AJE - update 31st Dec

Kenya is bigger than (its 2 big) presidential candidates

As I begin to type out this piece media reports reaching this part of the world state that counting at most polling stations is complete and that voter turnout was very high. That is certainly very uplifting.

However, latest media reports also state that the two big camps in this elections seem at the verge of declaring war, with their officials complaining vehemently about alleged suspicious activities. That is very worrying.

In many senses, Kenya is at yet another watershed moment where its patriots have been called upon to rise to the challenge, in this case the tough democratic challenge of choosing its next government.

Only 24 to 36 hours ago reports in Kenyan and international media were that elections were conducted in a very efficient manner save for a few incidences. However, only a few hours ago, reports changed pointing to the pockets of vandals emerging in different parts of the country, threatening to plunge the country into a dangerous downward spiral of violence.

While this may be the first time elections in Kenya have been this tight and stakes this high, its definitely not a world first. Citizens in other countries have walked down similar paths and, in many cases, portrayed maturity beyond expectation.

Only 7 years ago in the United States, George Bush and Al Gore were in the tightest election race that country had witnessed in more than 150 years. In percentage terms, the difference between the two candidates was 0.6% in the popular vote and using an electoral system, the votes were 271 versus 266. Bush won the electoral vote by a margin of 7 but lost the popular by a margin of 0.6% and yet was declared a winner. The stakes in the US were high, in many senses, much higher than in Kenya. Not only have democrats and republicans been political opponents for many many more decades (since the 1820s), but the winner of that election would then become leader of the the undisputed global economic and military superpower.

Even though there was much debate during and immediately after the announcement of the winner, did the country descend into chaos? No! Did people protest? Yes! Did they turn violent? No! Did they loot and plunder? No! Political opponents in that country, in the face of the most controversial election result in more than 150 years, displayed political maturity, having realized the nation was bigger than both presidential candidates.

Going even further back in history to the mid 1990s, in Tanzania, the ruling party at the time was going through a difficult transition period trying to choose it's next set of leadership. There was a very close contest between 2 party presidential candidates, so close it threatened the very core of party. The late Mwalimu Nyerere, at that time a retired president of both the country and party, stood from amongst the party electorate and proceeded to share some of his immense wisdom which eventually broke the deadlock and demonstrated that the internal party systems had enough political maturity to deal with democratic hurdles.

Over the last few weeks, the Kenyan presidential race has been compared to that of the recent ANC policy conference where Zuma allegedly trounced Mbeki. I say allegedly because the analogy has, in many instances, been overstated. For one, unlike our presidential election, both Mbeki and Zuma belong to the same party and have both been in the party for more than 50years, more than 30 of those in senior leadership positions. Secondly, they have both worked together very closely in various high-stake projects including, in the early 1990s negotiating with the Inkatha party during pre-election period. What may also not be common knowledge is that the ANC also (not so publicly) tasked Mbeki and Zuma to negotiate with elements of the Afrikaner military structures. Additionally, it seems most people don't realize that this close working relationship didn't end when Zuma lost his job as Deputy President of the country. In fact, every Monday since 1997 when they joined the ANC's top leadership, the two would meet with other top ANC leaders during the weekly Party's governing council meetings. Lastly, as demonstrated during the recent policy conference, the two individuals have the utmost respect for each other. Indeed when Zuma was announced the winner, they both spontaneously walked to the front of the conference hall and went on the hug before Mbeki left the stage. Of course, Zuma, during his closing speech referred to Comrade Mbeki as "a comrade, a friend and brother" This is confusing for many people who think they were sworn enemies. What they don't realize is that it was Mbeki that first taught Zuma how to use a gun in the 1970s and that the two, through the apartheid South African state's machinations, they and others were once caught in Swaziland and the two of them spent several nights in a cell together awaiting extradition and it was only through pressure from such countries as Sweden that they didn't end up South Africa. Had they been extradited, there's no doubt South Africa's liberation history would have been very different.

One of the key questions Kenyan wananchi are asking themselves is what is the way forward? Apparently the ECK has halted counting. Are we at an impasse? How long will it last? How will we survive? Does the country come to a standstill?

Kenyans have a thing to learn from Belgium which has definitely broken the world record at political impasse. On the 10th of June 2007, Belgian citizens voted in federal elections and within the next day or two it became apparent there was no outright winner therefore no new government. Immediately the first of what would develop into several rounds of negotiations began around forming a government. What was thought would take a few days, a week at most lasted more than 6 months! It is only on the 17th of December was an interim government put in place. Did the nation descend into chaos? No! Infact, save for European media houses, this remarkable display of political maturity was not carried beyond national boundaries.

How long can Kenya's political impasse last? A few hours? A few days?

Are we in danger of disintegrating into chaos? Yes! Should we? No! For the Kenya's sake we shouldn't.

There's no doubt the stakes in Kenya the highest they have been since independence. However, we must remember a number of things. First, even though politicians and their funders have put a lot of financial and other resources into the campaigns, the bigger issue to bear in mind is that all these resources were first and foremost used to facilitate the democratic process, albeit at high personal cost. Should any politician then not remember the bigger picture as they spew vitriolic utterances against real and perceived opponents, then we the citizens should realize they could be driven by personal rather than altruistic desires.

Secondly, it would seem that perceived ethnic differences have clouded many people's abilities for rational thought. Kenya has been independent for more than 40yrs, with several generations of its citizens having grown up in a multi-cultural and multi-ethnic environments. Yet as Philip Ochieng eloquently put it almost a month ago "Every time we approach the General Election, tribal emotion takes over and all our mental and manual energy goes into maligning, maiming and even killing one another. And what for? For the sake of individuals whose only service, when they enter Parliament, will be to clean up our Treasury and make us groan even more plaintively" This situation is highly undesirable. Kenya has already had painful episodes of ethnic clashes, albeit politically motivated, prior to every election since 1992. Yet the danger during this election impasse threaten to erupt into violence that would overshadow all previous incidences a thousand-fold.

Regardless of how high the stakes are for politicians, we need leaders who look beyond their interest to get into parliament and control national resources, and rather care more about the state of the nation.

We need leaders who will not incite people to taking up arms. There's a lesson to learn from the incitements by certain politicians in the early 1990s in South Africa, leading to more people dying of black-on-black violence in a period of a few years than all people dying from the apartheid machinery since the 1950s. Kenya needs a different kind of political leadership. We need leadership that is willing to, like Belgium, spend time negotiating for the future of the country. After all, many of these politicians, regardless of party affiliation are, at worst, cordial to each other whenever they meet in private and, at best, a few are actually business associates.

Kenya is not the first country in the world to experience tensions. Other nations have had years, decades and in a few of them, even centuries of tensions as a result of ethnic, cultural or religious differences that are played out in various political arena. South Africa, in the early 1990s was at a knife's edge for more than 2 years of the CODESA negotiations. This process broke down several times, witnessed the worst internal violence the country had ever and possibly ever experience and the shell shocking high profile assassination of Chris Hani. Yet, that country emerged from that tumultuous process with its first democratic election in April 1994.

Should we wait till people start burning other people's houses? Should we wait till there's a high profile assassination (as has just happened in Pakistan)? Should we watch as sections of the media spew ethnically incited vitriol? Do we remember what role the media played prior to the 1994 massacre, one of the worst incidences of genocide the world has seen in recent times?

Political maturity is realizing that we all sing the same national anthem. The second verse aptly reads

Amkeni ndugu zetu

Tufanye sote bidii

Nasi tujitoe kwa nguvu

Nchi yetu ya Kenya

Tunayoipenda

Tuwe tayari kuilinda.

Are we ready to defend, not just personal or partisan interests at huge cost to the nation? The 3rd verse reads

Natujenge taifa letu

Ee, ndio wajibu wetu

Kenya istahili heshima

Tuungane mikono

Pamoja kazini

Kila siku tuwe na shukrani.

Do we believe "Kenya yastahili heshima?" If yes, then we must go beyond partisan war mongering. We must learn from the painful lessons other nations have had to go through. We must start behaving maturely just like nations like Belgium have demonstrated.

After all, Kenya is much bigger than the sum of all its parties, and is certainly much bigger than its 2 big presidential candidates!

AJE - election assessment

AJE - inside story (part 2)

AJE - inside story (part 1)

46664 concert 1st Dec 2007 - Madiba's speech

"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Govan Mbeki (part 2)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 766 - 767

At tend minutes past two on the morning of Thursday 30 August 2001, Govan Mbeki died of congestive cardiac failure, at his home in Summerstrand in Port Elizabeth. He was 91 years old. His final request to Dr. Mamisa Chabula – his doctor and companion in the years since his release – had been to be wrapped in his favorite ANC blanket and cap. His last words, Chabula reported to the media, were: ‘Misa, its’ been a long journey.’

Dr Chabula is a prominent Port Elizabeth personality. In her early fifties at the time of Govan Mbeki’s death, she ran the largest private practice in the township of Motherwell, was a senior city health official, had either children who looked upon Govan Mbeki as a father, and had received national recognition for her tireless activism for the reform of Xhosa circumcision rituals. When we met in her somewhat grand suburban home a few months after Mbeki’s death, she talked with the same engaging fluency about the benefits of the Malaysian Tara circumcision clamp as she did about her years with the man she identified, publicly, as ‘more of a parent than a patient to me.’

‘In all the years of dealing with the Old Man,’ she said to me, ‘I never heard him say, “I miss so and so.” But a few days before he died, he said to me, “Misa, I miss Thabo.” It was at that point I knew that he was finally going.’

The timing could not have been worse for Thabo Mbeki. In its ongoing battle with the ANC over macro-economic policy, COSATU had called a national anti-privatisation strike to coincide exactly with the UN World Conference Against Racism, which Mbeki was hosting in Durban. On the day Mbeki received the call to come and say goodbye to his father, he had posted one of his angriest blogs yet, accusing the labour union of using workers as ‘cannon fodder’ against their own liberation movement, and of joining hands with the racist right wing.

Now, as Mbeki flew with Zanele down to Port Elizabeth on 26 August to see his father, he would have read the comments in the Sunday papers, by union leaders accusing him and his government of an assault on popular democracy; of betraying its roots and selling out to a ‘right-wing middle class.’ The GEAR wars had come to a head – in the week in which Govan Mbeki was dying. Never had public acrimony between the governing ANC and its alliance partners to the left been so severe.

The Mbekis landed in Port Elizabeth at lung time; in the most difficult week, yet, of his presidency, Thabo Mbeki spent hours with his father. When I asked him, later, what they spoke about, his answer was ‘practical things’, nothing ‘spectacular’. He then reminded me, unsolicited, that ‘we were not that kind of closeness of an entity that grows up together;, and that the Mbeki children had been raised ‘to be used to being without [our parents]’ because of the dangers of their political activism. ‘But it didn’t mean the relations broke down…So my father, for instance, I can’t remember him asking any questionabout how I was doing in the ANC leadership or the government and so on. It was always assumed that unless I wanted to raise some issue with him, everything is going fine. And both parents would always insist, “Sure he’s our son, but, we surrendered him to the nation a long time ago.”

Still, Mamisa Chabula remembers that Mbeki left the Summerstrand home filled with sadness. He wanted to move his father to Pretoria, to the comforts – and, presumably, final resting-place status – of the Presidency. When the old man demurred, Dr Chabula explained, ‘Old people, when they know it’s their time, they don’t want to go to an unfamiliar environment.’

‘You have everything on earth,’ she heard the president say, talking about himself. ‘You want to help your father…’

Political satire - Hilary vs Obama

Goodnight Mr Bean

"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Govan Mbeki (part 1)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 71-72

You have been a father to all our people, but you have never been a father to me.’ This was what Nelson Mandela’s eldest daughter, Maki, said to him upon his release from prison in 1990. Her words echo Moeletsi Mbeki’s : ‘My father was busy educating the nation. We had our mother.’

But, unlike Govan Mbeki, Mandela has publicly castigated himself for not having been a better parent and husband. His biographer Anthony Sampson write that he ‘blames himself’ for the fact that he had ‘sacrificed’ his family ‘for his political purpose’, and that he underwent some kind of redemptive process while in jail: ‘He learned about sensitivities and how to handle the fears and insecurities of others, including his Afrikaner warders. He was sensitized by his own sense of guilt about the family and friends he had used during his political career.’ It was this sensitization, says Sampson, that led to Mandela’s extraordinary capacity for reconciliation upon his release.

Perhaps it is unfair to compare Govan Mbeki and Nelson Mandela: the latter’s life project of personal reconciliation is unique, and Govan Mbeki was far more typical of his class and his generation in not going through a similar process of remorse – and thus self-knowledge – about his relationship with his family. Unlike Mandela, who after his release talked either with sadness or with love about his family, Govan Mbeki carried, to his death, deep and unresolved emotions on the subject, emotions he found hard to articulate.

As ideological and intellectual as Mandela was intuitive and emotional, Govan Mbeki found impenetrable refuge in the struggle, with its Marxist understanding of affective family relationships as sentimental, bourgeois, and ultimately distracting from the revolutionary matter at hand; of ‘the family’, then, as a political rather than a biological unit. When I asked him, for example, how he coped with the fact that his youngest son, Jama, and his grandson, Kwanda (Thabo’s son), disappeared without a trace while supposedly in exile in the 1980s, he responded once more with literature. He could not remember the name or the author of the poem or even the exact lines, but he was clear on the sentiment: ‘When you go into war, if your comrade in front of you falls off his horse, you must not stop and weep. You jump over his into battle. You learn not to weep.’

Likewise, when Govan Mbeki went off with other members of the internal leadership in January 1999 to meet the ANC-in-exile in Lusaka, he was asked by a reporter at Jan Smuts airport how he felt about seeing his son Thabo. ‘Not much finer than seeing the others,’ he retorted. ‘You must remember that Thabo Mbeki is no longer my son. He is my comrade!’ A son is mere biological appendage; to be called a comrade, on the other hand, is the highest honour.

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 3)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 614

On Saturday 7 August 1993, Thabo Mbeki slipped out of an ANC meeting, accompanied by Jacob Zuma. It was a full year after Joe Slovo had published his ‘sunset clauses’ outlining shared rule, and four months after the assassination of Chris Hani by renegade right-wingers had shocked both sides into resolving their outstanding differences and setting an election date of April 1994. But if consensus had been reached inside the tent of negotiations, there were still major problems in the wilderness beyond, and Mbeki – who had become a movement’s outrider – had been tasked to deal with them. Now, on a warm spring afternoon, he and Zuma were to met Jurgen Kogl, who whisked them off, in a hired Fiat Uno, to a pigeon racing club in Lynnwood, east of Pretoria.

Kogl was connected by marriage to Afrikaner military establishment, and –in the aftermath of the Hani assassination – had volunteered to connect the ANC to the saber-rattling right wing. He had arranged a secret rendezvous at the pigeon club with three prominent leaders of the Afrikaner secessionist movement, including the military hero and former head of the South African army, General Constand Viljoen. Like an Old Testament prophet, Viljooen had come out of retirement to lead the Afrikaner people to freedom. Leaving his Standerton farm to stump across the country, he commanded huge numbers and corralled strong emotions, and boasted of the force of fifty thousand men he would be able to muster in the name of Afrikaner self-determination. He formed the Afrikaner Vryheidsfron (AVF), or ‘Freedom Front’, to mobilize the Afrikaner population in favour of a volkstaat- an independent Afrikaner state.

Political satire - former Kenyan President in the US

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 2)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 603

If Mbeki’s comrades and colleagues have always been ambivalent about him – have always laced their fear for him and even dislike of him with avowed admiration – then this is clearly expressed in the way he was received at the July 1991 conference. While they were not yet prepared to anoint him Mandela’s deputy, they nonetheless accepted the absolute necessity for him to be in leadership. In the vote for the new National Executive, each of the voting delegates was required to vote for the 50 people of their choice, and 1824 of them – 93% - put Mbeki on their list. This put him just behind Chris Hani – who came first with 94.7% of the delegates’ support – and ahead of Slovo, with 89.8%.

Immediately following the conference, the new leadership gathered to select its National Working Committee (NWC), responsible for the day-to-day running of the organization. This time, in the election by their leadership peers, Mbeki came first with 66 votes and Hani second with 65. For Mufamadi, ‘it was as if the conference delegates and then the NEC were saying to Chris and Thabo, “We want both of you equally. It’s not like we’re choosing one or the other…”

But what happened next can only be described as a palace coup. It took place in the first week of August, while Mandela was away (on a visit to Cuba), as were both Mbeki and Zuma, attending a conference at Cambridge. Zuma heard about it on BBC and went rushing over to tell his comrade: the new man, Ramaphosa, had convened the NWC while they were away, and had sidelined them! Zuma had been relieved of his position as head of ANC intelligence and replaced by the UDF leader Mosiuoa ‘Terror’ Lekota, a man with no previous intelligence experience. And Mbeki had been replaced, as head of negotiations, by Ramaphosa himself.

This, Jacob Zuma would later allege, was the beginning of the ‘political conspiracy’ by enemy agents that would eventually see him charged with corruption and fired by Mbeki in 2005. The truth is that if Zuma was the victim of a conspiracy, it was one – by Slovo, Hani and their supporters, rather than by an enemy agents – against Mbeki and his entire negotiations team, of which Zuma was a part. Slovo in particular had lobbied intensively to replace Mbeki with Ramaphosa: ‘There was a deeply held feeling from JS that this guy was going to sell us out,’ one former UDF leader now on the NEC told me. ‘And we sort of agreed. Thabo’s problem was that he did not communicate properly with his own team, and so people suspected him of not giving them the whole story. He had incredible ideas – whenever he did articulate them, I found myself in agreement with him. But the problem was that he didn’t articulate them often enough. He didn’t want his ideas to be challenged, so didn’t submit them to the market. If he’d spent more time with us I’m sure he would have convinced us. But he didn’t. He was a Lone Ranger. I think he say himself like Madiba in jail. And he paid for that.’

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Zuma (part 1)

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 415

Jacob Zuma described Thabo Mbeki’s ascendancy to me as follows: ‘Because of his drafting skills, he came to command the ANC.’

Political satire - Obama vs Gulliani

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and OR Tambo

Author: Mark Gevisser
Pg 415

Mbeki had been Tambo’s unofficial wordsmith since the early 1970s; now that he was political secretary, the position was formalized. Mbeki’s ghostwriting career began, we will recall, when he was a little boy writing letters for illiterate peasants. Now, through speech-writing, he found in adult life the perfect vehicle for his particular combination of diffidence and intellect; his desire to put his thoughts, but not his personality, into the world. Mbeki understood-as did Tambo-that the job was particularly difficult; it required, as Barbara Masekela put it to me, ‘a new public diplomacy’ to be minted for the liberation movement.

As befitted a teacher of mathematics and a choirmaster, Tambo was notoriously precise, and believed that this was a revolutionary imperative. ‘Once he uttered a particular word, it had to communicate what he meant it to communicate,’ Mbeki told Tambo’s biographer Luli Callinicos. So perilous was the ANC’s position – so much at stake – that ‘we couldn’t allow for a situation in which it would be read differently from what he intended to say; because we had to be very precise about what you had to convey.’

The tales of such obsessive perfectionism are the stuff of ANC legend; they have an almost novelistic texture to them. To prepare for an address, Tambo would get several comrades to draft speeches for him, keeping them up all night for days on end, sending an entire draft back to be retyped because of a split infinitive or a superfluous comma. No matter how many different people were set to a drafting task, Josiah Jele told me, ‘whatever came in had to be finalized by Thabo Mbeki’ even before Tambo got to look at it. If presented with more than one final draft, the ANC leader would invariable choose Mbeki’s (although Pallo Jordan sometimes got a look-in, as did Jack Simons), and this position became a source of enviable power.

Nhlanhla told me about the first time he encountered this process, in the early 1970s, working on an address to commemorate the ANC’s 60th birthday: ‘We worked for two weeks on it. Coming from Moscow, we thought we had all the ideas. We had all the training. But here was this chap from the West!...Thabo was amazing. At the end of the day you found yourself collecting rather than drafting, and feeding into the mainstream that was Thabo.’

Once Henry Makgothi, the ANC’s education secretary, stormed out of a meeting saying, ‘It’s impossible to satisfy OR! The only one who can satisfy him is Comrade Thabo!’ Recounting this adecdote, Sipho Makana smiled when I suggested that Tambo’s protégé had taken on his mentor’s obsessive attention to detail; his perpetual air of dissatisfaction. Perhaps, Makan suggested delicately, ‘Thabo hasn’t found his own “Thabo” yet?’ It was an implication I heard again and again: there is nobody, in Mbeki’s inner circle, on whom he can rely as completely as Tambo relied on him.

‘You find this among a number of exiles,’ Frene Ginwala once said. ‘…We come out of this tradition where, our whole lives, we just work, work, work, work.’ This ethos is fetished, most of all, in the workaholism of Oliver Tambo and Thabo Mbeki, passed on from political father to son as a gene of leadership rather than simply a character train. Listen, for example, to Sanki Mthembi-Mahanyele on Mbeki; ‘He can work throughout the day, and through the night without any problem, and the same was the case with OR. Call it culture, call it a habit if you want, of those who had to lead and direct the struggle…’

What is fascinating is how different this self-perception is from the way exiled leaders were often perceived from the MK camps – as living the easy, lazy life of aeroplanes, conference and hotels. Unlike, say Samora Machel or Robert Mugabe, Tambo spent more time lobbying the world’s capitals rather than in the bush with his soldiers, and his own family was safely ensconced in north London. And so Tambo, like Mbeki, was vulnerable to the slur; perhaps, then, the workaholism legend around both men developed as a defense against such allegations.

Which is not to say that there isn’t truth to it. Tambo’s own Swedish neurologist believes that the debilitating stroke he suffered in August 1989 was a consequence, in part, of overwork. A decade into the democracy for which Tambo martyred himself, members of the ANC exile community often expressed a concern for Mbeki by referring back to this: ‘In exile,’ Sipho Makana said to me shortly before his own death in 2003, ‘people would complain, “We get into bed, OR is burning the midnight oil; we wake up early the next morning, OR hasn’t even been to bed yet. That’s why he got his stroke,” We have the same feeling with Thabo today. He does all the drafts himself.’ The comparison was made to me so many times – from Nelson Mandela himself down to cleaning staff and drivers – that I because convinced it carried a subtext: an annoyance that Mbeki’s own obsessive perfectionism was an expression of his dissatisfaction with their work, and an anxiety that they would never live up to his expectations.

Mr Bean featuring Shaggy

"Dream deferred" - the ANC dilemna

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 690-692

It did seem, in the late 1990s, that the ANC government actually wanted a confrontation with COSATU and the SACP; that it was taking a hard line over GEAR so as to project a confidence it did not, in reality, possess, and so demonstrate that it was up to the job of governing. The ghost of Latin America loomed large among the ANC's economic managers; specifically, the 'macro-economic populism' of democratically elected rulers who had spent their economies into ruin in an effort to make good on their election promises. Mbeki and especially Manuel believed that a line needed to be drawn: a government should not be in perpetual negotiation with its social partners. The ANC thus resorted to what the economist Stephen Gelb has described as 'reform from above with a vengeance' - instituting a hard line policy precisely to show that it was not susceptible to popular pressure.

The result was a crippling contention that would hobble Mbeki's entire term in office. Mbeki suggested to me that the ANC mishandled things, in part, out of a sense of desperation and dis empowerment. But one might see the conflict as inevitable, a fracture not just between 'centrists' and 'leftists' or between 'centralists' and popular democrats', or-as the left would have it-between the workers and the new bosses, but between those whose job was to run the state, and those whose job it remained to represent the people. GEAR heralded the shattering end to an experiment in co-operative governance that had been developing since the unbanning in the 1990, and its replacement by a new hegemony - the grabbing hold of the reins of state by an ANC now in government rather than fighting for freedom.

Out of this conflict grew two competitive narratives, both emanating from within the alliance itself. The first of these extends the ANC's story of struggle, and pits an elite vanguard of forward-thinking modernizers against the appetites of global capital, the recalcitrance of an inherited public service, and the easy populism of rabble-rousers who do not understand the complexity of the global economy. It is the kind of story by which Thabo Mbeki defines himself, a story that claims to redeem the lost legacies of Africa's uhuru generation.

The opposing narrative sees the ANC government as the betrayal, rather than the redemption, of such legacies; it is a tale of weakness and cowardice at best, and venality at worst. This is the impimpi story we know, already, from the ANC's days in exile. Convinced that the ANC leadership has betrayed its own constituency through a Faustian neocolonial pact with the private sector, this story justifies its pessimism with often credible indicators of social dysfunction and increasing human distress. This story's punchline, usually implied but increasingly explicit, is that the South African majority is worse off, under an ANC government, than it had been before.

The hero and the impimpi are the two archetypes by which the freedom fighter defines his identity. And so, while these two competing narratives of the South African transition might have recourse to the empirical data of social research, they are also rooted in the soil of myth; they are thus impossible to adjudicate as they relentlessly pit indicators of progress and regress against each other. The one side will trumpet the extraordinary number of houses that the government built against all odds in its first ten years; the other will counter with the backlog that still exists. The one side will praise the achievements of social welfare grants while the other will decry the absence of a basic income grant. Statistics become chimeric, and the subjects of all this contention - the people of South Africa themselves - tend to get lost in the haze. For every retrenched worker that COSATU digs up, the government will parade a proud new homeowner who no longer has to walk twenty kilometres a day to fetch clean water; for every distressed shack-dweller the social movements claim to represent, the ANC will counter-exhibit a passionate comrade, enthusiastically going to the poslls to return Thabo Mbeki with an ever-increasing majority.

The conundrum of South African politics is that these two subjects are usually the same person, increasingly disaffected and increasingly loyal to the ANC at the same time...

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 3)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 707-708

When I asked Mbeki about his differences with Mandela while in office, he conceded only one real problem: conflicting approaches to racial reconciliation. Mbeki felt that the way Mandela dealt with the issue negatively affected his own acceptability as his successor, and thus his ability to effect real transformation. South Africa just could not 'sustain a view of national reconciliation of the kind of which the media approved' and with which 'Madiba co-operated', he told me. I have seldom seen Mbeki as exercised, or as impassionated, as when he spoke about this:'You just couldn't do it! It was wrong! Just wrong!'

It all came to a head jsut a few weeks after the Saro-Wiwa affair in February 1996, when the rand crashed on the back of unfouded rumour that Mandela was dying. A Sunday Times editorial drew attention to the vulnerability of the South African economy and its dependance on Mandela's wellbeing: the collapse of the rand was 'a reminder that his extra-ordinary stature as a peacemaker and conciliator remains the pivot of international confidence in our future'. And given that 'we carry on our backs the burden of Africa's failure', Thabo Mbeki was just not up to the job of maintaining Mandela's legacy: 'He simply does not inspire confidence...Where Mr Mandela projects warmth of spirit and generosity, Mr Mbeki appears manipulative and calculating...Where Mr Mandela inspires affection, even love, Mr Mbeki evokes uncertainty and fear.'

...

For Mbeki, the Sunday Times editorial was the sharpest example yet of the 'one good native' syndrome. Referring to it a few years later in his online newsletter, he wrote about how 'the cynics and the sceptics...tried to scare the people about their future...pretending that President Mandela, with his 'magic', was the only person capable of guaranteeing the better future for our country...' Now in office, Mbeki seemed to fix his political psyche on two things; first, that, despite national reconciliation, whites were still racist in that they did not believe that blacks were equal to the task of running the country; second that he would prove them wrong.

Political satire - Kibaki and Raila

AJE - Everywoman part 2

AJE - Everywoman part 1

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 2)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 702-704

Even if Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki did not find, in each other, some imagined political father and son - or even, more simply, a comfortable intimacy - they developed an effective working relationship. This is evident in the way Mandela handed over so much of the stuff of governance to his deputy, and in their agreement on the key issues: most notably, as we have seen, on economic policy, and on how to manage the political fall-out with their alliance partners.

Inevitably, given Mbeki's history as the ANC's ranking diplomat, their first major public clash happened in the arena of foreign policy, and although it appeared to be a brushfire - lit with callous malice by the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha - it pointed to a problem that would become the fault line of their relationship, and would eventually cause it to break down almost entirely.

Not suprisingly, given the 'ugly shoes' dynamic, this problem had to do with reputation: specifically, the way the negative press about Mbeki seemed to accumulate in an almost inverse proportion to the adulation heaped upon his superior. Mbeki called it 'Mandela exceptionalism' when he was being polite; 'the one good native' when he was not. It went like this: Africa was a basket case, and Mandela the only good leader ever to come out of it; once he went, South Africa would sink like the rest of the continent into the mire of neo-colonial corruption and decay. It seemed to Mbeki that Mandela was actually colluding in the world's impression that he was 'the one good native', the consequence of which was the perception that all other blacks - Mbeki included - were incompetent.

Kenya's first lady slaps an mc during a state function

Political satire - Kenya's president and first lady at a sevens rugby match

"Dream deferred" - Mbeki and Mandela (part 1)

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
Page: 699-700

The overriding legacy of the Mandela presidency - of the years 1994 to 199 - is a country where the rule of law was entrenched in an unassailable Bill of Rights, and where the predictions of racial and ethnic conflict did not come true. These feats, alone, guarantee Mandela his sanctity. But he was a far better liberator and nation-builder than he was a governor. In contrast, Mbeki marketed himself as the technocrat, truth-telling antidote to the madness and the magic - the scattershot celebrity - of the Mandela era.

Mbeki saw his mission as effecting real transformation - the flip side to the coin of reconciliation, as he repeatedly - even it this meant disrupting the comfort of the white South African population Mandela had gone to such lengths to reassure. Mandela will go down in history as the man who, like Martin Luther King before him, gave the world a dream, while Mbeki's legacy is both more complex and more substantive: on his watch, South Africa found itself strung between deferring the dream and redeeming it.

A key difference between the two was Mbeki's eschewal of a kind of African paternalism that prevailed in the ANC despite its progressive political traditions. 'OR was a daddy,' a prominent member of the ANC said to me. 'It's like that with Madiba too. He makes it his business to know the names of your wife and children and to ask after them, even if he has never met them. Thabo doesn't do that. And so, among some comrades, there might be complaints that he doesn't invite people to sit and talk, "under the tree", like the old African patriarch'.

An intelligence operative who has worked closely with Mbeki for many years used strikingly similar language:'If people dislike Mbeki, it's because he is the anti-patriarch. He doesn't have a family. He's not a "who's your daddy?" kind of guy. He doesn't want to be anyone's daddy. He wants to engage with you as an equal, and you're useless, he'll tell you. He's not going to protect you or soften things for you because you're his child and he should thus feel an obligation to nurture you.'

People obeyed Mandela because they loved him, because he was their benevolent father: Mbeki could never command allegiance from such a wellspring , and so he needed to earn it elsewhere - people had to respect him, even fear him. If Mandela, the patriarch, loved us despite our many flaws. Mbeki required us to prove ourselves to him. If Mandela was a passionate player, Mbeki would have to be a skeptical and rather aloof observer.

SA Magistrate goes AWOL

A case where a magistrate continued to draw a salary while allegedly attending traditional classes to being a Sangoma will no doubt rekindle the debate about the extent to which the South African civil service can continue to accommodate public servants that want to honour their African traditions.

An article on the issue has just been published by the SA Times

Magistrate gets boot after 9-month Awol
Philani Nombembe	Published:Dec 09, 2007
Parliament has fired a magistrate who absconded from work for nine months and kept drawing a salary. Themba Mathyolo is the first magistrate to be sacked for failing to arrive for work at the New Law Court in Port Elizabeth. Colleagues presiding over civil cases at the court last saw him at his desk in February. Mathyolo made a brief reappearance in May to deliver a stack of medical certificates, from nine doctors, who treated him for a variety of ailments, including flu and headaches. He continued to draw his salary — R350 000 a year — between March and November. Court officials tried in vain to contact Mathyolo and eventually reported him to the Magistrates’ Commission. “He failed to report for duty since February 28. The Magistrates’ Commission recommended that he be removed from office on the basis of misconduct due to his failure to report for duty,” said Danie Schoeman, secretary for the commission. Lamla Makaba, a senior magistrate at the court said: “There are rumours that Matyholo went to train as a sangoma but he did not submit any leave forms for that.” Mathupa Mokoena, chairman of Parliament’s select committee on security and constitutional affairs confirmed that Mathyolo was fired last month. “The Magistrates’ Commission reported Mathyolo’s disappearance to the committee and requested that the minister [of Justice] should remove him from office. I wrote him a letter and sent it to his house. He was supposed to respond within 21 days but did not and as a committee we considered the request to remove him from office,” he said. “We were informed by the court that it had heard from family members that he had gone for a ritual to become a sangoma,” said Mokoena, adding that Mathyolo was entitled to appeal against his dismissal. Port Elizabeth attorney Francois Swanepoel said several cases which Mathyolo had been presiding over would have to go to trial again, entailing “ lengthy waiting periods and involves incurring of further unnecessary legal costs”. Efforts to get comment from Mathyolo proved fruitless. There's no doubt this is a developing story and more is yet to come.

"Dream deferred" - Thabo Mbeki and Cyril Ramaphosa in the early 1990s

Title: Thabo Mbeki - A dream deffered
Author: Mark Gevisser
pg. 605

Cyril Ramaphosa was a decade younger than Mbeki, Hani and Zuma. Of these three, the one he most closely resembled was undoubtedly Mbeki. Both were blessed with a formidable intellect and a preternatural strategic nous; both, too were adored by the media and respected by the establishment - Mbeki by the white politicians and businessmen with whom he was tasked to interact; Ramaphosa by the mining bosses he had met across a decades' worth of bargaining tables. Both masked ruthlessness with charm. But whereas Mbeki shied away from conflict, Ramaphosa - never losing this charm or even raising his voice - seemed to relish putting the knife in. He was not much taller than Mbeki, but significantly stouter, and something about his bigness of personality - his large, easy laguh and backslapping affability - made him fill whatever space he entered. You would be aware of Mbeki in the corner of a room and would be drawn to him for an intense one-on-one encounter; Ramaphosa, however, would be the first person you would see upon entering, usually surrounded by a shimmer of admirers, easy to great but hard to pin down. Ramaphosa came across as voracious and welcoming. Mbeki as ascetic and skeptical. And whereas you often felt you had to prove your work with Mbeki, Ramaphosa instantly made you feel like you were the most important person in the room. In their different ways, though, neither man encouraged intimacy; both were notoriously inscrutable. In their different ways, too, both were focussed and ambitious.

Political satire - Kenya's president and first lady

Ida Odinga speaks

Coke brr advert

Probably the one ad produced in Africa that has taken the world by storm.

There's the "original" African ad (that was filmed in Zanzibar and South Africa), few regional derivatives (mostly seemingly running in South America, parts of Asia and Eastern Europe) and then the usual cultist one-person derivates see

Forums have been set up where different views and opinions are aired (see http://www.bizcommunity.com/Forum/196/12/15438.html )

Fascinating...

Brr coke video

The case of missing data in the UK...

This been characterized as the biggest security breach ever in the UK.

The UK Guardian reports...

Computer discs holding sensitive personal data on 25 million people and 7.25 million families have gone missing, Chancellor Alistair Darling has admitted to MPs.

He said the details included names, addresses, dates of birth, Child Benefit numbers, National Insurance numbers and bank or building society account details.

Paul Gray, chairman of her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), which lost the discs containing the Government's entire Child Benefit database, has resigned over the affair.

The staggering scale of the loss means information on senior politicians, police officers and leading industrialists will be included in the missing data, which contains records on nearly half the UK's 60.5 million population. MPs gasped as Mr Darling revealed the scale of the loss in an emergency statement to the Commons.

The Metropolitan Police is now leading the hunt for the two password-protected discs and trying to discover how they went astray in transit from benefit headquarters in Newcastle to the National Audit Office (NAO) in London.

For more see

In a world that is increasingly relying on computer technology, this serves an ominous warning.

Zim's former Prime Minister Ian Smith

So he has passed on (according to some reports because of a stroke)... Reuters reports

* Born a farmer's son in the Southern Rhodesian mining town Selukwe in April 1919, Ian Douglas Smith was educated locally and at Rhodes University in South Africa, gaining a bachelor of commerce degree.

* A fighter pilot in Britain's Royal Air Force in World War Two, he was shot down twice and underwent plastic surgery.

* In 1962, the farmer/politician co-founded the right-wing Rhodesian Front, which won white elections in Southern Rhodesia, part of the British-ruled Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland.

* In April 1964, Smith became prime minister of Rhodesia and opposed moves to majority rule by 5 million black Rhodesians.

* In November 1965 he made a unilateral declaration of independence from Britain, defied international trade sanctions and fought an intermittent 14-year war against black guerrillas trying to overthrow his regime.

* Under mounting pressure from the West and from guerrilla forces, Smith accepted negotiations which led to a ceasefire, elections in 1980 and independence for Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe and his ZANU party.

* Smith remained a harsh critic of Mugabe's government, first as an opposition MP and later in retirement on his farm.

(Writing by Tim Pearce, Editing by Michael Winfrey)

For more see news reports

what does a carnival show in Barbados look like?

sorry, i couldn't record any sound...but it's still worth viewing...

NTV - ODM roadshow in Nairobi

CNN - Condi and the "fly story"

A tale of three countries...and their colonial masters

Over the last couple of weeks, three countries have had very different experiences dealing with nations that, several decades ago, were their colonialist masters.

The Venezuelan President Chavez had to be told to "shut up" by the King of Spain after an outburst where he accused a former Spanish Prime Minister of being fascist. Some commentators consider Chavez very brazen standing up to the Spanish

In Chad, something very different happened. Several French and Spanish citizens have been detained, accused of allegedly trafficking children who they purported were from Darfur but are now said to be from Chad. French President Sarkozy flew in to meet the Chadian President Idriss Déby and within a day or two, more than half the number of accused were set free. Some commentators have kept the debate around the issue of trafficking while others simply consider Déby weak.

Of course there's the perennial UK vs. Zimbabwe debate, the latest being the question of the African-EU summit to be held in Portugal. With President Mugabe having being invited, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown threatened not to attend. While some sections of society have appealed to Brown to change his mind, others have accused him of hypocrisy. Regardless, it is interesting to note that in this case, it is the UK and not Zimbabwe that is feeling the heat.

Pakistan state of emergency

It's almost a week to the day that General Musharraf declared a state of emergency. Many are deeply concerned about several key challenges including the extent to which "terrorist" organizations have a free hand, the fact that the country has nuclear weapons (that could fall into the wrong hands) as well as the presence of several religious extremist institutions.

However, measures taken by the administration in clamping down on what would be perceived as moderates including leaders of opposition parties as well as those in the judiciary (considered anything from lukewarm to being hostile to the current administration) seem to be rather extreme.

What seems to cause greatest concern is the extreme measures taken to censor the media. To think that military officers have now been tasked to scan all news, reader's comments and editorials for material against the administration seems totally paranoiac.

I wonder what the General's son in the Silicon Valley in the US (Bilal Musharraf) has to deal with when fielding questions and comments about his father's doings.

On elections...

A couple of weeks to the end of the year yet for some countries, these next couple of weeks are extremely important.

For example, Australia has its federal elections on the 24th of November. It's the first time in a long time that the incumbent John Howard, feels uneasy about retaining his seat. While most of the Commonwealth countries may not consider this election critical (considering that the country has a stable and vibrant democracy), the "coalition of the willing" aka the Bush administration in the US will want to see Howard return to power (considering Gordon Brown isn't as friendly as Blair was).

Then there's Venezuela's constitutional referendum on the 2nd of December. It's interesting to note how determined the administration is create a socialist state. There's concern about the violence that broke out earlier this month opposing that move and one hopes that there will be no such violence on the 2nd of Dec.

Lastly there's South Korea. Having mused about the country before, one is left wondering what will happen should the new administration get in a decide to make radical changes to one those from outside may perceive as rather rational economic, social and industrialization policies.

Elections on interest in other nations Denmark ( 13th of Nov.), Jordan (20th of Nov.), Croatia (25th of Nov.), Switzerland (12th of Dec.), Thailand (23rd of Dec.) and Kenya (27th of Dec.).

Young and energetic....

don't do this at home (esp. if you are old enough to earn a living!)

How happy are you?

I was pleasantly surprised to hear on Radio Netherlands last night a rebroadcast of a programme stating that the quest for happiness is an international movement!

Upon further investigation, it seems that this all started in the tiny nation of Bhutan more than 30 years ago!

In 2005, a journalist based in Mumbia, Rajni Bakshi, published a report stating...

The tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is an unlikely place for the birth of an international trend. Yet Bhutan is emerging as a global leader in the promotion of "Gross National Happiness," a concept it first embraced three decades ago and which is now being fleshed out by a wide range of professionals and agencies across the world.

The term Gross National Happiness (GNH) was coined by Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, when he ascended the throne in 1972. It signalled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan's unique culture permeated by Buddhist spiritual values.

Today, the concept of GNH resonates with a wide range of initiatives, across the world, to define prosperity in more holistic terms and to measure actual wellbeing rather than consumption. By contrast the conventional concept of Gross National Product (GNP) measures only the sum total of material production and exchange in any country. Thus an international conference on Gross National Happiness, hosted by the Bhutan government in the capital city of Thimphu in 2004, attracted 82 eminent participants from 20 countries.

The evolving concept of GNH could well be the most significant advancement in economic theory over the last 150 years, according to Frank Dixon, a Harvard Business School graduate who is currently managing director of research at Innovest Strategic Value Advisors. Innovest is the largest international financial services firm catering to ethical investment funds.

"GNH is an endeavor to greatly enhance the sophistication of human systems by emulating the infinitely greater sophistication of nature," says Dixon.

Just what would it mean for economic structures to emulate nature? Dixon and others explain it as follows. At present individual companies and entire countries are compelled to keep growing indefinitely. The only parallel for this in the natural world is cancer cells, which by growing exponentially destroy the host body and themselves.

Today it is widely acknowledged that the human economy cannot keep growing at the cost of its habitat. Yet even after two decades of expanding environmental regulation we are still losing the race to save the planet. This is partly because production systems and consumption patterns are out of sync with the carrying capacity of the planet. The pressure for ever higher GNP is merely one manifestation of this.

The concept of GNH is seen as one of several ways in which these imbalances might be rectified. The international gathering at Thimphu reflected a consensus that Gross National Product would still need to be measured and given due importance but in ways that are actually conducive to GNH. So far there has been a tendency to treat GNH as merely the well-intentioned slogan of a small country ruled by an enlightened monarch. The obvious difficulties of defining or measuring happiness have also helped to keep the concept of GNH on the outer fringes of serious discourse.

For more info read the report

Some may think this is pie-in-the-sky stuff but it seems the concept is taken quite seriously and is one of key discussions issues at the Centre for Bhutan Studies. Of course one must remember the "pursuit of happiness" is part of most quoted phrase in the US Declaration of Independence. (not to be confused with the movie Pursuit of Happyness, where Will Smith acted with his son Jaden Smith...definitely worth watching!)

Should one pursue happiness? Should one be in a constant state of happiness? Isn't life about balance of emotive/mental states?

Very many questions...

PS Interesting how some movements/nations had/have tripartite mottos
* Canada - peace, order and good government
* France - liberty, equality, fraternity
* Germany - unity and justice and freedom
* Russian revolution - peace, land and bread
* US - life, liberty and pursuit of happiness

When wildlife moves into your compound...

don't call the neighbour and not even some police...call the wildlife experts!

Land reclamation

It's fascinating to read that the Netherlands will soon be working on building another island. That 20% of all land in the Netherlands is the result of land reclamation is hard to believe particularly coming from a region land is often taken for granted.

Is Holland unique? Not really. Examples include Hong Kong's airport, parts of Cape Town, Singapore, Mexico City, Monaco, Barbados etc.

Some have argued that nature will always want to restore whatever is taken away. In New Orleans for example, while reclaimed land is not seen as the reason why Hurricane Katrina happened, it maybe the reason why the flood protection system failed. Does the argument border luddism? Maybe, maybe not.

How to be Bajan

Finally managed to finish a relatively small book "How to be Bajan" that I bought a couple of months ago.

Why did it take so long? Well, among other things, it got me thinking about issues that couldn't be answered by the book itself. At the core of these is "where exactly did the Bajan (slang for Barbadian) dialect from?"

What am I talking about? Courtesy of TotallyBarbados.com, here is a taste of some of the things I read in the book

• Jug is somethin' ya eat and not somethin' ya does put ya food in

• Ya does move scruffy

• Cheese on bread aint got nuttin to do wid being hungry

• Ya uses words like fowl cock, rock stone and ram goat

• Somebody stupid is actually a poppit

• Every childhood game can be played for licks

• Soup is a bit of water and nuff dumplings, potatoes, yams, eddoes and any other ground provision ya could find

• Any hot beverage is considered tea - cocoa tea, coffee tea, tea tea, green tea

• You finish sentences wid de word dennn

• You take sick people to the horsepital

• IMF means I man father

• You have a bad fall and ya either lick up, break up, skin up or catspraddle

• The word horn does not conjure up images of Dizzy Gillespie or Jazz music

• Tek is more than the name of a toothbrush

• Dub is the force, dub is...the.....force!!!!

• Yuh does see the humour in a cartoon named "gumby and pokey"!!!

• De cardinal points is eass, wess norf and sowf!!

• Yuh constantly explaining dat de dolphin you does eat is a fish and not a mammal!

• Nuh fish doan taste like a fish from Baxter's road!! A bread and two is not 3 breads!!!

• De word "foop" is not a "sound word like "voop" and "woosh"!!!

• A cutter is not a sharp utensil

• All de seasons uh de year start wid "C" - Congaline, Crop Over, Cricket and Christmas!!!

• Choice bread doan mean a good selection!

• A snakebite does only mek you drunk or tipsy - depending pun how much bites yuh have!!!

• Liming in front Cave Shepherd is a integral part a growin' up

• Yuh pun a "brasion"!! Even ef yuh only goin' tuh de beech, yuz be dress dung in bare hard
gear

• Yuh doan got tuh be mystical tuh be gypsy

• Yuh just cyant guh town an' doan see someone yuh know

• When somebody call ya pun de phone and sa 'wait you still home?' or when da see ya pun de road and ask ya if ya still living

• Yuh don't have to be drinking to ask for a scotch

• Yuh don't have to be spiteful to be malicious

• Yuh call every stranger either boss man, partner or skipper

Of course, there's always the temptation to oversimplify the answer. My gut feeling was the fact that there are traces of Irish influences. The author of the book (Harold Hoyte) posits there are traces of Scottish influences. However, experts argue that the Bajan dialect the result of English and West African syntax with pronunciation sharing accents with those in Liverpool, England!

Maybe that's why I often don't get it...

This is opulence!

Today the King of Saudia landed in London in style

• His entourage came in 3 planes
• It took 3 hours to unload the luggage
• It took a convey of 89 limos to transport everything from the airport
• He came with 23 personal advisers
• He also came with 400 aides

He definitely is making a statement...

Politcs and familial ties

Yesterday it was announced that the new president (Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) is actually the immediate former First lady. In other words, the husband (Néstor Kirchner) has "democractically" handed over the seat to the wife.

Of course, when one things of political families, the immediate nation that comes to mind is the US with its list of families including the Bush family, the Kennedys, the Rockefeller family, and the Roosevelts, as well as the less well known Lee family. Of course there are many more less known families.

One of the most hard-to-believe familial power blocks in recent times has been in Poland where, for a period of about 15 months, twin brothers have held the highest offices in the land (President and Prime Minister). The latest elections show that the Prime Minister will have to step down having lost in the elections.

In South Africa, two couples hold office in Cabinet. Minister for Home Affairs married to Minister for Saftey and Security. Minister for Public Service Administration married to Deputy Minister of Finance. Of course, at one point, two ex-spouses held office. The former Deputy President had been husband to the current Foreign Minister.

Other countries have their own list. Barbados has the Adams family , in Burundi the Bagaza-Buyoya family, in the Democratic Republic of Congo has the Kabilas, in Gabon the Sassou-Ngueso and Bongo families, in Kenya the top four families being Kenyatta, Moi, Odinga and Nyagah... The list is endless.

Fifa and Trinidadian Politics

A certain Mr. Austin Jack Warner ,a very influential individual in the football arena, is standing for public office in Trinidad and Tobago.

Twenty years ago, he was a poorly paid teacher but is now a successful businessman, made rich by football.

However, his success is tainted. In football, he has been accused of unethical behaviour. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/5076282.stm Yesterday, a publication in South Africa exposed more dirt see http://www.thetimes.co.za/PrintEdition/News/Article.aspx?id=598437

One wonders what the future holds for him...

News alert

Currie Cup finals - 27th October

In SA national rugby terms, Saturday evening was the absolute pinnacle. Sport fanatical town of Bloemfontein hosted the Currie Cup with their team, the Free State Cheetahs faced the Golden Lions (from Johannesburg).

No one could have anticipated the excitement generated by those 80minutes.
*6 minutes - Cheetahs 3 - Lions 0
*50 minutes - Cheetahs 6 - Lions 3
*60 minutes - Cheetahs 6 - Lions 15
*65 minutes - Cheetahs 6 - Lions 18
*68 minutes - Cheetahs 13 - Lions 18
*75 minutes - Cheetahs 18 - Lions 18
*77 minutes - Cheetahs 20 - Lions 18

With this win the Cheetahs become the 3rd time champion of the Currie Cup, this time not having to share it like last year.

To catch a glimpse

World rugby champions - South African Springboks

A humorous way of "supporting" the springbok!

Death of Lucky Dube

Thursday's are usually reggae/dancehall nights for the youth of Joburg with the formidable team of Oscar "Appleseed" (of the Bongo Maffin fame) and Andy "The Admiral" Kasrils (the son of SA's intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils) at the Horror Cafe.

This Thursday afternoon, while the two where spinning away old and new tunes, a few kilometres away from the venue, police had cordoned off a botched hijacking where one of the greatest reggae artists of all time had just been shot.

Lucky Dube, it is reported, had taken his young son and daughter to their uncle's house when he was accosted by a gang of men. In the fracas that ensued, he was shot and died from his wounds.
The country is in a state of shock and there's no doubt that in the coming days more will be revealed as investigations are underway. http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=lucky+dube&btnG=Search+News

Rugby world cup - England vs France

I woke up this morning to the news that Les Bleus lost the game. Again, it was Jonny Wilkinson that made everything happen. Before this game commentators mentioned how weird it would be to have the two teams that opened the world cup meeting in the final (Argentina vs France) but now the talk is about a possible South Africa vs England. However, that is not guaranteed yet. Let's wait and see whether the Pumas will devour the Boks.

Opinion polls

There is some amount of discussion political arena, in the last week or two, over opinion polls. In the US, President Bush's polls are the lowest of his presidency. In the UK, Prime Minister Gordon Brown apparently called off the worst kept election secret because of a sudden plummeting of his polls. On the contrary, in Australia, Prime Minister John Howard is believed to be on the verge of calling a snap election precisely because his poll ratings are lower that those of the opposition there.

In Kenya, it seems that this relatively "new" way of monitoring political pulse is subject of vigorous discussion. I believe that in an emerging economy setting, opinion polls are just that, polls on opinions. Nothing is absolute. The fact that, for practical reasons, polls only get opinions from a section of society means that they will almost always be controversial. It's about guestimating perspectives or views on an issue and therefore those with differing opinions will always oppose results. As one Oscar Obonyo has eloquently demonstrates, those who view polls favorably are those whose ratings are highest and the song may change when their ratings plummet

NTV - Bull's eye - political satire

Richest person in China

I heard this morning on 702 that the richest person in China is a certain 26 year property developer! I consider that an amazing achievement.

I decided to do a little research and this is part of what Forbes reports

"BEIJING (XFN-ASIA) - A 26-year-old female property developer tops this year's Forbes list of the richest people in China, grabbing the number one spot with a net worth of 16 bln usd, the US magazine said.

That amount also makes Yang Huiyan the richest woman in Asia, according to a statement from Forbes.

All the 40 people on Forbes Asia's 2007 China Rich List are billionaires, compared with only 15 last year, it said, attributing the rise to a boom in the nation's stock and property markets.

Their combined net worth is 120 bln usd, up more than three times from last year's 38 bln usd, it said.

Yang is one of more than a dozen property developers to make this year's list of the 40 richest, reflecting roaring demand for homes and real estate investments, according to Forbes...."

Of course some of my work colleagues were not too impressed... "The money must have come from her parents"

Well, her dad is in the property business as well so maybe there's some truth in that.

Am currently reading "Poor no more" by Tracey Davenport so am sure I could learn one or two things about how others make it. Not that I desire to be on any of Forbes' lists...;)

Rugby world cup 2007 - quarter final matches

I watched the England Aussie game. I don't think England won, I think it's Australia that lost.

As for the French, their script for this world cup couldn't have been more perfect. Start by losing the first game so that every other win is truly appreciated.

Worst team to be part of now? The All Blacks. I saw a documentary the other day of an All Black who was part of a losing team in a big match in the 60s. He was too embarrassed and never went back to his country.

I watched the Blacks play the French and between the 10th and 20th minute, it looked like they were going to cruise through that game like all the previous ones. The French were there to ensure the Blacks scrum, mauls, line-outs etc were tested to the maximum. As one commentator said near the end of the 1st half "Finally, a team the begins to test the All Blacks" Of course there'll be the usual controversy...were they denied a try just before their first try? That aside, that first All Black try was pure brilliance! It's sad to see them leave....

As for the Boks, they actually lost the plot 20 minutes from the end of that Fiji match. How does a team that is one man less actually score 2 tries in the space of two minutes?

Predictions? Of the big test playing nations, the Pumas have never beaten the Boks or the Kiwis. However, the Boks have a cleaner record (since the Kiwis have drawn with the Pumas once). I suspect the Pumas will walk into that semi-final wanting to turn the records for more
reasons than just wanting to be at the finals.

If the Boks play closed, set-piece based formations they could win. However, Pumas will want to open up things (am sure they have been studying those critical minutes in the 2nd half when Fiji almost won the game) and if that happens, they are guaranteed to win. Am sure the Boks will want to replicate the clinical performance they had against England....what a game!

PS I bet you Jake White had waited 4 years to either meet the Aussies or the Kiwis and probably hired Eddie Jones for that purpose. Meeting any other team is almost an anti-climax.

ANC succession

This information has been gleaned from William Gumede's book titled "T. Mbeki and the soul of the ANC", Anthony Simpson's biography on Mr. Mandela. Other sources one could use include http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/lists/politics-labour-al.htm and http://www.sahistory.org.za/pages/people/lists/politics-labour-mz.htm as well as http://www.anc.org.za/

In this diagram, the green flags are male candidates and blue female candidates.

Elections - lessons from Belgium and South Korea

This is a very brief outline of some things I have learnt in the last couple of days about political activities elsewhere. Of course like in most things in life, political similarity trends only exist to a
certain extent (nature is hardly ever comfortable with exact copies)

South Korea
* The current President is a man that has been self made (including being a human rights lawyer who initially sat for bar exams as a private candidate), who fought against corruption during a time when the country was undergoing immense political turmoil
* He ran for presidency and lost one election but was able to mobilize grassroot institutions into supporting him for the 2002 elections.
* Just before the elections, a political ally defected, a plan that backfired and he was elected president on a "narrow margin".
* Because he was new to governing the country, it meant that he could come in on a clean slate (no baggage).
* However it also meant that he was vulnerable to sabotage from, among others, some existing civil servants that served the previous government.
* Grassroot institutions that supported him were elated he won and had high expectations. These were unmanageable considering that government bureaucracy couldn't move as fast as people expected.
* 2 years into his term, his opponents tried to and failed to impeach him.
* Because of the constitution, he is only going to serve one term that ends December this year (2007),
* It's been a tough term for him including trying to deal with regionalism (equivalent to Kenya's ethnic tensions) which has meant that his country has been very polarized country


Belgium
*In terms of "ethnic tensions" this country probably is the worst in Western Europe. The Dutch (aka Flemish) and French societal extractions have made it very difficult for the country to make cohesive strides.
*Infact sometimes Brussels is fought over to a similar extent Jerusalem is (Jews vs Muslims).
*Then there are the (statistically insignificant 70,000) Germans who have ensured that German is a 3rd official language, in a country that has 10million people! Writing every government law and regulation in Dutch and French is bad enough, having to do it in German so that either one of the small number of Germans can read it in their home language is distressing to even think about!
* Of course they also have a ghostly past with King Leopold who committed some of the worst atrocities in human history and got away with it.
*Many countries have coalition situations but the Belgian situation is truly mind-boggling. There were elections in June this year. The rules on how to win the elections combined with the coalition makeup meant that the narrow margin win made it impossible to have a government.
*What happened? The winning coalitions started negotiating on the makeup of the future government, meanwhile the previous government "remained in power" under extra-ordinary provisions.
* This is the October and there is still no new government!

The language factor in Rome

It's pretty apparent I cannot speak a word in Italian... Tried to learn a few words this morning and it was quite embarrassing...

It's interesting how, when one is not familiar with something, one tends to associate it with "other" less familiar things even if not related. For example, can't speak a word in Italian...I start thinking maybe my 10 word vocabulary in French might help!

Is it that outrageous? Well, I decided to do a little research and one of the most dependable sources on languages around the world tells me that Italian has 89% lexical similarity with French! see http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=ita

But then again, speaking with people (e.g. asking for directions or trying to find out the price of something) doesn't depend on lexical similarity!

This thing of "feeling" mono-lingual is not good...

Walking around Rome

This city is totally amazing. While I know that Mombasa and surrounding areas have all sorts of heritage sites, Rome is simply a city in it's own class.

• I went to the Pantheon and that structure is simply mind-blowing. With all the Kings of Rome buried there, it needed more than the hour of just walking around. Am told places like Mexico and others have tried to emulate the architecture built around 30BC
  
• The Colosseum! My goodness! That is yet another wonder! No words
• Walking around the Borghese gardens was very reinvigorating.
• On the northern side of Via del Corso are the twin churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto, both of which looked very empty and un-used but splendid on the outside.
  
• I went to see Circus Maximus and after the little bit that I had heard, I felt a little let down since there's very little left. To think that the place is now used for "recreation" including watching football on a big screen! But I guess that is life.
• It's amazing how many people just sit around the Trevi fountains watching other people seating there watching others! (I took photos but they are nothing compared to what others took and hope to borrow a few photos)
• The Spanish steps look like the only place that could rival the Trevi fountains with the number of people sitting around looking at other people. If not by numbers, at least here people can also watch other people use the immaculate horse carriages waiting to be hired.

Am tired of walking, am sure there's a lot more to see...that's for another day.

In Rome

Landed in Rome at midday today and immediate thoughts...

• the airport looks very new and somewhat design like Washington Duelles only the terminal to terminal movement at the latter is facilitated by "cars" rather than a "sky train" at the former.
  
• immigration took all of 50 seconds to check me in! That's not compared to all of 10 seconds to EU nationals! Now that is what one calls efficiency.
• met a cab driver as I walked out of the airport, quite friendly only his English vocabulary (or so I found out 10 minutes into the journey) was all of 5 words. That did not stop him from showing me at least 10 sites in the city going on and on in a mixture of Italian and French (both of which I don't speak) and all I could say is "Si"
• the hotel am staying at has very small rooms and is quite on the expensive side but is definitely not surprising considering that all the places I have stayed at in London, Newcastle, Liverpool and Paris are almost the same size.

Am planning to take a walk and will write some more later.

AJE - Everywoman part 2

AJE - Everywoman part 1

In Dar-es-Salaam - addendum

We tried to take a photo of the sign outside the hotel

In Dar es Salaam

Been here since the 23rd. As usual, Dar is always an enticing place to be. A few interesting things happened between Monday and today.

• in the company of the national archivist, we managed to visit the military archives that has some very interesting artefacts. Among the most interesting are those that were used in what is locally known as vita vya Kagera
  
• unlike all the other times I have been here on official duty, this is the first time I have been joined by work colleagues.
• one of my colleagues asked about a certain former university mate (they were together in Australia in the mid 80s) who now happens to be the mayor of the city! As soon as he heard we were in town, he insisted we go there and have dinner.

We are leaving early tomorrow morning so I need to fall asleep sooner rather than later.

NTV - Bull's eye - political satire

MSNBC - Bush on the death of Madiba

Citizen Tv - Business interview with Juliet Wairimu

AJE - Inside Story - Mandela and the Elders part 2

AJE - Inside Story - Mandela and the Elders part 1

In Barbados

It's 3rd time in this lovely Island. Here to teach again at UWI campus records management programme. Will see whether I get the chance to do more than just teach. Got picked up at the airport by UWI driver for campus staff member. Unlike the other two times, I intentionally had a night's stop-over in London just to ensure I rest as well as ensure I don't miss my flight.

UNICEF - Violence against children in Kenya

Ethnic tendancies

I was thinking about this today. Its amazing how "tribalistic" some Kenyans are, it's a phenomenon that doesnot leave them regardless where they end up (socially or geographically).

Two days ago I was in a city I havenot visited in 7 years and met some black "brothers and sisters". As soon as I mentioned that am from Kenya, one American guy promptly told me he will introduce me to some XYZ Kenyans (where XYZ is a Kenyan tribe that shall remain anonymous).

I kept asking to myself, why would these Kenyans insist on identifying themsleves thus? Most African countries have multiple ethnicities (yes even Botswana does) but in my XX (where XX is a large number) yrs experience living in the diaspora, Kenyans and Nigerians rank way above everyone else in unhealthily identifying their ethnicities before the nationalities.

That said, socio-ethnic tensions are not necessarily unique to the continent. My recent experiences have reminded me of the similar societal conditions. Canada has been dealing with the separatist Quebec issue since the 1970s (thankfully with only traces of physical
violence but with extensive violence against the national psyche...last week the finance minister announced the federal budget and basically "bribed" the province to stay on after their provincial elections today). Spain has been dealing with the Basque separatists
for years (rather painfully). Tamils in Sri Lanka, East Timorese from Indonesia and of course the obvious two some (Yugoslavia that broke into 6 states and USSR that broke into 15 states). The list is endless, Pakistan and India, Eritrea and Ethiopia, Sudan, Czechoslovakia, Somalia etc

Each of these situations of course have their own of set of unique issues but, in very general terms, they demonstrate trends that are worrisome.