AFRICA

Recent history (19th-21st Century)
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kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

June 28, 2010
The Black and the White of It
By ROGER COHEN

JOHANNESBURG — South Africa is a country where race is not the subtext of existence. It’s the text.

I was at dinner the other night with my cousins, white South Africans divided as to whether they still have prospects here. The elder men said things like, “I now feel like a visitor,” or “The future is for the blacks.” They see race relations worsening, corruption spreading and inefficiency rampant.

Not the youngest among them, a law student in his mid-20s, proud African, brimming with indignation at his elders’ perceived conceits: “Is it race or is it class?” he asked. “What is freedom to them?” he demanded, voice rising. “They want houses, schools, sewage. They want justice.”

Conversation turned to this tidbit: Under apartheid, blacks could not be bricklayers because the job was classified as whites-only skilled labor. The student’s mother expressed anger, prompting a furious rebuke from him: “Why are you angry now when you weren’t 30 years ago? Your anger’s useless now. Drop it. When it would have been useful you didn’t have it. Now it’s payback time for them.”

“They” are the eternal other, of course, the blacks in this white conversation, the whites in mirror-image black conversations.

There are plenty of iterations of “they” in a land where the 1950 Population Registration Act (evil legislation is always innocuously named) ran a fine comb through types of inferior being, among them Indians and mixed-race “coloreds.” Almost a generation from apartheid’s end, South Africa is struggling to compose these differences into something foreign to nature: a sustainable rainbow.

The world has much at stake in this quest. South Africa — 79 percent black, 9.5 percent white and 11.5 percent Asian or mixed race — is the ground zero chosen by history and geography for the dilemma of otherness, the violent puzzle of race with its reflexive suspicions and repetitive eruptions.

At moments, as during this first African World Cup, the rainbow shimmers. This was supposed to be the competition of smash-and-grab and of machete attacks. Many stayed away.

The fear merchants, always hard at work, have been proved wrong. German grandmas do not lie savaged on the road to Rustenburg.

Unity has unfurled, calm broken out. Smiles crease black and white faces alike. To the point that the most asked question here is: Will this moving honeymoon last beyond the World Cup?

It’s a good question. South Africa, in the run-up, smoldered, crime eating at its heart like a surrogate for the post-apartheid bloodletting that never was.

There was the murder in April of the white supremacist Eugène Terre’Blanche, hacked to death after the leader of the African National Congress (A.N.C.) Youth League, Julius Malema, revived the “kill the Boer” line of black struggle. There were Malema’s endorsements of Zimbabwe’s disaster merchant, Robert Mugabe. There was the unhappy sight of the A.N.C., torn between its liberation mythology and the mundanity of governance, gripped by paralysis as unemployment climbed over 25 percent and its “tenderpreneurs” prospered.

A tenderpreneur is an insider pocketing millions from rigged government tenders for everything from air-conditioners to locomotives. The word denotes failure, that of black economic empowerment, which has come to mean much for the few and little for the many. If the powerful steal with front companies, why should the weak not steal with guns?

Yes, as my young cousin said, blacks want justice, from other blacks as well. If President Jacob Zuma does not use the lessons of this World Cup — that color lines can blur, that things can get done — to build momentum for reform, he will have failed. He must put the tenderpreneurs out of business. He must reverse the crumbling of education. Jobs do not lie in digging more stuff out the ground. The knowledge economy is where opportunity resides.

Is it class or race? South Africa is not going to rainbow race away, but it can bring blacks out of their miserable shacks and educate them — if its leaders are prepared to lead by example. I say it’s more class than race.

I was driving the other day with my colleague, Jere Longman, who mentioned that growing up in a small town in Lousiana in the early 1960s, he would see a “whites only” sign outside the launderette and imagine that meant white clothes alone. Almost a century separated the end of slavery from the end of Jim Crow segregation in the United States. Sixteen years have passed since the first free elections here.

There are no quick fixes. But I take heart from the African patriotism of my young cousin. I take heart from another 20-something white South African, a young woman who told me: “I am so happy for Ghana and so proud to be an African.”

That was after Ghana, lone African World Cup survivor, booted the United States out, a victory dedicated by its players to Africa, Nelson Mandela’s “proud continent.” We all know what Ghana long shipped to America: slaves.

It’s a pity President Obama couldn’t find time to be here in the land where race is text and the way it gets written will affect everyone’s future.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/opini ... ?th&emc=th
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

In this year’s World Cup, “The Big Man” model of both soccer and Africa has proved to be outdated.

July 1, 2010
Özil the German
By ROGER COHEN

JOHANNESBURG — No player has fascinated me more at the World Cup than Mesut Özil. He has the languid self-assurance on the ball that comes only to the greatest footballers. Where others are hurried, he has time. He conjures space with a shrug. His left foot can, with equal ease, caress a pass or unleash a shot.

Özil, at 21, oozes class. He’s a German. That’s part of my fascination. Özil’s a Muslim German of Turkish descent who believes he has married traditions: “My technique and feeling for the ball is the Turkish side to my game. The discipline, attitude and always-give-your-all is the German part.”

The technique undid Ghana in the group stage with a fizzing volleyed goal. The attitude left England’s Gareth Barry for dead as Özil burst down the left wing to set up Germany’s fourth goal in its demolition of English illusions. Poor England, consumed by inhibition before Özil’s invention!

Özil’s a German but only just. The years I spent in Berlin in the late 1990s were marked by angry debate as the country moved from a “Volkisch” view of nationality — one based on the bloodlines of the German Volk — to a more liberal law that gave millions of immigrants an avenue to citizenship for the first time. Özil would not have been German until the immigration law of 1999.

It’s this legislation that has birthed the Germany of Özil and his teammates Sami Khedira and Jerome Boateng (Tunisian and Ghanaian fathers respectively) and Cacau (naturalized Brazilian) and Dennis Aogo (Nigerian descent). The Volk have spread wings to hoist Germany into the last eight.

There’s a third reason, beyond brilliance and birthright, for my fascination with Özil. He is probably only on the team because “The Big Man” of the German squad, Michael Ballack, was injured a few weeks before the tournament.

Similarly, Ghana has advanced to the last eight — despite that defeat to Germany — even in the absence of its “Big Man,” the injured star Michael Essien. As for Uruguay and Paraguay, two other quarter-finalists, they had no “Big Man” to begin with.

Perhaps it’s not a bad thing that the first African World Cup has seen stars fail where they were not backed by teamwork. Cameroon, with its Big Man Samuel Eto’o of Inter Milan, and Ivory Coast, with Big Man Dider Drogba of Chelsea, are both out. Ghana, meanwhile, has endured through discipline and coordination.

Africa needs more of that kind of spirit. Since decolonization began in the second half of the 20th century, it has too often been the continent of “The Big Man.” That was the sobriquet V.S. Naipaul gave in “A Bend in the River” to the African dictator plundering the city of Kisangani in Congo through mercenaires granted license to run amok.

The colonizer’s plundering merely gave way to the Big Man’s impunity in stripping Africa’s assets bare.

Perhaps the most glaring examples have been in Zimbabwe and Congo, potentially wealthy nations that have hurtled backward. Robert Mugabe has single-handedly dismembered Zimbabwe, a wanton act hauntingly evoked in Peter Godwin’s “When a Crocodile Eats the Sun.”

In Congo, over a 30-year dictatorship that defined kleptocracy (Western-supported kleptocracy at that), Mobutu Sese Seko spread the wreckage that has provided the fissured stage for the recent slaughter of millions. Between games I’ve been reading Tim Butcher’s extraordinary “Blood River,” a riveting chronicle of the unraveling of a nation told through an impossible journey across Congo. Read it to understand African tragedy.

So I’m pleased that in this World Cup, the Big Men have proved dispensable. And I’m pleased it’s being held in a country that shares African problems but has not yielded to Africa’s curse.

South Africa has the mineral wealth — 90 percent of the world’s platinum reserves and 40 percent of its gold — that has proved the “resource curse” of African nations including Nigeria. It has what Moeletsi Mbeki, the brother of former president Thabo Mbeki, described to me as “a very warped society” born in part of big mining, with its single-sex hostels for laborers torn from their families and thrust into those incubators of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. It is still a land where poverty is racialized.

But it has resisted the devastating “Big Man” syndrome. Over the past 16 years, South Africa has had four free elections and four presidents. A robust judiciary and free press frustrate attempts to cow them. The interaction, under the law, of various interest groups holds South Africa back from the brink. This is its great lesson for a continent where, by 2025, one in four of every person under 24 will live.

“Ke Nako!” — “It’s Time!” — goes the chorus of the most haunting song of this exuberant World Cup: “Now it’s time to unite as black and white to be the pride of Africa’s might.” Yes, it’s time for an end to the African Big Man who trampled that pride.

When I lived in Germany, a Social Democrat once told me that the country’s ultimate victory over Hitler would lie in the reconstitution of the Jewish community, then being pursued by luring Jews of the former Soviet Union. I always thought that was a vain, slightly kitschy idea. But the Germany of Özil and Aogo is such a victory over the Big Man who destroyed Europe.

Africa, take note.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opini ... ?th&emc=th
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

The smoking gun of Somalia
Calgary Herald
July 18, 2010

Last Sunday's suicide bombing in Uganda is a clear sign that the world cannot ignore the failed state of Somalia much longer. While the War on Terror has focused on South Asia and Iraq, jihadist outfits in the Horn of Africa have grown largely unchecked and now look to be expanding.

At least 74 people, including a few foreigners, died last Sunday at a rugby club and a restaurant in Uganda's capital, Kampala, after a pair of explosions devastated crowds watching the World Cup final on TV. Reportedly, the head of a Somali was found at one scene while further investigations turned up an unused suicide vest complete with explosives.

Al-Shabab, a Somalian terror group with links to al-Qaeda, has claimed responsibility. Based in the southern part of the dismembered remnants of what used to be Somalia, al-Shabab was formerly a part of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU), a fundamentalist organization which ruled much of the country's southern and central portions before being defeated in early 2007 by Ethiopia and Somalia's weak internationally backed Transitional Federal Government (TFR).

After the losses and a period underground, al-Shabab emerged as a power in its own right and has been consolidating its grip on Somalia's southern reaches since 2008 through terror attacks and military operations.

There hasn't been much to stand in the group's way. Ethiopian troops withdrew in 2009 while the TFR is so feeble it can barely hang on to the few scraps of the country it maintains with outside help. While the TFR has soldiers

of its own, it relies heavily on Burundian and Ugandan troops serving in Somalia as part of the African Union Mission to Somalia for support.

The attacks reflect this state of affairs. The restaurant is Ethiopian while the rugby club is allegedly a gathering place for Ugandan officers. Somalia's seemingly endless civil war has metastasized beyond the borders of its ruined birthplace.

This is a problem both because East Africa is so unstable and because the rest of the world cares so little. Ethiopia and al-Shabab loathe each other, but the Ethiopians' attention is divided by their long-standing hatred of Eritrea, which has been accused of supporting the jihadists and by fighting in their own country with Muslim rebels who inhabit an area bordering Somalia.

Somalia is separated from Yemen only by the narrow Gulf of Aden, making cross-border links and resupply easy. Festering hatreds between Muslims and the Christians who comprise majorities in most of Somalia's neighbours could also lead to trouble.

Aside from a few air strikes, the United States has mostly stayed aloof from Somalia, while others have done even less.

East Africa looks doomed to chaos unless outside countries make a concerted effort to stabilize it -- the sooner the better.

http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... 2&sponsor=
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

There are a related multimedia and a video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/world ... ?ref=world

August 5, 2010
New Kenya Constitution Passes, Early Results Show
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — Kenya’s new constitution, written to alleviate longstanding problems that have undermined good governance here for decades, received overwhelming approval from voters in a referendum on Wednesday, according to provisional results released by election officials on Thursday morning.

Sixty-seven percent of voters approved the constitution, while 33 percent voted against, with turnout as high as 80 percent in some areas, the results showed.

“YES IT IS” was the giant headline in The Standard, one of Kenya’s leading newspapers.

The new constitution is expected to be a crucial turning point in this country’s postcolonial history by finally addressing many of the political issues that have dogged this East African powerhouse since independence in 1963.

President Mwai Kibaki held a boisterous victory rally in Nairobi on Thursday afternoon and told the crowd of thousands that the new constitution would be “our shield and defender as we strive to conquer poverty, disease and ignorance.”

“I see a great people ready to build a new and prosperous future,” he said.

Voting, which began before dawn on Wednesday, was peaceful across the country. The high turnout had been expected because of the intense campaigning for and against the constitution over the past several months. But the vote was shadowed by memories of the disputed 2007 election, which set off ethnically fueled clashes across the country that left more than 1,000 people dead.

To prevent any sort of repeat, the Kenyan government overhauled the entire election process, and sent thousands of police officers to keep order in rural areas.

The new constitution curtails the powers of an imperial-style presidency, paves the way for much-needed land reform and gives Kenyans a bill of rights. The combination that could spell the beginning of the end of one of the most corrupt, deeply entrenched political systems on the continent.

Earlier in the day, the leaders of the “no” campaign conceded defeat, with just a few grumbles.

William Ruto, the minister of higher education who had been leading the opposition to the new constitution, said that “as democrats, we accept the verdict of the people of Kenya.”

At the same time, he complained about the use of state resources to promote the new constitution and about “outside forces” — a thinly-veiled reference to the American government giving civic education grants to Kenyan groups that campaigned openly for the “yes” vote.

The early referendum results showed that political leaders still held enormous sway over their ethnic communities, an influence that many observers said was exploited during the 2007 election and stoked the violence.

On Wednesday, in some polling places in strongholds of leaders who were supporting the constitution, the “yes” votes were leading by more than 99 percent. The mirror image was true in strongholds of the politicians who had been opposing the constitution. In their areas, upwards of 90 percent of the people had voted “no.”
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

August 30, 2010
The Wrong Road

In late July, President Jakaya Kikwete of Tanzania announced that his government intended to go ahead in 2012 with plans to build a highway running from Arusha in north-central Tanzania to Musoma on Lake Victoria. No one disputes the economic value of developing highways and other public works in Tanzania. But this planned highway includes a potentially tragic pitfall: it cuts straight through the heart of the northern Serengeti, one of the greatest national parks on the planet.

It would bisect the route of the great migration, the annual movement of more than a million wildebeest and other herds. President Kikwete has promised that this would only be a gravel road, and has said that he would never build anything that could harm the ecosystem.

But it would be a commercial highway nonetheless, and it would link two populous regions of Tanzania. Even a gravel road across the northern Serengeti would bring an immediate flood of traffic, instantly fragmenting the ecosystem and causing enormous potential for human-animal conflict in the form of accidents and poaching.

Tanzania’s reputation as a conservation leader in Africa has depended in large part on its protection of Serengeti. And if the government so chose, it could still protect the integrity of the park and safeguard the millions of animals that live in it and migrate through it. There is an alternative southern route for the Arusha-Musoma highway, one that would link more unserved communities than the northern route and still leave Serengeti intact.

Two things are needed. The first is a clear answer to a basic question: Why does President Kikwete support this highway when its potential impact on the ecosystem and on tourism — a major component of the Tanzanian economy — could be so dire? This is not a question the Kikwete government is eager to see pursued, especially by Tanzanians.

What is also needed is international pressure on the governments and nongovernmental organizations that would normally help finance this kind of economic development. That includes China, which plays an enormous role in African development. This is not a choice between economic development and protecting Serengeti. It is a choice between the wrong kind of development and the right kind.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/opini ... ?th&emc=th
kmaherali
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Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multi-media linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/world ... rates.html

September 1, 2010
In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

HOBYO, Somalia — Ismail Haji Noor, a local government official, recently arrived in this notorious pirate den with a simple message: we need your help.

With the Shabab militant group sweeping across Somalia and the American-backed central government teetering on life support, Mr. Noor stood on a beach flanked by dozens of pirate gunmen, two hijacked ships over his shoulder, and announced, “From now on we’ll be working together.”

He hugged several well-known pirate bosses and called them “brother” and later explained that while he saw the pirates as criminals and eventually wanted to rehabilitate them, right now the Shabab were a much graver threat.

“Squished between the two, we have to become friends with the pirates,” Mr. Noor said. “Actually, this is a great opportunity.”

For years, Somalia’s heavily armed pirate gangs seemed content to rob and hijack on the high seas and not get sucked into the messy civil war on land. Now, that may be changing, and the pirates are taking sides — both sides.

While local government officials in Hobyo have deputized pirate gangs to ring off coastal villages and block out the Shabab, down the beach in Xarardheere, another pirate lair, elders said that other pirates recently agreed to split their ransoms with the Shabab and Hizbul Islam, another Islamist insurgent group.

The militant Islamists had originally vowed to shut down piracy in Xarardheere, claiming it was unholy, but apparently the money was too good. This seems to be beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country’s biggest growth industries — piracy and Islamist radicalism — joining hands.

Somalia’s pirates are famous opportunists — “we just want the money” is their mantra — so it is not clear how long these new alliances of convenience will last. But clan leaders along Somalia’s coast say that something different is in the salty air and that the pirates are getting more ambitious, shrewdly reinvesting their booty in heavy weapons and land-based militias, and now it may be impossible for such a large armed force — the pirates number thousands of men — to stay on the sidelines.

“You can’t ignore the pirates anymore,” said Mohamed Aden, a clan leader in central Somalia. “They’re getting more and more muscle. They used to invest their money in just boats and going out to sea but now they’re building up their military side.”

More at the above mentioned link.
kmaherali
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Post by kmaherali »

There are a related multimedia and a video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/world ... gewanted=1

October 30, 2010
Serengeti Road Plan Lined With Prospect and Fears
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

SERENGETI NATIONAL PARK, Tanzania — Every spring, out here on this endless sheet of yellow grass, two million wildebeest, zebras, gazelles and other grazers march north in search of greener pastures, with lions and hyenas stalking them and vultures circling above.

It is called the Great Migration, and it is widely considered one of the most spectacular assemblies of animal life on the planet.

But how much longer it will stay that way is another matter. Tanzania’s president, Jakaya Kikwete, plans to build a national highway straight through the Serengeti park, bisecting the migration route and possibly sending a thick stream of overloaded trucks and speeding buses through the traveling herds.

Scientists and conservation groups paint a grim picture of what could happen next: rare animals like rhinos getting knocked down as roadkill; fences going up; invasive seeds sticking to car tires and being spread throughout the park; the migration getting blocked and the entire ecosystem becoming irreversibly damaged.

“The Serengeti ecosystem is one of the wonders of the planet,” said Anne Pusey, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University. “It must be preserved.”

But it is election time in Tanzania, one of the poorest countries in the world, and Mr. Kikwete is embroiled in what political analysts say is the feistiest presidential race this country has seen. Few things symbolize progress better than a road; this road in particular, which will connect marginalized areas of northern Tanzania, has been one of Mr. Kikwete’s campaign promises.

“The decision’s been made,” said Salvator Rweyemamu, the president’s spokesman. “If this government comes back into power — and we will — the road will be built.”

He said Tanzania had done more to protect wildlife than most countries, and he added, with clear frustration at outsiders, that “you guys always talk about animals, but we need to think about people.”

Hundreds of thousands of people here depend on tourism for a living. And the Serengeti is like a giant A.T.M. for Tanzania, attracting more than 100,000 visitors each year, producing millions of dollars in park fees and helping drive Tanzania’s billion-dollar safari business, an economic pillar. “If anything bad happens to the Serengeti,” said Charles Ngereza, a Tanzanian tour operator, “we’re finished.”

Most Tanzanians scrape by on the equivalent of a few dollars a day, so economic development is a pressing issue in the election, scheduled for Sunday. But corruption is a growing — and related — concern.

Mr. Kikwete’s ruling party has been widely accused of siphoning millions of dollars out of the treasury by awarding contracts to ghost companies. Perhaps no one in the campaign has better channeled voters’ frustrations over being poor while the ruling class is getting rich than Willibrod Slaa, a former Roman Catholic priest and legislator who has crusaded against corruption for years and is now running for president, along with five other challengers.

Tanzania’s government is not accustomed to upstarts. The governing party, the Party of the Revolution, was formed in the 1970s as a continuation of the Socialist-leaning political party that brought Tanganyika independence in 1961, and it has dominated Tanzanian politics ever since.

But the government now seems to be worried. It recently threatened to close independent newspapers, and Mr. Kikwete refused to debate Mr. Slaa on television, sending his campaign manager instead. The government is also delaying opening universities until after the election, which means many students will not be able to vote and will be scattered across the country, not concentrated on campuses, should there be any trouble.

Mr. Kikwete’s green guards, the governing party’s youth wing, have attacked journalists and opposition supporters. Tanzania’s police, who rarely confront civil disobedience, have tear-gassed rowdy opposition rallies. This is one of the few African countries that has escaped civil war and ethnic violence, but some Tanzanians now wonder if their tradition of harmony will be tarnished.

“There’s no way this government can win this election in a clean shot,” said Azaveli Lwaitama, a political analyst at the University of Dar es Salaam, who predicted vote-rigging and possibly turmoil. “The masses are discontented. They’re seething for change.”

That may be true in the towns, but in rural areas, where most Tanzanians live, the president still has plenty of support. In Engare Sero, a village of 6,000 people, mostly Maasai herders, just about everyone interviewed said they would vote for him.

Engare Sero lies along the proposed 300-mile highway route, already marked by red paint on rocks. The only roads out here right now are spine-crunching gravel tracks. People here not only want the highway, said chief Loshipa Sadira, “but we’ve been praying for it for years.”

He rattled off the reasons: cheaper goods; getting to the hospital faster; being better connected to towns; and having a higher chance of someday getting electricity and cellphone service.

It is hard to argue with him. Mr. Loshipa and his family eke out a living herding cows in what is essentially a desert. There are fertile grasslands nearby. But they are mostly reserved for the animals. This policy goes back to colonial times, when Maasai were summarily evicted from their lands for the sake of conservation. It has left many Maasai destitute, with young men now converging in the towns to hustle tanzanite, a semiprecious local stone, or to seek poor-paying jobs as night guards.

None of the leading conservation groups pressing Mr. Kikwete to reconsider say they are trying to block the national highway altogether; they just oppose it running through the Serengeti, which is a Unesco World Heritage site. Grass-roots groups are mobilizing around the world, circulating petitions and setting up Web sites, like savetheserengeti.org.

Mr. Kikwete recently promised that the roughly 30-mile stretch through the park would not be tarmac but packed dirt, like the mainly tourist roads already in the park. But conservation groups say any major road would allow poachers to quickly get in, shoot the animals from the highway and get out.

Scientists say the ecological damage is very hard to predict but potentially enormous. During the annual migration, the wildebeest produce more than 800,000 pounds of dung — per day — which nourishes the grasslands. If the highway fragments that migration and makes the wildebeest turn back, “the whole ecosystem could crash,” said Bernard Kissui, a research scientist for the African Wildlife Foundation.

He spoke of a “cascading effect” on the lions, leopards, birds, plants, all interconnected in an ecological web that has been relatively undisturbed for eons.

The World Bank looked into financing such a highway around 20 years ago and rejected it, partly for environmental reasons. Western scientists have recently come up with an alternative route south of the park, which they say will link up more towns and spare the wildlife.

But the Tanzanian government is not biting. Tanzanian officials say that the original route through the park is better, that construction will start soon and that if no donors will pay the approximately half billion dollars for the road, they will build it themselves.

“We are Tanzanians,” Mr. Rweyemamu said. “We know where the people are. The research has been done.”
kmaherali
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There is a related video linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/world ... babwe.html

December 18, 2010
Zimbabwe Health Care, Paid With Peanuts
By CELIA W. DUGGER

CHIDAMOYO, Zimbabwe — People lined up on the veranda of the American mission hospital here from miles around to barter for doctor visits and medicines, clutching scrawny chickens, squirming goats and buckets of maize. But mostly, they arrived with sacks of peanuts on their heads.

The hospital’s cavernous chapel is now filled with what looks like a giant sand dune of unshelled nuts. The hospital makes them into peanut butter that is mixed into patients’ breakfast porridge, spread on teatime snacks and melted into vegetables at dinnertime.

“We literally are providing medical services for peanuts!” exclaimed Kathy McCarty, a nurse from California who has run this rural hospital, 35 miles from the nearest tarred road, since 1981.

The hospital, along with countless Zimbabweans, turned to barter in earnest in 2008 when inflation peaked at what the International Monetary Fund estimates was an astonishing 500 billion percent, wiping out life savings, making even trillion-dollar notes worthless and propelling the health and education systems into a vertiginous collapse.

Since then, a power-sharing government has formed after years of decline under President Robert Mugabe, and the economy has stabilized. Zimbabwe abandoned its currency last year, replacing it with the American dollar, and inflation has fallen to a demure 3.6 percent. Teachers are back in their classrooms and nurses are back on their wards.

But a recent United Nations report suggests how far Zimbabwe has to go. It is still poorer than any of the 183 countries the United Nations has income data for. It is also one of only three countries in the world to be worse off now on combined measures of health, education and income than it was 40 years ago, the United Nations found.

For many rural Zimbabweans, cash remains so scarce that the 85-bed Chidamoyo Christian Hospital has continued to allow its patients to barter. Studies have found that fees are a major barrier to medical care in rural areas, where most Zimbabweans live.

“It’s very difficult to get this famous dollar that people are talking about,” said Esther Chirasasa, 30, who hiked eight miles through the bush to the hospital for treatment of debilitating arthritis. Her son, Cain, 13, walked at her side carrying a sack of peanuts to pay for her care.

Mrs. Chirasasa said her family of seven was nearly out of the food they grew on their small plot, so she needed to get her pain under control to work in other farmers’ fields to feed her children.

Bartering helps plug some of the holes. A May survey of more than 4,000 rural households found that each of them, typically a family of six, spent an average of only $8 for all their needs in April, the cost of a couple of cappuccinos in New York. To help them get by, more than a third of households surveyed in September 2009 had used bartering.

Still, United Nations agencies estimate that 1.7 million of Zimbabwe’s 11 million people will need food aid in the coming months. And Mr. Mugabe’s continued domination of political life, along with persistent violations of the rule of law and human rights, have deterred foreign aid and investment needed to rebuild the nation’s shattered economy, analysts say.

Here in this rustic outpost with no phone service and often no electricity, the Chidamoyo hospital and the people who rely on it have entered an unwritten pact to resist the tide of death that has carried away so many. Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, plagued by AIDS and poverty, has fallen to 47 years from 61 years over the past quarter century.

Patients provide the crops they grow and the animals they raise — food that feeds the thousands of patients who use the hospital — and the hospital tends to their wounds, treats their illnesses and delivers their babies. Its two doctors and 15 nurses see about 6,000 patients a month and have put 2,000 people with AIDS on life-saving antiretroviral medicines.

Even during the hyperinflation of 2008, when government hospitals ceased to function as the salaries of their workers shriveled, the Chidamoyo hospital stayed open by giving its staff members food that patients had bartered.

“People are helped very well and the staff cares about the patients,” said Monica Mbizo, 22, who arrived with stomach pains and traded three skinny, black-feathered chickens for treatment.

The hospital, founded over four decades ago by American missionaries, from the Christian Church and Churches of Christ, receives limited support from a government that is itself hurting for revenue. The hospital also gets up to $10,000 a month from American and British churches, enabling it to charge patients far less in cash or goods than the fees at most government facilities. The hospital charges $1 to see the doctor — or a quarter bucket of peanuts — while a government hospital typically charges $4, in cash only.

Short of cash like the people it serves, the hospital practices a level of thrift unheard of in the United States. Workers and volunteers steam latex gloves to sterilize them for reuse, filling the fingers with water to ensure against leaks. They remove the cotton balls from thousands of pill bottles to swab patients’ arms before injections. And they collect the tissue-thin pages of instructions from the same bottles for use as toilet paper.

But there are limits to what even stringent economies can achieve. For most of the past year, the hospital did not have enough money to stock blood. Ms. McCarty said women who hemorrhaged after giving birth or experiencing ruptured ectopic pregnancies were referred to bigger hospitals, but often they had no blood either. Eight women died, she said. Just recently, the United Nations has begun paying for blood at the hospital to improve women’s odds of surviving.

Standing over an anesthetized woman before a Caesarean section, Dr. Vernon Murenje recalled how frightening it was to operate without blood in stock. “You’re operating,” he said, “but then at the back of your mind, you’ll be thinking, ‘What if we have significant blood loss?’ ”

As he prepared to make the incision, the hospital was in the midst of almost two weeks without power. Its old generator, already used when the hospital bought it 20 years ago, lacked enough juice to run the X-ray machine or to keep the florescent lights from flickering. It was turned on just before the Caesarean section. The air-conditioner coughed weakly to life in the stifling room.

When a boy emerged, Ms. McCarty cried, “Welcome to Zimbabwe!” But the newborn made no sound. She pounded his back and suctioned his nose until he let out a cry like a quavering baby bird.

“Oh, you finally realized you were born in Zimbabwe,” she said. “He thought he was born in South Africa, and he was happy.”

Postscript: The Community Presbyterian Church of Ringwood, N.J., has raised $24,000, and the Rotary Club of Sebastopol, Calif., contributed $7,000 to buy the hospital a generator.
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Post by kmaherali »

This article is of particular significance in the context of the Imamat's involvement in cultural activities in Northern Mali. Below is an excerpt of a recent interview of MHI where he made his remark about Mali.

Engel: We are meeting in a park you have renovated in Mali. Why Mali?

Aga Khan: Mali is a rather unusual country in Africa because first of all it has an effective cultural hub in northern Mali, which is unusual in sub-Saharan Africa ... and we want to work with that. Secondly, it has a form of pluralism in the interpretation of its faith, which is very welcome in the Islamic world.

http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/20 ... im-leader-

January 1, 2011
Mali Tackles Al Qaeda and Drug Traffic
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

BAMAKO, Mali — The tourism minister, N’Diaye Bah, visibly bristled when asked about the possibility that Al Qaeda’s North African offshoot might kidnap foreigners in fabled Timbuktu or anywhere across Mali’s northern desert.

France spread such rumors, he insisted. “They want to create this security issue that does not exist,” he said, wagging his finger. “When you come to Mali, there is no aggression against tourists. How can you say there is insecurity in this country?”

Yet the United States and French Embassies, among other foreign missions, explicitly warn against traveling to Timbuktu and indeed the entire desert that sweeps across roughly two-thirds of this landlocked West African nation. A French Embassy map colors the entire north red, a no-go area.

This uneasy, public standoff has existed for some time, reflective of Mali’s insistence that it is not a font of violence like some of its neighbors, notably Algeria. But in a sign that Mali both acknowledges the issue and seeks to address it, the country is rolling out a new development plan, hoping to tackle the problem at its roots.

The dearth of jobs and prospects in the north helps drive the region’s twin ills — narcotics trafficking and Islamic radicalism. By setting up military barracks, infirmaries, schools, shopping areas and animal markets in 11 northern towns, the Malian government hopes to establish a more visible government presence, foster economic activity and form a bulwark against lawlessness.

“The ultimate goal of the project is to eradicate” Al Qaeda’s affiliates in Mali, said Adam Tchiam, a leading Malian columnist.

Mali does not deny that an estimated 200 to 300 fighters from Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (Maghreb being the Arabic term for west) have found a perch in their desert, although most are believed to be Mauritanians and Algerians. But Mali often depicts the terrorists as a problem generated elsewhere.

“We are hostages to a situation that does not concern us,” news reports quoted President Amadou Toumani Touré as saying.

Behind the scenes, however, the president has been more forthcoming. In a meeting with the American ambassador, Gillian A. Milovanovic, and senior American military officers last year, he said the extremists “have had difficulty getting their message across to a generally reluctant population,” according to an embassy cable obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to several news organizations. Still, Mr. Touré acknowledged, “they have had some success in enlisting disaffected youth to their ranks.”

In recent years, the Qaeda affiliate has left a trail of violence across Mauritania, Niger, Algeria and Mali, taking aim at tourists, expatriate workers, local residents and security forces. Hostages taken in the porous border regions have been executed or ransomed. Five French and two African workers kidnapped in Niger last September are believed to be held in northern Mali.

The Algerians and some Western diplomats accuse the Malians of being too soft on terrorism, an opinion reflected in the cables obtained by WikiLeaks. But Mali’s defenders argue that the regional problem is far larger than any one poor country can address.

To that end, Mauritania recently moved uninvited troops permanently across the border in Mali to eradicate a Qaeda encampment, diplomats said, and Mali did not object.

For his part, President Touré has been trying to forge a regional consensus on the issue, but the leaked cables and diplomats suggest that Algeria has been reluctant to take part. Algerian officials regularly criticize the presence of French and American training forces, saying they constitute another threat.

Mali’s own plan faces two main problems, one domestic and one foreign. Tuareg rebels fought the government in the desert for decades, with the 1992 peace treaty specifying that the government forces completely withdraw from the north. Deploying them there risks reigniting a conflict that still simmers.

Even so, some northerners endorse almost any government action in the harsh environment, where battling sand alone constitutes a daily struggle.

“There are villages that have never seen an administrator, never seen a nurse, never seen a teacher,” said Amboudi Side Ahmed, a businessman in the capital, Bamako, who was raised in the north. “You could stay in a village up there for 10 years and never see a government official.”

Then there is the question of whether these northern hubs are even feasible, given the reluctance of foreign aid workers to venture north and finance projects there. “The president says the poor protect Al Qaeda because they do not have any means,” said Mr. Tchiam, the columnist. “Where are the means?”

While foreign governments recognize that the north needs development, the lack of security hampers it. American Embassy personnel, for example, can travel north only with express permission of the ambassador, which she said she rarely granted.

“Development is critical in dealing with the north,” Ambassador Milovanovic said, but “so long as security is unstable, it is hard to get those projects going.”

“We cannot just throw money up there.”

After her own visits, she has tried to meet local requests by offering training for midwives or supplying four-wheel-drive ambulances. As part of its broader efforts to counter extremism in northern Mali, the United States also underwrote a series of radio soap operas whose plot twists emphasized the dangers of extremism.

Beyond that, Washington provides basic military training, sometimes even more basic than envisioned. An exercise on what to do when the driver of a vehicle is shot dead revealed a startling truth — most Malian soldiers did not know how to drive. Lessons were instituted. But Malian officials want more.

“How many people in the north listen to the radio? That is never going to be strong enough to change their views on A.Q.M.I. or religious fundamentalism,” said Mohamed Baby, a presidential adviser working on fixing the northern problem, using the initials of the French name for Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. “We need to deal with development, with the lack of resources.”

Qaeda fighters have sometimes ingratiated themselves by paying inflated prices for food, fuel and other goods. Diplomats believe that the extremists have also informed local smugglers that they will pay a premium for kidnapped Westerners.

Aside from collecting ransoms for hostages, Al Qaeda is believed to be financing its operations by exacting tolls from drug smugglers and traffickers in arms, humans and illicit goods. Since at least the 10th century, Timbuktu has been a crossroads for trade routes across the Sahara, and the modern age is no different.

A series of drug-laden planes make the loop from South America to the Sahel, but numbers are elusive, said Alexandre Schmidt of the United Nations drug office. In one notorious 2009 episode, a Boeing 727 believed to have ferried cocaine from Latin America was set on fire after it got stuck in the sand.

Both the drug smugglers and Al Qaeda offer young men a quick route to money and symbols of prestige like a pickup truck. The government plan has no easy, short-term ways to compete, officials concede.

“They can recruit young people and undermine both the economy and the religion,” Mr. Baby said of the militants. “We have to build up some kind of resistance.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/world ... &emc=tha22
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Post by kmaherali »

This article is of particular significance in light of AKTC's involvement in the restoration work of the mosque in the city.

There is a related photo slide-show at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/world ... &emc=tha22

January 8, 2011
Mali City Rankled by Rules for Life in Spotlight
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

DJENNÉ , Mali — Abba Maiga stood in his dirt courtyard, smoking and seething over the fact that his 150-year-old mud-brick house is so culturally precious he is not allowed to update it — no tile floors, no screen doors, no shower.

“Who wants to live in a house with a mud floor?” groused Mr. Maiga, a retired riverboat captain.

With its cone-shaped crenellations and palm wood drainage spouts, the grand facade seems outside time and helps illustrate why this ancient city in eastern Mali is an official World Heritage site.

But the guidelines established by Unesco, the cultural arm of the United Nations, which compiles the heritage list, demand that any reconstruction not substantially alter the original.

“When a town is put on the heritage list, it means nothing should change,” Mr. Maiga said. “But we want development, more space, new appliances — things that are much more modern. We are angry about all that.”

It is a cultural clash echoed at World Heritage sites across Africa and around the world. While it may be good for tourism, residents complain of being frozen in time like pieces in a museum — their lives proscribed so visitors can gawk.

“The issue in Djenné is about people getting comfort, using the right materials without compromising the architectural values,” said Lazare Eloundou Assomo, the chief of the African unit of Unesco’s World Heritage Center.

Mr. Assomo ticked off a list of sites facing similar tension, including the island of St.-Louis in neighboring Senegal, the island of Lamu in Kenya, the entire island of Mozambique off the coast of the nation by the same name, or Asian and European cities like Lyon, France.

Here in Djenné, the striking Great Mosque is what put the town on the map. It is the largest mud-brick structure in the world, so unique that it looks as if it might have landed from another planet, an imposing sand castle looming over the main square. The architectural style, known as Sudanese, is native to the Sahel.

A trio of unique minarets — square, tapering towers topped by pointed pillars and crowned by an ostrich egg — dominate the facade. Palm tree boards poked into the mosque in rows like toothpicks create a permanent scaffolding that allows residents to swarm over the building to replaster the mud, an annual February ritual involving the entire town.

Djenné is the less famous but better preserved sister city to Timbuktu. Both reached their zenith of wealth and power in the 16th century by sitting at the crossroads of Sahara trade routes for goods like gold, ivory and slaves.

The town was also a gateway that helped spread Islam regionally. When the king converted in the 13th century, he leveled his palace and built a mosque. Mali’s French colonizers eventually oversaw its reconstruction in 1907.

The Grand Mosque was again near collapse when the Agha Khan Foundation arrived to begin a $900,000 restoration project, said Josephine Dilario, one of two supervising architects. The annual replastering had more than doubled the width of the walls and added a yard of mud to the roof. It was too heavy, even with the forest of thick pillars inside the mosque supporting the high ceiling — one for each of the 99 names of God.

In 2006, the initial restoration survey ignited a riot. Protesters sacked the mosque’s interior, attacked city buildings and destroyed cars. The uprising was apparently rooted in the simmering tension among the 12,000 townsfolk, particularly the young, who felt forced to live in squalor while the mosque imam and a few prominent families raked in the benefits from tourism.

The frustration seems to have lingered. While the mosque graces the national seal, residents here appear markedly more sullen about tourism than in many other Malian cities. They often glower rather than smile, and they tend to either ask for money or stomp off when cameras are pointed in their direction.

With the mosque restoration nearing completion, the town is focusing attention on other critical problems — raw sewage and the restoration of the nearly 2,000 houses.

“There is a kind of tension, a difficulty that has to be resolved by not locking people into the traditional and authentic architecture,” said Samuel Sidibé, the director of Mali’s National Museum in Bamako, the capital.

“We have to find a way to evolve this architecture, to provide the basic necessities the community needs to live, and to do it in such a way that doesn’t compromise the quality of the mud-brick architecture, the characteristic at the heart of the city’s identity.”

Elhajj Diakaté, 54, and his brother inherited three houses from their father. Mr. Diakaté hates bending over to navigate the cramped entryways, he said, and no room is big enough to accommodate a double bed. Worse, his wives and his brother’s wives all want armoires, he said.

But a Dutch-led restoration team working to save more than 100 houses ruled out expanding any rooms for armoires, he said. So Mr. Diakaté evicted them and tore down a fat interior wall graced by two narrow arches. The entire house collapsed. The Dutch restorer wept when she saw it, he said.

Collapses are the main threat, because mud brick requires regular upkeep. Just four rainstorms washed away much of the newly restored plaster at the Grand Mosque, exposing the underlying cylindrical bricks, each about the size of a mayonnaise jar.

But the natural materials needed — like rice husks or tree paste to make the bricks impermeable — have become so expensive that the art of hand-shaping the bricks almost died out.

Djenné occupies a small island amid the inland delta of the Niger River and its tributaries. The water was a rich source of mud, until it receded during an extended drought in the 1970s. Masons used more sand, weakening the bricks. Hungry residents also ate rice husks rather than build with them.

Urban problems multiplied. A project to pipe water into the city failed to include drainage, so raw sewage fouls the unpaved streets. Trash dumps mar the river embankments. Garbage has even made its way into the bricks, with black plastic bags jutting from house walls. A faint rotting odor hangs in the background.

Tourists complained, and in 2008 Unesco warned the city that something had to be done, said Fane Yamoussa, director of the city’s cultural mission. Trash and sewage alone is not cause to be kicked off the World Heritage list, until they start affecting the architecture.

The problem, said N’Diaye Bah, Mali’s tourism minister, is modernizing the town without wrecking its ambiance. “If you destroy the heritage which people come to see, if you destroy 2,000 years of history, then the town loses its soul,” he said.

Djenné residents take pride in their heritage and recognize that the Unesco list helped make their city famous. Yet they wonder aloud about the point of staying on it, given the lack of tangible gains, if they are forced to live literally in mud.

Many homeowners want to keep the distinctive facades, but alter the interiors. Unesco guidelines prohibit the sweeping alterations they would like, however.

Mahamame Bamoye Traoré, the leader of the powerful mason’s guild, surveyed the cramped rooms of the retired river boat captain’s house, naming all the things he would change if the World Heritage rules were more flexible.

“If you want to help someone, you have to help him in a way that he wants; to force him to live in a certain way is not right,” he said, before lying on the mud floor of a windowless room that measured about 6 feet by 3 feet.

“This is not a room,” he said. “It might as well be a grave.”
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January 15, 2011
Nigeria’s Promise, Africa’s Hope
By CHINUA ACHEBE

AFRICA has endured a tortured history of political instability and religious, racial and ethnic strife. In order to understand this bewildering, beautiful continent — and to grasp the complexity that is my home country, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation — I think it is absolutely important that we examine the story of African people.

In my mind, there are two parts to the story of the African peoples ... the rain beating us obviously goes back at least half a millennium. And what is happening in Africa today is a result of what has been going on for 400 or 500 years, from the “discovery” of Africa by Europe, through the period of darkness that engulfed the continent during the trans-Atlantic slave trade and through the Berlin Conference of 1885. That controversial gathering of the leading European powers, which precipitated the “scramble for Africa,” we all know took place without African consultation or representation. It created new boundaries in ancient kingdoms, and nation-states resulting in disjointed, inexplicable, tension-prone countries today.

During the colonial period, struggles were fought, exhaustingly, on so many fronts — for equality, for justice, for freedom — by politicians, intellectuals and common folk alike. At the end of the day, when the liberty was won, we found that we had not sufficiently reckoned with one incredibly important fact: If you take someone who has not really been in charge of himself for 300 years and tell him, “O.K., you are now free,” he will not know where to begin.

This is how I see the chaos in Africa today and the absence of logic in what we’re doing. Africa’s postcolonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves, forgotten their traditional way of thinking, embracing and engaging the world without sufficient preparation. We have also had difficulty running the systems foisted upon us at the dawn of independence by our colonial masters. We are like the man in the Igbo proverb who does not know where the rain began to beat him and so cannot say where he dried his body.

More.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/opini ... emc=tha212
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May 11, 2011
A Rite of Torture for Girls
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

HARGEISA, Somaliland

People usually torture those whom they fear or despise. But one of the most common forms of torture in the modern world, incomparably more widespread than waterboarding or electric shocks, is inflicted by mothers on daughters they love.

It’s female genital mutilation — sometimes called female circumcision — and it is prevalent across a broad swath of Africa and chunks of Asia as well. Mothers take their daughters at about age 10 to cutters like Maryan Hirsi Ibrahim, a middle-aged Somali woman who says she wields her razor blade on up to a dozen girls a day.

“This tradition is for keeping our girls chaste, for lowering the sex drive of our daughters,” Ms. Ibrahim told me. “This is our culture.”

Ms. Ibrahim prefers the most extreme form of genital mutilation, called infibulation or Pharaonic circumcision. And let’s not be dainty or euphemistic. This is a grotesque human rights abuse that doesn’t get much attention because it involves private parts and is awkward to talk about. So pardon the bluntness about what infibulation entails.

The girls’ genitals are carved out, including the clitoris and labia, often with no anesthetic. What’s left of the flesh is sewn together with three to six stitches — wild thorns in rural areas, or needle and thread in the cities. The cutter leaves a tiny opening to permit urination and menstruation. Then the girls’ legs are tied together, and she is kept immobile for 10 days until the flesh fuses together.

When the girl is married and ready for sex, she must be cut open by her husband or by a respected woman in the community.

All this is, of course, excruciating. It also leads to infections and urinary difficulties, and scar tissue can make childbirth more dangerous, increasing maternal mortality and injuries such as fistulas.

This is one of the most pervasive human rights abuses worldwide, with three million girls mutilated each year in Africa alone, according to United Nations estimates. A hospital here in Somaliland found that 96 percent of women it surveyed had undergone infibulation. The challenge is that this is a form of oppression that women themselves embrace and perpetuate.

“A young girl herself will want to be cut,” Ms. Ibrahim told me, vigorously defending the practice. “If a girl is not cut, it would be hard for her to live in the community. She would be stigmatized.”

Kalthoun Hassan, a young mother in an Ethiopian village near Somaliland, told me that she would insist on her daughters being cut and her sons marrying only girls who had been. She added: “It is God’s will for girls to be circumcised.”

For four decades, Westerners have campaigned against genital cutting, without much effect. Indeed, the Western term “female genital mutilation” has antagonized some African women because it assumes that they have been “mutilated.” Aid groups are now moving to add the more neutral term “female genital cutting” to their lexicon.

Is it cultural imperialism for Westerners to oppose genital mutilation? Yes, perhaps, but it’s also justified. Some cultural practices such as genital mutilation — or foot-binding or bride-burning — are too brutish to defer to.

But it is clear that the most effective efforts against genital mutilation are grass-roots initiatives by local women working for change from within a culture. In Senegal, Ghana, Egypt and other countries, such efforts have made headway.

Here among Somalis, reformers are trying a new tack: Instead of telling women to stop cutting their daughters altogether, they encourage them to turn to a milder form of genital mutilation (often involving just excision of part or all of the clitoris). They say that that would be a step forward and is much easier to achieve.

Although some Christians cut their daughters, it is more common among Muslims, who often assume that the tradition is Islamic. So a crucial step has been to get a growing number of Muslim leaders to denounce the practice as contrary to Islam, for their voices carry particular weight.

At one mosque in the remote town of Baligubadle, I met an imam named Abdelahi Adan, who bluntly denounces infibulation: “From a religious point of view, it is forbidden. It is against Islam.”

Maybe the tide is beginning to turn, ever so slowly, against infibulation, and at least we’re seeing some embarrassment about the practice. In Baligubadle, a traditional cutter named Mariam Ahmed told me that she had stopped cutting girls — apparently because she knows that foreigners disapprove. Then a nurse in the local health clinic told me that she had treated Ms. Ahmed’s own daughter recently for a horrific pelvic infection and urinary blockage after the girl was infibulated by her mother.

I confronted Ms. Ahmed. She grudgingly acknowledged cutting her daughter but quickly added that she had intended only a milder form of circumcision. She added quickly: “It was an accident.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/opini ... emc=tha212
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June 29, 2011
Yet Again in Sudan
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The world capital for crimes against humanity this month probably isn’t in Libya or Syria. Instead, it’s arguably the Nuba Mountains of Sudan, where we’re getting accounts of what appears to be a particularly vicious campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder and rape.

In its effort to preclude witnesses, the Sudanese government has barred humanitarian access to the area and threatened to shoot down United Nations helicopters. Sudanese troops even detained four United Nations peacekeepers and subjected them to “a mock firing squad,” the U.N. said.

An internal U.N. report says that Sudanese authorities are putting on uniforms of the Sudanese Red Crescent — a local version of the Red Cross — to order displaced people to move away from the United Nations compound. They were then herded into a stadium in the town of Kadugli, where their fate is uncertain.

Western aid workers have been forced to flee, and there are credible reports of government troops and government-backed Arab militias systematically hunting down members of the black-skinned Nuba ethnic group and killing them.

“Door-to-door executions of completely innocent and defenseless civilians, often by throat-cutting, by special internal security forces,” a Westerner with long experience in Sudan recounted in a terse e-mail that I posted on my blog. The writer, who was on the scene but has now left, does not want to be named for fear of losing access.

The Rt. Rev. Andudu Elnail, an Episcopal bishop for the Nuba Mountains area, told me that the Sudanese government has targeted many Nuban Christians. Armed forces burned down his cathedral, said Bishop Andudu, who is temporarily in the United States but remains in touch daily with people in the area.

“They’re killing educated people, especially black people, and they don’t like the church,” he said. Women are also being routinely raped, Bishop Andudu said, estimating that the death toll is “more than a few thousand” across the Sudanese state of South Kordofan.

This isn’t religious warfare, for many Nubans are Muslim and have also been targeted (including a mosque bombed the other day). The Sudanese military has been dropping bombs on markets and village wells.

The airstrip that I used when I visited the Nuba Mountains has now been bombed to keep humanitarians from flying in relief supplies; the markets I visited are now deserted, according to accounts smuggled out to monitoring groups. At least 73,000 people have fled their homes, the United Nations says.

A network of brave people on the ground, virtually all locals, have been secretly taking photos and transmitting them to human rights organizations in the West like the Enough Project. My hard drive overflows with photos of children bleeding from shrapnel.

Samuel Totten, a genocide scholar at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, visited the Nuba Mountains a year ago to gather historical accounts of the mass killings of Nuba by the Sudanese government in the 1990s. Now, he says, it is all beginning to happen again.

“As I watch the international community dither as the people of the Nuba Mountains are being killed, impunity reigns,” said Professor Totten.

The Sudanese government signed a framework agreement on Tuesday that could be a step to end the violence in South Kordofan, but there has been no deal on cessation of hostilities. Sudan has a long record of agreements reached and then breached (by the South as well as the North).

Sudan is preparing for a split on July 9, when South Sudan emerges as an independent nation after decades of on-and-off war between North and South. The Nuba Mountains will remain in the North when the South secedes, but many Nuba sided with the South during the war and still serve in a rebel military force dug into the mountains.

Most of the violence in the Nuba Mountains has been by northern Arabs against the Nuba, but there are also reports of rebel soldiers attacking Arab civilians. There is a risk that violence will spread to the neighboring state of Blue Nile and ultimately trigger a full-blown North-South war, although both sides want to avoid that.

It’s critical that the United Nations retain its presence. Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, already indicted for genocide in Darfur, is now visiting China, and Chinese leaders need to insist that he stop the killing of civilians and allow the U.N. to function.

The appeals from Nubans today feel like an anguished echo of those from Darfur eight years ago. Samaritan’s Purse, a Christian organization that has long worked in the Nuba Mountains, said it received a message from a Nuban pastor: “With grief today, I want to inform you that the new church is burned down. We have lost everything. The house where my staff lives was looted, and the offices were burned. Many people fled from town, but some stayed. There is no food or water now.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/30/opini ... emc=tha212
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Post by kmaherali »

An African Adventure, and a Revelation
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

An American student and a teacher discover that economies are growing, more girls are in school and gains are being made in nutrition.

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso

TAKE an American student and an American teacher who have never been near Africa before, lead them on a crazed “win a trip” journey through five particularly wretched countries, and what do you get?

Well, a few mishaps. There was that angry mob in Mauritania — who would have thought our cameras would upset people that much? And that bull elephant in Niger was equally inhospitable, although the giraffes seemed amiable as they approached to gawk at the strange white humans.

We encountered plenty of heartbreak, like the baby we met in Niger who was going blind from lack of vitamin A. In some places, we felt the gnawing disquiet of insecurity. The rise of banditry and a Qaeda network in West Africa forced us to take an armed escort across one particularly lawless stretch of “highway.”

Yet my travel buddies and I also found something far more significant on our journey: hope. One of the best-kept secrets in the world today can be found in thatched-roof villages like the ones we passed through: Africa appears to be turning around.

After a half-century of underperformance, Africa’s economy is growing significantly faster than America’s or Europe’s. In the last decade, 6 of the 10 fastest growing economies in the world were in sub-Saharan Africa, and, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton noted in a recent speech in Ethiopia, that proportion is expected to rise even higher in the next five years. The global economy has turned upside down: Europe risks imploding, while much of Africa is booming.

More....

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/opini ... emc=tha212
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Post by kmaherali »

There is a related multimedia which summarizes the article linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/world ... &emc=tha22

July 9, 2011
After Years of Struggle, South Sudan Becomes a New Nation
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

JUBA, South Sudan — The celebrations erupted at midnight. Thousands of revelers poured into Juba’s steamy streets in the predawn hours on Saturday, hoisting enormous flags, singing, dancing and leaping on the back of cars.

“Freedom!” they screamed.

A new nation was being born in what used to be a forlorn, war-racked patch of Africa, and to many it seemed nothing short of miraculous. After more than five decades of an underdog, guerrilla struggle and two million lives lost, the Republic of South Sudan, Africa’s 54th state, was about to declare its independence in front of a who’s who of Africa, including the president of the country letting it go: Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, a war-crimes suspect.

Many of those who turned out to celebrate, overcome with emotion, spoke of their fathers, mothers, sons and daughters killed in the long struggle to break free from the Arab-dominated north.
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African free-trade plan must be supported


By Mansoor Ladha, Calgary Herald July 26, 2011

A historic agreement aimed at creating a free-trade zone uniting 26 African countries and establishing Africa's biggest trading bloc was announced recently in Johannesburg, South Africa.

The proposed free-trade area would encompass the South African Development Community, the East African Community, and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa, with a population of more than 600 million people and a combined domestic product of $1 trillion.

At a time when only 10 per cent of Africa's trade is within Africa, there is no question that the attempt will have huge benefits to the continent and the venture should be wholly supported. Currently, Africa is plagued with corruption at border posts, several barriers to free trade and different economies adopted by each country. Now, of course, it is also facing famine in the Horn of Africa. When the proposed free-trade area becomes a reality in three years, South African car manufacturers, for example, believe that their production will triple due to inter-African business.

A free-trade area of this size would dramatically reduce the costs of doing business between African states and increase the flow of trade within the continent. An agreement of this kind would enhance the continent's bargaining power when dealing with the rest of the world, which could help to improve the terms of trade between Africa, the United States and the European Union.

This is not the first time such a venture has been proposed. Skeptics look at the East African Community established in 1967, consisting of Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, which was aborted in 1977 after 10 years in operation. Efforts to revive the community began in 1993, with the heads of state signing an agreement to establish a commission for East African co-operation. A free-trade area was created in East Africa again when Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania decided to join hands and form a trade bloc called East African Community in 2001. Kenya's then president Daniel arap Moi, Uganda's Yoweri Museveni and Tanzania's Benjamin Mkapa, formalized the treaty to pave the way for an economic and, ultimately, political union of the three countries. Burundi and Rwanda later joined the group; together, the five nations muster $40 billion in gross domestic product. The leaders agreed to create a free-trade zone within the region by pooling resources and promoting pro-liberalization policies, believing that they can prosper better as one unit than apart.

The East African Community, however, has had its fair share of disputes and disagreements. The main bone of contention has been the longheld perception that Kenya's economy - mainly the manufacturing sector - was more competitive than Tanzania and Uganda's despite the fact that it has been declining over the past few years under pressure from imports from the Middle East and inadequate infrastructure.

Increasing transportation costs to ship goods between Kenya and Uganda have also become an acute problem for the business community of East Africa. For instance, while it costs between $1,400 and $1,700 to ship a 13-metre container from Dubai to Mombasa, the average transportation and clearing cost for the same container between Mombasa and Kampala is $3,800. A 6.6-metre container costs a trader $2,250.

Ugandan traders are often forced to make costly and sometimes futile trips to Nairobi and Mombasa to demand faster clearance of freight and delivery, as their cargo remains in the ports for weeks or even months. The pileup of Ugandabound rail cargo at the Kenyan port of Mombasa has often reached crisis levels, threatening to paralyze the operations of several manufacturing companies in Uganda.

The proposed African trade area will require much more than the political will to materialize. Colonizing powers in Africa built railways from the interior to the coast to allow their products an outlet to the sea, but until transportation between the 55 inter-African nations is built, the success of African free trade will remain a pipe dream.

Each African nation will have to move toward greater democracy, ensuring free and fair elections, open contests for leadership positions, secure property rights, and a free press and independent judiciary. Each country will have to move significantly away from its authoritarian past.

African nations have faced turbulent times, politically and economically, and it is hoped that the advocates of the proposed free-trade region will be supported. On their part, African governments will have to focus on creating an economic environment that induces investment and risk-taking, while the private sector will have to act to take advantage of the new opportunities that regional integration offers for long-term expansion. In some countries, tribal factions, which dominate the political landscape, will have to be replaced by inter-African solidarity. The creation of a free-trade area is an effort that is truly worthy of support by everyone who has a stake in Africa's future - and that means all of us.

Mansoor Ladha is a Calgary-based freelance journalist and author.

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There is a related multimedia linked at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/30/world ... &emc=tha22

July 29, 2011
Maternal Deaths Focus Harsh Light on Uganda
By CELIA W. DUGGER

ARUA, Uganda — Jennifer Anguko was slowly bleeding to death right in the maternity ward of a major public hospital. Only a lone midwife was on duty, the hospital later admitted, and no doctor examined her for 12 hours. An obstetrician who investigated the case said Ms. Anguko, the mother of three young children, had arrived in time to be saved.

Her husband, Valente Inziku, a teacher, frantically changed her blood-soaked bedclothes as her life seeped away. “I’m going to leave you,” she told him as he cradled her. He said she pleaded, “Look after our children.”

Half of the 340,000 deaths of women from pregnancy-related causes each year occur in Africa, almost all in anonymity. But Ms. Anguko was a popular elected official seeking treatment in a 400-bed hospital, and a lawsuit over her death may be the first legal test of an African government’s obligation to provide basic maternal care.

It also raises broader questions about the unintended impact of foreign aid on Africa’s struggling public health systems. As the United States and other donors have given African nations billions of dollars to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases, helping millions of people survive, most of the African governments have reduced their own share of domestic spending devoted to health, shifting to other priorities.
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Ladha: We can all do our part to ease African famine


By Mansoor Ladha August 9, 2011

http://www.calgaryherald.com/business/L ... story.html

I don’t like watching the six o’clock news on TV as there are always depressing images of starving African women and children flickering across the screen. We have seen all this before, but in the latest episode, we see Somali women with dying babies stumbling into refugee camps in Kenya and Ethiopia.

Now, the whole Horn of Africa, which includes Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti and Uganda, is suffering from the worst drought in 60 years. Drought and food shortages are not new to this part of Africa, and this time around, the region has experienced the driest year in decades. The Horn, with more than 40 per cent of its population of more than 160 million living in areas prone to extreme food shortages, also happens to be the poorest region on the continent.

Although the region basically has an agricultural-oriented economy, with the majority of the population being farmers, they lack machinery and fertilizer. Agriculture productivity usually remains low, even when farmers get enough rain. The amount of food produced is small and it’s insufficient to be placed in reserve for times of drought.

“One of the problems for the Horn of Africa is the food crisis is becoming more or less chronic,” says Abbas Gnamo, an Ethiopian-born academic who teaches African politics and conflict studies at the University of Toronto and Ryerson University.

Local farmers have also lost incentives to grow food because of cheaper imports and the dumping of food aid onto local markets. Gnamo pointed out that Ethiopia faced such a situation in 2005-2006, when the government didn’t have the capacity to store surplus food after the relief operation was over, thus it was forced to sell the food on the local market or give it away.

“The peasants who invested and worked hard, then had to sell (their food) at a lower price,” Gnamo said. “Then, they lost incentive, and then they reduced (production), because they felt if you cannot compete with imported food which is sold on market, then why should you produce more?”

Africa’s recent tragedy is likely to spark discussions over why despite years of foreign aid, it remains a condemned continent, always facing famine, malnutrition, disease, corruption and civil wars. United Nations agencies have estimated they will need $1 billion to cope with the problem. So far, donor nations have pledged $200 million – considered to be a drop in the bucket.

Should we ignore this greatest tragedy facing mankind? Don’t we feel anything when we see those tragic images of starving and dying children on television?

Foreign aid is always considered a double-edged sword. One school of thought supports it, while the other opposes it, believing that the recipient country does not give it to the people who need it the most.

Dambia Moyo, a Zambian-born, Oxford University-trained economist, blames foreign aid for contributing to Africa’s problems.

“The problem is aid is not benign, it’s maligned,” she says in her book, Dead Aid. Her solution is that foreign aid to Africa should be replaced with trade and direct investment.

Delivering food and supplies is difficult in many of these areas because foreign agencies face great problems in ensuring that aid reaches those who need it the most. There have been cases of foreign workers accused of being spies. Jihadists have kidnapped, killed and threatened many of them.

Somalia, a failed state, is a disaster, where violence, pirates, clan conflicts and terrorism are rampant. Already, Somali government forces and African Union troops had to battle insurgents in the capital Mogadishu in a bid to secure aid routes for drought victims. Al-Shabaab insurgents, who have vowed to topple the western-backed transitional government and chase out African Union troops, control large areas of southern Somalia.

No one denies that critics like Moyo make sense, but that doesn’t mean that we in the developed world should ignore this natural calamity. We have been taught to help people in need and this is a classical example of people in dire straits. Fortunately, there are sympathetic countries like Canada that are willing to help and have responded with speed. Bev Oda, Canada’s International Co-operation minister, has already announced a $25-million aid package after visiting the disaster areas in East Africa. To date, the federal government has pledged $72 million for humanitarian relief and it has agreed to match donations given by individuals.

Canadians are generous people who have responded to disasters in Haiti, Pakistan and elsewhere, and it is my hope that this famine plea will not go unheeded. Trustworthy aid agencies such as the Red Cross, UNICEF, Samaritan’s Purse Canada and Oxfam have come forward to collect individual donations. If each one of us vowed to give even a nominal amount to this worthy cause, maybe there is a chance to reach the target.

I am hoping that next time I see the six o’clock news, I will see faces of happy and smiling African children on television.

Mansoor Ladha is a Calgary-based journalist and author who has lived in Kenya and Tanzania.
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November 24, 2011
African Union Force Makes Strides Inside Somalia
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NAIROBI, Kenya — When the first batch of African Union peacekeepers landed at Mogadishu’s decrepit airport in 2007, they were immediately shelled by insurgents with mortars and given little chance of success. This was Somalia after all, the graveyard of several other doomed interventions, and the African Union soldiers were a last resort for a deeply troubled mission.

But four years later and nearly 10,000 soldiers strong, the African Union force in Somalia has hardened into a war-fighting machine — and it seems to be winning the war. Analysts say the African Union has done a better job of pacifying Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital and a hornet’s nest of Islamist militants, clan warlords, factional armies and countless glassy-eyed freelance gunmen, than any other outside force, including 25,000 American troops in the 1990s.

The peacekeepers have “performed better than anyone would have dreamed,” said J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa program at the Atlantic Council, a Washington research institution.

Their surprising success has put the African Union in the driver’s seat of an intensifying international effort to wipe out Somalia’s Shabab militants, once and for all. Kenya, Ethiopia, the United States, France, Djibouti, Burundi and Uganda have all jumped in to some degree against the Shabab, a brutal and wily insurgent group that is considered both a regional menace and an international threat, with possible sleeper cells embedded in Somali communities in the United States and Europe.

The Shabab have been terrorizing Somalia for years, imposing a harsh and alien form of Islam, chopping off heads and unleashing suicide bombers, including Somali-Americans recruited from Minnesota. But the African Union has dealt the Shabab a crippling blow in Mogadishu, which is what may have encouraged Kenyan and Ethiopian forces to recently invade separate parts of Somalia in an unusual regional effort to spread the Shabab thin on several fronts and methodically eliminate them.

More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/world ... &emc=tha22
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Ladha: After 50 years, Tanzania is an African success story

By Mansoor LadhaDecember 8, 2011

Calgary, Alberta-20080717 Calgary author Mansoor Ladha has written a book on the history of Ismaili Muslims in Canada. Photo by Handout/ (For RELIGION section story by Graeme Morton)
Photograph by: Handout

A third generation Asian, I fled Tanzania in the 1970s, running away from President Julius Nyerere’s socialist policies. I was part of the Asian exodus that resulted from Nyerere’s nationalization policies, whereby Asian businesses, farms and even homes were taken over by the government without compensation.

Nyerere even nationalized the country’s leading English daily, The Standard, where I worked as features editor, forcing journalists to take out party memberships as a prerequisite to keeping their jobs. That’s when I decided to leave my beloved country, arguing I should keep my job because I am a good editor and not because I have a political party membership.

I vividly remember Dec. 9, 1961, as I watched with great joy and emotion, amid shouts of Uhuru, Uhuru (freedom, freedom), as the Union Jack was lowered for the last time and the new green, black and orange flag of the new nation, Tanganyika, was raised. With tears in my eyes, I witnessed this historic moment as Nyerere received the instruments of Tanganyika’s independence from Prince Philip.

Today, Tanzania — so named after it merged with the island of Zanzibar in 1964 — will be celebrating 50 years of independence amid pomp and festivities.

Nyerere placed Tanzania on the map by following an aggressive policy of socialism, taking an outspoken stand on foreign policy and showing unreserved support of Pan-Africanism. Nyerere believed that no country in Africa was free until all African nations were independent.

Freedom fighters and liberation organizations from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Angola and South West Africa converged on Dar es Salaam, the capital, making it the headquarters of Africa’s freedom movement. Everyone who was anyone visited Dar es Salaam during those years to meet Nyerere and the leaders of southern Africa’s liberation movements.

Nyerere, affectionately called Mwalimu (Swahili for teacher), used Tanzania as a pulpit to spread his socialist philosophy. As a university student in the 1960s, I worshipped the man as I admired him for squaring off with the U.S. and the colonial power, Britain, to try to create a just society. By the late 1960s, Tanzania had become one of the world’s poorest countries, suffering from a severe foreign debt burden, a decrease in foreign aid and a fall in the price of commodities. Nyerere’s solution was the collectivization of agriculture and large-scale nationalization. This vision, set out in the Arusha Declaration of 1967, was a unique blend of socialism and communal life.

I had the privilege of meeting Nyerere, first as a student leader and later as a journalist, and my adulation for him never diminished. When he retired in 1985, stepping down as president after 24 years, he was only the third modern African head of state to relinquish power voluntarily while in office. Although his socialist experiment failed, Nyerere, who died of leukemia on Oct. 14, 1999, will be remembered as a man dedicated to his countrymen, who wanted to develop the country without depending on western aid.

It was left to the succeeding leadership in Tanzania to dismantle government controls over the economy and to reverse Nyerere’s policies. This tremendous task fell upon three successors, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, Benjamin Mkapa and the present president, Jakaya Kikwete. It took three presidents to undo what Nyerere had done. During Mwinyi’s terms, Tanzania took the first steps to reversing Nyerere’s socialist policies.

Mwinyi relaxed import restrictions and encouraged private enterprise. He also introduced multi-party politics.

The next president, Mkapa, privatized state-owned corporations and instituted free market policies, arguing that attracting foreign investment would promote economic growth. So far, Kikwete’s government has received accolades across the country and in the donor community for fighting corruption, investing in people — particularly in education — and pushing for new investments.

Today, Tanzania is considered one of Africa’s most politically stable countries. Kikwete’s government has steered the country through challenging times, domestically, regionally and globally. The present government’s strategy has been to develop agriculture, as 75 per cent of Tanzanians live in rural areas and survive from working the land. There have been real improvements in health and education services, as well as in press and information since 2005.

Today, 97 per cent of children are in primary school, compared to only two per cent at independence.

Kikwete has also managed to improve his country’s status and boost Tanzania’s presence on the global stage. As chairman of the African Union in 2008, Kikwete was a key figure in peace talks that brought about a resolution to a violent political dispute in neighbouring Kenya.

A leading advocate of an economic free trade zone among its neighbours, Tanzania on July 1, 2010, formed a customs union with Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.

There is no doubt that given the right political direction, Tanzania, a nation formed by people from 126 tribes, will be an African success story. A country with such diversity, to have survived for 50 years where several other countries have failed, is something to be proud of.

Mansoor Ladha, a Calgary-based journalist and author, was born in Tanzania and worked on the leading English daily The Standard before coming to Canada in 1972.
© Copyright (c) The Calgary Herald

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December 5, 2011
Vast and Fertile Ground in Africa for Science to Take Root
By G. PASCAL ZACHARY

He might have been content simply to teach thousands of university students in Uganda how to use computers, assemble them into networks, manage them and write basic software programs. In a poor African country with one of the world’s fastest-growing populations and rising Internet use, that alone would have been an enormous achievement.

But Venansius Baryamureeba had bigger ideas. In 2005, when he returned home with a doctorate from the University of Bergen in Norway, he was just one of a handful of computer scientists in Uganda. And his timing was right. The largely agricultural economy had been growing by about 7 percent annually, propelling an enormous expansion of the upper middle class and the urban elite’s aspirations for advanced training in science and engineering.

Emboldened by Uganda’s relative peace and prosperity, Dr. Baryamureeba founded a new college that includes departments of computer science and computer engineering at creaky Makerere University, in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. At the top of a hill near the university’s entrance, overlooking the derelict law school to one side and a derelict school mosque to the other, two gleaming glass buildings went up seemingly without a hitch. So many undergraduates swarmed them that the faculty held classes at midnight to accommodate them.

Dr. Baryamureeba wanted more than a vocational school; he also created a graduate program he hoped would someday turn out dozens of Ph.D. scientists who would themselves become college professors and help push the boundaries of global research.

Improbably, his vision is gaining traction at Makerere. Young homegrown scientists there are now nearing completion of their Ph.D.’s. And faculty members are carrying out cutting-edge experiments. They are seeking to endow cellphones with the “intelligence,” embedded in tiny software programs animated by mathematical algorithms, to identify diseases in crops or malaria in a person’s bloodstream.

Ernest Mwebaze, a doctoral student and lecturer, said there are still serious obstacles to pursuing such research in Uganda, including unreliable Internet service and power failures. But he also said the potential upside is huge.

“Uganda offers several unique research challenges and problems whose solutions can actually have a greater marginal benefit than, say, solutions to problems in Europe,” he said.

Each Monday, in a laboratory of thrumming computers, Mr. Mwebaze teaches a small class on artificial intelligence to 10 graduate students, highlighting this esoteric field, the subject of his doctorate research.

And the potential for Africans trained in Africa to conduct science attuned to the realities of Africa is not limited to computing. “There’s a growing interest in research, and science generally, in the region,” said Calestous Juma, a Harvard professor who specializes in the study of technology and development.

The rapid spread of cellphones has fueled an appreciation among Africans for the practical uses of science and technology. And the children of the African elite are also seeing career possibilities in computing science and engineering, beyond the traditional disciplines of medicine, law and finance or the more typical scientific callings of crop and soil science.

“Computer science appeals to a generation of urban students raised on a diet of digital devices,” said Chanda Chisala of Zambia Online, a software development company and Internet provider in the Zambian capital, Lusaka.

The field also may appeal to chronically underfinanced African universities because the study of computer science is relatively inexpensive. No big atom smashers are needed, as in physics; no giant telescopes, as in astronomy.

Computer science in Africa, to be sure, is still held back by the perception that it is preferable to study and work in Europe or the United States, even if that means leaving Africa permanently. This must change for computer science to flourish in the region. Georgia Tech researchers recommended in a study that African educators reinforce efforts to mold computer science curriculum to meet “local needs.”

A shortage of skilled teachers also remains a problem. The continent’s leading computer science departments — based on research publications — are all in South Africa. Yet even there, the number of university-level teachers is limited. “Our C.S. departments are much smaller than counterparts in the U.S.,” said Bill Tucker, an American who is a senior lecturer at the University of Western Cape.

And differing ethical practices in African and American academic institutions complicate matters. When V. S. Subrahmanian, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, decided to forge a research partnership last year with Nigerian professors, he was enthusiastically received. But when he provided a Nigerian computer center with data compiled by Maryland, the center started selling it. Dr. Subramanian, who thought the data should have been openly available for scholars, found the experience “very troubling.”

Dr. Baryamureeba’s commitment has helped Makerere overcome such obstacles. He now leads the entire university, ensuring that computer science and engineering have high-level support. Partnerships with universities in Norway and the Netherlands have also proved crucial. Graduate students from Uganda have been able to study both at home and abroad. And the European universities promise not to poach them, requiring that the students return to Uganda to get their doctorates.

There’s also a palpable sense among young scholars that Africa is cool — and that universities are improving just enough to advance the scientific ambitions of Western scientists.

Consider John Quinn, a Scot. He attended Cambridge and received a doctorate in computer science from the University of Edinburgh. Searching for an unconventional research experience, he contacted Makerere just as Dr. Baryamureeba was casting about for international talent to bolster his faculty. Dr. Quinn accepted, and has never looked back. An artificial intelligence research group he formed has received financing from Microsoft and Google. One project involves designing code that turns a cellphone into a sophisticated microscope. He presented his research on diagnosing malaria over the phone at an international conference in San Francisco in August.

“There’s a growing awareness of the need to focus, to specialize and to become internationally competitive,” Dr. Quinn said of himself and his colleagues.

One potentially practical and profitable benefit partly explains the interest of computer companies in Dr. Quinn’s research: Turning cellphones into cheap microscopes and pattern-recognition devices could help people in the developed world lower costs of instant diagnosis of minor medical problems.

So far, Dr. Quinn’s reputation has only been enhanced by his work in Uganda, and he’s earning decent pay. Postdoctoral salaries for European computer scientists are not that much different from the roughly $3,000 a month Dr. Quinn earns at Makerere. That has him thinking he will stay awhile in Kampala. He’d initially planned to stick it out for two years, but he’s now already four years into his African university tenure and sees a lot of running room in computer science — for himself, and for Africa.

Josh Kron contributed reporting from Kampala, Uganda.


http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/06/scien ... emc=tha210
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April 15, 2012
Africa’s Free Press Problem
By MOHAMED KEITA
AS Africa’s economies grow, an insidious attack on press freedom is under way. Independent African journalists covering the continent’s development are now frequently persecuted for critical reporting on the misuse of public finances, corruption and the activities of foreign investors.

Why this disturbing trend? In the West, cynicism about African democracy has led governments to narrow their development priorities to poverty reduction and stability; individual liberties like press freedom have dropped off the agenda, making it easier for authoritarian rulers to go after journalists more aggressively. In the 1990s, leaders like Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia were praised by the West as political and social reformers. Today, the West extols these men for achieving growth and maintaining stability, which they do largely with a nearly absolute grip over all national institutions and the press.

Then there’s the influence of China, which surpassed the West as Africa’s largest trading partner in 2009. Ever since, China has been deepening technical and media ties with African governments to counter the kind of critical press coverage that both parties demonize as neocolonialist.

In January, Beijing issued a white paper calling for accelerated expansion of China’s news media abroad and the deployment of a press corps of 100,000 around the world, particularly in priority regions like Africa. In the last few months alone, China established its first TV news hub in Kenya and a print publication in South Africa. The state-run Xinhua news agency already operates more than 20 bureaus in Africa. More than 200 African government press officers received Chinese training between 2004 and 2011 in order to produce what the Communist Party propaganda chief, Li Changchun, called “truthful” coverage of development fueled by China’s activities.

China and African governments tend to agree that the press should focus on collective achievements and mobilize public support for the state, rather than report on divisive issues or so-called negative news.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Ethiopia, which remains one of the West’s foremost recipients of development assistance and whose largest trading partner and main source of foreign investment is China. The prisons in Ethiopia, like those in China, are now filled with journalists and dissidents, and critical Web sites are blocked.

This is particularly troubling in Ethiopia, a country where investigative journalism once saved countless lives. In the 1980s, the tyrannical president Mengistu Haile Mariam denied that a famine was happening in Ethiopia, even as it deepened. The world did not move to assist millions of starving Ethiopians until international journalists broke the dictator’s stranglehold on information.

Nearly three decades later, Ethiopia is still mired in a cycle of humanitarian crises and conflicts. But today, journalists are denied independent access to sensitive areas and risk up to 20 years in prison if they report about opposition groups designated by the government as terrorists. “We are not supposed to take pictures of obviously malnourished kids,” an Ethiopia-based reporter recently told me. “We are effectively prevented from going to areas and health facilities where severely malnourished kids are, or are being treated.”

This silencing in turn frustrates the ability of aid groups to quickly mobilize funds when help is needed. And with civil society, the political opposition and the press severely restricted, there is hardly any domestic scrutiny over how the government uses billions of dollars of international assistance from Western governments.

Rwanda is another worrisome case. The volume of trade between Rwanda and China increased fivefold between 2005 and 2009. During the same period, the government has eviscerated virtually all critical press and opposition and has begun filtering Rwandan dissident news Web sites based abroad.

As powerful political and economic interests tied to China’s investments seek to stamp out independent reporting, a free African press is needed more than ever, as a key institution of development, a consumer watchdog and a way for the public to contextualize official statistics about joblessness, inflation and other social and economic concerns. But support for the press, in order to be effective, will have to mean more than just supporting journalism training and publishing capacity; if such efforts are to succeed, they must be integrated into a wider strategy of political and media reforms.

Mohamed Keita is the Africa advocacy coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/opini ... y_20120416
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June 17, 2012
Africa’s Hidden Water Wealth
By ALAN MacDONALD
Edinburgh

FOR a continent where more than 300 million people lack access to safe drinking water, Africa is sitting on a lot of it.

The journal Environmental Research Letters recently published a set of maps of groundwater resources in Africa, the results of two years of research led by the British Geological Survey and financed by the British Department for International Development. The research showed that in Africa the volume of water naturally stored underground within the cracks and pores of rocks is much larger (possibly 20 times more) than the 8,000 cubic miles of water visible in lakes and rivers. This water holds enormous potential to help people and nations move out of poverty, produce more food and better adapt to climate change. But it also could lead to tensions between neighboring countries.

At least 45 transboundary aquifers have been identified in Africa so far, and competition sometimes leads to serious tensions. However, since groundwater moves very slowly (usually less than three feet per day), shared aquifers should be seen as vehicles for cooperation, rather than competition, and identifying and characterizing the aquifers is the first step.

Recognizing this, in December 2011 the United Nations General Assembly called upon its members to begin working toward a common goal: the effective management of their shared groundwater resources.

At the moment, the main constraint on supplying safe drinking water is lack of money. If there is sufficient investment in investigating groundwater, and water wells are carefully sited, it is usually possible to drill a well that can provide enough safe water for communities at a reasonable cost. Groundwater responds slowly to droughts and floods and, as a result, is much more resilient to climate variability than water supplies drawn from rivers or ponds. Therefore, serious and sustained investment in water wells and pumps will help provide a reliable and secure water supply to a significant number of those without safe drinking water.

Money on its own, however, will not solve drinking-water problems. About 30 percent of Africa’s water wells are no longer operational, so donors like the World Bank, the Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development need to get serious about maintenance and sustainability of services. New water supplies tend to gravitate to the better off, so investment in new services should be aimed at more remote areas where many of the poorest live; and with increased groundwater use comes the need for more qualified and experienced people to develop and manage the resource.

A major concern is that people may use the groundwater for whatever seems like a good idea at the time in a way that is unsustainable. There is much discussion about food insecurity in Africa, and at first glance irrigation based on groundwater seems like the perfect answer. However, it is not that simple. Our maps show that away from the large aquifers under the Sahara there are not many places where you can drill a water well and expect to pump out enough water to sustain center pivot irrigators like those in Nebraska. A potential compromise may be to encourage small-scale irrigation using lower yielding water wells. This approach will also require significant investment in expertise within Africa in groundwater development and governance and in reducing the costs of drilling and pumps.

And what about all that water under the Sahara? As inviting as it is, unfortunately this fossil water is not that easy to get at, requiring expensive, deep water wells and large pipelines to move the water to where people need it. Libya is the one country to have invested heavily in using Saharan groundwater, having spent some $20 billion to supply water to the coastal cities and for irrigation.

We should not be distracted by the large aquifers below the Sahara and dreams of cross-continental pipelines. The priority must be to serve those who still have to take unsafe drinking water from ponds and holes in dry riverbeds — and to do this sensibly and sustainably. We should get on with the job of getting drilling costs down and construction standards up and supporting and developing groundwater professionals in Africa. Then we can concentrate on helping communities, small towns and whole nations to sustainably develop and protect the groundwater under their feet.

Alan MacDonald is a principal hydrogeologist at the British Geological Survey.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/18/opini ... y_20120618
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June 27, 2012
Beijing, a Boon for Africa
By DAMBISA MOYO

IN June 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech in Zambia warning of a “new colonialism” threatening the African continent. “We saw that during colonial times, it is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave,” she said, in a thinly veiled swipe at China.

In 2009, China became Africa’s single largest trading partner, surpassing the United States. And China’s foreign direct investment in Africa has skyrocketed from under $100 million in 2003 to more than $12 billion in 2011.

Since China began seriously investing in Africa in 2005, it has been routinely cast as a stealthy imperialist with a voracious appetite for commodities and no qualms about exploiting Africans to get them. It is no wonder that the American government is lashing out at its new competitor — while China has made huge investments in Africa, the United States has stood on the sidelines and watched its influence on the continent fade.

Despite all the scaremongering, China’s motives for investing in Africa are actually quite pure. To satisfy China’s population and prevent a crisis of legitimacy for their rule, leaders in Beijing need to keep economic growth rates high and continue to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And to do so, China needs arable land, oil and minerals. Pursuing imperial or colonial ambitions with masses of impoverished people at home would be wholly irrational and out of sync with China’s current strategic thinking.

Moreover, the evidence does not support a claim that Africans themselves feel exploited. To the contrary, China’s role is broadly welcomed across the continent. A 2007 Pew Research Center survey of 10 sub-Saharan African countries found that Africans overwhelmingly viewed Chinese economic growth as beneficial. In virtually all countries surveyed, China’s involvement was viewed in a much more positive light than America’s; in Senegal, 86 percent said China’s role in their country helped make things better, compared with 56 percent who felt that way about America’s role. In Kenya, 91 percent of respondents said they believed China’s influence was positive, versus only 74 percent for the United States.

And the charge that Chinese companies prefer to ship Chinese employees (and even prisoners) to work in Africa rather than hire local African workers flies in the face of employment data. In countries like my own, Zambia, the ratio of African to Chinese workers has exceeded 13:1 recently, and there is no evidence of Chinese prisoners working there.

Of course, China should not have a free pass to run roughshod over workers’ rights or the environment. Human rights violations, environmental abuses and corruption deserve serious and objective investigation. But to finger-point and paint China’s approach in Africa as uniformly hostile to workers is largely unsubstantiated.

If anything, the bulk of responsibility for abuses lies with African leaders themselves. The 2011 Human Rights Watch Report “You’ll Be Fired If You Refuse,” which described a series of alleged labor and human rights abuses in Chinese-owned Zambian copper mines, missed a fundamental point: the onus of policing social policy and protecting the environment is on local governments, and it is local policy makers who should ultimately be held accountable and responsible if and when egregious failures occur.

China’s critics ignore the root cause of why many African leaders are corrupt and unaccountable to their populations. For decades, many African governments have abdicated their responsibilities at home in return for the vast sums of money they receive from courting international donors and catering to them. Even well-intentioned aid undermines accountability. Aid severs the link between Africans and their governments, because citizens generally have no say in how the aid dollars are spent and governments too often respond to the needs of donors, rather than those of their citizens.

In a functioning democracy, a government receives revenues (largely in the form of taxes) from its citizens, and in return promises to provide public goods and services, like education, national security and infrastructure. If the government fails to deliver on its promises, it runs the risk of being voted out.

The fact that so many African governments can stay in power by relying on foreign aid that has few strings attached, instead of revenues from their own populations, allows corrupt politicians to remain in charge. Thankfully, the decrease in the flow of Western aid since the 2008 financial crisis offers a chance to remedy this structural failure so that, like others in the world, Africans can finally hold their governments accountable.

With approximately 60 percent of Africa’s population under age 24, foreign investment and job creation are the only forces that can reduce poverty and stave off the sort of political upheaval that has swept the Arab world. And China’s rush for resources has spawned much-needed trade and investment and created a large market for African exports — a huge benefit for a continent seeking rapid economic growth.

Dambisa Moyo, an economist, is the author of “Winner Take All: China’s Race for Resources and What It Means for the World.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/opini ... h_20120628
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The Fairer Leaders

By DAYO OLOPADE

Many sub-Saharan African countries are well ahead of Western states in terms of female representation in politics. The payoff could be huge.

NAIROBI — The proportion of women heads of state worldwide is paltry: about 11 percent [pdf]. In North Africa, despite recent dramatic changes in regimes, the new boss looks much like the old; he is still male.

But south of the Sahara lies a more promising story.

The Nobel laureate Ellen Johnson Sirleaf is in her second term as Liberia’s president. Malawi’s newest chief executive is Joyce Banda, a vice president who peacefully transitioned to power following the death of the longtime ruler Bingu wa Mutharika. And last week, Senegal held the first round of parliamentary elections in which half of all candidates must be women. The results are still out, but female representation should increase from the current 23 percent.

Similar quotas have been passed in 20 sub-Saharan nations, six of which top the world in female representation. Rwanda is number one, with 56 percent of seats in Parliament held by women. These figures put African countries well ahead of the United States, France and Japan, which are just at or fall below the 19 percent mark.

It’s a shift from traditionally patriarchal power structures, with a potentially large payoff. Aloysia Inyumba, Rwanda’s former minister for gender, told me at a conference for women’s history month in South Africa, “There’s a general understanding and appreciation that if things are going to be better in Africa, women are going to have a key role.”

The very presence of female politicians has been shown to diversify the policy agenda and promote equity and justice. Banda, for one, stood up to the African Union when it planned to host President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, at a summit meeting in Malawi’s capital. After Banda announced that she would allow Bashir to be extradited if he came, the male-dominated regional body moved the summit to Ethiopia.

Of course, obstacles to female participation in politics persist. Here in Kenya, a new Constitution mandates that one-third of seats in Parliament be held by women, but in a front-page roundup of candidates for next year’s presidential election, the biggest local daily failed to mention the former minister Martha Karua, who is running. And then there’s Kenya’s Elections Act, passed in 2011, which requires higher education for anyone seeking higher office.

In Kenya and elsewhere, career politicians with name recognition and money to burn win regional elections but then struggle to make decisions regarding national security, agricultural policy, fiscal issues and free speech. According to Mzalendo, a Kenyan watchdog group, just 37 percent of the members of Kenya’s current parliament have secondary degrees “from a university recognized in Kenya.”

Though basically well intentioned, the law risks stifling women’s participation. Before primary schooling in Africa became free, bias favoring male children left many girls out of the educational loop. While millions of the earlier generations did receive quality instruction, most females at the age of community leadership are far from Ph.Ds.

I’m all for informed policymaking, but the belief that fancy education means intelligent leadership has its flaws. Humility, business experience, social connections and emotional intelligence are at least as important as fluency in the academy.

To encourage worthy female candidates, the idea of what qualifies someone for higher office should be broadened, not limited. Beth Mugo, the Kenyan public health minister who enjoys one of the better track records for service delivery and responsiveness, earned her stripes running a television station and helping women borrow money so they could start businesses.

Banda herself was mocked — and by the outgoing first lady — for having once worked as a market vendor. She came up with an easy retort: “I’m proud of it because the majority of women in Malawi are like us.” They’re enterprising, creative, hard-working — fit for office.

Dayo Olopade is a journalist covering global politics and development policy. She is writing a book about innovation in Africa.

http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/ ... y_20120710
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July 17, 2012

Jihadists’ Fierce Justice Drives Thousands to Flee Mali

By ADAM NOSSITER

MBERA, Mauritania — The vast desert expanse of northern Mali has become a magnet for Islamic extremists who have tightened their grip on Timbuktu and other far-flung towns, imposing a strict form of justice that is prompting tens of thousands of people to flee what some are likening to an African Afghanistan.

Rattled recent arrivals at a 92,000-person makeshift camp here at Mauritania’s remote eastern edge describe an influx of jihadists — some homegrown and others possibly from afar — intent on imposing an Islam of lash and gun on Malian Muslims who have long coexisted with Western tourists in the fabled town of Timbuktu.

The conditions here in Mbera are grim, with many of the Malians sick, hungry and bewildered. But that is better, refugees said in interviews Tuesday, than the grueling life turned upside-down that an unexpected Islamist military triumph inflicted on their lives in a vast region in the heart of West Africa.

Refugees from such places as Timbuktu, Goundam, Gao and Kidal described witnessing repeated whippings, beatings and other punishments in the streets, ostensibly for having violated strict Islamic law, and some of those who fled said they had been subjected to this harsh justice themselves.

More.....

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/18/world ... h_20120718
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July 19, 2012

With $20 Billion Loan Pledge, China Strengthens Its Ties to African Nations

By JANE PERLEZ


BEIJING — President Hu Jintao said Thursday that China would lend $20 billion to African governments for infrastructure and agriculture in the next three years, in a speech to a gathering of African leaders.

The loans outlined by Mr. Hu, which doubled the amount offered at the last such conference here, in 2009, signaled that China was pressing ahead with aid programs in African nations with abundant energy and mineral resources but with more focus on grass-roots projects.

China’s aid to Africa has expanded rapidly in the last decade as the continent has become a major source of oil from Sudan and Angola, and copper from Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. China has come under heavy criticism for offering its aid without conditioning it on human rights performance or governance, especially in the case of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan.

At the same time, its projects — roads, pipelines and ports — have focused on benefiting China’s extractive industries, not African people, critics say. The infrastructure is generally built with Chinese labor.

The president of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, addressed the meeting and praised China’s approach, saying it was preferred to Africa’s experience with Europe. “We are particularly pleased that in our relationship with China, we are equals and that agreements entered into are for mutual gain,” Mr. Zuma said.

However, he was also quoted as saying: “Africa’s commitment to China’s development has been demonstrated by supply of raw materials, other products and technology transfer. This trade pattern is unsustainable in the long term. Africa’s past economic experience with Europe dictates a need to be cautious when entering into partnerships with other economies.”

In his speech, Mr. Hu said China would train 30,000 Africans, offer 18,000 scholarships and send 1,500 medical personnel to Africa. He said China would mount programs to improve drinking water and protect forests, new endeavors for China.

More....

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/20/world ... h_20120720
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August 16, 2012

Pursuing Soft Power, China Puts Stamp on Africa’s News

By ANDREW JACOBS

NAIROBI, Kenya — China’s investment prowess and construction know-how is widely on display in this long-congested African capital. A $200 million ring road is being built and partly financed by Beijing. The international airport is undergoing a $208 million expansion supported by the Chinese, whose loans also paid for a working-class housing complex that residents have nicknamed the Great Wall apartments.

But Beijing’s efforts to win Kenyan affections involve much more than bricks and concrete. The country’s most popular English-language newspapers are flecked with articles by the Chinese state news agency, Xinhua. Television viewers can get their international news from either CCTV, the Chinese broadcasting behemoth, or CNC World, Xinhua’s English-language start-up. On the radio, just a few notches over from Voice of America and the BBC, China Radio International offers Mandarin instruction along with upbeat accounts of Chinese-African cooperation and the global perambulations of Chinese leaders.

“You would have to be blind not to notice the Chinese media’s arrival in Kenya,” said Eric Shimoli, a top editor at Kenya’s most widely read newspaper, The Daily Nation, which entered into a partnership with Xinhua last year. “It’s a full-on charm offensive.”

At a time when most Western broadcasting and newspaper companies are retrenching, China’s state-run news media giants are rapidly expanding in Africa and across the developing world. They are hoping to bolster China’s image and influence around the globe, particularly in regions rich in the natural resources needed to fuel China’s powerhouse industries and help feed its immense population.

The $7 billion campaign, part of a Chinese Communist Party bid to expand the country’s soft power, is based in part on the notion that biased Western news media have painted a distorted portrait of China.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world ... h_20120817
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Africa next: With investment outpacing aid, is this a new golden age for the poorest continent?

Geoffrey York

Sierra Leone — The Globe and Mail

Last updated Sunday, Sep. 23 2012, 12:28 PM EDT

http://m.theglobeandmail.com/news/world ... ice=mobile

* NOW: What is gained and lost as investment outpaces aid
* NEXT: Russians building luxury homes in Congo? Get used to it
* UPCOMING: The hotel magnate who used to hide from rebels3
* UPCOMING: Weary of handouts, Africans try enterprise
* UPCOMING: The impact of the new land grab
* UPCOMING: How the boom can transform Africa
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There is a related multimedia at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/world ... ehind.html

November 10, 2012
As Coal Boosts Mozambique, the Rural Poor Are Left Behind

By LYDIA POLGREEN

CATEME, Mozambique — When Augusto Conselho Chachoka and his neighbors heard that the world’s biggest coal mine was to be built on their land, a tantalizing new future floated before them. Instead of scraping by as subsistence farmers, they would earn wages as miners, they thought. The mining company would build them sturdy new houses, it seemed. Finally, a slice of the wealth that has propelled Mozambique from its war-addled past to its newfound status as one of the world’s fastest-growing economies would be theirs.

Instead, they ended up being moved 25 miles away from the mine, living in crumbling, leaky houses, farming barren plots of land, far from any kind of jobs that the mine might create and farther than ever from Mozambique’s growth miracle.

“Development is coming, but the development is going to certain areas and certain people,” Mr. Chachoka said, taking a break from trying to coax enough food from his scraggly field to feed his six children.

Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, broken by a brutal colonial legacy, a 16-year civil war and failed experiments with Marxist economic policy. But it is also one of the so-called African Lions: countries that are growing at well above 6 percent annually, even amid the global downturn.

Mozambique is poised for a long economic boom, driven by its vast deposits of coal and natural gas. Vale, the Brazilian mining company, is planning to invest $6 billion in its coal operation near here, and other coal giants like Rio Tinto will soon begin producing coal in the Tete region of northern Mozambique.

Gas projects could bring in far more, as much as $70 billion, according to World Bank estimates. Mozambique’s location on Africa’s southeastern coast means it is perfectly positioned to feed hungry markets in southern and eastern Asia. These investments mean that income from natural resources could easily outstrip the outsized contribution foreign aid makes to its $5 billion annual budget.

The country has been growing at a rapid clip for the past two decades, in fact, since the end of its brutal civil war. Yet, after a substantial drop in the first postwar decade, gains against poverty have slowed substantially, analysts say, leaving millions stuck below the poverty line and raising tough questions about whether Africa’s resource boom can effectively raise the standard of living of its people.

“You get these rich countries with poor people,” said the economist Joseph Stiglitz, who recently visited Mozambique and has written on the struggle of resource-rich countries to develop. “You have all this money flowing in, but you don’t have real job creation and you don’t have sustained growth.”

It is a problem in resource-rich countries across Africa. In a largely upbeat assessment of Africa’s growth prospects, the World Bank said in October that rapidly growing economies powered by oil, gas and minerals have seen poverty levels fall more slowly than countries without those resources
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