Is Jacob Zuma the Tiger Woods of African Politics?

A letter from a student to the president


Dear Mr President Jacob Zuma

After having read the front page story of the Sunday Times (31/01/2010), I feel compelled to write to you as this ordinary citizen that I am. Because I am a commoner, my judgment of your actions could be regarded as disrespect. Equally you might be indulging in all these sordid acts because you feel that you cannot be questioned and brought to book.

As a young man I have an interest in the way in which those in power are behaving, so as to ensure that we have good, moral and ethical leaders to look upon. A public figure who does not inspire confidence or does not conduct themselves in a manner that seek to inspire development of society, should be eliminated from the limelight and sent into the deepest of corners so that their misleading acts are shunned. To me you happen to be such an individual.

In your address during your inauguration and also in your first State of the Nation address, you emphasized greatly on moral regeneration. The reason why religion has seemingly failed to produce members that embody the values taught in religious institutions is because the preachers themselves are failing to be upright leaders who live out what they preach. You are such a preacher to me.

Given your past record that displays you as a man who is easily tempted by indulging in sexual intercourse, it is very difficult for me to throw water over the claims made by the Sunday Times. To me it is irrelevant that the person you impregnated is the daughter of Dr Irvin "The Iron Duke" Khoza, I would still feel the same way even if it was just yet another woman. If this baby was born under normal circumstances, it means that you must have slept with this lady around January 2009.

During the same time you had already paid Lobola for Thobeka Madiba-Zuma and you were planning your wedding day with her. At the same time you were already having the pleasure of being attended to by two wives. I suppose given that you were busy campaigning for the 2009 General
Elections, the challenges that you faced couldn't be accommodated by
your wives, you needed to find solace and release your masculine energy
on another woman outside wedlock.

What nauseates me the most is the fact that this lady got pregnant,
meaning you had unprotected sex yet again. To me it is clear that you
have unprotected sex with your wives, because you do it so easily with
"omakhwapheni". It means you are a risk to your wives, because you seem
to be fishing for HIV, so that you can take the catch home and
distribute it evenly amongst them. Unless there is preventive medication for HIV that you have and we the ordinary people do not have access to.

The Zulu Kingdom should be ashamed at how you have paraded their culture of polygamy, a culture that is in fact to me very demeaning of women. To me it symbolizes true qualities of chauvinism and patriarchy, whereby if a man is not satisfied with one woman, then they can go get another. Meanwhile society would vilify a woman who would take a second man. Polygamy also promotes cheating on your wife, because you must first know the second wife, well in your case sixth, intimately on stolen moments away from your wife. So during that time you are lying to your wife or wives claiming to be seeing no one besides them and even to God, whom you made such a pact with when getting married.

Polygamy reduces women to objects that are used to just satisfy the egos of many men out there, who see having many women as a sense of
superiority and achievement. To me this is a very small minded sense of
thinking.

I cannot have you preach morality to me when you partake in such
disgusting acts that make me feel if only I was not a South African.
When a sex scandal broke off about Mr Bill Clinton, he had to step down
as President of the USA . The President of the World Bank stepped down
after such allegations were tabled against him. However to you it is
just yet another day another dollar and nothing will happen, because you are hiding behind tradition and using it to camouflage your helpless sexuality.

You are a man who does not respect women clearly, a man who does not
believe in treating your wives with the best respect they deserve. I
doubt maKhumalo is happily married to you, but she is probably fearful
of what shall become of her if she were to leave you. It is unfortunate
that the majority of the people in your organization find your acts
acceptable; it goes to show how the morals of the ANC have become
fragmented over the years.

You occupy the highest seat in our land and many people will find a way
of using your acts to justify their mistakes and atrocious behaviors
which resemble yours. You are not a beacon of hope to me, but rather
that one of disaster.

It is impossible that you could raise all your 20 children, so it means
that you promote unstructured families whereby kids grow up with single
parents. You promote and justify cheating. You promote for society to
discredit the three pillars of fighting HIV, because you do not Abstain, you do not get to Be Faithful, you do not Condomize.

What are you good for? Absolutely nothing. You are shaming our country
and making it seem as if we are unable to be led by principled leaders.

You are a health risk to your wives, you are a financial risk to the
taxpayers who must pay for your opulence and you still pledge your
support to communists.

I ask of you to step down as President, before you turn South Africa
into a quagmire that resembles your sexual life and its animalistic
behaviors.



Written by: Lukhona Mnguni

Africa's Development in the 21st Century: A Review

Frankly, trying to address the ills facing the African continent in 40 pages is like trying to gather in a school of tuna with a butterfly net. You have to wonder what the Nordic Africa Institute, the sponsor of this work, was trying to achieve.

Nevertheless, Fantu Cheru’s treatise, 'Africa’s Development Agenda in the 21st Century: Reshaping the Research Agenda', is an earnest attempt to provide a roadmap for a new path towards African development. Cheru’s dispassionate lens briskly sweeps across the major issues of agriculture, urbanisation, globalisation, peace and conflict in a survey of all the ills that the continent faces. Unfortunately, he misses some of the major and perhaps most intractable ones.

He states that 'the development challenge in Africa is multidimensional and conventional development orthodoxies are inadequate to address it.' He then proposes five pillars of development for rebuilding Africa: reverse the failure in agriculture; reverse the decline in higher education; strengthen regional integration; expand the governance reform agenda; and prevent deadly conflicts. These dictums should strike even the most casual reader as both obvious and conventional.

Search as I might, I couldn’t find one exciting new approach to the challenges of development. There was scant mention of issues like corruption, HIV/AIDS, the possibilities for communication and bio-technologies, the impact of transnational drug and weapons flows, the dangers of China’s unique brand of self-serving ‘assistance’, reforming the World Bank and IMF (International Monetary Fund) agendas and the bilateral aid system, or the impact that climate change, economic meltdowns or the global jihad will have on Africa in the new century. What Cheru has given us is a policy paper that could have come directly off the World Bank’s website 10 years ago.

At this point one has to ask, what is Africa? Is it Botswana or Guinea-Bissau? Is it Swaziland or the Democratic Republic of Congo? Of course it is all of them. But they won’t develop in remotely similar ways. In fact, there should actually be a moratorium on the use of the word Africa in book titles related to development. Just that one modification would force well-intentioned thinkers like Famu to investigate more deeply and see what might actually work in a particular case, rather than what ought to work for everyone.

Famu should also pay more respect to the historical record. He calls the conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola 'the most deadly' without putting into the same category the war in the Congo, which has claimed several million deaths, or the wars in Mozambique, Sudan or even the wars of his own country Ethiopia with Eritrea. The section on conflict is the weakest in the text. In addition to committing factual errors such as claiming that Liberia’s President Samuel Doe was killed by supporters of Charles Taylor, rather than by Taylor’s arch-rival Prince Johnson (caught live on video tape), Famu submits that localising conflict resolution is the key to preventing conflict in African states in addition to 'changes in the social and political order'. Advice like this is veridical but hardly a reshaping of anyone’s agenda. He also promotes such dubious contrivances as the African Union inspired Panel of the Wise, which has accomplished nothing of significance since its creation in 2007.

If Africa must rely on the African Union or talk-shops like ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) to solve its endemic conflicts, then pity the poor African. Even in West Africa, where Liberia and Sierra Leone seem to be making baby-step progress, Guinea is heading in the opposite direction. What good has the African Union been in Guinea, or Guinea-Bissau or Equatorial Guinea, where thugs rule civil society and the word democracy is a tasteless pretence on the tongues of vampire elites?

In fairness Famu’s text has two strong recommendations: the need to assist urban slum dwellers who are multiplying exponentially but who rarely get a nod from the donor community; and the need to strengthen tertiary education, which has been embarrassingly ignored by the donor community. There is a great danger that with the newly inspired focus on reforming agriculture, the millions of young people growing up in urban slums will simply be left out of everyone’s ‘agenda'. It is certainly a lot easier to give a bag of seeds to an impoverished farmer than it is to find jobs for slum-dwelling, semi-literate, 20-year-old ex-combatants. One problem is that when the world thinks Africa it thinks poor peasant farmer, while the reality is that Africa, like most of the developing world, is urbanising at a rapid clip, and to say in an unplanned manner would not be ungenerous.

Brevity can sometimes be a virtue, but in the case of Professor Famu’s agenda it undermines its message by leaving out the urgency and anger.

Published by Pambazuka 12/03/09 Issue No. 460
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/books/60699

Amadou and Mariam

I first heard this dynamic duo from Mali at one of those listening kiosks at the Virgin record store in Paris. (Remember record stores? Apparently the French still have a liking for them.) Then I missed them when they came to Cambridge this summer. Lately I saw them in a compilation brought out by the folks at Starbuck's who I must say have decent taste at least in the opinion of this child of the 60's.)

Check out their MySpace page.

It's Africa's Downturn Next

In what he described as an impending ‘economic tsunami’ , Britain’s Development Minister Douglas Alexander has called upon the developed world not to forsake their promises and obligations to the world’s poor, regardless of the current state of the world economy. Speaking to the BBC yesterday Alexander warned that as many as 90 million people would be ‘pushed back’ into extreme poverty and that the very real gains in economic progress that many African countries have experience over the past few years would be in peril. His suggestion for action, in a move similar to one announced by Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, would be to set up special funds that would, in effect, be a special stimulus package for the world’s poor. Alexander also warned the developed world about the perils of protectionism and to encourage aid-on-top-of-trade to countries in the developing world.

These are bold and encouraging words coming from Britain, a country which has pledged to maintain its foreign aid commitments. The question for leaders of the G20 meeting London in April is whether the political risks of continuing their foreign aid outflows will be accepted by their constituents. Obviously, as the global crisis deepens, it will be harder and harder for Western politicians to continue to push foreign aid transfers through their legislatures, no matter how much pressure Bono or Jeffrey Sachs put on them.

On the ground in Africa, the effects of the global downturn were already being felt by the end of last last year as commodity prices fell and work was slowed or halted in Zambian copper mines and bauxite pits in Guinea. In countries with no social security or unemployment insurance and where private companies, not governments, supply essential services like energy, housing and health-care, the shutting of even a single mine can dramatically effect the lives of thousands of people.

We can certainly forgive the leaders of the G20 for turning their short-term focus on solving the international banking crisis and on stimulating their own economies. However, it must be said, that a real stress test of the moral character of the Western free-market system will take place when new aid budgets and trade policies are decided upon and announced in the coming years. After years of pounding the principles of free market economics and the glories of globalization into the heads of African leaders, it would be morally bankrupt to now turn our collective backs. Opponents of current policies might argue that this is a great opportunity for African leaders to wean themselves of foreign aid and begin to focus on developing real economies. There would certainly be nothing wrong with this outcome except that their dependence on natural resource exports and a lack of economic diversification make such a leap all but impossible in a world where commodity demand is shrinking and where trade barriers might start growing again.

Average Africans have much more to fear than fear itself. Who has the courage to stick by them?

(First published by the Harvard International Review, March 10th 2009)

Piggy Banks

On top of all the bad news surrounding international banking we can add to the list the findings of a just published report ( Undue Diligence : How Banks Do Business With Corrupt Regimes) from the anti-corruption NGO Global Witness.

The report, although dealing with somewhat dated material, nevertheless paints a devastating portrait of how some of the largest and formerly most prestigious international banks have been complicit in laundering the ill-gotten gains of the some of the world’s most unsavory regimes. Despite the existence of a whole host of regulations and public commitments to social responsibility on the part of institutions like Citibank, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, etc. the report condemns these institutions for doing the minimum amount of due-diligence and exploiting every loophole to avoid turning down lucrative deposits.

In my posting last week I made some comments about Equatorial Guinea which were responded to at length by someone from the EG Embassy in London. Although my Spanish is hardly fluent I was able to discern that I was being accused of slandering and perpetuating negative stereotypes about EG.

Lo and behold, but who should top the list of Global Witnesses’ list- of- shame but Equatorial Guinea and their partners in crime, first the now-defunct Riggs Bank, and more recently Barclays.

Management of the country’s vast oil wealth remains a ‘state secret’ according to President Teodoro Nguema Obiang. He has ruled since 1979 when he executed his brutal uncle to seize power, and has maintained his power through repression and human rights abuses. Members of Obiang’s family control key government ministries. Opposition parties are banned, and political prisoners are beaten and tortured in custody.

Meanwhile, the ruling family continues to enrich itself. At the end of 2006 Global Witness revealed that the president’s playboy son had bought a new $35 million dollar home in California. He has been reported as earning a $4,000 a month salary as the country’s Minister of Agriculture and Forestry.

But not to appear as unfairly picking on EG, it should be noted that Gabon, Republic of Congo, Angola, Charles Taylor’s Liberia, Turkmenistan and their cohort of international deposit-takers also make the list.

The main recommendation of the report is that now that the world seems to be getting serious about regulating shameless bankers it should also close all the loopholes and address all the convenient ambiguities which allow resource riches from desperately poor countries to find their way into international bank accounts - now matter how desperately these shattered institutions might need them.

(First Published March 22, 2009 in Harvard International Review)

Paul Kagame's Fan Club Grows

What do Bill Clinton, the Rev. Rick Warren, Harvard's Michael Porter, and Google's Eric Schmidt all have in common? According to Philip Gourevitch, writing in this week's New Yorker, they are all friends of Rwandan President Paul Kagame -- part of his "kitchen cabinet" of advisers. Like Stephen Kinzer of the New York Times, Gourevitch has definitively fallen under the spell of Kagame and his ambition to turn Rwanda into the Singapore of Central Africa.

There are, however, several assertions in this piece which are a bit dodgy, not least of which are Gourevitch's estimates of the numbers killed in the 1994 genocide. Most reports put the number at 800,000, with anywhere from 10-20 percent of those actually being moderate Hutus. Gourevitch simply says a million Tutsis.

That may seem like a minor quibble, but I think it reflects the underlying problem with Gourevitch's somewhat starry-eyed analysis. In his shattering accounts of the genocide published in 1998, Gourevitch brought us up close and personal with both victims and perpetrators. It was great reportage. Not much big picture needed.

At the time it seemed like a clear-cut case of good and evil, with Kagame coming across as George Washington, David Ben-Gurion and Gen. Patton rolled into one painfully thin looking Tutsi warlord. The problem is that even back then, Gourevitch seems to have bought Kagame's line that the mass killings occurring in the Congo -- some estimates say up to 5 million, mostly civilians -- many of which were being carried out by Rwandan troops or their proxies, were somehow justified because of the genocide.

Over the course of the latter conflict, Rwanda-based mining interests (which have yet to sign on to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative) have been accused of plundering the riches of neighboring Congo in the "fog of war" created by Rwanda's 15-year crusade to bring every last génocidaire to justice. No one can argue that the Rwandans have the right to seek justice. But for Gourevtich to take on face value Kagame's claim that his government didn't "supply anything" to the recently deposed Congolese-Tutsi militia leader Laurent Nkunda is disingenuous at best.

According to the Economist, the U.N. has plenty of evidence to the contrary, and one wonders why Gourevitch doesn't at least mention it -- never mind asking Kagame about it.

The best part of the article was the photo of Paul Kagame by brilliant South African photographer Pieter Hugo. Check out his other work here.

(First published May 1, 2009 in World Politics Review)

The World Bank's Little Book of Horrors

The World Bank's 2008 Little Data Book on Africa (.pdf) might also have been called the Little Book of Horrors. It describes a world of human beings living at the extremes of poverty and at the edge of a precarious existence, particularly children under five years old.

I ran some of the data from sub-Saharan countries where there are more than 200 deaths per thousand for under-5-year-olds to try to get some correlations between:

- The amounts of aid flowing into a country as a percentage of GDP.
- The per capita GDP.
- And the number of deaths per thousand for under-5-year-olds.

I found that there isn't much of one. Both oil-rich Angola and Equatorial Guinea, which both have less than 1 percent of aid as a percentage of GDP, have about the same deaths per thousand of children under five as countries which are much more aid dependent.

What's striking is that these two oil-rich countries boast per capita GDPs far above the average -- less than $300 -- for sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, with Angola at $1,069 and Equatorial Guinea at an astounding $7,470. If a measure of a country's performance is how it uses its wealth to protect its young, then both Angola and Equatorial Guinea have to be rated as failures, as they have the same or slightly worse mortality rates for under-5-year-olds than Liberia (per capita GDP $134) and Mali (per capita GDP $290.)

What's striking is that in the band of countries with under-five mortality rates greater than 200 per thousand, the amount of aid as a percentage of GDP runs from .3 percent to 43.8 percent. This suggests that massive amounts of aid in Africa might be good for some things but not necessarily for reaching one's 6th birthday.

(First published April 29th in World Politics Review)