project and some are even buying government bonds to help fund its construction.
A job well done then, Ethiopia? Not so say the government’s detractors. They say the public mobilisation is just a diversionary tactic, a ploy to distract citizens from the country’s ills.
They’ve even set up an online campaign calling for an Arab-style “day of rage” on May 28, the day Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s rebels captured the capital in 1991.
“There is no reason why we cannot have the Arab uprising in Ethiopia,” says their proclamation, headlined “Beka!” – meaning “enough” in the Amharic language.
“We have resolved to bring the torch to Ethiopia, and liberate the country from the minority dictatorship that has been in power for more than 20 years,” says a post on their Facebook page, which has some 3,000 “confirmed” attendants.
‘Day of rage’ and the future of Ethiopia –
Ethiopia may need a new leadership, but not in a revolutionary fashion. Ethiopians of the young generation are the solution for the chronic poverty. The young generation will contribute in changing the image of Ethiopia that has been severing as a poster child for poverty for the last 30 years.
So Reuters, while thanking your reportage, but we say no thanks for covering only negative news that comes out from the Ethiopia and the African Continent in general. There are more positive and inspirational news making stories each day in Ethiopia – we, your esteemed readers, would appreciate if you sometimes share those positive stories.
Sincerely,
Addistalks
Lessons learnt from Ivory Coast
TV images of an incredulous Laurent Gbagbo being forcibly evicted from power this week by United Nations- and French-backed Ivorian soldiers send an unequivocal message to other leaders across the continent: outstay your welcome and it could be you next.
Monday’s storming of his Abidjan residence by troops loyal to Alassane Ouattara – whom the rest of the world months ago recognised as winner of the Nov. 28 election – came after Gbagbo was disowned by even his closest African peers.
So the lesson learnt is, as one U.S. official put it early on in the crisis, that the era of stealing elections in Africa is over?
Unfortunately not quite.
While Gbagbo’s fate will no doubt dissuade leaders from being caught red-handed in the act of election theft, some will be drawing up a more cynical “lessons learnt” list along the lines that follow:
Lesson 1: Don’t even entertain the prospect of elections unless you are sure – absolutely sure – of victory. Gbagbo’s mistake was to think that supporters of Henri Konan Bedie would rally to him in the second round. They didn’t. If you’re not certain of victory, best to delay the elections citing technical problems.
Lesson 2: If you get a heads-up that the result is not going your way, don’t let it get out. To be fair, Gbagbo allies did their best in this department, even snatching the results from the hands of the election commission official who was reading them out. However they were caught unawares shortly afterwards when the commission chief then walked unscheduled into a media-packed hotel and gave news of Ouattara’s eight-point victory to bemused journalists. From then on, the cat was out of the bag.
lesson 3: make sure you control both the electoral commission and anyone else relevant.
So many African countries are pointing the way and reaping benefits of democracy and pease, when will remaining leaders be able to say they would rather relinquish power than see death and bloodshed of fellow countrypeople?
Many so called African democracies use the term democracy relatively. In SA,eg. the ANC is an absolute power unto themselves and give little credence to minority or other views. Furthermore, rampant corruption, nepotism, croneyism, squandering and theft of state resources are chronic and inherent in the party machinery. Like many so called African democracies, they are propped into power by ensuring a group of party loyals are well greased. These people are put into key positions and become authorities unto themselves. They become big daddies to the group that they bring in to ensure that their life spans in the cushy jobs are prolonged. Needless to say that sooner or later the wheels of administration come off.
Furthermore the ANC strives after prestigious positions like permanent seats in the UN Security council and chairs of various other bodies, but they are incapable of service delivery of their own people, and filling the potholes in the roads which their own inefficiency has created. They may be proud to boast about a 100 existence, but the results on the ground of their so called achievements are yet to be seen.