Friday, 30 May 2008
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
Monday, 26 May 2008
Sunday, 25 May 2008
Saturday, 24 May 2008
Friday, 23 May 2008
Thursday, 22 May 2008
Commentary (by Charles Onyango-Obbo) - It’s on the walls of Kigali; East Africa needs to read it
Ref: http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=123748
Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 5/22/2008
THERE’S A HEATED RACE going on in East Africa, but most of us go about our lives oblivious to it.
The race is over which country will be the economic champion in the region in the next 10 years.
We are oblivious because the contest is largely invisible. However, you sense it immediately you set foot in Kigali, or Rwanda in general.
In 1994, when the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Army rebels won the war whose high (and tragic) point was the massacre of nearly one million people by the government army and its extremist militia, the Interahamwe, the bushes around the city were full of bodies.
The city, and country, was a wasteland. A putrid smell overhang its hills.
The bushes have since disappeared in what must be the region’s biggest middle class housing boom. In one area, Kigali has won the East African race decisively... it is the cleanest and least potholed city in the region.
A colleague asked our pretty and articulate guide the most ordinary question of the week.
“Gosh, this city is clean”, he said, “who keeps it clean, the City Council?” he asked.
The reply was quite unexpected. She hesitated for a while, then said: “Actually, I am not sure”.
In Kampala or Dar es Salaam, we all know who is responsible for the failure to keep the cities clean.
But to get to a stage where an African city is so well-kept people don’t even know who is responsible for it, tells you how much progress Kigali has made.
A tiny land-locked nation which lost 30 years in the genocide and has no natural resources, Rwanda decided it could only save itself by being the most competitive in ICT, and offering the best investment climate.
Every country says that, so the test is whether a country actually walks the talk. A story is told in Kigali of a recent group of wealthy Nigerians who came to town to buy into a major Rwandese insurance company.
Its leader said, shyly, that the one thing he would have liked to do while in Rwanda on the deal was to meet President Paul Kagame.
Kagame was told, and he sent word to the Nigerians that he would meet them.
They were asked to wait at their hotel for word on the meeting.
While they were waiting, they were told they had an important guest. Guess who shows up at the hotel room of the team leader? None other than President Kagame himself.
If the other East African presidents didn’t know it, Kagame has taken the prize, and if they don’t prevent him running away with it, this race is going to end early.
REFLECTING ON THIS, I REALISED that 14 years is a lifetime in politics. In early October, 1990, the RPA launched the armed struggle.
Within days, their campaign fell apart and they were crushed.
I was in the group of journalists that witnessed the final moments as the Rwanda government troops chased remnants of the RPA towards the Uganda border and finished off some who were trapped.
The troops posed triumphantly at the border for our cameras. They celebrated too early.
Four years later, a regrouped RPA was the “victor” if, indeed, there was one in the Rwanda war.
I was reminded that such reversal of fortune is not common. In 1979, as the Tanzanian army and Ugandan exiles closed in on Kampala and the city was being bombed, it became clear that the game was over for military despot Idi Amin.
Two days to the fall of the city, shells started falling on the Makerere University campus, which had remained the only safe refuge in Kampala.
International radio stations began reporting that the Amin army was planning to invade the campus and use the students as human shields.
That started off a stampede as frightened students took flight. One large group of students headed west, toward the industrial town of Jinja.
Some 30 kilometres along the road, an Amin civilian supporter had set up a one-man “roadblock” to stop people fleeing.
He was screaming Amin’s praises, and saying there was no precedent in African history of an army marching from another country and ousting a president in another.
Just then, a long convoy of over 30 cars led by machine-gun mounted Land Rovers, and communication vehicles, with light-armoured trucks bringing up the rear rumbled by.
The figure in the Humvee-type car in the middle of the convoy was unmistakable. It was Amin, waving and thumping the air triumphantly.
But to us, this was clearly a defeated man in retreat trying to save face with empty bravado.
However, his supporter didn’t see it that way. He went into higher gear, proclaiming that his hero was going to make the last stand that would scatter the enemy.
It was never to be. Amin died in forlorn exile in Saudi Arabia, on August 16, 2003.
Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 5/22/2008
THERE’S A HEATED RACE going on in East Africa, but most of us go about our lives oblivious to it.
The race is over which country will be the economic champion in the region in the next 10 years.
We are oblivious because the contest is largely invisible. However, you sense it immediately you set foot in Kigali, or Rwanda in general.
In 1994, when the ruling Rwanda Patriotic Army rebels won the war whose high (and tragic) point was the massacre of nearly one million people by the government army and its extremist militia, the Interahamwe, the bushes around the city were full of bodies.
The city, and country, was a wasteland. A putrid smell overhang its hills.
The bushes have since disappeared in what must be the region’s biggest middle class housing boom. In one area, Kigali has won the East African race decisively... it is the cleanest and least potholed city in the region.
A colleague asked our pretty and articulate guide the most ordinary question of the week.
“Gosh, this city is clean”, he said, “who keeps it clean, the City Council?” he asked.
The reply was quite unexpected. She hesitated for a while, then said: “Actually, I am not sure”.
In Kampala or Dar es Salaam, we all know who is responsible for the failure to keep the cities clean.
But to get to a stage where an African city is so well-kept people don’t even know who is responsible for it, tells you how much progress Kigali has made.
A tiny land-locked nation which lost 30 years in the genocide and has no natural resources, Rwanda decided it could only save itself by being the most competitive in ICT, and offering the best investment climate.
Every country says that, so the test is whether a country actually walks the talk. A story is told in Kigali of a recent group of wealthy Nigerians who came to town to buy into a major Rwandese insurance company.
Its leader said, shyly, that the one thing he would have liked to do while in Rwanda on the deal was to meet President Paul Kagame.
Kagame was told, and he sent word to the Nigerians that he would meet them.
They were asked to wait at their hotel for word on the meeting.
While they were waiting, they were told they had an important guest. Guess who shows up at the hotel room of the team leader? None other than President Kagame himself.
If the other East African presidents didn’t know it, Kagame has taken the prize, and if they don’t prevent him running away with it, this race is going to end early.
REFLECTING ON THIS, I REALISED that 14 years is a lifetime in politics. In early October, 1990, the RPA launched the armed struggle.
Within days, their campaign fell apart and they were crushed.
I was in the group of journalists that witnessed the final moments as the Rwanda government troops chased remnants of the RPA towards the Uganda border and finished off some who were trapped.
The troops posed triumphantly at the border for our cameras. They celebrated too early.
Four years later, a regrouped RPA was the “victor” if, indeed, there was one in the Rwanda war.
I was reminded that such reversal of fortune is not common. In 1979, as the Tanzanian army and Ugandan exiles closed in on Kampala and the city was being bombed, it became clear that the game was over for military despot Idi Amin.
Two days to the fall of the city, shells started falling on the Makerere University campus, which had remained the only safe refuge in Kampala.
International radio stations began reporting that the Amin army was planning to invade the campus and use the students as human shields.
That started off a stampede as frightened students took flight. One large group of students headed west, toward the industrial town of Jinja.
Some 30 kilometres along the road, an Amin civilian supporter had set up a one-man “roadblock” to stop people fleeing.
He was screaming Amin’s praises, and saying there was no precedent in African history of an army marching from another country and ousting a president in another.
Just then, a long convoy of over 30 cars led by machine-gun mounted Land Rovers, and communication vehicles, with light-armoured trucks bringing up the rear rumbled by.
The figure in the Humvee-type car in the middle of the convoy was unmistakable. It was Amin, waving and thumping the air triumphantly.
But to us, this was clearly a defeated man in retreat trying to save face with empty bravado.
However, his supporter didn’t see it that way. He went into higher gear, proclaiming that his hero was going to make the last stand that would scatter the enemy.
It was never to be. Amin died in forlorn exile in Saudi Arabia, on August 16, 2003.
Wednesday, 21 May 2008
Tuesday, 20 May 2008
Monday, 19 May 2008
Sunday, 18 May 2008
Saturday, 17 May 2008
Friday, 16 May 2008
Thursday, 15 May 2008
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
Monday, 12 May 2008
Sunday, 11 May 2008
Saturday, 10 May 2008
Friday, 09 May 2008
Thursday, 08 May 2008
Commentary (by Charles Onyango-Obbo) - An angry son and the hungry of the world get a raw deal
Ref: http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=25&newsid=122694
Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 5/8/2008
WITH THE BLOW-UP that followed the December elections in Kenya, and the bizarre election fiasco that we are witnessing in Zimbabwe, you would think we have seen it all.
Apparently not. Local council elections were held in the UK on May 1, but the contest for Orrell county in the Wigan Council made headlines for the most unusual reasons.
Richard Clayton Sr., a Conservative who has represented Orrell for the past four years, was challenged by his son, Richard Clayton Jr. The young man was angry that his 65-year-old father left his mother for a younger woman.
According to reports, the domestic feud began when Clayton Sr left his wife, Marjorie, to move in with his new partner, a 46-year-old divorcee. It looked like the senior Clayton was toast, but voters everywhere can be fickle.
When the counting was done, the old man had routed his son comprehensively. Senior got 1,608 votes, and Junior only a measly 321.
The one voter who left no one in doubt about whom she was going to vote for was Marjorie. She cast for Junior.
Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF might have lost its majority in Parliament, and the ageing strongman who has wrecked a once great nation was beaten in the first round of the presidential race by opposition leader, Morgan Tsivangirai.
Because Tsivangirai didn’t win by more than 50 per cent, there will now be a run-off. Mugabe might have lost it, but there is one area in which he and his henchmen are still world champions – in the art of vituperation.
After some African leaders criticised Mugabe’s attempt to steal the election, the government mouthpiece, The Herald, called them “myopic stooges”.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis (inflation is now 170,000 per cent) has left many of its citizens going hungry. Now, says the World Bank, 100 million people in the world are facing severe hunger too as global prices of food shoot through the roof.
But like the soaring oil prices that have enabled the giant oil companies to rake in unprecedented profits, there are multinationals that are making a killing from the high food prices.
According to a report in The Independent on Sunday, Monsato (famous for its controversial genetically modified foods) last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (Sh33bn) to $1.2bn (Sh76bn).
Its profits increased from $1.44bn (Sh89bn) to $2.2bn (Sh136bn). Cargill’s net earnings soared by 85 per cent from $553m (Sh34bn), to $1.12bn (Sh69bn) over the same three months.
AND ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m (Sh22bn) to $517m (Sh32bn).
The operating profit of its grains merchant merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold.
The unjust thing about some of this is that, according to a new authoritative study carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US, contrary to the hype that genetic modification increases crop yields, the opposite is actually true.
Genetic production, the study found, cuts the productivity of crops. GM soya, for example, produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent.
The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsato GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.
Mid last month the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.
Now, that leaves us in a tight spot.
We can’t be blamed for escaping the dangers facing us by burying ourselves into the odd and funny contradictions of life.
Take China, a country which is officially atheist. It is set to become one of the biggest Bible producing countries in the world, The Guardian reports.
A massive new printing plant which opens this month will employ 600 non-Christians locals producing 23 Bibles a minute. The plant is expected to supply a quarter of the world’s Bibles by 2009.
To less holy matters, recently, a Russian man returned home from holiday only to find his two-storey house had been stolen brick by brick.
That, of itself, was surprising, but perhaps not more than the discovery that the house had been stolen by his neighbour.
Not too far from the Vatican in Italy, a man was convicted for an old Biblical sin. He was found guilty of “staring too intently” at the woman sitting opposite him on the train.
My favourite comes from Australia. Last week. One of Australia’s most senior conservative politicians broke down at a news conference as he tearfully admitted sniffing the chair of a female colleague shortly after she vacated it.
Troy Buswell, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party in Western Australia, is under intense pressure to resign over the incident, which happened in 2005.
Story by CHARLES ONYANGO-OBBO
Publication Date: 5/8/2008
WITH THE BLOW-UP that followed the December elections in Kenya, and the bizarre election fiasco that we are witnessing in Zimbabwe, you would think we have seen it all.
Apparently not. Local council elections were held in the UK on May 1, but the contest for Orrell county in the Wigan Council made headlines for the most unusual reasons.
Richard Clayton Sr., a Conservative who has represented Orrell for the past four years, was challenged by his son, Richard Clayton Jr. The young man was angry that his 65-year-old father left his mother for a younger woman.
According to reports, the domestic feud began when Clayton Sr left his wife, Marjorie, to move in with his new partner, a 46-year-old divorcee. It looked like the senior Clayton was toast, but voters everywhere can be fickle.
When the counting was done, the old man had routed his son comprehensively. Senior got 1,608 votes, and Junior only a measly 321.
The one voter who left no one in doubt about whom she was going to vote for was Marjorie. She cast for Junior.
Meanwhile in Zimbabwe, Mugabe’s ruling Zanu-PF might have lost its majority in Parliament, and the ageing strongman who has wrecked a once great nation was beaten in the first round of the presidential race by opposition leader, Morgan Tsivangirai.
Because Tsivangirai didn’t win by more than 50 per cent, there will now be a run-off. Mugabe might have lost it, but there is one area in which he and his henchmen are still world champions – in the art of vituperation.
After some African leaders criticised Mugabe’s attempt to steal the election, the government mouthpiece, The Herald, called them “myopic stooges”.
Zimbabwe’s economic crisis (inflation is now 170,000 per cent) has left many of its citizens going hungry. Now, says the World Bank, 100 million people in the world are facing severe hunger too as global prices of food shoot through the roof.
But like the soaring oil prices that have enabled the giant oil companies to rake in unprecedented profits, there are multinationals that are making a killing from the high food prices.
According to a report in The Independent on Sunday, Monsato (famous for its controversial genetically modified foods) last month reported that its net income for the three months up to the end of February this year had more than doubled over the same period in 2007, from $543m (Sh33bn) to $1.2bn (Sh76bn).
Its profits increased from $1.44bn (Sh89bn) to $2.2bn (Sh136bn). Cargill’s net earnings soared by 85 per cent from $553m (Sh34bn), to $1.12bn (Sh69bn) over the same three months.
AND ARCHER DANIELS MIDLAND, one of the world’s largest agricultural processors of soy, corn and wheat, increased its net earnings by 42 per cent in the first three months of this year from $363m (Sh22bn) to $517m (Sh32bn).
The operating profit of its grains merchant merchandising and handling operations jumped 16-fold.
The unjust thing about some of this is that, according to a new authoritative study carried out over the past three years at the University of Kansas in the US, contrary to the hype that genetic modification increases crop yields, the opposite is actually true.
Genetic production, the study found, cuts the productivity of crops. GM soya, for example, produces 10 per cent less food than its conventional equivalent.
The new study confirms earlier research at the University of Nebraska, which found that another Monsato GM soya produced 6 per cent less than its closest conventional relative, and 11 per cent less than the best non-GM soya available.
Mid last month the biggest study of its kind ever conducted – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development – concluded that GM was not the answer to world hunger.
Now, that leaves us in a tight spot.
We can’t be blamed for escaping the dangers facing us by burying ourselves into the odd and funny contradictions of life.
Take China, a country which is officially atheist. It is set to become one of the biggest Bible producing countries in the world, The Guardian reports.
A massive new printing plant which opens this month will employ 600 non-Christians locals producing 23 Bibles a minute. The plant is expected to supply a quarter of the world’s Bibles by 2009.
To less holy matters, recently, a Russian man returned home from holiday only to find his two-storey house had been stolen brick by brick.
That, of itself, was surprising, but perhaps not more than the discovery that the house had been stolen by his neighbour.
Not too far from the Vatican in Italy, a man was convicted for an old Biblical sin. He was found guilty of “staring too intently” at the woman sitting opposite him on the train.
My favourite comes from Australia. Last week. One of Australia’s most senior conservative politicians broke down at a news conference as he tearfully admitted sniffing the chair of a female colleague shortly after she vacated it.
Troy Buswell, the leader of the opposition Liberal Party in Western Australia, is under intense pressure to resign over the incident, which happened in 2005.
Wednesday, 07 May 2008
Tuesday, 06 May 2008
Monday, 05 May 2008
Sunday, 04 May 2008
Commentary (by James Kariuki) - Clinton’s remark on Iran may haunt her
Ref: http://www.eastandard.net/columnists/?id=1143985934&cid=190
Published on May 4, 2008, 12:00 am
By James N Kariuki
On primary election day in her do-or-die state of Pennsylvania, presidential contender Mrs Hillary Clinton was asked how she would respond in the event of a nuclear attack on Israel by Iran. It was largely a hypothetical question but Clinton gave a startling response. She would "totally obliterate them."
There was no immediate political threat for Clinton’s candidacy. The polls showed that she was well ahead in Pennsylvania; she was going to win. Israel was not in danger of a nuclear attack; Iran does not have nuclear weapons, it is Israel that does. Clinton’s extremist assertion was not prompted by a need to deter Iran to desist from an impeding nuclear aggression.
In the heat of the campaign, it is possible that Clinton was playing up to the gallery, stating what she believed an anti-Islamic audience wanted to hear. She was moved by a craving for votes. She may also have been appealing to the powerful Jewish community; she needed its financial and political support.
It is possible that Clinton’s words were drawn by a combination of both factors, but most likely by politics of desperation. She intended to illustrate that she is tough. In other words, she sought to distance herself from her awesome political rival, Barack Obama.
Indeed, she has been at pains in recent months to project him as too weak to be America’s commander-in-chief.
Clinton’s Iran statement was naÔve and unwise in more ways than one. Her major campaign pledge in foreign policy is that, if she is elected president, she will seek to restore US respectability in the world community. American standing has been severely damaged by the diplomatic recklessness of George W Bush administration.
Threatening to use nuclear weapons against a third world nation does little to re-establish trust in the world’s only super power. What the world community remembers is that the US was the first country to develop nuclear weapons. More critically, the world recalls vividly that the US was the first and only power to ever unleash nuclear destruction upon innocent civilian population.
International terrorism
Clinton’s assertion is particularly reckless coming from an individual who is theoretically only two steps away from the ‘buttons’ of the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It is alarming and disconcerting as it comes from a mindset of a potential commander-in-chief that arrogates to the US the right to repeat and commit genocide against innocent civilians. For all intents and purposes, this is international terrorism on a grand scale.
What about political consequences of employing nuclear weapons rhetoric as a campaign strategy? Clinton probably did not consider that in the 1964 presidential race, Republican hopeful, Barry Goldwater, urged the US to consider using tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. His mindset was, "…extremism in defence of liberty is no vice."
In the years to come, Goldwater admitted that his provocative nuclear suggestion was politically ill-advised and that it was largely responsible for his humiliating loss to Lyndon B Johnson.
In short, the American voter is not sympathetic to the suggestion of using nuclear weapons. If the Goldwater experience is anything to go by, Clinton’s statement may indeed come back to haunt her candidacy. It may have elicited instant audience applause but in the long run, Barack Obama’s balanced thoughtfulness in his responses may be what pays off politically.
Already Clinton’s military judgment has been questioned on the grounds that she was ‘fooled’ into supporting the war in Iraq by a phony claim that it (Iraq) possessed weapons of mass destruction. And so soon thereafter, she is employing military rhetoric of collective punishment of innocents, thereby endorsing terrorism.
One American critic has stated, "any nation that claims that it has the right to obliterate the population of another… should be challenged as unacceptably barbaric."
Is it the case that Clinton’s rhetoric is refuelling nuclear arms race? Is it giving reason for Iran’s need to develop nuclear weapons as "deterrence" to American jingoism?
Published on May 4, 2008, 12:00 am
By James N Kariuki
On primary election day in her do-or-die state of Pennsylvania, presidential contender Mrs Hillary Clinton was asked how she would respond in the event of a nuclear attack on Israel by Iran. It was largely a hypothetical question but Clinton gave a startling response. She would "totally obliterate them."
There was no immediate political threat for Clinton’s candidacy. The polls showed that she was well ahead in Pennsylvania; she was going to win. Israel was not in danger of a nuclear attack; Iran does not have nuclear weapons, it is Israel that does. Clinton’s extremist assertion was not prompted by a need to deter Iran to desist from an impeding nuclear aggression.
In the heat of the campaign, it is possible that Clinton was playing up to the gallery, stating what she believed an anti-Islamic audience wanted to hear. She was moved by a craving for votes. She may also have been appealing to the powerful Jewish community; she needed its financial and political support.
It is possible that Clinton’s words were drawn by a combination of both factors, but most likely by politics of desperation. She intended to illustrate that she is tough. In other words, she sought to distance herself from her awesome political rival, Barack Obama.
Indeed, she has been at pains in recent months to project him as too weak to be America’s commander-in-chief.
Clinton’s Iran statement was naÔve and unwise in more ways than one. Her major campaign pledge in foreign policy is that, if she is elected president, she will seek to restore US respectability in the world community. American standing has been severely damaged by the diplomatic recklessness of George W Bush administration.
Threatening to use nuclear weapons against a third world nation does little to re-establish trust in the world’s only super power. What the world community remembers is that the US was the first country to develop nuclear weapons. More critically, the world recalls vividly that the US was the first and only power to ever unleash nuclear destruction upon innocent civilian population.
International terrorism
Clinton’s assertion is particularly reckless coming from an individual who is theoretically only two steps away from the ‘buttons’ of the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. It is alarming and disconcerting as it comes from a mindset of a potential commander-in-chief that arrogates to the US the right to repeat and commit genocide against innocent civilians. For all intents and purposes, this is international terrorism on a grand scale.
What about political consequences of employing nuclear weapons rhetoric as a campaign strategy? Clinton probably did not consider that in the 1964 presidential race, Republican hopeful, Barry Goldwater, urged the US to consider using tactical nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War. His mindset was, "…extremism in defence of liberty is no vice."
In the years to come, Goldwater admitted that his provocative nuclear suggestion was politically ill-advised and that it was largely responsible for his humiliating loss to Lyndon B Johnson.
In short, the American voter is not sympathetic to the suggestion of using nuclear weapons. If the Goldwater experience is anything to go by, Clinton’s statement may indeed come back to haunt her candidacy. It may have elicited instant audience applause but in the long run, Barack Obama’s balanced thoughtfulness in his responses may be what pays off politically.
Already Clinton’s military judgment has been questioned on the grounds that she was ‘fooled’ into supporting the war in Iraq by a phony claim that it (Iraq) possessed weapons of mass destruction. And so soon thereafter, she is employing military rhetoric of collective punishment of innocents, thereby endorsing terrorism.
One American critic has stated, "any nation that claims that it has the right to obliterate the population of another… should be challenged as unacceptably barbaric."
Is it the case that Clinton’s rhetoric is refuelling nuclear arms race? Is it giving reason for Iran’s need to develop nuclear weapons as "deterrence" to American jingoism?
Saturday, 03 May 2008
Friday, 02 May 2008
Thursday, 01 May 2008
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