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A category focusing on the issues that plaque that African continent. All you need to know about poverty, malaria, HIV/AID, african stereotypes, africans struggle in the west, bad leadership at home
People who smoke soon after getting up in the morning are more likely to develop cancer than those who light up later in the day, say US researchers.
A study of 7,610 smokers, published in the journal Cancer, said the effect was independent of other smoking habits.
Smoking in the first 30 minutes after waking nearly doubled the, already high, risk of lung cancer.
Five months into the Libyan crisis that seeks to nurture democracy by clearing out the long-running Murmur Gaddafi dictatorial regime, the Libyan leader digs in precariously. Part of the reasons is the environment Gaddafi finds himself in – Africa, where he has like-minded leaders.
The June 29 to July 1 African Union (AU) Summit in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea that said African leaders “will not subscribe or respect the recent arrest warrant” smacked on Gaddafi by the International Criminal Court (ICC)” for crimes against humanity is inopportune for Africa’s democratic growth.
The AU’s stand on Gaddafi isn’t surprising. The Gaddafi lobby had recruited ex-Ghanaian dictator President Jerry Rawlings, who has weak democratic credentials and was helped by Gaddafi in 1981 to topple the democratically elected President Hilla Limann, to Malabo to talk some African leaders to disregard the ICC warrant. Similar arrest warrant slapped on the Sudanese President Omar el-Bashir on July 12, 2010, whose forces have killed over 300,000 civilians in Sudan’s Darfur, has not been enforced by AU members. In fact, Gaddafi had earlier arm-twisted fellow African leaders to ignore the ICC warrant whacked on el-Bashir.
African leaders do not share common democratic purpose. This is nauseating. They are tyrannical playactors against Africa’s real democratic needs – the rule of law, freedoms, social justice, equality and deep decentralization as harbingers for authentic advancement. This has made the swaggering AU a forum of unrealistic dictators at collision with realistic democrats. This is putting Africa’s emerging democracy and progress at risk.
Another bad omen for African democrats was the fact that Malabo, unlike Accra (Ghana) or Port Louis (Mauritius), wasn’t a positive democratic venue for their struggles. The dark, nightmarish undemocratic forces in Malabo were too strong for the burgeoning African democrats. The gloomy autocratic forces were able to disable the blossoming African democracy. Teodoro Obiang, the President of Equatorial Guinea, who hosted the AU summit and was elected the new chair of the AU, is horrific premonition for African democrats.
Equatorial Guinea is practically a one-party system despite multiparty democracy enshrined in its 1991 constitution. With only a population of 668,225, Equatorial Guinea may be oil rich but majority of Equatorial Guineans survive on less than US$2.00 a day. This is despite the fact that the US State Department reports, “the 2010 government revenue was about US$6.739 billion.”
Irrationally believing he is a God-sent, like Gaddafi and other African leaders, Teodoro Obiang has ruled Equatorial Guinea wistfully for 31 years, luckily dodging off attempts to overthrow him. With one of the worst human rights violations in Africa, Obiang tortures and has killed hundreds of Equatorial Guineans to contain opposition.
Whether in Malabo, Teodoro Obiang or Gaddafi, at issue are democratic values driven by Africans’ experiences and history. Malabo, Teodoro Obiang or Gaddafi is allergic to democratic ideals. They cannot put up with democratic daylight beamed onto their dark authoritarian practices by African democrats.
In this sense, at the heart of the tussle between the AU and the ICC are Africa’s democratic enlargement and its implications for Africa’s progress – based on Africa’s dark history of tyranny, social injustice and corruption by its leaders such as Gaddafi. The ICC incursion into Africa’s democratic growth, as Cote d’Ivoire’s President Alassane Ouattara indicated when he asked the ICC to “investigate allegations of serious human rights crimes committed during the country’s recent turmoil,” is that years of dictatorship have made the African legal system frail and at the mercy of dictators like Gaddafi.
Against this backdrop, it isn’t surprising that Gaddafi thinks the pro-democracy campaigners are possessed with evil spirits and should be ritually killed to cleanse Libya. But for NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) Gaddafi would have engaged in mass butchering of the Libyan pro-democracy campaigners. In the fashion of African style-human sacrifice, Gaddafi had planned to purify the Libyan society with the blood of the Libyan democrats.
While the world condemned Gaddafi, most African leaders did not. The reasons are obvious, most African leaders’ mind-set aren’t different from Gaddafi. Over the years, Gaddafi has gleefully bankrolled a good number of them. Despite this some African countries and institutions such as the main opposition party in Ghana, the National Patriotic Party, has asked for global support for Libya’s pro-democracy campaigners. The grand old Liberia has sided with Libyan democrats, following the heels of Senegal and Mauritania. Chad, which has suffered over the years from Gaddafi’s disorder, too, “supports efforts to drive Muammar Gaddafi from power.”
African watchers such as the Geoffrey York, of the Toronto-based The Globe And Mail, thinks part of the reasons why African leaders are soft on Gaddafi and shown no support for Africa’s pro-democracy revolutionaries is that democratic “revolution is often a luxury of an educated middle class, and much of Africa is too rural and too poor to sustain a national uprising … Dictators in sub-Sahara Africa often defend their power through a politically loyal military …”
Gaddafi’s legendary use of his family and his Bedouin ethnic group that dominated the Libyan military to violently suppress Libyans quest for democracy and freedoms in the past 42 years is open secret. This is the African “Big Man” syndrome at work, either in the Malabo AU summit or Tripoli’s Green Square, aided by prevailing armies and an unfeeling readiness to use brutality against democracy and freedom activists.
Still, some of the motives for the muted African voices are technology and ethnic and religious. Geoffrey York argues that limited technologies such as internet make it difficult for Africans to rally for Libyan democrats (Cell phones are hugely common but other forms of technology are limited). “And the ethnic and religious rifts in many African countries are huge obstacle to the organization of national” democratic “protest.” This has restricted civil society.
Gibril Koroma, the Sierra Leonean publisher of the Vancouver-based www.thepatrioticvanguard.com argues that by not giving higher thoughts to Africa’s democratic evolution and supporting Gaddafi’s violent attacks against Libya’s democrats, the African Union “pumps oxygen into Gaddafi.” That’s sad and inhuman considering Gaddafi’s history of brutalities against Libyans and other Africans. In Gibril Koroma’s own native Sierra Leone, Gaddafi destructively helped finance and traine the murderous Revolutionary United Front that killed, maimed, raped, fire-boomed property, looted diamonds and amputed Sierra Leoneans – cutting off their limbs, noses, ears and genitals.
Other reasons why African leaders constantly keep quiet about Gaddafi’s dictatorial attitude, Gibril Koroma, in an op-ed piece in the Toronto-based Digital Journal argued, is “Gaddafi has used Libyan money to help most of the cash-strapped African countries and has been financially supporting the political and economic unification of the continent. Most African leaders are grateful for this and will stand by him through thick and thin.”
That’s untoward for a continent which progress has been stunted by the likes of Gaddafi. The nascent African democratic experiences reveal that democracy and freedoms will bring indestructibly superior advancement for the struggling Africans. Ghana, Botswana, Cape Verde, Mauritius, Mali, South Africa and Benin Republic attest to this. But majority of other Africans are still suffering under authoritarian regimes like Gaddafi’s.
Plausibly, this makes Gibril Koroma’s other argument that African leaders are cool with Gaddafi because of his make-believe mission of a United States of America and some Western leaders are “hypocrites,” some of whom aren’t “even a signatory to the ICC agreements,” off tangent. Yes, these may be true to some points. But the critical issue is Africa’s healthier democratic fruition for its progress informed by the contemptible political records of African leaders such as Gaddafi.
For their greater progress, Africans should ignore the wobbly African Union’s stand on Gaddafi and arrest Gaddafi if they locate him anywhere on the African continent for the International Criminal Court, for his crimes against Africans.
Politics is a neutral game anchored in the body polity of political parties which serve as the platforms upon which political aspirants seeking for elective positions canvass for the support of the electorate. Therefore, political parties must be viable in terms of sound-minded men and women who are politically schooled in the game of politics. They ought to be guided by rules that are not partial and fair to all, robust political culture, devoid of grandstand personalities who exude an air of personal aggrandizement, ethnically balanced, religiously unprejudiced, as well as a near-perfect structure that train and breed future leaders.
But political parties in many African countries since their independence have been reduced to mere quasi family organizations, vendetta-spots, money-making machines for hungry and upstart politicians and surrogate aspirants. Besides, they lack internal democracy- the hallmark of party politics and, they are ethnically and religiously fragmented and ideologically divided with no clue for the progress of the society. These parties are built around an individual either because he is financially empowered or s/she is charismatic. They thrive in ethnic savor and most times lack national outlook and they are not institutionalized. They run party’s activities with thugs and pugilists in a macho-manner. As such, they push parochial agenda and programs, manipulate positions for wives and children and friends in an inheritance fashion, betray financially less-privileged candidates; while favoritism rather meritocracy, takes the driver’s seat.
The fallouts of lack of internal democracy in the conduct of political party’s affairs had led to the imposition of unpopular candidates on the electorate and the state in case they win elections, internal squabbles and political tension in the body polity. All these have grave implications for development. Above all, they undermine the strength of the party; breed unspoken animosity and breaks-away, cross-carpeting and in most cases make the party profoundly unpopular in strongholds of unsatisfied actors.
Meanwhile this also creates an avenue for the dominant party to lose elections. Break-away further leads to the formation of new smaller political parties as alternatives. Though, multi-party politics is robust and deepens democracy the world over, in Africa it has become the harbinger of ethnic tension and post-election violence. The reason being aggrieved political defectors erroneously believe they must win elections at all costs even before they are conducted. They threaten fire and brimstones on how best they would make their countries ungovernable if elections (yet to be conducted) results are not in their favor. Good omen for development?
Political parties these days hardly come up with viable options for development in their manifestos as they lack well-rounded ideology. The only program they always rehearse is how they will stamp-out corruption and provide modern infrastructure and eradicate poverty. Nothing more! This is because the caliber of people at the helms of affairs is self-serving and they are either looking for political appointments or contracts. So, what we have in Africa are political dealers who jump into the party’s executive race to deal on party’s juicy opportunities to further personal interest. They end up with candidates who are corruption driven, unable to deliver on fake fabulous electioneering promises. These candidates would not come back to their primary constituencies, except another electioneering calendar year is near. What an affront on the electorate.
It is pertinent to know that the future development of any country practicing democracy rests on the shoulders of political parties that have strong development program which embraces corrupt-free political actors, adhere to rules and subject all party players to the same part ethics, adhere to the guiding principle of election rather than selection in party primaries, discipline any act of real misconducts, no matter whose horse is gored. When political parties fail in their duty to educate and bring forth trust-worthy and popular candidates for elections, they will not only be bashed in the process, they are laying the foundation for future demise of the parties, while they inadvertently hold their country’s development to hurtful underdevelopment.
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By Peter Martell, Juba
UN African Renewal
With a roaring cheer the people of South Sudan welcomed the newest nation in the world. A sea of people waved flags in a blur of colour as the south’s flag was hoisted high into the air on 9 July, marking the historic moment of formal independence from former civil war enemies in the north. Couples embraced and men cried as the new national anthem was sung for the first time ever.
“Today is the most important day for the people of South Sudan, the proclamation of whose birth and emergence as a member of the community of world nations you have just witnessed,” said President Salva Kiir, speaking in front of a giant crowd. “It is a day which will be forever engraved on our hearts and minds.… We have waited 56 years for this day. It is a dream that has come true.”
But the party is over, and now the hard work begins. “Let us celebrate today, but we must get to work right away,” President Kiir added. Achieving that dream will be no easy task. The new nation, an area about the size of Spain and Portugal combined, is left in ruins by decades of war.
“We have suffered so much over many long years of fighting,” said former child soldier turned student Mabior David. “Our baby nation has a long way to go,” he added. “But if we can be left in peace, I’m hopeful we will manage.”
Sudan’s wars were the longest running conflict in Africa: two rounds of civil war spanning nearly 40 years, fought over ideology, religion, ethnicity, resources, land and oil. The last round, from 1983 to 2005, left some 2 million people dead and 4 million displaced from their homes.
Some in the south fought for separation. Others wanted Sudan to remain united, aiming to change a ruling regime in Khartoum that they said marginalized the majority. But the rebels also fought amongst themselves, in bitter internecine battles as bloody and as bitter as those fought against government forces.
A referendum on independence was set as part of a 2005 peace deal. When it came this January, almost 99 per cent of southerners who voted in the poll chose to split Africa’s largest country into two.
Southerners hope that the wars are now over. But formal independence will not solve overnight the massive problems left by such a long war.
“There are enormous expectations, but also enormous challenges ahead,” said Joe Feeney, who heads the UN Development Programme in South Sudan. “The people of South Sudan have suffered enormously. [The war] left a scar that is not only physical, in the infrastructure, but a scar has been left on the people.”
Six nations share a border with South Sudan, which has fewer than 100 kilometres of tarmac roads. “The vast majority of the country remains inaccessible during the rainy season,” added Mr. Feeney. “Jonglei state, just one of the 10 states in the south, is twice the size of my country, Ireland, and it has no paved roads.”
Statistics are shocking. South Sudan has lucrative oil reserves, but remains one of the most impoverished and least developed countries in the world. The UN’s World Food Programme said it helped feed about half the population last year, or some 4 million people.
The UN issues a list of “scary statistics” for visiting journalists: South Sudan has the lowest routine immunization coverage rate in the world. A 15-year-old girl has a higher chance of dying in childbirth than completing school. One out of seven women who become pregnant in the south will probably die from pregnancy-related causes.
Away from the celebrations in the capital, Juba, people had little time to party for independence. Much of their lives are taken up with day-to-day survival. “The acid test of success will be what changes the people out in the states will see in their lives as a result of independence,” Mr. Feeney said.
“All of Sudan, not just the south, will face major challenges,” warns Oxfam, the UK-based aid agency. “It will need long-term support from the international community if there is to be lasting peace and development.”
Football and basketball teams have been made, passports ordered, a national anthem written and sung. “Having our own team play under the South Sudanese flag is something we have waited for,” says Rudolf Andrea, secretary of the South Sudan Football Association. “It is something I never thought would be possible, to show the world we are truly a new nation.”
But creating a viable nation will take more work than the symbolic trappings of state alone. The introduction of a new separate currency for the south is just one step, with other major hurdles ahead for the fledgling economy.
Key to the success of the south will be how the government negotiates with those who still threaten the new country, from outside and within. Ethnic rivalries between multiple groups are exasperated by bitter enmities dating from the war. In the past, the north exploited rivalries by backing splinter militias distrustful of the mainstream southern leadership.
Most of the south pulled together during the war in opposition to forces from the north. But now that separation has taken place, the south must unite and find new bonds and create a nation based on a shared identity.
“Is this nation going to be an inclusive nation?” asked Jok Madut Jok, a South Sudanese academic working in the culture ministry, who is also a history professor at Loyola Marymount University in the US state of California. “Or is it going to exercise the double standard that other countries have gone in for — that you become independent and then go ahead and do the exact things that you had rebelled against?”
Over 2 million southerners have returned home since the 2005 peace agreement was signed. But a new wave of tens of thousands of families are now travelling from the north to south. Over 300,000 people have returned home since last October, with many more expected still to come.
“We have returned home because we had to leave the north, because our jobs were terminated,” said former civil service official Giir Thiik, who spent four weeks on a slow barge to Juba. “There is nothing here for me to do, and my money is little. I’m glad to be back in the south, but truthfully, it is a shock.”
Building an economy to construct the new nation and provide jobs will put huge pressure on the government. Up to now, many services have been provided by aid agencies and international partners.
The government budget is based almost entirely on oil revenues, as much as 98 per cent in recent years. But there is also other economic potential. The south is believed to hold large mineral and metal deposits. It has vast areas of potential farmland, forestry and even hydroelectric power from the White Nile River.
But change must reach the people on the streets and in the villages. “We just want to be able to work and make a life for ourselves,” says Mary Okech, a widow with six children, who collects rubbish. “The problems are that there are not good jobs for us, and I don’t have the money to make a business on my own. I need help for that.”
Stabilizing peace also remains a real concern. The final steps towards Sudan’s divorce have been far from easy. Key deals remain to be struck on a variety of issues: sharing the oil proceeds, dividing the US$35 billion debt and demarcating the borders. Both countries have introduced new currencies, a process that is likely to add complications to their struggling and poorly managed economies.
Despite a peaceful referendum for the south, tensions remain high with the north, after months of violence in the border areas. In May, northern troops took over the contested Abyei region, forcing over 110,000 people to flee into the south. Both north and south claim the flashpoint region of grasslands and farms about the size of Lebanon as theirs. A referendum to determine where it will belong has been blocked, and remains a source of tension between the two sides.
A deal has been struck for northern troops to pull out and Ethiopian peacekeepers to replace them. But that deal still does not provide any means for a long-term peaceful solution.
Then in June violence broke out in the northern oil state of Southern Kordofan, between the northern military and former members of the ex-rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, now the official southern army. The north claims the fighters there are backed by the south, just as the south accuses the north of backing rebels in its territory to destabilize key oil areas along the still undefined north-south border.
Each side rejects the other’s accusations. But analysts say they fear there will be no swift solution to the conflict along the border.
Africa’s evil scene
The eccentric atmosphere following the International Criminal Court (ICC) issuing an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s President, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity (short of genocide) in Darfur open the obscurities of evil in Africa for the past 50 years.
In some sort of grim moment, al-Bashir and the ICC are quarrelling over the darkness in Darfur, where the United Nations estimates that over 300,000 people (and still counting) have died in the past six years of the conflict. So, what have al-Bashir being doing in the past years to have prevented such evil? And al-Bashir, with a cold-shoulder, denies the ICC charges and dismisses any ruling by the ICC as insignificant and rejects the chilling pains, horrors, darkness, and deaths hovering over Darfur.
Africans, who have over the past 50 years seen other horrifying evils across their borders, are a bit relieved over the al-Bashir indictment – at least, for now, psychologically. Al Bashir’s formal arrest and trial will add up to the updating on Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s ex-warlord Thomas Lubanga and Chad’s Hissène Habré. And as Clifton Crais meditates in Politics of Evil, Africans, with the help of the international community, are capable of fighting evils that have destroyed their progress as they did against one of the great evils of the 20th century – South Africa’s apartheid.
For the past decades, from Idi Amin’s Uganda, Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s Central African Republic (CAR), Samuel Doe’s Liberia, Foday Sankoh’s Sierra Leone, Mengistu Haile Mariam’s Ethiopia to Juvénal Habyarimana’s Rwanda, stains of deadly ethnicity, threats, frightening tension, harassments, massacres, witchcraft, human sacrifices, genocides, deaths, civil wars, famine, murders, floods, locusts and other natural disasters have visited Africa.
With fast developing global communication gadgets, Africa’s evils are being tracked day in, day out by satellites, video clips, radio, mobile phones, photographs, and computers, showing vivid clarities of the heavy suffering of the people of Darfur, CAR’s north-east region, Chad’s Zaghawa and Tama ethnic groups and the DRC’s eastern region. Video clips released by the British-based Aegis Trust show a Sudanese government soldier saying he was forced to rape at gunpoint by a senior officer and other doers said such acts were intended to make babies of a different race.
Now and then, an evil, a true chasm.
An evening newscast would tell the natural tribulations – the Supreme Being (God)’s anger and nature – locusts’ outbreak in Mali, the Gambia, Senegal, Niger and Burkina Faso, the floods in Mozambique, Malawi, and Zambia, the deaths by cholera in Zimbabwe, and ebola outbreak in the DRC. As Darfur shows, it would add up to moral evils – the horrors accomplished by Africa’s “Big Men” and their foreign accomplices. After Darfur, Liberia and Sierra Leone, anything new about Africa’s evils? Hackings in apartheid South Africa? The simultaneous assassination of Guinea-Bissau’s President Bernardo Vieira and Chief of its Armed Forces, Gen. Tagme na Waie, on purely tribal hatred? A baby, called Mercy, left to die in Ghana’s Upper West region for allegedly being a witch? Or the constant kidnappings in Nigeria’s fidgety Niger Delta region where pregnant women are raped to death? Its being awhile in 2005 when the charity Medecine Sans Frontieres reported that almost 500 cases of rape against women, children and men in Darfur – the horror is still going on.
From genocide, rape, human sacrifices, floods, moral evils, cannibalism to juju-marabout mediums and witchdoctors messing up families, Africa has seen all evils and appears to have explored all sorts of evil deeds. Villages and farms burned in Sierra Leone and Liberia during their civil wars were evils made noticeable. The evil turned people’s shelters and livehood upside down, with some committing suicide as a result.
Despite highly developed high-tech war gadgets, the genocide in Rwanda saw the use of crude weapons – machetes. In Conspiracy to Murder – the Rwandan Genocide, Linda Melvern explains how machetes were purposely imported from Egypt and France to commit the genocide in an atmosphere of frightful tribalism. In the Liberian civil war, both President Samuel Doe and then rebel leader Charles Taylor used sophisticated weapons and demonized each other as evil. Doe had Taylor as evil, Taylor had Doe as evil. After Doe’s murder and with Taylor confronted with new war as President, Taylor came down as the evil one by rebel forces. Liberian women organized protests that helped push Taylor into exile in Nigeria and later on his on-going trial at The Hague on eleven counts of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other slaughter.
Is there more or less evil in Africa today?
Is there more or less evil in Africa today than 50 years ago? As Ghana and Benin Republic exemplify, the past years have brought the triumph of democratic order and freedoms against long years of detestable military juntas and insomniac one-party systems. In Ethiopia and Benin Republic communism collapsed; in South Africa apartheid was toppled; the end of the Cold War freed Africa as the threatre of Superpower rival that left Somalia burnt down and Liberia in the gutter. But state violence persists in most African states – in the style of CAR’s Bokassa, Guinea’s Sekou Toure and Mobutu’s Zaire.
Across Africa, democracy and freedoms are flowering, though with pains, announcing the beginning of history, with mass communications and global prosperity knocking down the old order. Africa can take satisfaction from the progress of Ghana, Cape Verde, Senegal, Tanzania, Benin, South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius, without disparagement, that reason, the rule of law, freedoms, human rights and democracy are pushing out some of its evils into the Atlantic and the Indian oceans and enlightening the continent.
But as Somalia, CAR, the DRC and Darfur show some parts of Africa are concurrently darker. The amputations in Sierra Leone and the dismembering of people in Liberia during their respective civil wars not only announced that each African era reveals its own evils but also the sorting out of different darkness. In some parts of Africa evil may be changing its priorities and intentions but pretty much of it remain the same – human sacrifices remains the same, and is increasing in Gabon over the past twenty years, where Jean-Elvis Ebang Ondo, a school teacher, has been waging national campaigns against human sacrifices after his 12-year-old son and a friend were ritualistically killed, their dismembered bodies washed up on a Libreville beach.
From the African culture to the practices of their nation-states, evil does exist – Africans do not argue about that, they know all about the horrors evil brings, as new killing-fields, from DRC, Darfur to Somalia, show, the level of horrors still shock even the most hardened observers, revealing how violent, corrupt, atrocious and vicious Africa’s evil perpetrators can be. Natural evils or the hands of the Supreme Being? The 2000 catastrophic flood in Mozambique that made many homeless, about 800 people killed, over 1,400 km² of arable land destroyed and over 20,000 head of cattle lost, the worst in 50 years, shows nature’s impulses and brutalities that go past reasoning.
But though Africans know evil exist, they do not give it too much credit, to do that is to give more power to evil than good. Africans acknowledge that their cultural universe is a battleground between evil and good forces, the outcome not in doubt, where good triumph over evil, over witchcraft and demons. As the re-marking of Uganda by Yoweri Museveni shows after Idi Amin’s cataclysm, Africans know evil is temporary but good is permanent. From the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia, Africans, who are one of the most forgiving of humanity, do not allow their lower instincts and tragedies grow-up as the dominant idea. To do that is to make evil equal to the Supreme Being. What passes for evil, such as a baby called Mercy abandoned to die in Ghana’s Upper West region, for allegedly being a witch, may be mere ignorance that can be corrected with public human rights education. Guinea-Bissau’s dark metaphysics can be managed by the regional body ECOWAS seeing it as outlandish accidents or absolute stupidity.
Or, for the matter of evil challenging the Supreme Being, Zambia’s ex-Roman Catholic Archbishop, Emmanuel Milingo, talks of the fact that in African tradition, development occurs only when the metaphysical is balanced with the physical. And where there is no balance, crises occur. Here darkness isn’t empowered; the darkness hasn’t the same power as the light.
But as Africans deal with evil, the issue is being moved out of their metaphysics into the intellectual framework, into the human agency, into the ICC, into the various Truth and Reconciliation Commissions across Africa, into the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, into the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone and the growing democracies, the rule of law and freedoms across the continent. This means evil as an African dilemma will be solved more intelligently outside the African cosmological context.
This moves the evil discussions out of African fatalism and “na god mak am” (God has destined it) syndrome, as the Sierra Leonean would say, to the holistic, making the evil-doers responsible for their actions, as human agencies, and not some demons, evil spirits influencing malevolent perpetrators. When in DRC’s Ituri province between June 2007 and June 2008, 6,766 cases of rape were reported, according to the UN, with 43% involving children, the evil debate was being addressed outside demonology to the intellectual framework, to the real world. Despite that, as Lance Morrow explains in Evil: An Investigation, evil is amorphous, intellectually unmanageable, an anonymous, hideous charm, difficult to comprehend, and no explanation as to what it is despite attempts by geo-politics and sociobiology to do so.
Continue reading “Africa’s Evil: An Examination”
The situation in Somalia calls for reflection. It demands from other African countries, the need to be proactive in their planning process. No one could basically tell why the problem seems a hydra-headed one: from piracy to militancy, kidnapping, insurgency and, now the greatest of all- famine that has been sacking the two regions in the South Central Somalia. Media report has it that over 12,000 persons have been displaced from their homes to the nation’s capital-Mogadishu, as many more thousands are spewing-out to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia without food and water and transportation. And the Transitional government and the world stand-still and helpless because Al-Shabab, Somalia’s most fearsome and deadliest insurgent group remained on the prowl.
Unfortunately, as the people are fleeing the famine region, they are been assaulted and the women are been raped while children die in their thousands! According to the UN, the scourge may in no distant time spread to other regions if nothing is done urgently to arrest the situation by wealthy nations and other aids agencies. Thus, the world supra body has declared famine in Somalia after about 19 years. Besides, Mr. J.J Rawlings, the AU representation has declared that if we do not act urgently, Africa would have many children to bury in the ensuing weeks. Somalians are trekking kilometers upon kilometers, escaping the food shortage in their land. Who is to blame for the severity of the food shortage?
While the situation is blamed on nature, its most complex dimension is hinged on the Al-Shabab militant group that had been at war with the Transition government since 1992. Consequent upon this, there has been no government, no state police, no functional infrastructure and other basic necessities that make life meaning to citizens. The Al-Shabab militants’ strongholds are the worse-hit regions because they have barred food supplies from NGOs into these regions few years ago while they continue their heinous activities. Their illicit operations in the sea coast of Somalia has been hindering smooth movement of vessels and the crew men that have attracted international attention in the last two decades, yet the situation is more worrisome now that the food shortage is being heightened by the same group which had blocked the innocent population’s access to food supplies. Notwithstanding, the ban Al-Shabab has lifted on the food agencies and NGOs is tenuous and not all-compassing. What is the guarantee that the group would not kidnap aid workers, and confiscate food as they are famished too?
Certainly, Somalia is a failed-state. It does not have the capacity to curtail the situation all alone. The United Nations, other donor agencies have been doing their best to salvage the condition by making food and water available to the famished population in Mogadishu and those in refugee camps in Kenya. Nevertheless, many more are left stranded in remote areas. What are the other countries doing to help? Horrible footages of malnourished and dead children from Somalia are terrible enough to spur other African nations into action to help their dying neighbor. It is not about waiting for the world to take a step first. They must act now. The African Union (AU) must live up to its role as an umbrella body which oversees activities of its constituent members. Having their representative in the person of the former president of Ghana, Mr. J.J. Rawlings is not enough. There is need for profound empowerment.
Essentially, the whole of East Africa is susceptible to the same scenario playing out in Somalia. The Somalia’s example should prompt their neighboring nations to take proactive and preemptive measures to tackle the situation head-on. They must not play the lie-and-wait game. Planning for food sufficiency through new technological innovations, making use of the natural resources and embracing good governance would go a long way to put off the imminent problem. While it is appreciated that the US and UN, have done much to bring peace to Somalia particularly, and other African nations; they could do more by assisting in the best innovative ways to tackle the Al-Shabab extremists group, so that Somalia can assume the status of a responsible nation- state with the capability to respond to its tasks as a sovereign nation that would require the least of assistance from other nations.
KATHARINE HOURELD
DADAAB, Kenya — Nurse Serat Amin works in the world’s largest refugee camp treating the stream of starving children coming into Kenya from famine-struck Somalia, and although he has painful memories of the children who have died, watching the weak get stronger gives him the courage to carry on.
“You can see if a child is getting better just from the face of the parent,” he said. “Making a difference is what keeps me here.”
Amin works at a stabilization ward at the International Rescue Committee hospital in the Dadaab refugee camp, where dozens of tiny children with stick-thin limbs and oversize heads loll on plastic mattresses. Mothers use their fringed shawls to flap the humid aid around their babies’ faces while patient nurses poke intravenous needles into tiny hands. Amin, walking about the ward in his yellow T-shirt, knows them all.
“Most come in here very sick. Mihag was unconscious when he came,” said Amin, speaking of a tiny 7-month-old the same size as an infant. “But today he is picking up a bit.”
The child, which weighed as much as a newborn when he arrived, has put on 3.5 ounces (100 grams) in the past few days. The wailing babies are weighed in a wicker basket suspended from the ceiling.
The U.N. says parts of Somalia held by Islamist rebels are suffering from famine, and a total of 11.3 million people in the Horn of Africa need aid. Amin said the situation is the worst he’s seen it – they’ve had up to 42 babies in his ward for malnourished babies at a time, a sevenfold increase at the hospital since the beginning of the year. The hospital is just one of three treating Somalis refugees in Dadaab camp.
Most of the children are also suffering from pneumonia and other diseases after hunger weakened their immune systems. That’s particularly painful for Amin: his own cousin lost his eyesight after suffering from malnutrition and measles. It’s what led him into nutritional medicine in the first place.
Now the wards are full of hungry babies with medical complications. On Friday, there were eight more patients than beds, so women had to share overnight.
“I’ve asked UNICEF to come with some tents so we can set them up outside and start treating more people,” said Amin.
The children come in with two types of malnutrition: marasmus, or straightforward starvation where the child is so thin its skin stands up in folds when pinched, and kwashiorkor, where the child has had food but no protein or nutrients.
Habiba Dubow’s son Abdirahman is one year old and weighs nearly 10 pounds (4.5 kilograms). He should weigh 22 pounds (10 kilograms). He is so thin his tiny ribs are clear through his skin and they barely lift with his breathing. When his mother takes his shirt off, his limbs flop back onto the bed and his eyes roll back in his head until only the whites are showing. He is too weak to cry.
“We walked here for 20 days after we lost all our cattle,” she said. “He got sick on the way.”
The kwashiorkor children often have peeling skin or sores, swelling of the limbs or stomach and reddish hair, like Hamud Mohamed Abdi. The 2-year-old also weighs only half what he should for his age, but doctors say he is improving and might go home next week if he can get extra food every day. His parents are rail-thin themselves.
The weakest children can’t even hold onto their mothers’ breasts to get milk and are fed through tubes in their noses. The U.N. says it is the worst emergency in Somalia since the famine in the early 90s that triggered an international intervention that ended after two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters were shot down.
“This influx of severe cases we have not seen before,” Abdi said.
Most have recently arrived in Kenya from Somalia, a war-ravaged nation which has not had a stable central government for more than 20 years. The refugees arrive on foot, or packed into dented minivans, praying that gunmen won’t rob them or rape their daughters before they arrive at the overflowing camp, where nearly 400,000 people have sought refuge.
Among them was a couple who arrived at Amin’s ward with twins. One had taken sick on the journey and was barely clinging to life. He slipped away in just a few hours. Amin said it made him want to cry for all day. From time to time he sees the parents, and he always makes a point of going to speak with them.
“The situation goes with you when you go home,” he said. “I think that for every life we save in this hospital, there are so many more behind them we can’t reach.”
The U.N. has warned that routes out of Somalia are turning into ‘roads of death’ after parents were forced to leave dead children along the roadside. The ones who make it to Kenya but are too hungry, too sick or too weak to survive are buried in a small sandy graveyards near the hospital compound.
Most graves have no markers apart from thorny branches piled on top of the mounds. Plastic trash bags catch in the thorns, fluttering in the wind. The earth on many of them is fresh but the small sandy hills soon drift back into the ground. nearby children play football or fly small kites made from twigs and discarded plastic bags.
But most children survive with treatment, even those whose own parents have already let go.
“There was a child we treated last year – Aden – we had to treat him intensively for seven days. We didn’t know if he would make it. His father and grandmother said, why are you taking him? He is already almost dead. Now he’s walking around and his dad is talking about school,” said Amin.
“Sometimes you are walking in the camp and someone calls you by your name and you don’t recognize them, but they come up and thank you for helping their child
By Bekele Abaire and Sara A. Fajardo
Ethiopians remember keenly the devastating losses of the drought in 1984 and the more recent one in 2000. The numerous pastoralist communities in Ethiopia know that lack of access to water will kill their livestock and destroy the very fabric of their culture.
The East African drought of 2011 that is hitting Kenya and Somalia so hard is also proving to be one of the worst that Ethiopia has faced in 50 years. Currently more than 4.5 million people in Ethiopia alone are facing severe hunger due to the La Niña-induced rainfall shortage. The work that CRS has been carrying out in Ethiopia for more than 50 years is paying off in this drought.
One particularly hard-hit area is eastern Ethiopia near the lowlands of the Somali region. A common sight is pastoralists traveling across the barren landscape in search of water for their livestock. As the sources dry up, desperation is taking hold. Their animals, losing weight and producing less milk, are further weakened as the pastoralists are forced to move them up to six miles a day to find drinking water. In the worst cases, their herds die from thirst, starvation and exhaustion.
“When people hear the word drought, they automatically assume that there is no — or very little — water in an area. And while it is true that we’re dealing with the aftermath of poor rain seasons, the truth is that there is water in Ethiopia,” says Bekele Abaire, CRS water and sanitation program manager. “There is a solution to this problem of recurrent drought that has left millions to face severe hunger. The challenge is that the water runs below the surface in underground caverns as deep as 1,000 feet. This water is difficult but not impossible to access.”
During the past 8 years, CRS — with generous funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, U.N. Office for the Coordination of International Affairs, and donations from concerned Catholics and others of goodwill — has helped fight the effects of recurrent drought in Ethiopia.
“We brought in rigs to drill wells 1,000 feet into the earth. A recent visit to the field revealed that 95 percent of 28 wells we’ve constructed are still operational,” Abaire says. “These sites were built to serve up to 5,000 people in any given community, but we’re finding that the need is so severe that up to 10,000 are now flocking to these water points.”
Pastoralists travel in search of water. Drought, though, often forces them to stay in one place, their livestock dies off, or they move to cities to buy food. The strains of urban life are debilitating to them both psychologically and culturally. Taking these factors into account, a CRS water and sanitation team studied the migratory path of pastoralist communities to create a system that would meet their needs for water and help maintain their nomadic traditions.
“We’ve drilled wells along the route pastoralists often travel. The goal was to provide water without encouraging any given group to settle in one spot,” Abaire says. “It’s an approach that includes a drinking trough for livestock, water for human consumption, showers, and washbasins for women to do their laundry.”
The difference between communities with water sources and those without is remarkable. The livestock are plumper and produce more milk, which, in turn, means that the people themselves are nourished better. People in these areas rely less on food aid and more on their own means. Water is prized here. It is never squandered.
“Most years our system works beautifully. Pastoralists migrate and access water easily.” Abaire says. “A concern of ours now, however, is that, because of the current drought, many of them are settling near water points out of fear that they will not be able to access more. This puts a strain on the existing resources.”
Much more work needs to be done. Water is there, but more wells need to be built. Yet, few rigs in Ethiopia have the capacity to drill deep enough to access the water. Abaire says that the solution won’t come overnight, but, if planned right and with adequate resources, it can happen.
Bekele Abaire is a water and sanitation program manager with CRS. He is based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Sara A. Fajardo is CRS’ regional information officer for eastern and southern Africa. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.