AFRICA

Recent history (19th-21st Century)
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kmaherali
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Africa takes the reins
Debt relief was a major factor

Hany Besada
For The Calgary Herald


Wednesday, July 04, 2007


Welcome news about Africa's economic recovery was announced at the recent World Economic Forum's (WEF) annual general meeting on Africa, in Cape Town.

Africa's economy is expected to grow at an impressive rate of 6.2 per cent, compared to last year's 5.5 per cent expansion

African governments have been applauded by multilateral institutions and western governments for making a determined effort to undertake economic reforms aimed at ridding themselves of a past often plagued by disease, civil wars, famine, economic mismanagement and corruption.

Remittances from the continent's diasporas stand at $8 billion annually, compared with an approximate $1 billion during the mid-1980s, while direct foreign investment has mushroomed during the past two decades, rising to $19 billion in 2006, compared to $2.2 billion per annum during the early 1980s.

Much still needs to be done to increase the continent's economic growth to seven per cent annually, which is the minimum threshold required to cut poverty and disease by half in 2015 -- one of the key UN Millennium Development Goals.

A large part of the continent's current growth was fuelled by external factors, in particular debt relief, high commodity prices and an upbeat international economic environment.

Poor infrastructure, insufficient access to finance, corruption and bureaucratic red tape were flagged by foreign investors and multilateral financial institutions as some of the impediments to sustainable economic growth.

These challenges notwithstanding, it would be a disservice to the continent for the international community to dwell on what is wrong, rather than to build on the steady stream of successes, encapsulated in the sheer level of optimism, shared by millions of Africans, about their future.

The improvements on a macroeconomic level came about, not thanks to increased levels of aid, as many advocates of aid would like to claim, but because African states are more self-reliant and have increasingly taken responsibility for their economic fortunes and misfortunes.

Africans realize the West's pledges of aid are not the silver bullet required to drive economic growth and alleviate poverty, and that these pledges should be accepted with caution.

When, at their latest summit in Heiligendamm, Germany, the G-8 nations agreed to allocate $60 billion, of which $30 billion would come from the U.S., to fight tuberculosis, HIV-AIDS and malaria, African and western aid organizations and NGOs protested against what they called a futile attempt to repackage old and broken promises.

There is a great deal of reluctance on the part of AIDS advocates and health organizations, who work with millions of victims living with AIDS and other devastating diseases in Africa, to jump on the bandwagon and offer their unequivocal support to the G-8 and their grand pledges.

International aid groups were quick to criticize the latest pledges, pointing out the lack of a definite timetable for the disbursement of funds and the lack of specificity regarding the size of individual countries' contributions.

They also raised the issue of how much of these stipulated funds were new money and how much formed part of unfulfilled previous G-8 pledges. Oxfam argued the new $60-billion aid package actually amounted to a mere $3 billion in additional aid, given that the previous pledge, made at the 2005 G-8 summit at Gleneagles, was spread over several years.

At Gleneagles, G-8 leaders endorsed a plan to double their aid to Africa to $50 billion annually by 2010. The plan called for debt cancellation of at least $40 billion, owed by 18 of the world's poorest states, of which the majority are African. It also included an agreement on providing universal access to HIV-AIDS treatment.

However, their track record, thus far, left even more skeptics on both sides of the economic divide.

Given the criticism surrounding these pledges of aid, African economists and international aid agencies were quick to point out the dangers for any African leader relying on external intervention as a panacea for the continent's developmental challenges.

Global trade with Africa, as well as intercontinental trade, sound macroeconomic policies by host governments, economic liberalization, strengthening of the private sector, and increased direct foreign investment are the real keys to sustainable, long-term development in Africa.

Sound domestic policies are more important than external assistance in creating the right conditions for prosperity, stability and growth.

Hany Besada is a senior researcher at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, in Waterloo, Ont.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
kmaherali
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July 5, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Africa: Land of Hope
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
KIGALI, Rwanda

In the early 1990s, Rwanda reinforced all the worst stereotypes of Africa: wretchedly poor, torn apart by war and seemingly destined to be an international basket case forever.

Yet now it has become the little nation that could. It is clean, safe and enjoying economic growth more than twice as fast as the U.S. or Europe. And Rwanda underscores something that is easy to forget: There are signs of a turnaround in Africa, and plenty of reason for optimism.

This is the last column from my win-a-trip journey in Africa with a student, Leana Wen, and a teacher, Will Okun, and the stories have been long on gloom and suffering. But there is also a cheerier side to Africa, and Rwanda reflects the continent's potential when there is both stability and good governance.

Dr. Paul Farmer, the Harvard public health specialist best known for his work in Haiti, is among a growing number of Americans who have begun working in Rwanda in part because it is so well-managed.

"The first time I got stopped by a policeman here, I thought, 'Oh, no! Am I going to get kidnapped, or worse?' " said Dr. Farmer. "I rolled down the window, and the policeman said, 'Put on your seat belt.' "

In the early 1960s, most of Africa was richer than Asia and many economists expected Africa to zoom far ahead of Asia. Back then, the World Bank named a group of African countries that it projected to grow at 7 percent annually.

Instead, Africa drove over a cliff. Of those countries with good data, one-third now have lower per capita incomes than they did at independence (typically about 1960), and the five worst-performing economies in the world from 1960 to 2001 were all in Africa.

What went wrong? The two most important reasons were that Africa was terribly governed and that it was torn apart by wars.

The problem of conflict is as bad as ever (Darfur sums it up), but governance is getting far better.

Increasingly there are new leaders like Paul Kagame here in Rwanda who are honest, intelligent and capable. President Kagame reads Harvard Business Review and is an African version of Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of modern Singapore. Both are authoritarian, repressive and quirky (Mr. Kagame banned plastic bags to curb litter). Both did wonders for their countries' living standards. And both are blunt.

I asked President Kagame why Asian countries that used to be at the same income level as Africa are now so much richer. He offered one reason that bowled me over: perhaps Asians are today more ambitious and work harder.

"I'm hesitant to talk about the issue of culture, but I have to — and we have to work on it — that culture of hard work, that culture of being ambitious and wanting to achieve," he said, adding: "I believe that those values were in Africans, but I don't know what dampened it — what killed it."

Wow. It's a bullish sign whenever a leader is willing to be self-critical, but in fact lackadaisical work may have more to do with malaria, anemia, worms and misrule than with culture.

And when African countries have enjoyed stability and sound policies, they have often thrived. Indeed, the fastest-growing country in the world from 1960 to 2001 was Botswana (South Korea was second, and Singapore and China tied for third).

More and more African countries are now following the Botswana model of welcoming investors and obeying markets. Aside from Rwanda, countries like Mozambique, Benin, Tanzania, Liberia and Mauritius are among those trying to build a future on trade more than aid.

"We're not going to say 'We don't need aid,' " Mr. Kagame said. "But there's no question about trade being more important than aid. There's no question about that."

Rwanda is trying to develop high-value exports like pomegranate juice that it could air-freight to Western countries. One of the best kinds of aid that the West could provide would be to expand the African Growth and Opportunity Act program, which encourages imports from Africa.

After decades of stagnation, Africa has now been growing solidly for several years, and this year the average economic growth rate is expected to rise again, to about 6 percent. To me, much of Africa feels like India in the early 1990s as it was reforming its economy and setting the stage for today's boom.

So here's an investment tip: Buy real estate in Benin and Rwanda.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/busin ... q3KKMEz4OA

July 22, 2007
Africa, Offline: Waiting for the Web
By RON NIXON
ON a muggy day in Kigali in 2003, some of the highest-ranking officials in the Rwandan government, including President Paul Kagame, flanked an American businessman, Greg Wyler, as he boldly described how he could help turn their small country into a hub of Internet activity.

Mr. Wyler, an executive based in Boston who made his fortune during the tech boom, said he would lace Rwanda with fiber optic cables, connecting schools, government institutions and homes with low-cost, high-speed Internet service. Until that point, Mr. Wyler, 37, had never set foot in Africa — he was invited by a Rwandan government official he had met at a wedding. Mr. Wyler never expected to start a business there; he simply wanted to try to help the war-torn country.

Even so, Mr. Wyler’s company, Terracom, was granted a contract to connect 300 schools to the Internet. Later, the company would buy 99 percent of the shares in Rwandatel, the country’s national telecommunications company, for $20 million.

But after nearly four years, most of the benefits hailed by him and his company have failed to materialize, Rwandan officials say. “The bottom line is that he promised many things and didn’t deliver,” said Albert Butare, the country’s telecommunications minister.

Mr. Wyler says he sees things quite differently, and he and Rwandan officials will probably never agree on why their joint venture has been so slow to get off the ground. But Terracom’s tale is more than a story about a business dispute in Rwanda. It is also emblematic of what can happen when good intentions run into the technical, political and business realities of Africa.

Attempts to bring affordable high-speed Internet service to the masses have made little headway on the continent. Less than 4 percent of Africa’s population is connected to the Web; most subscribers are in North African countries and the republic of South Africa.

A lack of infrastructure is the biggest problem. In many countries, communications networks were destroyed during years of civil conflict, and continuing political instability deters governments or companies from investing in new systems. E-mail messages and phone calls sent from some African countries have to be routed through Britain, or even the United States, increasing expenses and delivery times. About 75 percent of African Internet traffic is routed this way and costs African countries billions of extra dollars each year that they would not incur if their infrastructure was up to speed.

“Most African governments haven’t paid much attention to their infrastructure,” said Vincent Oria, an associate professor of computer science at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and a native of the Ivory Coast. “In places where hunger, AIDS and poverty are rampant, they didn’t see it as critical until now.”

Africa’s only connection to the network of computers and fiber optic cables that are the Internet’s backbone is a $600 million undersea cable running from Portugal down the west coast of Africa. Built in 2002, the cable was supposed to provide cheaper and faster Web access, but so far that has not happened.

Prices remain high because the national telecommunications linked to the cable maintain a monopoly over access, squeezing out potential competitors. And plans for a fiber optic cable along the East African coast have stalled over similar access issues. Most countries in Eastern Africa, like Rwanda, depend on slower satellite technology for Internet service.

The result is that Africa remains the least connected region in the world, and the digital gap between it and the developed world is widening rapidly. “Unless you can offer Internet access that is the same as the rest of the world, Africa can’t be part of the global economy or academic environment,” said Lawrence H. Landweber, professor emeritus of computer science at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who was also part of an early effort to bring the Web to Africa in the mid-1990s. “The benefits of the Internet age will bypass the continent.”

RWANDAN officials were especially interested in wiring primary and secondary schools, seeing information technology as crucial to modernizing the country’s rural economy. Some 90 percent of the country’s eight million people work in agriculture.

But as of mid-July, only one-third of the 300 schools covered in Terracom’s contract had high-speed Internet service. All 300 were supposed to have been connected by 2006.

Over all, less than 1 percent of the population is connected to the Internet. Rwandan officials say the company seems more interested in tapping the more lucrative cellphone market than in being an Internet service provider. (In November, Mr. Wyler stepped down as chief executive of Terracom, saying he wanted to spend more time with his family; he still serves on the board.)

In a telephone interview from his home in Boston, Mr. Wyler said he would not address the government’s criticism, saying he did not want to be quoted as saying anything negative. But he said there were some things he had not anticipated, particularly the technical challenges of linking Rwanda’s Internet network to the rest of the world. The only way to do it is to buy bandwidth capacity on satellites, but there are not enough satellites to meet demand.

Mr. Wyler also says he believes that Terracom suffers from unrealistic expectations. “Terracom has done everything it can, “ he said. “Because of the technical challenges, the Internet service is as good as it’s going to get. But given what we started from, I still think we have accomplished a lot. In the beginning there were a few people with Internet service; now there are thousands.”

The Rwandan government had hoped that the number of Web surfers would be much higher by now. Rwanda, which is about the size of Maryland, has little industry, and its infrastructure is still being rebuilt after being left in shambles by a 1994 genocide in which 800,000 to a million people were killed.

“We have almost no natural resources and no seaports in Rwanda, which leaves us only with trying to become a knowledge-based society,” said Romain Murenzi, the minister of science, technology and scientific research.

Officials saw Terracom’s investment as crucial to its transformation. Unlike many African governments, Rwanda’s was eager to privatize the national telecommunications company, which had outdated equipment, high prices and few subscribers.

But from the start, government officials say, there were problems with Terracom. Mr. Butare, the telecommunications minister, said the government had trouble getting basic information from the company.

Complicating the situation, Mr. Butare said, was that Mr. Wyler tried to run Terracom from the United States, visiting Rwanda just a few weeks at a time. He left day-to-day management to a poorly trained staff, Mr. Butare said.

“There were spots where they did some things here and there,” Mr. Butare said. “But over all they have failed to do what they promised.”

Internet rates have been lowered, from about $1,000 a month when Terracom arrived in 2003, but most people still can’t afford it. The average Rwandan makes about $220 a year, and a fixed-line Internet hookup costs about $90 a month. Basic wireless Internet is about $63 a month. Those rich enough to pay the fees complain about poor service.

Government officials say the company has spent more time marketing and signing up cellphone customers than on expanding Internet service. According to government figures, Terracom has 30,000 to 40,000 mobile phone subscribers and about 20,000 Internet customers.

The situation came to a head late last year, when government officials contended that Terracom secretly tried to trade its shares in the Rwandan telecom to GV Telecom, a regional African telecommunications company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Rwandan officials were furious, saying this was a violation of the contract signed by the two parties.

The plan was scrapped and Mr. Wyler was widely criticized. In June, the government fined Terracom nearly $400,000 for failing to comply with its licensing obligations, failing to provide information about its operations and failing to pay several fees.

“We decided to penalize Terracom after they failed to fulfill their obligations for a long time,” said Beatha Mukangabo, legal officer for the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Agency. Terracom said it has paid the fines and is working with the government to meet all of its obligations.

Mr. Wyler said he has not been involved in Terracom for nearly 10 months and could not comment on its current operations.

Christopher Lundh, Terracom’s new chief executive and a former executive of Gateway Communications in London, has worked in several African countries. He now lives and works full time in Rwanda, and many government officials say Terracom’s performance has improved under his leadership.

Mr. Lundh acknowledged that there were problems with the company’s operations in the past. “The former management did make some promises that they were not able to keep,” he said. “That’s why I was brought in to professionalize things.” He also said that the company could have better handled the matter with GV Telecom but that he thinks the government overreacted.

He said the Rwandan government is to blame for some of the delays. “We would get to schools that don’t even have electricity or computers,” he said. “That is not our fault.” In addition, he said that many of the complaints about the company concerned things beyond its ability to control. Getting adequate bandwidth remains a constant challenge.

Like most telecommunications companies in eastern Africa, Terracom depends on satellites for Internet service. Satellite service is much slower than cable because of delays in the signals. Satellites also provide less bandwidth than cable.

Adding to the problem is that most of the satellites serving Africa were launched nearly 20 years ago and are aging or going out of commission. A satellite set to go into service last year blew up on the launching pad. Power is also an issue, as intermittent power failures in Rwanda hamper efforts to provide a steady electricity source.

DESPITE these limitations and earlier setbacks, Mr. Lundh says Terracom is moving ahead with plans to give Rwanda the most advanced Internet infrastructure in Africa. A nationwide wireless connection should begin operating near year-end, he said, about the time a nonprofit group, One Laptop Per Child, based in Boston, is to introduce a $100 laptop in the country.

And Terracom is continuing to lay fiber optic cables to connect Rwanda to several other African countries, eliminating a need for phone calls and Internet traffic to be routed via European or American networks.

The government, meanwhile, is moving forward with its own plans to build a fiber optic network. It also has granted Internet service licenses to South African companies and plans to issue several more. “We think we are going to have a healthier market pretty soon,” said Nkubito Bakuramutsa, director general of the Rwanda Information Technology Authority. “We have learned from past experience.”

Mr. Bakuramutsa said he hopes to bring the price of Internet service down to about $10 a month.

Mr. Lundh said his company welcomes the competition. But, he added, getting necessary bandwidth remains an issue and no matter what company supplies Internet service, speed will be a problem. “Eventually you reach a point of diminishing returns,” he said. “Unless there is a new undersea fiber optic cable built or a new satellite launched, it’s going to be difficult.”

Magnus K. Mazimpaka contributed reporting from Rwanda.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/world ... ref=slogin

July 25, 2007
Africans Are Wary but Hopeful, Poll Shows
By LYDIA POLGREEN and MARJORIE CONNELLY

DAKAR, Senegal, July 24 — Despite a thicket of troubles, from deadly illnesses like AIDS and malaria to corrupt politicians and deep-seated poverty, a plurality of Africans say they are better off today than they were five years ago and are optimistic about their future and that of the next generation, according to a poll conducted in 10 sub-Saharan countries by The New York Times and the Pew Global Attitudes Project.

The results offer an unusual and complex portrait of a continent in flux — a snapshot of 10 modern African states as they struggle to build accountable governments, manage violent conflict and turn their natural resources into wealth for the population.

It found that in the main, Africans are satisfied with their national governments, and a majority of respondents in 7 of the 10 countries said their economic situation was at least somewhat good. But many said they faced a wide array of difficult and sometimes life-threatening problems, from illegal drug trafficking to political corruption, from the lack of clean water to inadequate schools for their children, from ethnic and political violence to deadly disease.

Face-to-face interviews were conducted in April and May with 8,471 adults in Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda. The survey sampled nationwide adult populations, except in South Africa, where the sample was completely urban, and Ivory Coast, where it was disproportionately urban and tended to be in areas sympathetic to the government. The margins of sampling error were plus or minus either three or four percentage points.

The results showed that the struggle for democracy and good governing in Africa is more like a patchwork of gains and setbacks than a steady tide of progress across a continent that has suffered some of the worst instances of misrule. While all of the countries polled are nominally democracies, half of them have suffered serious rollbacks of multiparty representational government in recent years. A majority in each country said corrupt political leaders were a big problem.

The most recent elections in Ethiopia and Uganda were marred by violence and the exclusion of major candidates, and failed to meet international standards of fairness; they were considerable setbacks for two countries that a decade ago were seen as rising examples of Africa’s democratic future.

Electoral trouble has even tinged Senegal, often seen as a beacon in the volatile West African region because it has never had a coup and has a long tradition of democracy. This year, opposition parties boycotted legislative elections there over accusations of election fraud.

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation and top oil producer, the poll results reflect frustration with the way elections are carried out — 67 percent of Nigerians said that their presidential election was not conducted fairly. Presidential and local elections in April were so badly marred by fraud and violence that the European Union called them not credible. Asked if they were generally satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things were going in their country, 87 percent of those interviewed for the survey said they were dissatisfied. Yet Nigerians were the most optimistic of all the nations surveyed — 69 percent said they expected that children growing up in Nigeria would be better off than people today.

“It expresses a huge challenge for democracy in Africa,” said Peter M. Lewis, director of African Studies at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the Afrobarometer, a public opinion survey of African attitudes. “We have seen significant strides for democratic liberty and practices in the last 10 or 15 years. It is also a fact that in most of their countries, average citizens have not seen a significant improvement in their material circumstances and their living condition.”

The economic data in the poll give a mixed picture. A plurality of respondents said that their financial situation had improved in the last five years, with the exception of Ivory Coast, Tanzania and Uganda. Many African economies are growing rapidly as prices for oil, iron ore, copper and timber have risen in recent years — overall gross domestic product growth in Africa last year was 5.7 percent and some countries, like Nigeria, Africa’s largest oil producer, have seen much higher growth.

But more resource wealth has not necessarily led to broad prosperity. Of the respondents in Nigeria, 82 percent said average people were not benefiting from the country’s oil wealth.

Salimata Mbengue, a 21-year-old shopkeeper in Ngor, a village at the edge of Dakar, said that she had high hopes for the future of her business but was very worried about the current economic situation of her family.

“I have five brothers, and only two are employed,” she said, sitting outside the small convenience store where she sells sodas, candy, biscuits and cartons of milk. “Our parents are retired, and we have to support them. I am hopeful, but it is very hard to get ahead here.”

The spread of infectious diseases like AIDS is seen as a very big problem by a large majority of the respondents in every country polled. More than half of the 40 million people infected with H.I.V. live in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations, and Africa accounted for 65 percent of new infections in 2006.

Yet few respondents in all the countries polled said they had been tested for H.I.V., ranging from 4 percent in Ghana to 27 percent in Kenya and Ethiopia. Still, a considerable majority of respondents in each country were either willing to be tested, or already had been.

Other health concerns weighed heavily on most respondents. Getting access to clean drinking water was seen as a big problem for a majority in all 10 countries, ranging from 86 percent in Ethiopia to 58 percent in urban South Africa. About half or more in eight countries said that they had been unable to pay for medical care.

But hunger seemed less of a problem — a majority of respondents in all but Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania said that they had enough money to buy food their family needed.

Large majorities said poor-quality schools were a major problem, and many respondents said it was harder to provide an education for their children than to get food for them.

The poll also measured African attitudes to the United States and found that on the whole, 8 of the 10 countries surveyed said they viewed it as a dependable ally. They showed little of the anti-American sentiment that has dominated polls of public opinion in recent years, but some countries had negative views of American culture — 82 percent of Tanzanians, two-thirds of Senegalese and about half of the Ghanaians, Malians and Kenyans surveyed.

Oumar Diallo, a 27-year-old unemployed plumber in Dakar, said that his Muslim faith made him uneasy with some aspects of American culture. “For us Muslims, we have certain values and ways of conducting ourselves that is different than America,” he said. “America is hard towards Muslims.”

Lydia Polgreen reported from Dakar, and Marjorie Connelly from New York.
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Post by kmaherali »

There is also an illuminative multimedia presentation linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/world ... ?th&emc=th

July 29, 2007
Toiling in the Dark: Africa's Power Crisis
By MICHAEL WINES

LUSAKA, Zambia — It is not that Jacob Mwale minds irrigating the 11 acres of land he farms just east of Lusaka, Zambia's capital. It is irrigating his 11 acres in the dead of night that angers him.

Two or three times a week, the Mwale farm abruptly loses power, like the homes and businesses of some of Zambia's 300,000 other electricity users. When the power returns, sometimes late in the evening, Mr. Mwale's farmhands work overtime, watering the fields by moonlight.

"If they shut down the whole day, I have to work nights, and pay extra," Mr. Mwale, 39, grumbled. "It's killing us."

Power blackouts — "load shedding," in utility jargon — are hardly novel in sub-Saharan Africa, where many electricity grids remain chewing-gum-and-baling-wire affairs. Even so, this year is different. Perhaps 25 of the 44 sub-Saharan nations face crippling electricity shortages, a power crisis that some experts call unprecedented.

The causes are manifold: strong economic growth in some places, economic collapse in others, war, poor planning, population booms, high oil prices and drought have combined to leave both industry and residents short of power when many need it most.

"We've had no significant capital injection into generation and transmission, from either the private or public sectors, for 15, maybe 20 years," said Lawrence Musaba, the manager of the Southern African Power Pool, a 12-nation consortium of electricity utilities at the continent's tip.

The implications go beyond candlelight suppers and extra blankets on beds. The lack of reliable power has already begun to hamper the region's development, clipping more than 2 percent off the annual growth rates of the worst-hit African economies, according to the World Bank. Some nations, like Ghana, have tried to deal with their power crises by leasing huge teams of gas generators, producing emergency power at exorbitant rates until power plants can be built.

In Nigeria, Angola and some other nations, virtually all businesses and many residents run private generators to supplement faltering public service, saddling economies with added costs and worsening pollution.

"I've been on the 20th floor of an apartment building in Luanda, and there would be generators on all the verandas, with the racket, the fumes," said Anton Eberhard, a former electricity regulator and an expert on power at the University of Cape Town. "And the lift isn't working, because the main power supply is off."

In normal times, South Africa 's muscular chain of power plants fills the gaps of its neighbors. But South Africa now could experience up to seven years of its own electricity shortages. Rolling blackouts blanketed parts of the country in January, and sporadic power failures have persisted since.

The gravity of this year's shortage is all the more apparent considering how little electricity sub-Saharan Africa has to begin with. Excluding South Africa, whose economy and power consumption dwarf other nations', the region's remaining 700 million citizens have access to roughly as much electricity as do the 38 million citizens of Poland.

Much goes to industry: a single aluminum smelter near Mozambique's capital, Maputo, gobbles four times as much power as the entire rest of Mozambique. On average, the World Bank says, fewer than one in four sub-Saharan Africans are hooked to national electricity grids.

Moreover, some grids are so poorly maintained that electricity suppliers get paid for as little as 60 percent of the power they generate. The rest is either stolen or lost in ill-maintained networks.

For decades, the region had enough generating capacity — and few enough customers — to tolerate such waste. No more: sub-Saharan nations are adding about a thousand megawatts of generating capacity each year, World Bank experts say, but need up to twice that to keep pace with demand.

Some governments privatized chunks of their power industry in the early 1990s when free-market solutions to public-sector problems were in vogue, leaving it unclear who is ultimately responsible for providing power.

Other governments, as in South Africa, failed to build power plants that experts warned were needed. The government monopoly Eskom, the world's fourth-largest power utility, was advised in a 1998 report that it would run short of power in 2007, but planning and financing problems — not all within the utility's control — stalled upgrades. The forecast was actually optimistic: Eskom began running short in 2006.

Yet South Africa's woes pale beside those of Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation. Only 19 of 79 power plants work, the government said in April. Daily electricity output has plunged 60 percent from its peak, and blackouts cost the economy $1 billion a year, the Council for Renewable Energy in Nigeria says.

Poor management is but one problem. War has devastated the power grid in Congo, in Africa's heart, and stalled plans to develop its vast hydroelectric potential. In Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and parts of West Africa, drought has shrunk rivers and slashed the generating capacity of hydroelectric dams. Drought in Ghana, for example, has crippled gold and aluminum production and set off blackouts in Togo and Benin, which buy power from Ghana.

Once a major power exporter, Uganda now blacks out parts of its capital, Kampala, for as much as a day at a time and has leased two 50-megawatt generators, burning diesel at a time of record oil prices. The demand for hydropower in Uganda and its neighbors, with drought, is blamed by some for a steady reduction in the water level of Lake Victoria, Africa's largest.

Uganda's gas stations are now short of diesel for vehicles — in part, paradoxically, because power shortages are shutting down a pipeline from Kenya. News reports say the nation has spent enough on diesel-fueled power generation to build two hydroelectric dams.

Zambia, where power to customers like Mr. Mwale is rationed almost every day, is a template for such problems. Barely 20 percent of households are wired for power — only 3 percent in rural areas — but the Zambia Electricity Supply Company, known as Zesco, is signing up 10,000 new customers a year, said Christopher Nthala, the utility's transmission director.

Now Zambia is getting a push: a global commodities boom has jolted its moribund metals industry to life. Investors are building two smelters, and doubling the capacity of another, to handle the boom in copper, nickel and other metals, taxing the nation's power supply.

"We've never seen this kind of growth before," Mr. Nthala said.

Once the utility could make up shortfalls by buying power from other utilities in the Southern Africa Power Pool. But today, Mr. Nthala said, neighbors have little surplus to hand out. "Sometimes we get it," he said. "Sometimes we don't."

None of that mollifies customers, who say blackouts are so common that service in much of Lusaka has become totally unreliable.

Many power failures seem to hit Matero, a poor township that is home to maybe a million of Lusaka's estimated three million residents. "Every day — it's either in the morning, when people are going to work or preparing to cook, or in the evening, the prime time when I'm tired and I need to go home and listen to the news and cook my supper," said Bishop Peter Ndhlovu, who leads the 250,000-member Bible Gospel Church, an evangelical movement.

Nighttime prayer meetings in his corrugated-roof chapel have been canceled. Bishop Ndhlovu and others say they lave lost refrigerators, televisions and DVD players to the utility's blackouts and surges.

Most of the township's residents have adapted by turning away from their stoves and instead cooking outdoors, village-style, with homemade charcoal. "Charcoal is going very fast, because they've found out that Zesco is cutting power unpredictably," the bishop said.

On Lusaka's eastern outskirts, Mr. Mwale, the farmer, also has laid in a stock of charcoal — not to cook, but to warm his stock of newborn chicks, which must be kept at a constant 90 degrees for the three weeks after hatching.

He said he worried about the environment. Charcoal production is a major contributor to deforestation in Zambia and nearby nations. But the alternative is to take a loss on his poultry business.

"When they make a loss, they just raise their tariff," he said of Zesco. "When I make a loss, I have to make it up myself. Is that fair?"

Zambia's plan, like the plans of dozens of other nations, is to build its way out of the power crunch. Zesco plans $1.2 billion in generating upgrades and new capacity, financed mostly by China and India. South Africa plans more than $20 billion in upgrades; Congo is contemplating a hydroelectric station that by itself would increase capacity outside South Africa by 50 to 75 percent.

The World Bank says its financing of power projects in sub-Saharan Africa is ballooning, from $250 million five years ago to $660 million last year to $1 billion in 2007.

But many plans remain just that. Issues like creditworthiness, lax regulation, domestic politics and the sheer difficulty of sending power over rundown grids to the customer make outside investments in power stations tougher than they appear, said Tore Horvei, the chief operating officer of CIC Energy Corporation, which is based in South Africa.

The best answer, most experts consulted agree, would be for nations to cooperate on regional power solutions. One or two large regional plants, they say, could supply power more cheaply and efficiently than dozens of smaller ones.

But while that may be logical, Mr. Horvei said, "it's very challenging in practice to do so."

"National pride and everything else comes in," he added.

There is an alternative: saving energy. Namibia plans a wind farm on its southern coast, while in South Africa, Eskom has handed out five million fluorescent bulbs and 140,000 insulating blankets for water heaters, and has paid industrial customers to switch off equipment during periods of high demand.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/opini ... ref=slogin

July 31, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
Why Africa Fears Western Medicine
By HARRIET A. WASHINGTON

TO Westerners, the repatriation of five nurses and a doctor to Bulgaria last week after more than eight years' imprisonment meant the end of an unsettling ordeal. The medical workers, who in May 2004 were sentenced to death on charges of intentionally infecting hundreds of Libyan children with H.I.V., have been freed, and another international incident is averted.

But to many Africans, the accusations, which have been validated by a guilty verdict and a promise to reimburse the families of the infected children with a $426 million payout, seem perfectly plausible. The medical workers' release appears to be the latest episode in a health care nightmare in which white and Western-trained doctors and nurses have harmed Africans — and have gone unpunished.

The evidence against the Bulgarian medical team, like H.I.V.-contaminated vials discovered in their apartments, has seemed to Westerners preposterous. But to dismiss the Libyan accusations of medical malfeasance out of hand means losing an opportunity to understand why a dangerous suspicion of medicine is so widespread in Africa.

Africa has harbored a number of high-profile Western medical miscreants who have intentionally administered deadly agents under the guise of providing health care or conducting research. In March 2000, Werner Bezwoda, a cancer researcher at South Africa's Witwatersrand University, was fired after conducting medical experiments involving very high doses of chemotherapy on black breast-cancer patients, possibly without their knowledge or consent. In Zimbabwe, in 1995, Richard McGown, a Scottish anesthesiologist, was accused of five murders and convicted in the deaths of two infant patients whom he injected with lethal doses of morphine. And Dr. Michael Swango, ultimately convicted of murder after pleading guilty to killing three American patients with lethal injections of potassium, is suspected of causing the deaths of 60 other people, many of them in Zimbabwe and Zambia during the 1980s and '90s. (Dr. Swango was never tried on the African charges.)

These medical killers are well known throughout Africa, but the most notorious is Wouter Basson, a former head of Project Coast, South Africa's chemical and biological weapons unit under apartheid. Dr. Basson was charged with killing hundreds of blacks in South Africa and Namibia, from 1979 to 1987, many via injected poisons. He was never convicted in South African courts, even though his lieutenants testified in detail and with consistency about the medical crimes they conducted against blacks.

Such well-publicized events have spread a fear of medicine throughout Africa, even in countries where Western doctors have not practiced in significant numbers. It is a fear the continent can ill afford when medical care is already hard to come by. Only 1.3 percent of the world's health workers practice in sub-Saharan Africa, although the region harbors fully 25 percent of the world's disease. A minimum of 2.5 health workers is needed for every 1,000 people, according to standards set by the United Nations, but only six African countries have this many.

The distrust of Western medical workers has had direct consequences. Since 2003, for example, polio has been on the rise in Nigeria, Chad and Burkina Faso because many people avoid vaccinations, believing that the vaccines are contaminated with H.I.V. or are actually sterilization agents in disguise. This would sound incredible were it not that scientists working for Dr. Basson's Project Coast reported that one of their chief goals was to find ways to selectively and secretly sterilize Africans.

Such tragedies highlight the challenges facing even the most idealistic medical workers, who can find themselves working under unhygienic conditions that threaten patients' welfare. Well-meaning Western caregivers must sometimes use incompletely cleaned or unsterilized needles, simply because nothing else is available. These needles can and do spread infectious agents like H.I.V. — proving that Western medical practices need not be intentional to be deadly.

Although the World Health Organization maintains that the reuse of syringes without sterilization accounts for only 2.5 percent of new H.I.V. infections in Africa, a 2003 study in The International Journal of S.T.D. and AIDS found that as many as 40 percent of H.I.V. infections in Africa are caused by contaminated needles during medical treatment. Even the conservative W.H.O. estimate translates to tens of thousands of cases.

Several esteemed science journals, including Nature, have suggested that the Libyan children were infected in just this manner, through the re-use of incompletely cleaned medical instruments, long before the Bulgarian nurses arrived in Libya. If this is the case, then the Libyan accusations of iatrogenic, or healer-transmitted, infection are true. The acts may not have been intentional, but given the history of Western medicine in Africa, accusations that they were done consciously are far from paranoid.

Certainly, the vast majority of beneficent Western medical workers in Africa are to be thanked, not censured. But the canon of "silence equals death" applies here: We are ignoring a responsibility to defend the mass of innocent Western doctors against the belief that they are not treating disease, but intentionally spreading it. We should approach Africans' suspicions with respect, realizing that they are born of the acts of a few monsters and of the deadly constraints on medical care in difficult conditions. By continuing to dismiss their reasonable fears, we raise the risk of even more needless illness and death.

Harriet A. Washington is the author of "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present."
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UN commits peacekeepers to Darfur

Steven Edwards
CanWest News Service


Wednesday, August 01, 2007



CREDIT: Chip East, Reuters
Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, left, arrives for a meeting with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in New York on Tuesday.

After months of wrangling, the United Nations agreed Tuesday to send 19,000 peacekeepers to Darfur to join an African Union force that has been unable to quell the violence.

The move came after an impassioned speech by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown about western-led efforts to bring peace to the region -- and his idea for a new global commitment to end world poverty.

He announced 11 other world leaders had signed up to his Commitment to Act -- including Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

By joining the group, Harper commits Canada to push for a UN summit next year to review the limited progress the world has made in meeting development goals set at the 2000 UN Millennium Summit.

That conference may in turn lead to new global pressure on Canada and other rich countries to dramatically increase overseas aid so that Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are achieved by the 2015 target date.

"The message for Darfur is that it is time for change," Brown told a UN audience during his first visit to the world body since he succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister last month. "And I am here to say that it's also time for change so that we can meet the world's Millennium Development Goals."

On Darfur, the 15 members of the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution that will create the UN's biggest peacekeeping operation -- as long as Sudan honours a pledge to admit the soldiers.

The breakthrough came after Sudan and its veto-wielding Security Council ally China -- which has extensive oil interests in the African country -- agreed to wording that limits the amount of force the peacekeepers can use.

On his anti-poverty initiative, Brown said the MDGs were a "million miles" from being met. "I believe the scale of the challenge is such that we cannot now leave it to some other time and some other people, but must act now, working together," he said.

The Commitment to Act contains no specifics on what new funds may be needed, but the UN has long pushed for the "O.7 solution" -- rich countries giving 0.7 per cent of their national incomes in aid.

Canada currently gives around 0.34 per cent -- meaning overseas aid would have to more than double to meet the UN standard. This is despite a finding by Hudson Institute, a Washington-based think tank, that Canada gives around one per cent of its national income in foreign aid when charitable donations are included.

The Darfur force, to be called the UN African Union Mission in Darfur (Unamid), is expected to cost up to $2 billion US a year. UN assessments will charge Canada almost three per cent of that amount. Canada may also add to its current separate commitment to help the AU force with troop transports. Eleven Canadian forces members are involved in that operation, and 103 armoured vehicles are on loan to African units.

"We must now move forward in all haste (to) put in place the complex and vital peacekeeping operation. . . ." UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said following the vote. "Member states must provide every support -- especially troop and police contributing countries."

The deal on Darfur follows a ceasefire last year that Canada helped broker, but which collapsed in part because some rebel groups had not signed on
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/opini ... nted=print
August 3, 2007
Editorial
A First Step to Save Darfur

The United Nations Security Council has at last taken a meaningful step toward stopping the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region, authorizing a joint United Nations-African Union peacekeeping force to begin operations this fall. With 26,000 soldiers and police officers, it will be the world’s largest peacekeeping effort.

The Security Council should have acted a long time ago. The cost of four years of temporizing is at least 200,000 people dead, 2.5 million driven from their homes and a crisis that has spilled over the borders into Chad and the Central African Republic.

Sudan’s government must now follow through on its promises to support rather than obstruct the effort: providing the landing strips, flight clearances and on-the-ground cooperation the international force will need.

The core of the mission is protecting the endangered civilians of Darfur, enforcing peace agreements negotiated between armed rebel groups and the Sudanese government, suppressing attacks by any side and curbing illegal arms shipments. While this sort of peacekeeping is urgently needed, Darfur needs a lot more help if the killing is to finally end.

Fundamentally, the fight in Darfur — some 600 miles west of Sudan’s capital, Khartoum — is over scarce resources and the Sudanese government’s deadly discrimination against the region. While newly tapped oil wealth is flowing into Sudan, almost all of it is going to the capital’s elite and next to none to Darfur. When people there rose in revolt, Khartoum launched a genocidal repression carried out by army-backed militias known as the janjaweed. Darfur is also internally divided between nomads and farmers forced to compete for dwindling water supplies.

Stopping the slaughter would require not only disarming the janjaweed, but bringing all of Darfur’s rebel groups into the still partial peace agreement. An effort to do that begins today in Tanzania.

Reaching a comprehensive political settlement will require a change in mentality, starting with the discriminatory mentality of Khartoum. And to keep a new internal war from erupting again over resources, there will also have to be a new framework for the region’s development.

World pressure, begun by grass-roots campaigners, but joined early on by President Bush and more recently by China and the Arab League, is finally being felt in Khartoum. That pressure will have to continue so that Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, finally understands that he will not be allowed to turn Khartoum into a bubble of oil-fed prosperity while Darfur’s people are murdered and raped and the survivors left to die of hunger, thirst and disease. And that pressure will have to continue in the crucial months ahead if the new peacekeeping force is to succeed.

Stopping the slaughter must come first. But the challenge of saving Darfur does not end there.
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http://select.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/op ... nted=print
August 6, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
Mr. Bush, Here’s a Plan for Darfur
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Frustrated by the genocide he is tolerating in Darfur, President Bush has suggested to aides on occasion that maybe the U.S. should just send troops there.

He alluded to that when he told a woman in Tennessee who asked him about Darfur: “The threshold question was: If there is a problem, why don’t you just go take care of it?” Mr. Bush was talked out of the idea by Condi Rice, who told him that the U.S. just couldn’t start another war in a Muslim country. So, as Mr. Bush told the questioner: “I made the decision not to send U.S. troops unilaterally into Darfur.”

That was the right decision. The Sudanese regime would use our invasion as a rallying cry against infidels and make the crisis harder to resolve.

But the upshot was that Mr. Bush, lacking a military option, hasn’t taken up other options. He seems genuinely appalled by the horrors of Darfur — he raises them regularly with foreign leaders, even when aides haven’t put them on his talking points — yet he has done little, apparently because he doesn’t know quite what to do. So here are some practical suggestions.

First, the administration should invest far more energy toward seeking a negotiated peace between rebels and government — the only long-term solution to the slaughter. Instead, the diplomatic focus has been on U.N. peacekeepers, and they are a terrific addition but not a solution in themselves.

The preliminary step is for the rebels to form a united negotiating front, and they are now meeting in Tanzania to do so. The U.S. desperately needs to assist that process to the hilt.

Second, we should back an international appeal for Sudan to release Suleiman Jamous, an elder who is one of the best hopes for uniting the rebel factions and leading them to peace.

Third, we need to work with other countries to insist that Sudan stop importing tens of thousands of Arabs from neighboring countries to repopulate those areas where it has slaughtered the local population. These new settlements seal the demographic consequences of genocide, outrage the survivors and make peace harder to achieve.

Fourth, we need to increase intelligence coverage over the area, and release occasional satellite photos so that Sudan knows it is being watched. Releasing a photo of the beleaguered Gereida camp, for example, would reduce the chance that Sudan will slaughter its 130,000 occupants.

Fifth, Mr. Bush can join Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown in the trip they have discussed to Chad. They should also publicly invite the leaders of China and Egypt, two countries that are critical to pressuring Sudan, to join them.

Sixth, the U.S. can quietly encourage Muslim leaders to push for peace. Malaysia’s prime minister, who is also the head of a group of Islamic countries, has prepared a peace proposal, and Saudi Arabia is interested in helping.

Seventh, Mr. Bush can use the bully pulpit. He can give a prime-time speech or bring Darfuri refugees to the White House for a photo-op.

Eighth, the U.S. should begin contingency planning in case Sudan starts mass slaughters of people in camps, or in case Sudan resumes its war against its south. If the former, we could secure camps and create a corridor to bring survivors to Chad; if the latter, we should arm South Sudan and perhaps blockade Port Sudan.

Ninth, we need to work much more with China, which has the most leverage over Sudan. The goal should be to get China to suspend arms transfers to Sudan until Khartoum makes a serious effort at peace.

Tenth, we can work with France to stabilize Chad and Central African Republic. President Sarkozy is pushing for European peacekeepers to rescue both countries after Sudanese-sponsored proxy invasions, and he deserves strong support.

Finally, we should work with Britain and France to enforce the U.N.’s ban on offensive military flights in Darfur. At a minimum, we should seek U.N. sanctions for Sudan’s violations. In addition, when Sudan bombs a village, we can afterward destroy one of its Chinese-made A-5 Fantan fighter bombers that it keeps in Darfur.

Many aid workers disagree with this suggestion, for fear that Sudan will retaliate by cutting off humanitarian access. But after four years, I think we need to show President Omar Hassan al-Bashir that he will pay a price for genocide. And he values his gunships and fighter bombers in a way he has never valued his people.

You are invited to comment on this column at Mr. Kristof’s blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground.
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There is a multimedia show giving highlights of the essay linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/world ... ref=slogin

August 7, 2007
Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival
By LYDIA POLGREEN

TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.

"This is our family's story," he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. "It was written in 1519."

The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten outpost's future.

A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu's dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.

"I am a historian," Mr. Haïdara said. "I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past."

This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge of a renaissance.

"We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa," said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. "This is our chance to regain our place in history."

The South African government is building a new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city's musty family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.

The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu's only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu's new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links to some of the history stored here, while American charities began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr. , the Harvard professor of African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.

This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it.

The geography that has doomed Timbuktu to obscurity in the popular imagination for half a millennium was once the reason for its greatness. It was founded as a trading post by nomads in the 11th century and later became part of the vast Mali Empire, then ultimately came under the control of the Songhai Empire.

For centuries it flourished because it sat between the great superhighways of the era — the Sahara, with its caravan routes carrying salt, cloth, spices and other riches from the north, and the Niger River, which carried gold and slaves from the rest of West Africa.

Traders brought books and manuscripts from across the Mediterranean and Middle East, and books were bought and sold in Timbuktu — in Arabic and local languages like Songhai and Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg people.

Timbuktu was home to the University of Sankore, which at its height had 25,000 scholars. An army of scribes, gifted in calligraphy, earned their living copying the manuscripts brought by travelers. Prominent families added those copies to their own libraries. As a result, Timbuktu became a repository of an extensive and eclectic collection of manuscripts.

"Astronomy, botany, pharmacology, geometry, geography, chemistry, biology," said Ali Imam Ben Essayouti, the descendant of a family of imams that keeps a vast library in one of the city's mosques. "There is Islamic law, family law, women's rights, human rights, laws regarding livestock, children's rights. All subjects under the sun, they are represented here."

One 19th-century book on Islamic practices gives advice on menstruation. A medical text suggests using toad meat to treat snake bites, and droppings from panthers mixed with butter to soothe boils. There are thousands of Korans and books on Islamic law, as well as decorated biographies of the Prophet Muhammad, some dating back a millennium, complete with diagrams of his shoes.

Mr. Haïdara is a descendant of the Kati family, a prominent Muslim family in Toledo, Spain. One of his ancestors fled religious persecution in the 15th century and settled in what is now Mali, bringing his formidable library with him. The Kati family intermarried into the Songhai imperial family, and the habit Mr. Haïdara's ancestors had of doodling notes in the margins of their manuscripts has left an abundance of historical information: births and deaths in the imperial family, the weather, drafts of imperial letters, herbal cures, records of slaves, and salt and gold traded.

Moroccan invaders deposed the Songhai empire in 1591, and the new rulers were hostile to the community of scholars, who were seen as malcontents. Facing persecution, many fled, taking many books with them.

West African sea routes overtook the importance of the old inland desert and river trade, and the city began its long decline. When the first European explorers stumbled across the once fabled city, they were stunned at its decrepitude. René Caillié, a French explorer who arrived here in 1828, said it was "a mass of ill-looking houses built of earth."

Mr. Caillié's description remains accurate today. For all its vaunted legend, Timbuktu remains a collection of low mud houses along narrow, trash-choked streets backed by sand dunes, difficult to reach and unimpressive on first sight. In 1990, Unesco designated it an endangered site because sand dunes threatened to swallow it.

Many tourists who come here stay for just a day, long enough to buy a T-shirt and get their passports stamped at the local tourism office as proof they have been to the end of the earth. In a recent Internet campaign to choose the new seven wonders of the world, Timbuktu failed to make the cut, much to the chagrin of the city's tour guides and boosters.

Yet the city has been making a slow comeback for years. Its manuscripts, long hidden, began to emerge in the mid-20th century, as Mali won its independence from France and the city was declared a Unesco world heritage site.

The government created an institute named after Ahmed Baba, Timbuktu's greatest scholar, to collect, preserve and interpret the manuscripts. Abdel Kader Haïdara, no relation of Ismaël Diadié Haïdara, an Islamic scholar whose family owned an extensive collection of manuscripts, started an organization called Savama-DCI dedicated to preserving the manuscripts. After a visit from Mr. Gates in 1997, he was able to get help from American charities to support private family libraries. With the support of the Ford and Mellon foundations, families began to catalog and preserve their collections.

But time, scorching desert heat, termites and sandstorms have taken a toll on the manuscripts. Most were locked in trunks or kept on dusty shelves for centuries, and their pages are brittle and crumbling, waterlogged and termite-eaten. In the village of Ber, two hours of dusty track east of Timbuktu, Fida Ag Mohammed tends to several trunks of manuscripts that have been in his family, a line of Tuareg imams, for centuries.

"This is a biography of the Prophet Muhammad," he said, gingerly lifting one manuscript bound in crumbling leather. "It is from the 13th century."

The neat lines of Arabic script were clearly legible, but the edges of many pages had crumbled away, the words trailing off into nothingness.

Savama is in the process of building a new mud-brick library for Mr. Mohammed's books, but until it is ready he has no means to preserve his manuscripts. To rescue their contents, if not their physical substance, he was copying the most fragile texts by hand, using an ink he makes himself out of gum.

Now, when the scorching heat of the day eases, a favored sunset activity in Timbuktu is watching the Libyan earthmovers dig the new canal. Like tiny toy trucks in a giant sandbox, they push mountains of sand to coax the Niger to flow here, bringing more water and new life to the dune-surrounded city.

"To see this machine makes me more happy because it means things are changing in Timbuktu," said Sidi Muhammad, a 40-year-old Koranic scholar, splayed on a dune with a group of friends, gossiping and fingering their prayer beads.

The Malian government has encouraged Islamic learning to flourish here once again, and there are dozens of Koranic schools where children and adults learn to read and recite the Koran. Training programs are teaching men and women how to classify, interpret and translate the documents, as well as preserve them for future study.

Abdel Kader Haïdara, who in many ways started the renaissance by wandering the desert in search of manuscripts, persuading families to allow their treasures to see the light of day, said Timbuktu's best days lie ahead of it.

"Timbuktu is coming back," he said. "It will rise again."
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Aga Khan's Service to Humanity Has Few Equals in the World

The Nation (Nairobi)
OPINION
10 August 2007
Posted to the web 9 August 2007

By Salim Lone
Nairobi

AS MUSLIM TEENAGERS growing up in Nairobi in the 1950s, the thing that interested us most about the Ismaili community was that some of its girls were available for discreet dates. Our girls were forbidden to do so.

There were other differences. Their girls wore skirts and blouses rather than the "modest" Muslim clothing. Their weekly service in the "jamat khana" took place on Friday evening, while our prayers in the mosque were at noon. Ismailis also seemed rather clannish, so in all, we didn't believe them to be real Muslims.

We were, of course, completely wrong. Basheer Mauladad, a leading Kenyan Muslim who as a young man in 1955 met the-then Aga Khan, Sir Sultan Mohammed Shah, at his London Jubilee Ball in July 1955, remembers being moved by his love for Islam - and for Africa. He still has his autographed inscription from that day: "Don't ever forget the progress of African Muslims."

As for Ismaili girls, it is not surprising that they were so progressive so early. Sir Sultan was so committed to educating them that he told parents that their education took precedence over their sons', since educated mothers were more beneficial to their families.

WHEN IN 1945 HE MET THE 15-year-old Malek, wife subsequently of Kurban Bhaloo, the community's leader in the 1980s and 1990s, Sir Sultan asked his secretary to ensure she would be able to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor.

So the seeds of dynamism that mark the Ismaili community's contemporary work were laid a long time ago. But it is the extraordinary leadership of Sir Sultan's grandson, Karim, who inherited the mantle 50 years ago at the age of only 20, which is responsible for the community's nationalistic commitment, and the modernisation and professionalism of its orientation and institutions.

The result has been the community's stunning success in economic and social achievements in Kenya, while at the same time providing a secure safety net for vulnerable Ismailis against poverty and social exclusion.

The key to this success has of course been the visionary leadership of the Aga Khan, accompanied by his ability to master the workings of the array of institutional operations.

Mr Mauladad, who developed a close relationship with the Aga Khan when serving him on boards and as chairman of committees between 1967 and 1994, recalls how at a board meeting, His Highness examined a major document produced by an eminent Ismaili.

"He picked up weaknesses and contradictions in the proposal that had eluded others," recounted Mr Mauladad. "The mortified author immediately said it would be redone. Such candidness made all his officials know that they always had to give of their best."

Leaders, of course, achieve only what their followers deliver. And the Ismaili community in Kenya has certainly delivered through successfully implementing programmes for improving living conditions and opportunities in key areas of national economic, social and cultural life, through institutions overseen at country level by the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN).

A big chunk of our current national leadership has benefited from Aga Khan schools, hospitals and other training institutions, and virtually all the beneficiaries of capacity- building efforts funded by the Aga Khan Foundation in education, health, rural development and civil society organisations, are all non-Ismaili.

And there are also the economic enterprises that the community launched - the Nation and Serena groups, Jubilee Insurance and Diamond Trust financial institutions - that are major players in key sectors of the economy.

"He has instilled in us the spirit of voluntary giving, which is a resonant tradition in Islamic teaching," says Yusuf Keshavjee, who headed the Aga Khan Foundation during most of the last decade and is the first trustee from Africa on the international board of the Aga Khan University. "Its so encouraging seeing that even our youngsters who have trained and are settled abroad return to contribute to the nations in which they grew up."

One of those who has just returned from abroad to give back to the country - without a salary - is Aziz Bhaloo, the new AKDN head. Mr Bhaloo is working day and night co-ordinating the frenetic preparations by 400 primarily young Ismaili volunteers to ensure every aspect of the Aga Khan's four-day visit from Sunday proceeds without a hitch.

MR BHALOO'S IMMEDIATE predecessor, Anil Ishani, who ran AKDN for nine years, said that the commitment to be loyal to the nation in which one lives is a core precept of Islam and is one of the Aga Khan's primary teachings.

The place of Islam in global life has been a central preoccupation of the Aga Khan. He is one of the world's best-known champions of Islam's core beliefs of peace, compassion and tolerance, as well as of its ecumenical orientation, all of which he sees captured in Islamic architecture, one of his great passions. His other great love is education, and he will announce new programmes next week.

There are, of course, the inevitable bad eggs in the community, and a few of the educational and hospital services, including nursing, are creaking a bit now. But I was impressed to find that everyone I talked to was aware of the weaknesses and working to address them.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 2007 The Nation. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com).
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/11/world ... ref=slogin

August 11, 2007
To Curb Illegal Migration, Spain Offers a Legal Route
By VICTORIA BURNETT

TORRIJOS, Spain, Aug. 7 — Fatou Faye was not the first person to head for Spain from her run-down corner of Dakar, the Senegalese capital. Half a dozen friends and relatives left before her, squeezing into wooden fishing boats and wagering their lives on the high seas for the chance of a future in Europe.

"Some succeeded," Ms. Faye said flatly. "Some were sent back. Some drowned."

But there was no dangerous sea voyage for Ms. Faye, a 32-year-old mother of two who came to Spain under circumstances that thousands of her compatriots can only dream of: on a plane, with a visa and a job that pays five times what she earned back home.

Ms. Faye is one of the first Senegalese workers to be hired under a Spanish labor plan that offers legal passage and a one-year work permit to some with the idea that by raising the possibility of reaching Spain legally, young Africans will be dissuaded from throwing themselves on the mercy of the Atlantic.

The program, promoted by the Spanish and Senegalese governments, aims to bring hundreds of workers to Spain this year with renewable one-year visas and jobs. Workers on one-year permits may have their contracts extended, at which point they have the right to bring over their immediate family. Ultimately, officials here say, the plan is to bring in thousands of immigrants through the program.

"I thought, 'Thank God. I will be able to help my father and mother, my brothers and sisters,' " Ms. Faye said of the moment when she heard she had a job waiting for her at Acciona, a major Spanish building and cleaning company.

In January, she flew with 72 others to Spain, where Acciona helped her find the three-bedroom house she shares with four other Senegalese on the edge of this small industrial town. She now earns $960 a month after taxes, as part of a cleaning team at a ham processing factory.

As Europe struggles to cope with an unstinting flow of desperate migrants to its southern shores, Spain's African initiative, a blend of carrots and sticks, has won praise for the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.

Several companies are in the process of hiring people in Dakar to come to work in Spain for a year, potentially more. Those companies include McDonald's; Carrefour, a French retailer; and Vips, a Spanish convenience store chain.

"It's advanced thinking in terms of migration policy," Peter Sutherland, the United Nations special representative for migration, said in a telephone interview. "It's trailblazing."

Supporters of the program say they are under no illusion that it will fix Europe's migration problem.

"When you measure the volume of people we can hire against the needs of their countries, it's a drop in the ocean," said Miguel Ángel García, head of human resources for Vips, which has hired 25 people from Senegal and is in the process of hiring 40 more. "But we just have to keep working, drop by drop."

A surge in sub-Saharan migration last year to the Canary Islands, a Spanish possession that many Africans try to use as a gateway to Europe, prompted Spain to toughen its stance on immigration and, along with the rest of Europe, extend the cordon around its shores with international patrols.

This year, the number of arrivals has fallen steeply: about 6,000 migrants landed in the Canaries in the first seven months, compared to 13,000 in the same period of 2006. Spanish officials and emergency workers based in the Canaries attributed the decline to better maritime surveillance and cooperation from countries like Senegal, as well as rougher seas.

Mr. Zapatero's immigration policy has not always drawn applause. Spain's decision to legalize 600,000 immigrants in 2005 infuriated some European partners, who believe it encouraged a flood of migrants.

But as Europe closes its door to illegal immigrants, Spain is opening a small window of possibility. Labor Minister Jesús Caldera signed an agreement with Gambia on Wednesday to invest $1.3 million to train Gambians who could be recruited to work in Spain. In July, Spain signed similar agreements with Mali and Mauritania.

It is not just for humanitarian reasons that Spain is reaching out to African migrants. Rapid economic growth has forced companies to look abroad to cover a dearth of local labor. Thousands of migrants are hired from Eastern Europe, Morocco and Latin America each year to pick strawberries, wait tables and work in the country's booming construction sector.

"There are parts of Spain where it's impossible to find qualified workers," said Juan Manuel Cruz, head of labor relations for Acciona. He said the group of Senegalese workers was "very well trained, with strong language skills" and had "a huge will to work."

For Ms. Faye, the message behind the new Spanish labor program was clear. Senegal announced the plan after it agreed to take back hundreds of illegal Senegalese migrants from Spain in September.

When Ms. Faye boarded a Spanish government plane bound for Madrid in January, it had just returned a group of illegal Senegalese immigrants to Dakar. No migrant in Spain illegally in the past two years was considered for a job with Acciona.

"There need to be more contracts like this, more possibilities for young people to come here," said Issa Faye, 30, no relation to Fatou. He was earning $130 a month driving a taxi in Dakar when he was recruited by Acciona to work in Torrijos, about 1,800 miles from his home.

Mr. Faye said that getting to Europe was a local obsession. He had made three unsuccessful attempts, once losing about $1,600 to an immigration agent.

"If a person has no alternative, he will board a fishing boat," he said.

Spanish officials say the government approach to African migration squares with existing efforts to raise Spain's profile in the region under a three-year Africa Plan unveiled in 2006. Spain has opened new embassies in Cape Verde, Mali, Niger, Guinea and Guinea-Bissau, and has installed full-time diplomatic representatives in Liberia, Gambia and Sierra Leone.

"We want to completely change the parameters of Spain's relationship with Africa," Bernardino León Gross, secretary of state for foreign affairs, said in an interview.

Even though migration has risen to the top of the agenda, Mr. León said, Spain is trying to maintain a long view and deal with the factors that prompt migrants to leave home in the first place.

Mr. Sutherland of the United Nations said that Spain's approach could serve as an example for Europe. "Immigration involves foreign affairs, health, economics, border affairs, all of those things," he said. Immigration is "clearly a European problem, so the Spanish efforts have to be married into a European policy," he said. "Europe doesn't stop at the Pyrenees."
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Modern Africa needs more than aid
Projects focus on sustainable development

Sheila Rowe
For the Calgary Herald


Sunday, August 12, 2007


A man of brief acquaintance and considerable intelligence recently told me -- only half jokingly -- that he thought the solution to Africa's problems was to "re-colonize." It was not the first time I'd heard the notion.

Such talk is nothing short of heresy to most Africans and non-Africans alike. In truth, neither colonial dominance nor deliverance promised by Western aid has proven effective in addressing the seemingly insurmountable problems of the sub-Sahara.

Modern Africa demands modern solutions -- African initiative meets selective and authentic international partnership.

I met Mwangi Hai and Matolo Nyami at a gas station on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. Three hours drive northeast we arrived at Masinga Dam, a poor but beautiful part of Kenya. As board members of Ndama Development Ltd., Mwangi and Matolo unfolded their vision; a five-star golf course and eco-resort targeted toward the Asian market -- an alternative to the safaris that make up the bulk of Kenya's tourism.

But it's bigger than that. The business plan includes social responsibility. Forty acres of the 200-acre resort site will be dedicated to crop cultivation. With readily accessible irrigation water, there's potential for growing a vast array of produce. From the profits of their enterprise, the company aims to directly assist at least 50 area families with food, clothing, shelter and schooling.

Mwangi's rationale for this benevolence is simple.

"Helping other people is part of our identity as a Christian company. If we do not impact anyone else, God does not fulfill our existence," he says.

As an agricultural engineer, Mwangi has helped farmers with water harvesting in semi-arid areas during his 24-year career with Kenya's Ministry of Agriculture. The Masinga Dam project aligns with what he's learned.

"The policies in the last five years are showing a sharp need for our own Kenyan investment in arid areas, rather than relief," Mwangi says.

"If you give me food today, tomorrow and the next day, I don't become independent." Ndama is not opposed to limited foreign aid input; both Canada's Hope For the Nations and U.S.-based Love Mercy are considering management of a 20-acre portion of land specifically dedicated for benevolent purposes.

Ryan Schumacher, an organic agricultural specialist with Love Mercy, says it's the kind of aid Africa needs.

"We need to honour them. With a little bit of help, they can do so well. We don't need to commercialize them or turn them into the west." Matolo is convinced the Masinga Dam project has the right elements of African business, appropriate foreign aid and homegrown charity to succeed.

"If our business does not affect the nation, perhaps we need to rethink what we are doing here." David Githugu was educated as a lawyer. Today, he's a pastor with Covenant Church, an outgrowth of the thriving Nairobi Chapel. When the church expanded their work to a Nairobi slum, their assigned pastor immediately saw a need to care for HIV/AIDS orphans, children who Githugu says were, "not infected themselves, but were not cared for by anyone." He finds a "growing sense of awakening" among Africans regarding compassion toward their fellow Kenyans.

"I don't need to do much convincing. The Lord is working in people's hearts, even in those who don't know Him. People are talking of investing in their own continent." Meanwhile, his wife Pauline, also a former lawyer now works for FAULU, a Kenyan Christian microfinance company. When a Maasai community southeast of Nairobi submitted a proposal to build a two classroom schoolhouse, FAULU answered the need for funds.

"The African context of growing together in communities finds resonance," Pauline asserts. "Doing something for your own strikes a chord in a lot of hearts." With construction of the school almost completed, village elder Josiah Ole Kirisuah is grateful.

"The Maasai are marginalized even as much as people in the slums," he says. "The nearest school is 10 kilometers away so there are times when the children can't go. There's always a desire to help the children." In 2001, Pastor Patrick Siabutu had a vision for helping street children in the western Kenyan city of Bungoma.

He completed a survey of the population in 2002 and hasn't looked back. With assistance from Hope For The Nations, Siabutu is overseeing construction of a Children's Home that will house 21.

In the meantime, he's giving young men like 18 year old Chrisandus Wafula a chance for a different life.

Wafula has been on the street since he was orphaned six years ago. He's learning carpentry; his dream is to someday build a wall unit. Today, he's fixed a stool.

"Life has changed," he tells me simply.

With patience and counselling, Siabutu sees street kids learning and growing.

"It's a process, not through forcing them." Siabutu didn't wait for foreign assistance to start his work among the street kids of Kitale. His views on foreign aid and local African initiative are as clear as his vision.

"Do I value you because you give money or because you give me an idea? And how do you value me? It's about relationship. If we're not careful, money can destroy relationships." "In these last days, God is joining people to do much together. We are able to learn from two experiences, African and North American. When we put these together, the results can be so good." Sheila Rowe is a calgary freelance writer.

****
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Sierra Leone voters cast eyes to future
War-weary nation hungers for recovery

Daniel Flynn and Katrina Manson
Reuters


Sunday, August 12, 2007


CREDIT: Katrina Manson, Reuters
People queue in long lines to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections in western Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, on Saturday. About 2.6 million people are registered to vote. (photo)

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone - From jungle clearings to city slums, Sierra Leoneans voted in huge numbers on Saturday in the first polls since UN peacekeepers left two years ago, hoping to speed their nation's recovery from a 1991-2002 civil war.

Many arrived before dawn and patiently queued for hours in the dilapidated capital Freetown to vote for a new president and 112 parliamentarians.

Some sheltered under umbrellas from the drizzle, while others clasped radios to their ears.

"Maybe now things are going to get better," Freetown resident Abubakar Kamara said before voting in the west of the city. "We must vote in peace and show the world that Sierra Leone is a peaceful country."

Five years after the end of the diamond-fuelled war, which killed 50,000 people, Sierra Leone remains the second least developed nation on earth.

Most people earn less than a dollar a day and lack basic amenities. Many are hungry for a change.

In the presidential race, Ernest Bai Koroma of the opposition All People's Congress is expected to mount a strong challenge to Vice-President Solomon Berewa, 69, candidate for the ruling Sierra Leone People's Party.

President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah, re-elected on a wave of postwar euphoria in 2002, is stepping down as required by the constitution amid anger at corruption which many voters believe has drained away the country's substantial foreign aid.

"We have diamonds, gold and even oil. We should be one of the richest countries in Africa, but where does the money go?" said Abdul Bassie, a 24-year-old student, after voting in the second city of Bo.

Days of torrential downpours eased on Saturday, to the relief of officials who feared the rainy season could disrupt voting.

The head of the national electoral commission said only one of 6,176 polling stations had failed to open.

Ballots have been transported by trucks, canoes and porters to polling stations in savannah, jungles and mountains.

Some 2.6 million people are registered to vote -- roughly half the population -- and many arrived early to oversee the work of electoral staff amid concerns over fraud. Aside from a few scuffles, voting was generally peaceful.

Long lines snaked around voting booths in settlements of corrugated iron roofs set deep in the sprawling jungle, a Reuters correspondent travelling by helicopter said.

If no candidate wins more than 55 per cent, a run-off will be held, probably in early September. The election commission will announce results as they come in, but expects a meaningful trend to take several days to emerge.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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August 13, 2007
China, Filling a Void, Drills for Riches in Chad
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN

KOUDJIWAI, Chad — The small plane flew in low over a scorched, peppercorn scrubland, following a broad, muddy river that was all elbows on its run to the southeast.

The first hint of humanity came with the appearance of an immense grid for seismic testing, laboriously traced through the brush. Finally, a lonely, hulking steel drilling platform popped into view.

Chad is as geographically isolated as places come in Africa. It is also among the continent’s poorest and least stable countries, the scene of recurrent civil wars and foreign invasions since it gained independence from France in 1960.

None of that has put off the Chinese, though. In January, they bought the rights to a vast exploration zone that surrounds this rural village, making the baked wilderness here, without roads, electricity or telephones, the latest frontier for their thirsty oil industry and increasingly global ambitions.

The same is happening in one African country after another. In large oil-exporting countries like Angola and Nigeria, China is building or fixing railroads, and landing giant exploration contracts in Congo and Guinea.

In mineral-rich countries that had been all but abandoned by foreign investors because of unrest and corruption, Chinese companies are reviving output of cobalt and bauxite. China has even become the new mover and shaker in agricultural countries like Ivory Coast, once the crown jewel in France’s postcolonial African empire, where Chinese companies are building a new capital, in Yamoussoukro, paid for by Chinese loans.

Surging Chinese interest in this continent has helped bring about what many Africans believe is the most important moment since the end of the cold war, when democracy was spreading in Africa and Western nations spoke of a “peace dividend” that might ease African poverty.

That blush of interest in Africa quickly faded, though, as did several of the new democracies, and Africans and Westerners have regarded each other warily ever since. Westerners complain about chronic corruption and ineffective government, while Africans lament broken promises on aid and a hostile international economic system.

The Chinese have stepped into this picture, coming to struggling countries like Chad with deep pockets, fewer demands on how African governments should behave and an avowed faith in everyone’s ability to prosper.

As Beijing’s ambassador to this country, Wang Yingwu, said at his residence in Ndjamena, Chad’s capital, where the electricity repeatedly failed, “We are exempting Chadian goods from import duties.” When the interviewer noted that Chad produced almost nothing besides oil, Mr. Wang was undaunted, saying, “If they don’t produce things today, they will tomorrow.”

To help make that happen, China plans to build the country’s first oil refinery, lay new roads, provide irrigation and erect a mobile telephone network, for starters.

With such intensive efforts across the continent, China’s trade with Africa topped $55 billion in 2006, up from less than $10 million in the 1980s. To achieve this growth, it has bypassed multinational institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and flouted many of their lending criteria, including minimum standards of transparency, open bidding for contracts, environmental impact studies and assessments of overall debt and fiscal policies.

In some ways, the new Chinese model of doing business in Africa is a throwback to an earlier era of Western involvement that is now widely seen as disastrous. In that era, borrowing countries typically had to work with companies from the lending nation, limiting competition and giving priority to business over development. Today, China takes things even further, signing long-term deals for rights to natural resources that allow countries otherwise unworthy of credit to repay their debt in oil or mineral output.

“In what manner has Africa progressed, in what sector?” said the Chadian president, Idriss Déby, referring to decades of close ties to the West. “Whatever the good will of Africa’s old friends and the old partners in its development, it has not progressed at all.”

Still, major doubts hang heavily in the air. Will China’s hunger for raw materials enable this continent to take off? Or will Beijing’s willingness to spend whatever it needs in Africa, without regard to fiscal prudence, democracy, honest business practices and human rights, produce a replay of booms past, enriching local elites but leaving the continent poorer, its environment despoiled and its natural resources depleted?

A Test Case for China

There are few better places than Chad to watch for signs of how China’s African gambit will pay off. Chad ranks just four places from the bottom on the United Nations scale of human development, yet it is emerging as a critical piece in China’s economic push in a broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa, beginning with Sudan and extending in virtually every direction.

Despite advanced prospecting by French and other Western firms dating back to the 1970s, Chad’s oil had never been tapped. The nation was simply too unstable and the price of oil too low to justify investing much here. The oil that had been found was of low quality, and there was no practical way to get it out.

That changed in 2000, when the World Bank agreed to help finance a $4.2 billion, 665-mile pipeline connecting Chad to Cameroon on the condition that oil revenues be used to fight poverty.

Chad’s revenues quickly outstripped expectations, but have not gone into quelling its immense poverty. Mismanagement and fraud have beset the World Bank plan from the start.

Beyond that, Chadian rebels with bases in Sudan have been trying to depose Mr. Déby, so he pressed the World Bank to relax its rules on how to spend the country’s oil money. A compromise was reached, and he went on a military spending spree, buying guns, aircraft and armored vehicles for his troops, along with a fleet of armored Humvees that stop traffic as they zoom about Ndjamena’s dusty, potholed streets.

Seeking an even freer hand with the country’s oil bonanza, Mr. Déby’s government also hinted that it could find other partners willing to invest in Chad, especially with the price of oil so high.

Then, in 2006, Chad ended a relationship with Taiwan and recognized mainland China, and the floodgates opened. China bought the rights to several oil exploration zones in the country from a Canadian company and has gone from bit player to center stage in Chad’s affairs, confident that it can wring smart profits from the most inhospitable conditions.

“The Canadians and the Americans are only interested in really big finds,” said a veteran Western oil production engineer who works under contract here for the China National Petroleum Company, the C.N.P.C. “Anything else they think is not worth their time. The Chinese have a different approach. They are happy with the smaller finds, just lots of them. “They seem to have a different time frame, too,” the engineer added. “They plan to be here for a while.”

Indeed, the Chinese dream in this region consists of making finds here and there, using the World Bank financed pipeline to transport the oil and eventually building new pipelines to connect with a Chinese-built grid in Sudan.

This vision requires not only finding more oil, but establishing peace between Chad and Sudan. Darfur, the chaotic western Sudanese region where at least 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million been displaced in a government-backed counterinsurgency campaign, lies next to China’s exploration zones. Human rights groups maintain that Chinese weapons have played a major role in the carnage in Darfur.

Beijing’s recent diplomatic activity in the region may be explained by these Chinese oil interests as much as by American pressure on China to help stop the killing in Darfur.

“It used to be that when we had problems with our neighbor sending mercenaries to invade us that none of our complaints before the United Nations would pass, because China blocked them,” said President Déby. Since breaking relations with Taiwan and opening the door to Chinese investment, he added, “we have been able to raise our concerns without taboo.”

One topic that neither side was willing to say much about was the World Bank’s foundering efforts to ensure that petroleum revenues were well spent here. “I know the current pipeline is part of a project involving the World Bank and Esso,” said Dou Lirong, the general manager of C.N.P.C. International in Chad, calling the authority over revenues “a very complicated” matter. “I don’t know too much about it,” Mr. Dou continued, “but I’ve read a little bit on the Web.”

In fact, the very idea of the World Bank project is anathema to China’s deeply held noninterference policy, which has for decades governed China’s foreign policy and development. Underlying both is a kind of golden rule — China considers other countries meddling in its affairs unacceptable, and it assumes its friends feel the same way.

Cao Zhongming, deputy director of the Department of African Affairs, in the Chinese Foreign Ministry said: “China won’t interfere with Chad’s internal affairs. As a policy, that doesn’t change. If C.N.P.C., World Bank and Chad reach an agreement, it’s between them.” But, he added, if Chad does not accept the World Bank arrangement, “neither C.N.P.C. or the Chinese government would impose it.”

“The Chinese government,” he said, “won’t enforce something that Chad thinks interferes with their internal affairs.”

To China’s new African allies, this notion is a breath of fresh air. After years of hewing to the latest fads in international development doled out by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Western donors and the United Nations, African governments have grown weary of the strings attached to foreign aid.

Thérèse Mekombe, vice chairwoman of the committee that monitors Chad’s oil money to make sure it is used properly, expressed surprise about the Chinese executive’s uncertainty about how oil revenues would be handled. Brandishing a copy of the law, she said all of the country’s oil earnings fell under the control of the World Bank arrangement. “The Chinese need to understand that they cannot arrive in a country and just impose their way of thinking,” Ms. Mekombe said.

A ‘Win-Win’ Business Plan

Chinese officials almost invariably describe their relationship with African countries as a win-win — based on mutual respect, aimed at joint prosperity and free of the overtones of exploitation and paternalism that critics worldwide say have governed much of the West’s postcolonial relationship with Africa.

China plans to build a petroleum refinery and a cement factory in Chad, both desperately needed in a landlocked country forced to import basic goods. Indeed, lowering gas and cement prices, which are among the highest in Africa, could do more to reduce poverty than the efforts of the World Bank and other donors combined, Mr. Dou suggested. “We can make a contribution to Chad,” he said.

Asked for an example of what win-win relationships look like, Mr. Dou offered what might seem an unlikely choice: Sudan. In its capital, Khartoum, he said, signs of China’s impact are everywhere.

“If you go to Sudan, you see paved roads,” he said. In the past, “the cars in Sudan had no turn signals, they point directions by hand. Now there are many good cars.”

Asked whether the oil money was really benefiting the Sudanese people, not just their rulers, Mr. Dou replied: “It is difficult for me to say. I am an engineer.”

To some critics, the answer is clear. “China’s no-strings-attached approach is problematic, particularly if its effect, if not its intent, is to undermine others’ efforts to change situations on the ground,” said Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch. “Often what is happening,” he added, “is underwriting of repression.”

Few Benefits for the People

Even with binding arrangements governing the use of oil revenues, Chad’s people have largely missed out.

In the Mayo-Kébbi region, where much of China’s feverish oil exploration is happening, the city of Bongor hardly looks like the capital of the booming oil region it is set to become. Along its tree-fringed main avenue, the briskest business is preparing the city’s signature dish — a chicken so scrawny it can be grilled whole in a few minutes.

At the lone hospital, a moldering colonial-era structure, a handful of workers tended to dozens of patients suffering from the classic ailments of poverty: hunger, diarrhea, malaria, tuberculosis, AIDS, pneumonia. Civil servants were on strike, seeking to force the government, which according to World Bank estimates will collect $1.2 billion in oil money this year, to increase their meager salaries.

Pauline Maratangou, a 53-year-old midwife, did show up to work, and it was a good thing. Half a dozen pregnant women with bellies fit to burst patiently awaited her services.

“Vas-y, vas-y, vas-y!” she cooed, urging an 18-year-old mother to push. The maternity ward had only a padded bench for deliveries and no stirrups. The floors and walls were caked with dirt — the orderlies were on strike. Ms. Maratangou worked with quick, efficient motions, pouring iodine over the crown of the baby’s head as it emerged, trying to keep mother and child free of infection.

At last a little boy popped out, his head slightly misshapen, like a peanut shell.

“Ah, he’s a handsome boy,” she said, holding him aloft, feet first, waiting for his first bellowing cries. There was only time to snip his umbilical cord, weigh him — five and a half pounds, not too bad for this part of the world — and swaddle him in rags before the next mother, also 18, was ready to hop on the table still slick with afterbirth slime.

The grim conditions help explain why Chad has among the highest maternal and infant mortality rates in the world. One of every five children will die before age 5.

“We hear that our country has oil, but we see no evidence of it here,” said Ms. Maratangou, the midwife.

Officials in Bongor say money from Chinese investments could fix schools and hospitals, or provide jobs and new roads. Under Chadian law, 5 percent of the oil revenue is supposed to go back to the community where the oil was drilled.

“We have very high hopes,” said Khalifa Malloum, the secretary general of Bongor’s regional government. “If the West does not want to invest in us, let the Chinese come. We welcome them. They don’t tell us what to do and they bring development. They are good partners.”

But Limassou Saleh, a community organizer in Bongor, said he was deeply skeptical. “Chad is maybe the most corrupt country in the world,” Mr. Saleh said. “We have a long history of human rights violations, of lack of transparency, of exploitation. China has a reputation for corruption. They are one of the worst human rights abusers. They have no record of transparency. What would we want with a country like that? Only to make our own problems worse.”

Fan Wenxin contributed reporting from Shanghai.
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August 14, 2007
Editorial
Firing an AIDS Fighter

What is it about South Africa's devastating AIDS epidemic that President Thabo Mbeki just doesn't want to understand? Mr. Mbeki has catastrophically failed to face up to his country's greatest challenge.

For years, he associated himself with crackpot theories that disputed the demonstrable fact that AIDS was transmitted by a treatable virus. He also insisted that he knew nobody with AIDS, even though nearly 20 percent of South Africa's adult population are estimated to be living with H.I.V. And he suggested that antiretroviral drugs were toxic, and he encouraged useless herbal folk remedies instead. As a result, thousands of South Africans have needlessly sickened and died.

Now Mr. Mbeki has fired one of the few effective AIDS fighters in his administration, Deputy Health Minister Nozizwe Madlala-Routledge.

Ms. Madlala-Routledge provided a brief interlude of sanity and seriousness after the health minister — who recommended beetroot and garlic therapy — fell ill last fall. Over the next nine months, Ms. Madlala-Routledge promoted an ambitious but attainable goal of cutting the number of new H.I.V. infections in half and treating 80 percent of people in need by 2011.

But after her boss, the beetroot and garlic advocate, returned to work early this summer, that new seriousness was shoved aside. And, last week, so was the woman responsible for it.

The official explanation for Ms. Madlala-Routledge's firing was that she did not have official approval for a trip she made to Spain to attend an AIDS conference. The more likely reason was the visit she made to Frere Hospital in the Eastern Cape Province in July where, ever outspoken, she condemned the abominable conditions there as a national emergency.

Unlike other African countries, South Africa has the financial resources and the medical talent to successfully take on its H.I.V./AIDS epidemic. What it lacks is a president who cares enough about his people's suffering to provide serious leadership. Only two more years remain in Mr. Mbeki's presidential term. Unless he finally starts listening to sensible advice on AIDS, he will leave a tragic legacy of junk science and unnecessary death.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/18/world ... ref=slogin

August 18, 2007
New Power in Africa
Entrepreneurs From China Flourish in Africa
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and LYDIA POLGREEN

LILONGWE, Malawi — When Yang Jie left home at 18, he was doing what people from China’s hardscrabble Fujian Province have done for generations: emigrating in search of a better living overseas.

What set him apart was his destination. Instead of the traditional adopted homelands like the United States and Europe, where Fujian people have settled by the hundreds of thousands, he chose this small, landlocked country in southern Africa.

“Before I left China,” said Mr. Yang, now 25, “I thought Africa was all one big desert.” So he figured that ice cream would be in high demand, and with money pooled from relatives and friends, he created his own factory at the edge of Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital. The climate is in fact subtropical, but that has not stopped his ice cream company from becoming the country’s biggest.

Stories like this have become legion across Africa in the past five years or so, as hundreds of thousands of Chinese have discovered the continent, setting off to do business in a part of the world that had been terra incognita. The Xinhua News Agency recently estimated that at least 750,000 Chinese were working or living for extended periods on the continent, a reflection of deepening economic ties between China and Africa that reached $55 billion in trade in 2006, compared with less than $10 million a generation earlier.

Even when Mr. Yang arrived here in 2001, he said, he could go weeks without encountering another traveler from his homeland. But as surely as his investments in the country have prospered, he said, an increasingly large community of Chinese migrants has taken root, and now runs everything from small factories to health care clinics and trading companies.

During the previous wave of Chinese interest in Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, an era of radical socialism and proclaimed third-world solidarity, European and American companies held sway over economies in most of the continent. Here and there, though, the Chinese made their presence felt, often in drably dressed, state-run work brigades that built stadiums, railroads and highways, crushing rocks and doing other labor by hand.

Today, in many of the countries where the new Chinese emigrants have settled, like Chad, Chinese-owned pharmacies, massage parlors and restaurants serving a variety of regional Chinese cuisines can be found; the Western presence, once dominant, has steadily dwindled, and essentially consists nowadays of relief experts working international agencies or oil workers, living behind high walls in heavily guarded enclaves.

At first, this new Chinese exodus was driven largely by word of mouth, as pioneers like Mr. Yang relayed news back home of abundant opportunities in a part of the world where many economies lie undeveloped or in ruins, and where even in the richer countries many things taken for granted in the developed world await builders and investors.

Conditions like these often deter Western investors, but for many budding Chinese entrepreneurs, Africa’s emerging economies are inviting precisely because they seem small and accessible. Competition is often weak or nonexistent, and for African customers, the low price of many Chinese goods and services make them more affordable than their Western counterparts.

Chinese Expansion

You Xianwen sold his pipe-laying business in Chengdu, in southwest China, this year to move to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, to join a startup company with a Chinese partner he had met only online. “Back where I come from we are pretty independent people,” Mr. You, 55, said. “My brothers and sisters all supported my decision to come here. In fact, they say that if things really work out for me, they would like to move to Africa, too.”

Mr. You said he had considered other African countries before settling on Ethiopia, including Zambia. “Luckily I didn’t decide to go there,” he said, explaining that he had been frightened by the recent anti-Chinese protests in that country.

His new business, ABC Bioenergy, builds devices that generate combustible gas from ordinary refuse, providing what Mr. You said would be an affordable alternative source of energy in a country where electricity supplies are erratic and prices high.

Mr. You’s partner here, Mei Haijun, first came to Ethiopia a decade ago to work at a Chinese-built textile factory and has since married an Ethiopian woman, with whom he has a child. “When I first came here you could go two months without seeing another Chinese person,” he said. “But it is a different era now. There’s a flight to China every day.”

The pickup in air traffic between China and countries like Ethiopia now has Chinese companies scrambling to add new routes, as the Chinese government and big Chinese companies increase their stake in Africa.

Much of that activity reflects an intense appetite for African oil and mineral resources needed to fuel China’s manufacturing sector, but big Chinese companies have quickly become formidable competitors in other sectors as well, particularly for big-ticket public works contracts. China is building major new railroad lines in Nigeria and Angola, large dams in Sudan, airports in several countries and new roads, it seems, almost everywhere.

One of the largest road builders, China Road and Bridge Construction, has picked up where the solidarity brigades of an earlier generation left off. The company, which is owned by the Chinese government, has 29 projects in Africa, many financed by the World Bank or other lenders, and it maintains offices in 22 African countries.

On a recent Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Beijing brimming with Chinese contractors, workers from Road and Bridge and other companies swapped notes on the grab bag of countries they work in, and debated about the difficulties of learning Portuguese and French in places like Mozambique and Ivory Coast.

Africans view the influx of Chinese with a mix of anticipation and dread. Business leaders in Chad, a central African nation with deepening oil ties to China, are bracing for what they suspect will be an army of Chinese workers and investors.

“We expect a large influx of at least 40,000 Chinese in the coming years,” said Renaud Dinguemnaial, director of Chad’s Chamber of Commerce. “This massive arrival could be a plus for the economy, but we are also worried. When they arrive, will they bring their own workers, stay in their own houses, send all their money home?”

In Zambia, where anti-Chinese sentiment has been building for several years, merchants at the central market in Lusaka, the capital, said that if Chinese people wanted to come to Africa, they should come as investors, building factories, not as petty traders who compete for already scarce customers for bottom-dollar items like flip-flops and T-shirts.

“The Chinese claim to come here as investors, but they are trading just like us,” said Dorothy Mainga, who sells knockoff Puma sneakers and Harley Davidson T-shirts in the Kamwala Market in Lusaka. “They are selling the same things we are selling at cheap prices. We pay duty and tax, but they use their connections to avoid paying tax.”

Although Chinese oil workers have been kidnapped in Nigeria and in Ethiopia, where nine were killed by an armed separatist movement in May, the growing Chinese presence around the continent has produced few serious incidents.

Misunderstandings are common, however, and resentments inevitably arise. Africans in many countries complain that Chinese workers occupy jobs that locals are either qualified for or could be easily trained to do. “We are happy to have the Chinese here,” said Dennis Phiri, 21, a Malawian university student who is studying to become an engineer. “The problem with the Chinese companies is that they reserve all the good jobs for their own people. Africans are only hired in menial roles.”

Another frequent criticism is that the Chinese are clannish, sticking among themselves day and night.

In Addis Ababa, in what is a typical arrangement for most large companies, the 200 Chinese workers for the Road and Bridge Corporation live in a communal compound, eating food prepared by cooks brought from China and receiving basic health care from a Chinese doctor.

“After a day off you wonder what you’re doing here, so we like to keep working,” said Cheng Qian, the country manager for the road-building company in Ethiopia. He added that his family had never visited him during several years of work here.

African Ambivalence

Sometimes, the Chinese approach has created serious frictions with African workers. At a leading hotel here in Lilongwe, breakfast guests stared as an agitated Chinese traveling salesman, sweating profusely, screamed at his staff minutes before his pitch on nutritional supplements was set to begin.

“You say it is not your fault, but the way you are doing things is just stupid, stupid,” the man sputtered before a clutch of African assistants, who looked humiliated. “You people are unbelievable.”

When the salesman finally left the room, members of the restaurant staff gathered near the door and vented their disgust. “We don’t need people like that to come here and colonize us again,” one said.

After nearly seven years in Malawi, Yang Jie, the ice cream maker, seems to have learned better. Greeting his workers at the ice cream factory, he begins the day by asking, “How did you sleep last night?”

One quickly replied, “Very well,” sounding a bit formal.

“Don’t tell me a lie,” Mr. Yang answered with a sly, friendly smile. “It’s O.K. to tell me your worries.”

Howard W. French reported from Lilongwe and from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lydia Polgreen from Lusaka, Zambia, and Dakar, Senegal.
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Post by kmaherali »

East African Federation:

Leaders decide gradual pace
SUKHDEV CHHATBAR in ARUSHA
Daily News; Tuesday,August 21, 2007 @00:03

EAST African Community (EAC) summit resolved here yesterday that the East African Federation (EAF) should be established gradually and step-by-step.

The decision was made by the sixth extra-ordinary summit, which was attended by Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda (Chairman of EAC), Mwai Kibaki of Kenya, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and host President Jakaya Kikwete. Burundi's President Pierre Nkurunziza was represented by his second deputy Vice-President Gabriel Ntisezerana.

President Amani Karume attended the meeting as an observer.

The EAC Secretary General, Ambassador Juma Mwapachu, told a press briefing at the end of the summit that the leaders' aim was "to build a strong and a vibrant EAF".

He said that the leaders called for additional sensitization of the people on the community, including its benefits. But the summit encouraged the secretariat to further deepen regional integration.

The idea of fast-tracking EAF was mooted at a summit of regional presidents in 2004 and a commission under Kenya's Attorney General Amos Wako was assigned to prepare a strategic plan. The Commission had set 2013 as the year for EAF.

Mid-last year national committees were formed in partner states to collect public views on fast tracking the EAF. According to Ambassador Mwapachu, Uganda and Kenya agreed to fast tracking idea, but Tanzania overwhelmingly rejected the idea. Tanzanians opted for a gradual formation of EAF that would be led by a single president.

Ambassador Mwapachu said the leaders considered a report on the EAC position on negotiations of an EAC economic-partnership agreement with the European Union. "The summit has directed regional trade ministers and EAC ministers to meet and explore ways of negotiating as a bloc."

This, he said, was a follow up to an earlier directive issued in June, this year in Kampala.

An EAC source said that there was a broad consensus that EAC being a customs union, should negotiate as one Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with EU, rather than having EAC member states negotiating under different regional organizations.

According to the source, by last Sunday Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda were ready for EAC-EPA negotiations. Kenya, which is the current chair of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern African (COMESA), was yet to reconsider its stand.

The summit also amended treaty clauses to allow participation of Burundi and Rwanda as full members of the regional organization. Rwanda and Burundi formally joined the community in June.

With the amendments, Rwanda and Burundi each can appoint nine legislators to the EA Legislative Assembly. Each can also appoint two judges each to EA Court of Justice.

The two countries will also be represented in other organs of the Secretariat and will have to appoint deputy secretaries general.

The old EAC collapsed in 1977 because of divergent political and economic perceptions of the partner states. The new EAC was revived in 1999 and is popularised as 'people-centred'.
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/world ... ?th&emc=th

August 21, 2007
New Power in Africa
China’s Trade in Africa Carries a Price Tag
By LYDIA POLGREEN and HOWARD W. FRENCH

KABWE, Zambia — The courtyard in front of the Zambia China Mulungushi Textiles factory is so quiet, even at midday, that the fluttering of the ragged Chinese and Zambian flags is the only sound hanging in the air.

The factory used to roar. From the day it opened more than 20 years ago, the vast compound had shuddered to the whir of rollers and the clatter of mechanical weaving machines spooling out millions of yards of brightly colored African cloth.

Today, only the cotton gin still runs, with the company’s Chinese managers buying raw cotton for export to China’s humming textile industry. Nobody can say when or even if the factory here will reopen.

“We are back where we started,” said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city’s biggest employers. “Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn’t progress. It is colonialism.”

Chinese officials and their African allies like to call their growing relationship a win-win proposition, a rising tide that lifts all boats in China’s ever-widening sea of influence.

This year, China pledged $20 billion to finance trade and infrastructure across the continent over the next three years. In Zambia alone, China plans to invest $800 million in the next few years.

From South Africa’s manganese mines to Niger’s uranium pits, from Sudan’s oil fields to Congo’s cobalt mines, China’s hunger for resources has been a shot in the arm, increasing revenues and helping push some of the world’s poorest countries further up the ladder of development.

But China is also exporting huge volumes of finished, manufactured goods — T-shirts, flashlights, radios and socks, just to name a few — to those same countries, hampering Africa’s ability to make its own products and develop healthy, diverse economies.

“Most of our countries have been independent for 35 to 50 years,” said Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African entrepreneur and a political analyst. “Yet they have failed to develop manufacturing for a variety of reasons, and for the Chinese that’s a huge opportunity. We are a very important market for China.”

On the one hand, Chinese imports give Africans access to goods and amenities that developed countries take for granted but that most people here could not have dreamed of affording just a few years ago — cellular telephones, televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, computers. And cheaper prices on more basic items, like clothing, light bulbs and shoes, mean people have more money in their pockets.

“There is no doubt China has been good for Zambia,” said Felix Mutati, Zambia’s minister of finance. “Why should we have a bad attitude toward the Chinese when they are doing all the right things? They are bringing investment, world-class technology, jobs, value addition. What more can you ask for?”

But across Africa, and especially in the relatively robust economies of southern Africa, there are clear winners and losers. Textile mills and other factories here in Zambia have suffered and even closed as cheap Chinese goods flood the world market, eliminating jobs in a country that sorely needs them.

The Chinese investment in copper mining here has left a trail of heartbreak and recrimination after one of the worst industrial accidents in Zambian history, a blast at a Chinese-owned explosives factory in Chambishi in 2005 that killed 46 people, most of them in their 20s.

“Who is winning? The Chinese are, for sure,” said Michael Sata, a Zambian opposition politician who campaigned in last year’s presidential election on an anti-China platform. He lost, but with a surprisingly strong showing, and his party, the Patriotic Front, won many seats in local and parliamentary elections in Lusaka, the capital, and the Zambian industrial heartland, where China has made its biggest investments.

“Their interest is exploiting us, just like everyone who came before,” he said. “They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new colonizers of Africa.”

Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the country’s role in Zambia. But Chinese diplomats across Africa and top officials in Beijing have emphasized the money and opportunity they bring to Africa. In Zambia, for example, government officials say that the Chinese are sending dozens of workers for training in China and that their investments will create thousands of high-wage jobs.

Measured in some ways, Zambia’s economy is booming. Copper prices have soared from 75 cents a pound in January 2003 to more than $3 a pound this year, driven in large part by Chinese demand. That demand has pushed Zambia’s long-dormant copper mines into record production.

China’s Nonferrous Metals Corporation, a state-owned company, purchased rights to develop a mine in Chambishi, in the heart of the copper belt, in 1998, and it plans to build factories in an export processing zone that will bring as many as 60,000 jobs, according to government officials.

But China’s growing presence in global trade is wiping out thousands of jobs in countries with fledgling manufacturing sectors like Zambia and South Africa.

Despite relatively low wages in many countries, African manufacturers find it very hard to compete, arguing that China’s currency policies undervalue the yuan and give Chinese exporters a huge advantage.

Many industries in China also benefited at various points from subsidies and free or low-cost government financing, making their costs lower. Beyond that, there are major infrastructure problems in Africa, where industry struggles with inadequate roads and railways, and unreliable electricity and water supplies.

“So who do you blame?” said Martyn J. Davies, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. “You can’t blame China for being too competitive. China is doing what every other emerging market is doing.”

The textile and clothing industry, one of the engines China used to fuel its own economic expansion in the 1980s, has been particularly hard hit in Africa. For decades, African countries exported large quantities of clothes and textiles to developed countries under a trade agreement intended to protect European and American markets from competition from China and others, while encouraging exports from the world’s poorest nations. But the trade provision, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, expired in January 2005, putting these countries in direct export competition with China.

Africa found itself once again on the losing end of globalization. If copper is Zambia’s bread and butter, manufacturing should have been its main meal — just as many economies across the globe have progressed from producers of raw materials to low-tech manufacturing and beyond, a well-trod path to development.

Ms. Zimba, 40, a quality-control worker at the plant here who asked to be identified only by her common last name because she feared losing her termination benefits, first got a job at the factory in 1989, after moving to Kabwe from the depressed eastern region of the country with her brother.

She earned a little less than $100 a month, as well as free health care and a pension, and a little three-room house in the workers’ compound. But since she lost her job, her family’s standard of living has plummeted. The water was turned off, and Ms. Zimba does not know where she will come up with next semester’s tuition for her 20-year-old daughter’s trade school.

“We will see what God brings me,” Ms. Zimba said.

For Ms. Zimba, the transition from salaried work to selling goods for pocket change in the market is a devastating setback to a grim fate she thought she had escaped — her mother was widowed when Ms. Zimba was 15 and reduced to selling in the market as well.

“I am right back where I started,” Ms. Zimba said.

As for the Chinese, she bitterly refers to them as “briefcase investors.”

“They just fill their briefcases with our wealth and leave,” she said.

Such anti-Chinese sentiment has been brewing here for several years. When China’s president, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia earlier this year he received the usual red carpet treatment from his Zambian host, President Levy Mwanawasa , but the reception from many ordinary Zambians was nasty. A trip to the site of China’s big new investment, Chambishi, had to be scuttled entirely because of fears of unrest, and the circumstances of the industrial disaster there are still not entirely understood.

The mine at Chambishi had for decades been run by the government, and had limped along while copper prices slumped in the 1980s. When the Non-ferrous Metal Mining Group bought the rights to develop the mine in 1998, local residents cheered, hoping for new jobs.

In 2003, Keegan Chibuye got one as a mechanic at the mine, a job he was grateful to have in a country where even skilled men like himself struggled to find work. Mr. Chibuye’s sister, Vennie, 27, also found work for the Chinese, as a computer specialist at an explosives factory on the mine’s grounds. Ms. Chibuye was the eldest of seven, and her parents had sent her to Britain at great expense, to a technical college in Derbyshire, where she earned a diploma in information technology. A brother, Mwape, got a job as a casual worker in the explosives factory, for a little more than a dollar a day, to save money for college.

Keegan Chibuye said he had concerns about the way the Chinese managers were running the mine almost from the beginning. “They were careless,” he said. “Safety was not their priority. Everything was about productivity no matter what.”

On April 20, 2005, Keegan Chibuye heard an ear-splitting boom that would shatter his world — a huge blast at the explosives factory.

There was almost nothing left of Vennie and Mwape left to bury. Virtually all the bodies had been incinerated. Only fragments were buried just off the main road at the graveyard built by the Chinese owners — a finger, an ear, a bit of scalp. As the 46 headstones testify, most of the workers were young, born after 1980.

Officials of the company that runs the mine did not respond to repeated telephone requests for an interview to talk about working conditions and safety at the mine. But at the Chinese workers’ compound in Chambishi, Han Yaping, who identified himself as the company’s human resources manager, said that the company hoped to help Zambia develop.

“China works here in cooperation with Zambia,” Mr. Han said in English. “It is friendship.”

Asked why the wages at the mine were lower than those paid by other companies, Mr. Han said that Zambian workers had limited skills and no experience with technology. By way of example, he said, a Chinese worker trying to remove a screw would use a screwdriver.

“But a Zambian worker,” he continued with a chuckle, “he use his finger.”

A look around the compound for Chinese workers illustrates why China is able to do business so profitably in Africa. While Western companies must provide relatively plush and private accommodations to attract expatriate workers, the Chinese employees at Chambishi live in barracks-like conditions, several to a room. A table for table tennis and a dusty soccer field are the only recreational facilities.

“We like simple,” Mr. Han explained.

Many African scholars and political leaders say Africa has no need for the colonial baggage and paternalism of the West, and they welcome the Chinese approach of cowboy capitalism. “Let the Chinese come,” said Mahamat Hassan Abakar, a lawyer in Chad, a former French colony in central Africa with deepening ties to China. “What Africa needs is investment. It needs partners. All of these years we have been tied to France. Look what it has brought us.”

In South Africa, dozens of clothing and textile companies closed, according to trade organizations representing manufacturers. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost because of Chinese imports, and in response the government negotiated temporary voluntary restraints on some items.

But Iqbal Meer-Sharma, deputy director of South Africa’s Department of Trade and Industry, said that the clothing industry was ultimately less valuable to South Africa than the other benefits of its growing relationship with China.

“We’ve always known we have a dysfunctional relationship with the West,” Mr. Sharma said. “Now with China we have a relationship as equals. They don’t look down on us. They are not condescending.”

In an era of ruthless global competition, Mr. Sharma said, Africa should stop trying to compete with China at what it does best — producing cheap goods for export — and find other ways to compete instead.

In the meantime, many Africans are caught in limbo.

Clarissa Fabrik, 19, lives at the edge of Atlantis, a depressed industrial town in South Africa’s Western Cape. She had hoped to earn an engineering degree, courtesy of the scholarship fund from her mother’s clothing workers’ union benefit package. But her mother’s factory closed, and now she is trying to teach herself basics from a textbook on industrial electronics when she is not at her retail job.

“I don’t know what the future will bring,” she said.

Lydia Polgreen reported from Kabwe, and Howard W. French from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
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Post by kmaherali »

Does Uganda deserve an investor like The Aga Khan?
Friday, 24th August, 2007

His Highness the Aga Khan

SHILLINGS AND CENTS

By Paul Busharizi

This week, President Yoweri Museveni and his Highness the Aga Khan, laid the foundation stone for the $800m Bujagali dam.

The dam will be the single largest power investment ever undertaken by the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – the private sector lending arm of the World Bank. It is also the largest single infrastructure development of The Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED) Network worldwide.

The next day, the Aga Khan laid another foundation stone in Munyonyo for a $50m Academy of Excellence that will "nurture the spirit of anticipation and agility, adaptability and adventure."

Sub-Saharan Africa needs more investors like the Aga Khan.

Investors, whose profit motive is tempered by a sense of social responsibility, which probably comes with his responsibility as the head of the Ismaili sect.

Sub-Saharan Africa needs investors who have a long- term view and are willing to put their money in parts of the world that are not attractive investment destinations because of their corrupt governments, lack of physical and social infrastructure.

Uganda is not the most God-forsaken place the Aga Khan has invested in. A multi-million rehabilitation of the war-damaged Kabul Serena Hotel is probably the best example.

Sub-Saharan Africa needs investors like the Aga Khan who have got a more bankable international profile than the countries they invest in.

By leveraging such reputations, sub-Saharan Africa can attract the kind of investment that will make a long-lasting impression.

In the Bujagali project, AKFED partner sponsor is the Sithe Group, an affiliate of the private equity firm the Blackstone Group, who as of end of June controlled assets of $18b.

In July, the Blackstone Group put down $26b for leading global hospitality company the Hilton Hotels Corporation, which has 2,800 hotels worldwide.

No one can understate the benefit of the 250 mega watts Bujagali project to Uganda but co-opting the Blackstone Group into the project may have long-term investor benefits for Uganda.

But the Aga Khan also stands out as an example of how resources, pooled and invested wisely over time, can create meaningful change for communities.

Funds or donations from his minority Ismaili community are channelled into his development vehicles, which invest in schools, hospitals, hotels and in any number of industries through the entrepreneurial Ismaili community.

As a country grappling with the issues of poverty and development, partnering the Aga Khan presents opportunity and useful lessons.

Whereas the Aga Khan has a philanthropic agency, his most telling interventions have come not by throwing money at poverty (which never works anyway) but through investments in infrastructure both social – hospitals, schools, media, hotels and physical – power generation, manufacturing, property and telecommunications.

The Aga Khan's "aid" model best mirrors the saying, "Give a man a fish and he will keep coming back for more, but teach him to fish and he will feed himself."

The fact that the Aga Khan chooses to invest in Uganda is credit enough. But Uganda should go beyond attracting his kind of investor, investors whose profit motive is coloured by a sentimental attachment to this country.

Investors like the Aga Khan are in short supply and unlike him, most of them do not feel obligated to have a presence in Uganda.

Uganda needs to make itself attractive to other hardnosed businessmen who unfortunately, or fortunately, control the bulk of the world's capital flows.

Let us not delude ourselves that investors are falling over themselves to be here – high returns on investment not withstanding.

Top of the list of things to do in this direction is the removal of corruption, strengthening of the Government institutions and improvement of road, rail and power infrastructure.

A study in the 1990s showed that businessmen spend as much greasing the machinery of government with bribes as they do in paying taxes.

In business, money follows good management. Capital is a coward, it seeks stability and predictability. Investment rule number one is do not lose money. Investment rule number two is don't forget rule number one.

So even if Uganda has very enviable returns on investment, the risks that accompany it are just not worth it. The investor will take a lesser return in South Africa or South East Asia or Europe than risk burning his fingers here.

pbusharizi@...

http://www.newvision.co.ug/D/8/220/583121
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Post by kmaherali »

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/
August 29, 2007, 9:11 am
On the Ground: Josh Ruxin in Rwanda
By Josh Ruxin

Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last couple of years living in Rwanda. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker.

With the world’s eyes finally shifting toward Darfur, and the most optimistic thinking about post-genocide life there, it is time to look closely at Darfur’s southern neighbor, Rwanda, for hope and instruction.
In many respects, Rwanda was abandoned after its 1994 genocide. Outside observers assumed that it would soon plunge back into chaos. For the last two years, I have been living there, though I’ve been engaged in development projects there since 2000. Rwanda is a crucible of sorts: having resurrected itself after the genocide, it has steadily demonstrated that a sub-Saharan country that falls down can rise again. In spite of the extraordinary challenges the country faces – it is, after all, desperately poor and land-locked — it may well grow to be a great success story that points the way for other countries to follow.

The Mayange Health Center(photo)
What has been most striking about working in Rwanda is the relative lack of corruption and the speed with which donor funds can be converted to meaningful results. In April 2006, two of my initiatives — the Access Project and the Millennium Villages Project Rwanda – began working to improve the management and delivery of services in Mayange Health Center. Mayange is situated in Bugesera district — the virtual epicenter of the 1994 genocide where 60 percent of the population was wiped out and crushing poverty dominates the landscape — and is fast transforming itself into a model of success. The Rwandan government chose this site to address what have been seen as unsolvable development issues in the region. The land is utterly eroded and where elephants roamed just three decades ago, there is little but hardened parched earth. Mayange, Rwanda, up until about a year ago, was a dusty hopeless sector with 25,000 abjectly poor people.

The first day my team arrived at the health center, we literally could not find a nurse or a patient. While the sign to the center proudly acknowledged that it had been built by the U.N. Refugee Agency in 1999, there was no sign that health services had been offered since. Fluorescent lights in every room testified to the center’s aspirations, but the lack of a connection to the power grid meant that they were mere accessories. When we finally tracked down the nurses, we learned that they saw roughly 5 patients per day, had no drug stock, no running water, no management or coordination. Working with local government and the Ministry of Health, our team quickly turned around the situation: today there are on average 150 consultations per day, with another 200 or so people who come for ancillary care (well-baby programs, emergency feeding.)

JacquelineJacqueline — a proud community leader whose weather-worn face makes her 40 years appear like 60 — has been at the front lines of the change in Mayange. She recently told me that the success in agriculture and health now allowed her more time for farming. She used to be in charge of funeral arrangements for the children and mothers who died on a weekly basis just last year, but there has not been a death in the past nine months.

This small success is being replicated elsewhere in Rwanda, and must be replicated on a larger scale. In the weeks to come, I look forward to sharing with you how this was accomplished. I also want to share the stories of the Rwandans I know and how they are rising to the challenge.
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Post by kmaherali »

Fragile Congo peace threatened

Hany Besada and Ariane Goetz
For The Calgary Herald

Friday, August 31, 2007

Last week, Uganda's Security Minister, Amama Mbabazi, threatened to re-enter neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), following two cross-border incursions by Congolese gunmen, who were thought to have been linked to the army.

Kinshasa stands accused of killing a British worker from the oil-exploring Heritage Corp after a 15-minute exchange of fire with the Uganda People's Defence Force and private guards. The oil company is believed to have carried out illegal prospecting in DRC's half of Lake Albert, which the company shares with Uganda.

During the skirmishes, four Ugandan soldiers were captured by Congolese government soldiers while patrolling the lake. This came days after some armed persons had crossed over from the DRC and killed three civilians in Butogota's Kanungu District in southwestern Uganda. The raid escalated tensions, with both armies reinforcing their presence on the border.

Many people in the region are worried that if cross-border incursions continue and diplomatic consultation to resolve the latest crisis fails, the Congo could see itself entangled in yet another conflict with its neighbours -- one that could potentially spill well beyond their shared borders.

All does not bode well for a country that is slowly emerging from the brink of total state collapse and regional conflict, which was regarded as the deadliest since the end of the Second World War, and in which an estimated 3.8 million people died, mostly from starvation and disease, while millions of others were displaced between 1998 and 2003.

To add to the misery of the Congo's belligerent population living in the turbulent eastern provinces, Yakin Erturk, special representative of the UN Human Rights Council, recently gave a haunting summary of the extreme human rights violations that seemingly had become characteristic in many parts of the country.

Erturk warned that, as a result of five years of civil war and the power struggle between internal and external actors, violence and sexual abuse as a means of ethnic or political strife had become a way of life for many people in the region.

Her latest report found that extreme sexual violence against women was pervasive to a point where local authorities have stopped prosecuting perpetrators. On her visit to the region, she met with rape victims whose gruesome accounts told of how they had been forced to eat excrement off the flesh of their murdered relatives, or how they had been raped while their male relatives had often been held at gunpoint by gangs and rebels roaming the forests, as well as by government soldiers sent to keep the peace in the volatile region.

Despite an improvement in the overall security situation in the country, following the pull-out of Ugandan-Rwandese troops after the signing of peace accords between the DRC and its two neighbours in the east, despite the formation of a transitional government from the main warring factions in 2003, which had been supported by both the Rwandan and Ugandan governments during the previous conflict, and despite last year's first multi-party elections since independence in 1960, peace and stability remain elusive for many people outside Kinshasa and its surrounding areas.

More than one million people remain internally displaced in the east of the country. Relief agencies warned that if the situation did not improve, this might result in the country experiencing a severe humanitarian crisis, caused by malnutrition, disease and the consequences of violence and abuse. Operations by the reunified Congolese Armed Forces against militias, and human rights violations committed by both the Congolese Army and militias, still cause people to flee their villages.

Often, alongside ethnic constellations, confrontations represent a struggle for political influence and control over the country's natural and human resources, such as the ample rainfall, fertile soil and the second largest rain forest in the world, as well as a variety of mineral resources.

Historically, the mining of diamonds, copper, cobalt, zinc and other base metals, as well as petroleum extraction, accounted for approximately 75 per cent of total export revenue.

However, to the government's detriment, conflict is often incited by former local leaders who fear losing their sphere of influence in the region, due to the disarmament program aimed at their combatants.

Thus far, most government reforms directed at security and at regaining control over the country's land mass of forests, have been less than successful, which is partially due to a lack of political will.

More particularly, the central feature of the security reform and state-building measures, i.e., the reintegration of combatants from different factions of the war into the reunified Congolese Armed Forced, has turned foul. Low salaries, poor living conditions, the absence of a legal structure, and the lack of training and monitoring of military personnel has resulted in the reunified forces becoming a major source of human rights violations, and a threat to the volatile peace in the country's hinterland, while neighbouring states, and Uganda in particular, reflect the current heightened tensions between Kampala and Kinshasa.

As both countries scramble to avoid another all-out war, pressure is mounting on the Congolese authorities to rein in their ill-disciplined forces in the east, who have become a liability rather than an asset to the state's security dilemma.

Given the government's lack of capacity to control the national territory, fully integrate former militias into unified armed forces and retrain army personnel, renewed instability, in more parts of the country is an ever-present reality.

In recent months, the Congolese government has come to learn an all-important lesson: in order to augment its authority across the country, it must not only strengthen the rule of law in the east, but also raise the revenue necessary to distribute peace dividends among all sectors of society, particularly among disgruntled former militias and army personnel.

Hany Besada is the senior researcher working on fragile states at the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Ont., and Ariane Goetz, from the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin, is an intern at CIGI.
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Post by kmaherali »

Swaziland's king ponders 14th wife at annual dance

Herald News Services

Monday, September 03, 2007

Tens of thousands of chanting, bare-breasted maidens paraded before King Mswati III of Swaziland Sunday, many of them hoping to catch his eye and be picked out to become his 14th wife.

The annual Umhlanga, or reed dance, which finishes Monday at the royal residence in Ludzidzini, is a display of national tradition and pride in one of Africa's smallest countries.

As part of the ceremonies, Mswati III, Africa's last absolute monarch, is entitled to choose a new bride from among the maidens to add to his current 13 wives. It is an honour that cannot be refused.

"He is a great king to us," said Nothando Nhlengethwa, 21, leader of the maidens.

But despite her words, not all Swazis feel the same way. Around 70 per cent of the population live on less than 50 cents a day, in stark contrast to the wealth of the royal family.

"We don't want a benevolent dictator," said Mario Masuku, president of the banned People's United Democratic Movement, adding that the king had sought $45 million to buy a private jet when hundreds of thousands of people needed food aid. "That's his weakness, he likes women and he likes money, irrespective of the . . . economic conditions."

****

There is an interesting video about the issue linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/03/world ... ref=slogin

September 3, 2007
Chaos in Darfur on Rise as Arabs Fight With Arabs
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NYALA, Sudan, Aug. 28 — Some of the same Arab tribes accused of massacring civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan are now unleashing their considerable firepower against one another in a battle over the spoils of war that is killing hundreds of people and displacing tens of thousands.

In the past several months, the Terjem and the Mahria, heavily armed Arab tribes that United Nations officials said raped and pillaged together as part of the region's notorious janjaweed militias, have squared off in South Darfur, fighting from pickup trucks and the backs of camels. They are raiding each other's villages, according to aid workers and the fighters themselves, and scattering Arab tribesmen into the same kinds of displacement camps that still house some of their earlier victims.

United Nations officials said that thousands of gunmen from each side, including some from hundreds of miles away, were pouring into a strategic river valley called Bulbul, while clashes between two other Arab tribes, the Habanniya and the Salamat, were intensifying farther south.

Darfur's violence has often been characterized as government-backed Arab tribes slaughtering non-Arab tribes, but this new Arab-versus-Arab dimension seems to be a sign of the evolving complexity of the crisis. What started out four years ago in western Sudan as a rebellion and brutal counterinsurgency has cracked wide open into a fluid, chaotic, confusing free-for-all with dozens of armed groups, a spike in banditry and chronic attacks on aid workers.

United Nations officials said tribal and factional fighting was killing more people than the battles between government and rebel forces, which, except in a few areas, have declined considerably.

Though the recent round of clashes between the splintering groups has not come close to taking as many lives as the thousands who were dying each month during the height of the conflict in 2003 and 2004, many aid officials say they fear that the situation is getting out of control.

"The fragmentation of armed groups is among our major concerns," said Maurizio Giuliano, a spokesman for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Sudan. "This is making the situation even more complex, and more difficult for civilians as well as for humanitarians trying to help them."

The rising insecurity is spelled out in two color-coded maps taped to Mr. Giuliano's wall in Khartoum, the capital. One is from May 2006 and has only a few pockets of orange and yellow danger zones. But on the map from this June, the danger zones are everywhere.

United Nations officials say the militias may be jockeying for power and trying to seize turf before the long-awaited hybrid force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers begins to arrive, perhaps later this year. Today's battlefields are superimposed on yesterday's, with the Arab militias killing one another over the same burned villages and stingy riverbeds where so much blood has already been spilled.

Though many Western diplomats and a seemingly endless supply of advocates have blamed the Sudanese government for arming Arab militias in the first place, an accusation the government denies, several independent observers in Sudan said the government was not driving this phase of the conflict.

"The government is no longer arming the janjaweed," said Col. James Oladipo, the African Union commander in Nyala, in South Darfur. The problem now, he said, is "bandits and factions."

Some aid workers say Darfur is beginning to resemble Somalia, the world's longest-running showcase for AK-47-fed chaos. Highwaymen in green camouflage — rebel fighters? local militia? janjaweed? — routinely flag down trucks and drag out passengers, robbing the men and sexually assaulting the women. Newly empowered warlords are exacting taxes. The galaxy of rebel armies — the Greater Sudan Liberation Movement, the Popular Forces Troops, the Sudan Democratic Group, to name a few new arrivals — keeps expanding, and ideology seems to fade away. Despite peace talks among them in early August, the rebels, mostly non-Arabs, are now also battling themselves.

Among Arabs, one of the most egregious examples of the recent infighting happened on the morning of July 31 near Sania Daleibah, in southern Darfur. Terjem leaders said hundreds of Terjem had gathered to bury an important sheik. Then they were suddenly surrounded. It was Mahria tribesmen, and according to United Nations reports and witness accounts, the Mahria opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and belt-fed machine guns and mowed down more than 60 Terjem.

"It was a massacre," said Mohammed Yacob Ibrahim Abdelrahman, the top Terjem leader. "By our brothers."

The Arab-Arab violence is impeding the slow recovery process that had begun in some parts of Darfur. Around 2.2 million people are stuck in displaced persons camps, though some had been taking the first steps to leave, like villagers from Jimaiza, north of Nyala, who left their camp in July to go back to plant their peanut fields. They were not worried about Arab militias raiding their village, they said. Those days seemed over. But then the Terjem-Mahria feud erupted.

"It was strange," said Abakar Ahmed Abdul Rahman, a leader of the Fur tribe, which is non-Arab and the biggest in Darfur. "A few days after the fighting, a Mahria elder came up to me and said: 'Tell your people not to go back to the camp. They're safe in the village. We don't have a problem with you.' "

But Mr. Abakar shook his head and laughed.

"I know these people," he said. "They killed my wife and burned my hut. I'll never trust them."

Not all Arab tribes joined the bloodletting when Darfur exploded in 2003. But according to United Nations documents, the Mahria and the Terjem did.

The Mahria are nomadic camel herders from northern Darfur, rugged people of the desert whose militias have helped the Sudanese government patrol the long, sandy border with Chad. The Terjem are farmers and cattle herders who lived closely with the Fur. The Mahria knew how to fight. The Terjem knew where the Fur lived.

Together, the two tribes massacred many Fur villagers, according to United Nations officials and Fur survivors. Then they divvied up Fur land. But the partnership broke down late last year, when, Terjem leaders say, the Mahria kidnapped a 14-year-old Terjem boy. For their part, Mahria leaders say the Terjem started it by stealing Mahria animals, an act that had to be answered.

Juma Dagalow, a Mahria sheik, said that after one ambush in which Terjem gunmen killed many Mahria, he called other sheiks by satellite phone and rallied the troops.

"We went to that funeral to attack them, to finish the account," the sheik explained, adding that his people were "a little aggressive."

It was then that the wali stepped in. The wali, or governor, of South Darfur called a peace conference and urged neutral tribes to mediate a cease-fire.

The wali, Ali Mahamoud Mohammed, said in an interview that such clashes were "just a natural part of the life of the tribes" and something he had witnessed growing up in Darfur in the 1970s.

Mr. Ali said the fighting began in December, when the Mahria headed south on a seasonal migration with their camels and trampled through Terjem territory near the Bulbul River. The fighting predictably resumed in July, he said, when the Mahria trampled back.

The governor said he sent troops to Bulbul to quell the fighting. But the Arab-Arab bloodshed, fueled by an overflow of guns in Darfur and a breakdown in the traditional order, seems to be spreading faster than anyone can control. Several tribes have recently fought over land, livestock and the right to extort money along certain trade routes. Among those fighting: Hotiya versus Rizeigat (the Rizeigat are a huge tribe that includes the Mahria); Rizeigat versus Habanniya; Habanniya versus Salamat.

Tribal feuds that used to be reconciled by sheiks before the body count reached into the hundreds are now turning into tribal wars.

And there may be a connection to the rampant banditry, which seems to spare no one — not aid workers, villagers or even Sudanese government officials.

"As these groups split," said Colonel Oladipo of the African Union, "banditry becomes the source for weapons, money and food in order to sustain their factions."

The 50 miles of asphalt running between Nyala and the neighboring town of Kas, which cuts straight through a Terjem stronghold, have become bandit boulevard. On a single day in late August, there were six attacks. Traveling by road has become so dangerous in Darfur that the United Nations now uses helicopters to fly even 12 miles.

"There's absolutely no law and order in this place," said Annette Rehrl, a spokeswoman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The insecurity has driven away some aid workers, United Nations officials said, with 12,300 working in Darfur, 16 percent less than last year.

It has also cemented tens of thousands of Terjem, who traditionally roam with their animals for part of the year, in internally displaced persons camps where they are not free to move. Out here, newly widowed women lie in plastic huts, flies exploring the corners of their eyes. Once proud sheiks have been reduced to carrying sacks of sand on their backs for work. A Terjem baby with a three-inch, bubbly scar at the base of her spine — a recent gunshot wound — howled her head off.

"We just sit here, hating ourselves," said Mariam Mohammed, a wisp-thin Terjem woman who said her husband had been shot dead in front of her. "Just look at me. I'm half of what I used to be."
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/world ... ?th&emc=th

September 20, 2007
Voices Rise in Egypt to Shield Girls From an Old Tradition
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Correction Appended

KAFR AL MANSHI ABOU HAMAR, Egypt — The men in this poor farming community were seething. A 13-year-old girl was brought to a doctor’s office to have her clitoris removed, a surgery considered necessary here to preserve chastity and honor.

The girl died, but that was not the source of the outrage. After her death, the government shut down the clinic, and that got everyone stirred up.

“They will not stop us,” shouted Saad Yehia, a tea shop owner along the main street. “We support circumcision!” he shouted over and over.

“Even if the state doesn’t like it, we will circumcise the girls,” shouted Fahmy Ezzeddin Shaweesh, an elder in the village.

Circumcision, as supporters call it, or female genital mutilation, as opponents refer to it, was suddenly a ferocious focus of debate in Egypt this summer. A nationwide campaign to stop the practice has become one of the most powerful social movements in Egypt in decades, uniting an unlikely alliance of government forces, official religious leaders and street-level activists.

Though Egypt’s Health Ministry ordered an end to the practice in 1996, it allowed exceptions in cases of emergency, a loophole critics describe as so wide that it effectively rendered the ban meaningless. But now the government is trying to force a comprehensive ban.

Not only was it unusual for the government to shut down the clinic, but the health minister has also issued a decree banning health care workers— or anyone — from conducting the procedure for any reason. Beyond that, the Ministry of Religious Affairs also issued a booklet explaining why the practice was not called for in Islam; Egypt’s grand mufti, Ali Gomaa, declared it haram, or prohibited by Islam; Egypt’s highest religious official, Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, called it harmful; television advertisements have been shown on state channels to discourage it; and a national hot line was set up to answer the public’s questions about genital cutting.

But as the men in this village demonstrated, widespread social change in Egypt comes slowly, very slowly. This country is conservative, religious and, for many, guided largely by traditions, even when those traditions do not adhere to the tenets of their faith, be it Christianity or Islam.

For centuries Egyptian girls, usually between the ages of 7 and 13, have been taken to have the procedure done, sometimes by a doctor, sometimes by a barber or whoever else in the village would do it. As recently as 2005, a government health survey showed that 96 percent of the thousands of married, divorced or widowed women interviewed said they had undergone the procedure — a figure that astounds even many Egyptians. In the language of the survey, “The practice of female circumcision is virtually universal among women of reproductive age in Egypt.”

Though the practice is common and increasingly contentious throughout sub-Saharan Africa, among Arab states the only other place where this practice is customary is in southern Yemen, experts here said. In Saudi Arabia, where women cannot drive, cannot vote, cannot hold most jobs, the practice is viewed as abhorrent, a reflection of pre-Islamic traditions.

But now, quite suddenly, forces opposing genital cutting in Egypt are pressing back as never before. More than a century after the first efforts to curb this custom, the movement has broken through one of the main barriers to change: It is no longer considered taboo to discuss it in public. That shift seems to have coincided with a small but growing acceptance of talking about human sexuality on television and radio.

For the first time, opponents said, television news shows and newspapers have aggressively reported details of botched operations. This summer two young girls died, and it was front-page news in Al Masry al Yom, an independent and popular daily. Activists highlighted the deaths with public demonstrations, which generated even more coverage.

The force behind this unlikely collaboration between government, nongovernment organizations, religious leaders and the news media is a no-nonsense 84-year-old anthropologist named Marie Assaad, who has been fighting against genital cutting since the 1950s.

“I never thought I would live to see this day,” she said, reading about the subject in a widely circulated daily newspaper.

Dr. Nasr el-Sayyid, assistant to the minister of health, said there had already been a drop in urban areas, along with an aggressive effort in more than 100 villages, mostly in the south, to curb the practice. “Our plan and program over the next two years is aiming to take it down 20 percent nationwide,” he said.

The challenge, however, rests in persuading people that their grandparents, parents and they themselves have harmed their daughters. Moreover, advocates must convince a skeptical public that men will marry a woman who has not undergone the procedure and that circumcision is not necessary to preserve family honor. It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.

And it will be a challenge to convince influential people like Osama Mohamed el-Moaseri, imam of a mosque in Basyoun, the city near where the 13-year-old girl lived, and died. “This practice has been passed down generation after generation, so it is natural that every person circumcises his daughter,” he said. “When Ali Gomaa says it is haram, he is criticizing the practice of our fathers and forefathers.”

But the movement against genital cutting has matured and is increasingly prepared for these arguments. At first, Ms. Assaad and a group of intellectuals who together created a task force simply lectured their neighbors, essentially calling the practice barbaric.

“At the beginning we preached and said this is wrong,” she recalled. “It didn’t work. They said, ‘It was done to our mothers and grandmothers, and they are fine.’ ”

She and her colleagues sounded like out-of-touch urban intellectuals, she said. But over time, they enlisted the aid of Islamic scholars and health care workers, hoping to disperse misconceptions — like the idea that cutting off the clitoris prevents homosexuality — and relate to people’s lives.

“Circumcision is a very old custom and has absolutely no benefits,” Vivian Fouad, who helps staff the national hot line, said to a caller wondering what to do with her own daughter. She continued: “If you want to protect your daughter, then you have to raise her well. How you raise your child is the main factor in everything, not mutilating your daughter.”

Egypt is a patriarchal society, but women can be a powerful force. So Ms. Assaad helped persuade two important women, elite and privileged, who like herself could not believe the practice was as widespread as it was, to join her battle.

The first was Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of President Hosni Mubarak and a political force in her own right. The second was an ally of Mrs. Mubarak, Mosheira Khattab, head of the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, a government agency that helps set national health and social policies.

Mrs. Khattab has become a force in pressing the agenda. Her council now has a full-time staff working on the issue and runs the hot line. She toured the Nile Delta region, three cities in one day, promoting the message, blunt and outraged that genital cutting had not stopped.

“The Koran is a newcomer to tradition in this manner,” she said. “As a male society, the men took parts of religion that satisfied men and inflated it. The parts of the Koran that helped women, they ignored.”

It is an unusual swipe at the Islamists who have promoted the practice as in keeping with religion, especially since the government generally tries to avoid taking on conservative religious leaders. It tries to position itself as the guardian of Islamic values, aiming to enhance its own wilted legitimacy and undercut support for the Muslim Brotherhood, the banned but popular opposition movement.

But the religious discourse concerning genital cutting has changed, and that is credited to Ms. Assaad’s strategy of reaching up to people like Mrs. Mubarak and out to young women like Fatma Ibrahim, 24. When Ms. Ibrahim was 11 years old, she said, her parents told her she was going for a blood test. The doctor, a relative, put her to sleep and when she woke, she said she could not walk.

The memory haunts her now, and though she says that her parents “will kill” her if they find out, she has become a volunteer in the movement against genital cutting, hoping to spare other women what she endured.

“I am looking to talk to the young, the ones who will be parents in 10 years,” she said. “This is my target group. I talk to the young. When I get married, inshallah, I will never, ever circumcise my daughter.”

Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Cairo.

Correction: September 21, 2007


Two picture captions yesterday with the continuation of a front-page article about the tradition of female genital cutting in Egypt were reversed. The top photograph showed health care workers and nursing students attending a symposium on genital cutting; the picture below it showed men defending the tradition at a tea shop across the street from a clinic where a 13-year-old girl died during an operation to remove her clitoris.
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Post by kmaherali »

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/world ... ?th&emc=th

September 27, 2007
Somalia Tallies the Plagues, Fearing What's Next

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

JOWHAR, Somalia, Sept. 26 — The instant the sack of grain fell off the truck and thumped down on the ground, it was enveloped in a whirl of dust, fists and knees.

The crowd of hungry people, who had been baking for hours in the brutal heat at an emergency distribution center on Wednesday, were in no mood to negotiate. One man whipped out a footlong machete, another a dagger, a third a handgun, which he waved menacingly in the air.

"My food, my food, my food!" they all yelled, tussling over the sack.

It has been nine months since this country went through its biggest political change in 16 years, but surprisingly little has changed.

Hundreds of thousands of people are still on the verge of starvation, pirates still roam the seas, teenage gunmen still roam the streets, and the promise of a functioning government remains a vapor.

The Transitional Federal Government of Somalia, a United Nations creation that was always considered a shaky, short-term compromise, was finally installed in Mogadishu, the capital, in December, but it, like many Somalis, is now teetering on the edge of survival. A raging insurgency has confined the government to a handful of heavily fortified buildings in Mogadishu, while the rest of the country suffers.

Jowhar, a town of donkey carts and dust storms about 50 miles north of Mogadishu, has been recently hit by a devastating mix of drought and floods, and a huge influx of needy people. The intensifying street fighting in Mogadishu has driven thousands from their homes and many showed up here, just when the local crops failed.

"There is nothing to eat," said Binti Olo Ahmad, 40, who trudged out of the capital two weeks ago with eight children and now lives in a tent made from twigs and garbage bags. She laughed a short, throaty laugh when asked if the anarchy of the 1990s, when warring clans tore Somalia apart after the central government collapsed, were any worse.

"No way," she said. "I've never seen war like this."

United Nations officials are increasingly concerned. All the signs of a famine are on the horizon: food prices have nearly doubled in some areas, the cereal harvest was the worst in 13 years, malnutrition rates are sharply rising and the long-term forecast indicates that the rains this fall will be disappointing.

"Thousands of people are marching right up to the edge of a crisis," said Peter Goossens, the director of the World Food Program in Somalia. "Any additional little thing, any little flood or drought, will push them over."

The World Food Program is feeding 1.2 million people in Somalia, more than 15 percent of the population. Already, some people have starved.

"This poor country keeps taking one blow after another," Mr. Goossens said. "Ultimately, it will break."

Many Somalis feel that has already happened. A multimillion-dollar clan-reconciliation conference ended last month, and some elders later traveled to Saudi Arabia to sign a ceremonial agreement. But the myriad clans are still not at peace, and even the transitional government is showing worrying cracks.

This week, Ali Mohamed Gedi, the prime minister, and Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, the president, got into a standoff over whether some of Mr. Gedi's allies should face corruption charges. The two leaders are from rival clans, and some Somalis fear that unless the dispute is quickly resolved it could spell an end to the thin veneer of cooperation between the men and possibly turn into a clan war.

Government officials in Jowhar admit there are serious challenges. Ministries are not functioning, the transitional government is running out of money and all the recent turmoil has created overwhelming needs, said Hussein Hassan Mahamoud, the deputy governor in Jowhar.

"But we are trying," he said. "We just need time."

The question is, How much time is there before the insurgency causes such serious divisions in the government that it falls apart? On Sunday, more than a dozen government soldiers were killed in a single raid. Hit-and-run attacks like this one started when Ethiopian troops invaded in December to oust an Islamist movement that had briefly ruled much of the country and to shore up the transitional government, which has never enjoyed a lot of support. Now the Islamists have regrouped in the thickly forested areas of southern Somalia, where they operate with virtual impunity. Mogadishu, meanwhile, has become a Baghdad-like mess of suicide bombs, roadside bombs and assassinations.

This month the insurgents, a mix of clan and Islamist militias, held their own reconciliation conference in Asmara, Eritrea. They formed the Alliance for the Reliberation of Somalia, a movement openly dedicated to overthrowing the transitional government.

Not all the country is up in flames, though. Jowhar is relatively stable. Girls flock to school in bright yellow veils. Battered old taxis glide down the streets. Tensions like the ruckus over the sack of grain that fell off the food aid truck are usually solved the Somali way.

As soon as the man yanked out his pistol, three heavily armed militiamen in wraparound sunglasses surrounded him. Facing superior firepower, the pistol-wielder smiled, shook his head and tucked his gun back into his waistband.

The sack of grain was then tossed back on the truck, which sputtered on, like most of this country.
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September 28, 2007, 12:37 pm
The Word Is Getting Out
By Josh Ruxin


Josh Ruxin is a Columbia University expert on public health who has spent the last couple of years living in Rwanda. He’s an unusual mix of academic expert and mud-between-the-toes aid worker.

It was much to the dismay of family and friends that my wife and I moved to Rwanda. Having seen little more than “Hotel Rwanda” to educate them about the country, they believed it to be a hostile and unstable place. We had a different take: it’s safe, clean, friendly and relatively uncorrupted. Our perception is clearly shared by others and, now, the country’s resurgence is being recognized.

Tuesday, the Mo Ibrahim Foundation released the results of its “Ibrahim Index” — a holistic ranking of how African countries are doing across the dimension of governance. Ibrahim, one of Africa’s most successful and philanthropic entrepreneurs, set up the index to inform the Mo Ibrahim Prize — an annual award of $5 million for a former head of state who has demonstrated excellence in leadership. The surprise to all but Rwandan insiders was that Rwanda made the greatest progress of any country during the course of the last five years.

As the always insightful Steve Radelet pointed out in an earlier post, governance and democracy in Africa mean everything. Having worked in nearly a dozen countries in Africa, I decided to place my bets on Rwanda because it was the first place I’d never been asked to pay a bribe. I’m not alone: donors are lining up to invest in Rwanda, reassured that the money will reach the people who need it most.

None of this is to say that Rwanda is utopia: major challenges remain for improvements in the press and in democracy. Nevertheless, at a time when many nations are spiraling downward, it’s heartening to see little Rwanda making progress against all odds.

http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/0 ... ?th&emc=th
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September 29, 2007, 10:20 am
A Few Days in the South of Ethiopia…
By Joseph Stiglitz

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel-winning economist who is also the author of several books on international economic issues. He was chief economist at the World Bank and chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers, and has contributed to many diverse areas of economics. Lately, he has also written incisively about the costs of our involvement in Iraq.

After joining the celebrations for the new millennium in Addis Abbaba, we headed south to the Rift valley and ended up spending a few days around
Jinka and Arabaminch, enjoying the spectacular views and visiting some of the tribal villages and markets. We had met few foreigners or people from
the north of the country who had been to the area and, once we arrived, it was easy to see why.
Not only does Ethiopian Airlines cancel most of the flights (we were told that at one point there was no air service for two months) but the roads were as bad as any I have seen in Africa. We saw numerous bridges that had been washed away, we had to ford a number of swollen rivers, we passed trucks that had overturned in the treacherous mud and lines of trucks waiting on the river banks until the water had receded so they could cross. When we did arrive somewhere, people would ask us for information about the state of the roads we had driven through. All of this gave an air of excitement to the venture — but does not make for easy tourism or business.
After having two weeks in Ethiopia, and seen half of the domestic flights we had planned to take be canceled, I think it’s time for the government to seriously consider privatizing at least the domestic part of Ethiopian Airlines.
One of the arguments against privatization is the fear that the new profit-seeking owner will cut services to markets that aren’t
money-making. Many countries are caught in a Catch-22: producers don’t produce perishables, like flowers, because there is no ready access to
markets; but private carriers won’t provide routes, unless there is already sufficient demand to make it worthwhile. In the past couple of years,
Ethiopia’s rose industry has been blossoming; without ready air transport, this would never have happened.
Government-run airlines are more willing to create and maintain such routes, even if initially they are forced to run at a loss. They recognize that more than short run profits are at stake. So, the argument goes, one needs government-run airlines that will fly initially unprofitable routes, or to remote areas no one else will go to.
In the case of utilities, there is a similar argument: a publicly listed company won’t serve poor customers who can not pay their bills; the companies’ first and last concern is to make money to recoup their investments and to provide as strong a return to their shareholders as possible. A well-done documentary on this subject is “Power Cuts” which is about the privatization of electricity in the country of Georgia. I also recommend William Finnegan’s piece in The New Yorker about the attempt to privatize water in Cochibamba, Bolivia.
Typically what happens is a poor government with many urgent priorities cannot invest in infrastructure (whether it be roads or new
pipes that prevent the loss of the city’s water.) Worse still, they are told not to borrow to make these investments — even if there is a high
return on them. The deficits, it is claimed, are bad in themselves, regardless of how the money is spent. (Evidently, the argument is that
Wall Street, for all its sophistication, only knows how to look at the liability side of a balance sheet, not the asset side!) They are told by
lending institutions such as the IMF or World Bank to find outside investors and they often wind up with privatized companies that don’t do a
good, or fair, job of delivering services. It’s a well known fact that privatizations are extremely difficult to do well and many end up failing.
Having said that, there may be a strong case for the privatization of at least the domestic portion of Ethiopian Airlines — unless it can make a quick turnaround on the quality and reliability of its services. For starters, it is clear that they are not serving well many of the less-visited cities. When we were in Harar, for example, the flights to and from Addis were canceled for three days running. From my admittedly
small sample (with, however, a remarkable consistency) it’s difficult to believe that a new owner could do much worse than the existing one.
Reliable transport is, however, essential for the country’s growth — including attracting foreign investment — and certainly for the development of tourism, which could bring in badly-needed foreign exchange. One of the sign of India’s tremendous growth –­ and a big contributor to that growth — is the proliferation of reliable new airlines (Jet Airlines being just one example) that have eclipsed Indian Airlines in the domestic market.
For us, the flight cancellations were a good thing as it meant we had to drive everywhere and we saw more of the country than we otherwise would
have. The south was far poorer than anywhere else we had seen in the country. Many of the children had swollen bellies, typically a sign of serious malnutrition. Even in the larger villages, the children lacked shoes. There were far fewer schools and clinics than we had seen up north and we did not see any of the community self[-]help projects likr the one we saw up in Tigray aimed at fighting land erosion, raising the water table and promoting fruit orchards.
Nor were there many tourists. We met staffers from USAID and the Germans government’s GTZ as well some NGO activists who were helping a member of the traditionally nomadic Mursi tribe make a documentary about their reaction to the controversial new road — it will cut through the land where they live — and a new national park, which will intrude on their traditional grazing grounds. When it is finally finished, the road (which may go as far as the Kenyan border) will bring many more tourists into contact with tribes like the Mursi, Turmi and Hamar.
For many, this is worrying, as so far the tourism being done is quite destructive to the tribal peoples. It mostly consists of short visits to villages where the locals swarm their visitors asking to have their photos taken (adults get 2 birr per photo and the children get 1 birr) and try to sell a few, paltry souvenirs. The foreign tourist learns nothing of the local culture or customs — or the struggles through which they are going — and the tribal people don’t make as much money as they could if they were better organized. In one case, we proposed making a large donation to the village as a whole but were told they wanted individual payments. I have no idea if it’s true, but we were told by two people that much of the money is then used to buy the local beer.
Another village, run by another tribal group, the Dorze, nearer Arabaminch, seemed to be more organized. There we were taken to visit a family which was well set up for tourism. The 16-year-old son spoke excellent English and showed us all around his family compound. He told us about the architecture of the houses (how the roofs are very tall and then shrink down as the termites chew on them from the bottom) and we saw a demonstration of how they use the false banana to make different foods, how it’s prepared, fermented, wrapped, stored and finally eaten.
After that we saw a main square of the village where they have a crafts shop and guest rooms for travelers. They said they perform traditional dances every night for tourists. The whole thing (we were told) is organized by a village cooperative that has existed for 100 years, and much of the money is used to buy cattle and goats that are killed and eaten by the whole village at their ceremonies held twice a year.
If this is all true, then it’s clearly a much better way of doing things than we saw at the Mursi village. We didn’t get to visit inside the village (just the first compound and public area) but we got a sense of what the village looks like and some of the customs. When the road is done, it will be interesting to see what happens to the people near the Rift valley: how, and how well, they adjust as globalization truly reaches their villages.
The intrusion of the road — with its costs and benefits — is only one of the changes facing those in what had once been a relatively remote part of Ethiopia. As we have seen in Mongolia (among other places), there is always tension between government that wants to preserve nature and expand national parks and settle nomads and educate their children, and traditional peoples who want to continue their old forms of life. Even if incomes are increased or risk reduced, many resist being resettled.
Africa’s population explosion has made land increasingly scarce. America’s West was marked by a conflict between cattle raisers and homesteaders — and no one pad any attention to conservation. These kinds of disagreements are now taking place in the Omo valley. Perhaps through better land management and improvements in pastoral practices, we can find a compromise that can preserve the environment and lead to sustainable increases in living standards.
Back in Addis, I met with representatives of some of the groups protesting human rights violations and the trade blockades in the Ogaden desert in the east of the country. (For more information see The New York Times and Human Rights Watch reports from July 2007). I also met with Western government officials who say Somalia and the Ogaden have become a magnet for extremists from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and so defend Ethiopia’s hard-line policies there. I spoke with donors who are upset about the 2005 elections and the government’s attitude to human rights and say they are withholding foreign aid because of these concerns. Other donors seem more focused on economics (including a few who are still pushing the old neo-liberal lines that have failed so often elsewhere.) I heard from donors who want the government to privatize more businesses and reform the financial sector and improve the way it collects data on poverty. I also talked to British and Japanese donors who are pleased with how the government is handling the aid it receives and the tremendous efforts it has made to help the vast majority of the population that lives in the countryside.
A recent World Bank study suggests poverty is declining in the rural areas. Some singled out Prime Minister Meles for his reasonable views on many topics, his remarkable achievement in managing the conflicting pressures, his efforts to promote decentralization — some 40 percent of the budget is being turned over to local and regional authorities. In short, Ethiopia is a country that people are passionate about and that provokes strong opinions. The foreign donors are not shy about expressing their opinion about virtually every aspect of how Ethiopia conducts itself. (I wonder how the United States would take it if the foreign ambassadors in Washington got together and issued demands about how the government should conduct itself — whether in Iraq, in Guatanamo, or in the provision of health care to the indigent! I suspect that we would be somewhat less tolerant than the Ethiopians have been.)
I would not claim to be an expert on Ethiopia but it’s obvious to me that in the area of economics and development, what is happening is impressive. The 10 percent growth for each of the past four years puts Ethiopia towards the top of the growth league tables. It is transforming large parts of the country. Now the challenge is to make sure that it is sustained. In terms of politics, Ethiopia has come a long way since the Derg was overthrown in 1991, but it still has a way to go. As so often happens, the opposition sometimes believes that it can strengthen its own hand but weakening the government’s — even if it works to the disadvantage of the country as a whole. It will evidently take some time to develop a culture combining cooperation in efforts to develop the country and competition for the best ideas. Also, being in a tough neighborhood, we have to hope that the War on Terror will not become an excuse for the infringement of civil liberties and human rights abuses by the military as we have seen in other parts of Africa as well the United States, the United Kingdom and so many other countries.

Correction
Somehow I was given the wrong number for Ethiopia’s flower exports. They were $60 million last year, not $160 million as I stated in my last posting. $160 million represents projected sales for the coming year.
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October 7, 2007
Rape Epidemic Raises Trauma of Congo War
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
BUKAVU, Congo — Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.

Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

“We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,” said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. “They are done to destroy women.”

Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.

“The sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world,” said John Holmes, the United Nations under secretary general for humanitarian affairs. “The sheer numbers, the wholesale brutality, the culture of impunity — it’s appalling.”

The days of chaos in Congo were supposed to be over. Last year, this country of 66 million people held a historic election that cost $500 million and was intended to end Congo’s various wars and rebellions and its tradition of epically bad government.

But the elections have not unified the country or significantly strengthened the Congolese government’s hand to deal with renegade forces, many of them from outside the country. The justice system and the military still barely function, and United Nations officials say Congolese government troops are among the worst offenders when it comes to rape. Large swaths of the country, especially in the east, remain authority-free zones where civilians are at the mercy of heavily armed groups who have made warfare a livelihood and survive by raiding villages and abducting women for ransom.

According to victims, one of the newest groups to emerge is called the Rastas, a mysterious gang of dreadlocked fugitives who live deep in the forest, wear shiny tracksuits and Los Angeles Lakers jerseys and are notorious for burning babies, kidnapping women and literally chopping up anybody who gets in their way.

United Nations officials said the so-called Rastas were once part of the Hutu militias who fled Rwanda after committing genocide there in 1994, but now it seems they have split off on their own and specialize in freelance cruelty.

Honorata Barinjibanwa, an 18-year-old woman with high cheekbones and downcast eyes, said she was kidnapped from a village that the Rastas raided in April and kept as a sex slave until August. Most of that time she was tied to a tree, and she still has rope marks ringing her delicate neck. The men would untie her for a few hours each day to gang-rape her, she said.

“I’m weak, I’m angry, and I don’t know how to restart my life,” she said from Panzi Hospital in Bukavu, where she was taken after her captors freed her.

She is also pregnant.

While rape has always been a weapon of war, researchers say they fear that Congo’s problem has metastasized into a wider social phenomenon.

“It’s gone beyond the conflict,” said Alexandra Bilak, who has studied various armed groups around Bukavu, on the shores of Lake Kivu. She said that the number of women abused and even killed by their husbands seemed to be going up and that brutality toward women had become “almost normal.”

Malteser International, a European aid organization that runs health clinics in eastern Congo, estimates that it will treat 8,000 sexual violence cases this year, compared with 6,338 last year. The organization said that in one town, Shabunda, 70 percent of the women reported being sexually brutalized.

At Panzi Hospital, where Dr. Mukwege performs as many as six rape-related surgeries a day, bed after bed is filled with women lying on their backs, staring at the ceiling, with colostomy bags hanging next to them because of all the internal damage.

“I still have pain and feel chills,” said Kasindi Wabulasa, a patient who was raped in February by five men. The men held an AK-47 rifle to her husband’s chest and made him watch, telling him that if he closed his eyes, they would shoot him. When they were finished, Ms. Wabulasa said, they shot him anyway.

In almost all the reported cases, the culprits are described as young men with guns, and in the deceptively beautiful hills here, there is no shortage of them: poorly paid and often mutinous government soldiers; homegrown militias called the Mai-Mai who slick themselves with oil before marching into battle; members of paramilitary groups originally from Uganda and Rwanda who have destabilized this area over the past 10 years in a quest for gold and all the other riches that can be extracted from Congo’s exploited soil.

The attacks go on despite the presence of the largest United Nations peacekeeping force in the world, with more than 17,000 troops.

Few seem to be spared. Dr. Mukwege said his oldest patient was 75, his youngest 3.

“Some of these girls whose insides have been destroyed are so young that they don’t understand what happened to them,” Dr. Mukwege said. “They ask me if they will ever be able to have children, and it’s hard to look into their eyes.”

No one — doctors, aid workers, Congolese and Western researchers — can explain exactly why this is happening.

“That is the question,” said André Bourque, a Canadian consultant who works with aid groups in eastern Congo. “Sexual violence in Congo reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide.”

Impunity may be a contributing factor, Mr. Bourque added, saying that very few of the culprits are punished.

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society. “If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago,” said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu.

Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo’s forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda’s genocide 13 years ago.

Mr. Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias.

“These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it,” he said.

Mr. Bourque called this phenomenon “reversed values” and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years, like eastern Congo.

This place, one of the greenest, hilliest and most scenic slices of central Africa, continues to reverberate from the aftershocks of the genocide next door. Take the recent fighting near Bukavu between the Congolese Army and Laurent Nkunda, a dissident general who commands a formidable rebel force. Mr. Nkunda is a Congolese Tutsi who has accused the Congolese Army of supporting Hutu militias, which the army denies. Mr. Nkunda says his rebel force is simply protecting Tutsi civilians from being victimized again.

But his men may be no better.

Willermine Mulihano said she was raped twice — first by Hutu militiamen two years ago and then by Nkunda soldiers in July. Two soldiers held her legs apart, while three others took turns violating her.

“When I think about what happened,” she said, “I feel anxious and brokenhearted.”

She is also lonely. Her husband divorced her after the first rape, saying she was diseased.

In some cases, the attacks are on civilians already caught in the cross-fire between warring groups. In one village near Bukavu where 27 women were raped and 18 civilians killed in May, the attackers left behind a note in broken Swahili telling the villagers that the violence would go on as long as government troops were in the area.

The United Nations peacekeepers here seem to be stepping up efforts to protect women.

Recently, they initiated what they call “night flashes,” in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.

But the problem seems bigger than the resources currently devoted to it.

Panzi Hospital has 350 beds, and though a new ward is being built specifically for rape victims, the hospital sends women back to their villages before they have fully recovered because it needs space for the never-ending stream of new arrivals.

Dr. Mukwege, 52, said he remembered the days when Bukavu was known for its stunning lake views and nearby national parks, like Kahuzi-Biega.

“There used to be a lot of gorillas in there,” he said. “But now they’ve been replaced by much more savage beasts.”
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http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... 7d4f1ef587

Egypt's plan to green Sahara a growing controversy
Desert country seeks more room for population

Will Rasmussen
Reuters

Monday, October 08, 2007

CREDIT: Tara Todras-Whitehill, Reuters
Workers till a field at the Desert Development Center in the Nile Delta. The lush fields growing among a vast stretch of sand north of Cairo's pyramids points to Egypt's determination to make deserts habitable.

It looks like a mirage but the lush fields of cauliflower, apricot trees and melon growing among a vast stretch of sand north of Cairo's pyramids is all too real -- proof of Egypt's determination to turn its deserts green.

While climate change and land over-use help many deserts across the world advance, Egypt is slowly greening the sand that covers almost all of its territory as it seeks to create more space for its growing population.

Tarek el-Kowmey, 45, points proudly to the banana trees he grows on what was once Sahara sands near the Desert Development Centre, north of Cairo, where scientists experiment with high-tech techniques to make Egypt's desert bloom.

"All of this used to be just sand," he said. "Now we can grow anything."

With only five per cent of the country habitable, almost all of Egypt's 74 million people live along the Nile River and the Mediterranean Sea. Already crowded living conditions -- Cairo is one of the most densely populated cities on earth -- will likely get worse as Egypt's population is expected to double by 2050.

So the government is keen to encourage people to move to the desert by pressing ahead with an estimated $70 billion plan to reclaim 1.36 million hectares of desert over the next 10 years. Among the incentives are cheap desert land to college graduates.

But to make these areas habitable and capable of cultivation, the government will need to tap into scarce water resources of the Nile River as rainfall is almost non-existent in Egypt.

The plan has raised controversy among some conservationists who say turning the desert green is neither practical nor sustainable and might ultimately backfire.

Anders Jagerskog, director of the Stockholm International Water Institute in Sweden, questions the wisdom of using precious water resources to grow in desert areas unsuited to cultivation and where water will evaporate quickly under the scorching sun.

"A desert is not the best place to grow food," he said. "From a political perspective, it makes sense in terms of giving more people jobs even though it is not very rational from a water perspective," he added.

The scope of the reclamations could also add to regional tension over Nile water sharing arrangements as in order to green its desert Egypt might need to take more than its share of Nile water determined by international treaties.

Egypt's project to reclaim deserts in the south, called "Toshka," would expand Egypt's farmland by about 40 per cent by 2017, using about five billion cubic metres of water a year.

That worries neighbours to the south who are already unhappy about Nile water sharing arrangements.

© The Calgary Herald 2007
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October 10, 2007
In Africa, Prosperity From Seeds Falls Short
By CELIA W. DUGGER

HERMAKONO, Guinea — The seeds are a marvel, producing bountiful, aromatic rice crops resistant to drought, pests and disease. But a decade after their introduction, they have spread to only a tiny fraction of the land here in West Africa where they could help millions of farming families escape poverty.

At a time when philanthropists like Bill Gates have become entranced by the possibility of a Green Revolution for Africa, the New Rices for Africa, as scientists call the wonder seeds, offer a clear warning. Even the most promising new crop varieties will not by themselves bring the plentiful harvests that can end poverty. New ways to get seeds into the hands of farmers are needed, as well as broader investment in the basic ingredients of a farm economy: roads, credit and farmer education, among others.

Developed with financing from wealthy countries and private foundations, the New Rices for Africa, or Nericas, are unpatented and may be grown by anyone. Yet there is a severe shortage of them in a region where both the private and the agricultural sectors are woefully undeveloped.

"This is a story repeated thousands of times all over Africa," said Joseph Devries, who is the head of seed development for a joint effort by the Rockefeller and Bill and Melinda Gates foundations to jump-start farm productivity in Africa.

"You have farmers who are very willing adopters of new technologies and want to raise yields," he added, "but are not getting access to seed, fertilizer and small-scale irrigation." Finding a sustainable way to supply them with seed, he said, "is emerging as the holy grail for agricultural development."

Here in West Africa, where rice is a staple crop, the African Development Bank is financing a $34 million program in seven countries to spur wider use of the new rice seeds. But the obstacles are daunting.

Farmers typically lack credit to buy seed and fertilizer. And the agricultural economy itself suffers from a lack of investment. Foreign aid for agriculture has plunged over the past two decades. And African governments — some, like Guinea, endowed with natural resources and cursed with corruption — have too often spent less of that wealth than they might have on rural development.

Decent roads to move crops to market are scarce. So are storage facilities to preserve harvests and crop insurance to protect farmers from drought, flood or bumper yields that perversely cause prices to collapse. All can wipe out the income farmers need to provide reliable demand to seed companies, making sale and distribution of the improved seeds a high-risk venture.

Across the region, a handful of private companies in Nigeria and Benin have begun to multiply and market the new rice varieties. Here in Guinea, where there is not a single seed company, the government is now working with farmers to expand the supply of Nericas seed.

Villagers here in Hermakono first enviously spotted the new rices growing in a neighboring community's field. In 2006, after writing to the Agriculture Ministry, they got their first small store of the seeds.

So precious were they that as the first crop grew heavy with grain, the villagers took turns standing watch in the fields. "We divided into small groups to guard it so nobody would steal even one stalk," said Goulou Camara, a farmer.

Early one morning last year, a dozen farmers threshed their first harvest. They swirled in a circle, kicking golden sheaves of rice into the air with their bare feet, then beating them with sticks to shake loose the grains. They were determined not to eat any of it, but to save it to plant as seed.

Only about 200,000 African farmers are sowing the new rices on just 5 percent of the land where they could thrive, according to the Africa Rice Center, an international research institution based in Benin that developed the new rices in the mid-1990s.

In contrast to Africa, India had a stronger foundation when new wheat varieties set off a Green Revolution there in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing the nation to feed hundreds of millions of people. India had a public seed company to take the marketing risks, far more irrigated farmland and a better road system.

"If we don't develop the infrastructure, there's no way we'll attain the Green Revolution," said Monty Jones, the plant breeder whose groundbreaking research led to creation of the new rices. "How do you bring the Nericas to farmers? How do you get farmers to know the seeds exist?"

Mr. Jones now leads the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, based in Ghana. He also serves on the board of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, a nonprofit group financed with an initial $150 million from the Gates and Rockefeller foundations.

The alliance intends to invest $23 million to promote the distribution of promising seeds.

Mr. Jones, 55, who was born into the Creole elite of Sierra Leone, said he decided to go into the agricultural sciences when as a teenager he heard of rioting over rice shortages in West Africa.

At age 39, he was put in charge of a team breeding upland rain-fed rice varieties at the West Africa Rice Development Agency, now the Africa Rice Center.

For more than a generation, scientists had unsuccessfully sought to combine the hardy African rice species with high-yield Asian species.

With great ingenuity, his team overcame the obstacles and produced the first new rices more than a decade ago.

The new seeds increased yields even without fertilizer and more than doubled them with it. From planting to harvest, they also took three months rather than the five or six required by traditional varieties, putting rice on the family table during the hungry season.

But to sustain increased yields, farmers need a reliable source of fresh seed. Productivity declines when the new seeds become degraded after mixing with local varieties in storage sheds and fields and on the floors of the farmers' huts.

Odia Camara, a 30-year-old farmer and mother of five, remembers glimpsing the new rices growing in a government-sponsored test field near her village, also named Camara, in 1998.

"The stalks were big and very bushy, carrying a lot of rice, and swayed when the wind blew," recalled Ms. Camara, who is not related to Goulou Camara of Hermakono.

Four years later, Ms. Camara's group of about 50 farmers, all women, initially organized to grow vegetables, was one of two groups in the village that got their chance. The government provided each of them with a scant 55 pounds of seed, as well as subsidized fertilizer — enough for a small plot.

The groups also got basic machines to thresh, husk and parboil the rice from Sasakawa-Global 2000, a nonprofit partnership organized by Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions to the original Asian Green Revolution.

The first two years, the new rices yielded the village's richest rice harvests ever — triple the usual amount. There was plenty of the aromatic rice to feed the families and cash left over to pay children's school fees. Even cranky marriages mellowed.

"When we are hungry, we don't even look at each other," Ms. Camara said of her husband. "When the rice comes, we are very happy together."

But 2004 brought signs of trouble. The groups had a decent harvest, but the acreage planted was greater and the yields lower because the new seed was not as pure.

In 2005, international donors did not give Guinea fertilizer, and the government provided none to the farmers in the area, nor did private traders bring any to local markets, according to government officials.

At harvest time, yields plummeted. Hunger stole back. Ms. Camara's group grew so discouraged, she said, that it wanted to give up on the new rices.

But government workers visited their village last year and persuaded them to try again. The government provided the village of 2,500 people with 150 pounds of scarce subsidized seeds. The two women's groups split it.

Despite the challenges, the new rices spread farther in Guinea than in any other country, covering 16 percent of the area under rice production — progress credited to the commitment of civil servants and the enthusiasm of the political elite.

But the rice seeds could have reached many more farmers if they knew about them and were able to buy them, researchers say.

Guinean officials complained that rich countries had not invested enough in agriculture. But Tareke Berhe, an agronomist who represented Sasakawa-Global 2000 in Guinea from 1996 to 2004, said the government should have spent more on agricultural fundamentals.

Guinea is rich in resources but has been plagued by corruption and ruled for more than two decades by the autocratic leader Lansana Conté.

"Guinea doesn't have to depend on anybody," Mr. Berhe said. "It's a rich country in every way. It has diamonds, gold, bauxite. It has forestry products, lumber. It has a long coastline with fisheries."

Meanwhile, the people make do.

After a grueling afternoon threshing rice last year, Ms. Camara sat in front of her mud hut with her baby boy on her lap. She had earlier spoken lyrically about farming when surrounded by women, but grew silent in the presence of her elder brother-in-law, Aboubacar Oularé, 40, a community health worker.

In measured tones, Mr. Oularé explained that the new rices made up only a small portion of what the villagers cultivated. Still, he credited the harvests with relieving the suffering of his illiterate sister-in-law and her family. And if the seeds spread, they could improve more lives.

"They have brought change — not a lot, but some," he said. "It is not now as it was before."
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October 14, 2007
As Angola Rebuilds, Most Find Their Poverty Persists

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

LUANDA, Angola — Two years ago, only the brave or desperate would attempt the 186-mile drive from this garbage-strewn capital to the northern provincial capital, Uige. It was a 12-hour, teeth-clenching, hair-raising ordeal of dodging tire-blowing potholes and edges of roadway that crumbled into precipices.

Now, thanks to Angola's surging oil production, the journey takes half the time. And that is not all that is being transformed: All over Angola, hundreds of workers are rebuilding roads, airports, bridges and railways that were shattered during nearly three decades of civil war.

For most Angolans, the drone of road graders and steam shovels is the first tangible evidence of a dividend from their country's oil and diamond wealth, mined in earnest now after five years of peace. Many call it long past due.

Angola is gushing oil, pumping about 2 million barrels a day, more than any other African country except Nigeria. The International Monetary Fund projects a 24 percent economic growth this year — one of the fastest rates in the world. The government is taking in two and a half times as much money as it did three years ago.

But Angolans, by many indications, remain as poor as ever. The poverty rate is a matter of debate: the government claims a 12 percent drop in the past five years; analysts for the Catholic University of Angola's research center say two in three Angolans still live on $2 or less a day, the same percentage as in 2002. Still, no one disputes that most Angolans face appalling living conditions, sky-high infant mortality rates, dirty water, illiteracy and a host of other ills.

The United Nations ranked Angola last year as the world's 17th least developed country. In a December poll by a pro-democracy group and the United States Agency for International Development, 6 in 10 Angolans said their economic situation was no better now than five years ago.

With elections approaching, the government's huge effort to rebuild the county's infrastructure is intended to help change that. Aguinaldo Jaime, the nation's deputy prime minister, said Angola had taken out between $8 billion and $9 billion in loans from China since 2004, exchanging guarantees of oil supply for reconstruction work. Others, like the World Bank, estimate the Chinese loans at $12 billion.

Reconnecting roads and railways, Mr. Jaime said, will help jump-start agriculture and commercial sectors and spread the wealth beyond a small elite.

"The question many people have is that if the economy is growing so fast, when will the population start feeling the benefits?" he said at a recent lecture here. He answered his own question: "I have to say it takes time."

The government's critics argue that progress would be quicker if public officials were not so busy enriching themselves. In 2003, the weekly newspaper Angolese Samanario published a list of the wealthiest people in Angola. Twelve of the top 20 were government officials; five were former government officials.

Since then, the government has opened some of its financial records. Mr. Jaime said in an interview that some officials had prospered not by stealing public funds, but by exploiting business prospects and Angola's antiquated conflict of interest law.

Still, Transparency International, the anticorruption organization, continues to rank Angola as the world's 10th most corrupt nation. Many Angolans take it as a given that those who shop at Luanda's new upscale mall or tool about in Land Cruisers are state officials or their friends. One car dealership manager, who caters to government officials, said he ordered only the costliest luxury cars. "They want to be first with the latest model," he said, speaking anonymously so as not to lose customers.

"Everyone around the president has big business here and abroad," said Landu Kama, coordinator of the Coalition for Reconciliation, Transparency and Citizenship, a pro-democracy group. "These are special Angolans. The rest of Angolans are just part of the landscape."

But even critics like Mr. Kama acknowledge that the scenery is changing. Since 2002, the government says, it has rebuilt 2,400 miles of crumbled roads — more than half of the nation's system — and renovated airports in Luanda and three other cities. More than 430 miles of new rail track have been laid, officials said.

Even once forgotten provincial capitals like Uige are bustling with work crews in royal blue work outfits. One Chinese engineer who identified himself as Tom said his Beijing-based company had sent 100 workers to live in a compound surrounded by half-ruined buildings pockmarked with bullet holes.

"These roads here are terrible, very bad," he said as he supervised the widening of a red-dirt road. He said his crew worked 15 hours a day, seven days a week, with only five days off a year. "There is no rest," he said.

The pace of the work has picked up as elections have drawn nearer. Angola last held multiparty elections in 1992, after nearly two decades of civil war that followed independence from Portugal. The rebel Union for the Total Independence of Angola accused the governing Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, or MPLA, of rigging the vote, and war broke out again in 1998 and lasted six more years. Since then, the MPLA-led government has repeatedly promised and put off a new election.

Angolans patiently tolerate the delays, analysts say, because their memories of bloodshed are fresh. "People fear we will have another fight, so we have to keep all these things in low tension," said Manuel Alves da Rocha, academic director of Catholic University's research center here.

Increasingly, parliamentary elections look likely, with presidential elections tentatively scheduled for 2008. About 7.5 million voters have been registered in the past year, of a total population of 16 million. President José Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in power for 28 years, is expected to run, even though he said in 2001 that he would not.

That his party would win seems a given. The opposition is weak and co-opted. Nine in 10 Angolans polled in the December survey said the government was doing a good job. But after decades of conflict, self-censorship is a rule of thumb, and true gauges of public sentiment are rare. Analysts predict Angolans who do not like the governing party will stay home rather than vote.

Even executives of American oil companies here keep far out of the public eye, saying they do not want to risk offending the government by commenting to the news media.

Western diplomats and representatives of financial institutions like the World Bank try to keep up the pressure for elections and good governance measures. But as oil revenues have ballooned, their influence has diminished. This year, Angola joined the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, but limited its cooperation with the International Monetary Fund.

Todd Moss, the American deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, said, "Angola has traditionally been very, very closed" and "has not made as much progress as we would like." Still, he said, "We don't want to back them into a corner where they think their only option is to withdraw further."

Some Western diplomats say the West missed a major chance to help shape Angola when the United States and other nations turned down the government's request in 2002 to hold a donor conference. Mr. Jaime said that rejection was a major reason that Angola turned to China to finance its reconstruction.

"We are following our own model," Mr. Jaime said. "It is probably not orthodox. But when you have all the basic infrastructure destroyed, there is no other way."
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