In this July 2006 file photo, members of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army are seen as their leader Joseph Kony meets with a delegation of Ugandan officials and lawmakers and representatives from non-governmental organizations, in the Democratic Republic of Congo near the Sudanese border. Invisible Children launched a viral campaign to 'Stop Kony' on Tuesday to mobilize the next generation of young Americans to help end the conflict in northern Uganda. (AP/File)
Joseph Kony 2012: It's fine to 'Stop Kony' and the LRA. But Learn to Respect Africans.
This week’s biggest Africa news isn’t from Africa. It’s from a massive online and social media campaign launched by the American advocacy group Invisible Children to capture indicted war criminal and Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony.
As with their previous campaigns Displace Me and How it Ends, Invisible Children launched Stop Kony 2012 on Tuesday to mobilize the next generation of young Americans to help end the conflict in northern Uganda – except this time, they called on their mostly white, privileged, and educated youth followers to get involved through web-activism on their Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and YouTube accounts.
It all begins with a remarkable 30-minute video highlighting the instantaneous and hyper-connected world we live in. Founder Jason Russell narrates, stating “there are more people on Facebook than there were in the world 200 years ago” and that “humanity’s greatest desire is to belong and connect.” He may be right. In just two days, it has been viewed 32 million times and quickly grabbed the attention of personalities such as Oprah Winfrey, Van Jones, Sean Combs and Rihanna.
It is a powerful example of how social media, art and activism can merge to mobilize privileged people into action and how open-minded Americans want a safer, fairer, and more prosperous world.
I appreciate their role. They are reaching a core constituency -- many of whom have never thought about these issues before -- and getting them to care about Africa. But caring is no longer enough.
Sadly, there are concerns that history may be repeating itself, as seen in responses from emerging African diaspora leaders Solome Lemma and TMS Ruge.
Of course Joseph Kony should be captured. But this approach is flawed. The video shows only a Western audience, without any reference to African partners or leaders. They are disempowering and undermining the role of Africans. They failed to recognize the role of individuals like Betty Bigombe, a long-time Ugandan activist, or seek partnerships with African organizations for the launch, such as Ushahidi or Africans Act for Africa.
Invisible Children and other Africa-focused advocacy organizations should deliver more sophisticated, nuanced, and respectful narratives that recognize capturing Kony is a collective responsibility and that Africans must play the primary role in bringing peace to the region.
Calling for the use of the latest technology, tools, and organizing tactics to attract millions of people who have never heard of Kony before (as they say, 99 percent of the world) into action is exciting. But for Africa’s sake, it is no longer enough.
On its face, it’s eerily reminiscent of previous Africa advocacy movements, such as Save Darfur in its early days: grand public launches, with minimal partnership and little substance. Dangerous. Whether they meant it to or not, whatever the intentions, it ends up looking like yet another Western campaign to help Africans who can’t help themselves. Africa can’t be handled that way anymore.
Besides the most obvious concern of another “white savior” narrative for Africa (complete with a young blonde child learning of Africa’s “good guys” and “bad guys’), there’s an absence of depth and deference to the power of Africans who are standing up for themselves. There’s also a complete failure to recognize the role the Ugandan government has had and should have in protecting its citizens and ending the conflict.
Invisible Children must be careful not to sell a simple narrative, raise unreasonably high expectations of the conflict’s resolution, ignore the power and agency of Africans on the ground or rely too much on Western solutions and audiences. They must do better.
The anti-apartheid movement of the 80s, the debt relief movement of the 90s and the Save Darfur movement just a few years ago all showed us that legislation, peace agreements, foreign aid and International Criminal Court arrest warrants don’t always end suffering. For conflict zones like this, there must be global political will focused on longterm security, peace-building, development, and investment in local leadership and capacity building.
We also now know that young people’s minds are open and hungry. They should be inspired by knowing Africa is empowered, saving itself, and working with partners to remove Kony. That is the real story.
Invisible Children must be willing to take their followers on a journey through the Africa that Africans know. They must be willing to inspire – but also to manage – their followers’ expectations. They must be willing to use their media to amplify African voices, not simply their own.
This isn’t about them.
Lastly, this campaign must be better at representing and working with a more accurate reflection of young America. This includes diverse voices, communities of color and new Americans. African-American organizations, historically black colleges and universities, and African diaspora groups are missing from the video. Additionally, Invisible Children’s own US-based staffing and board of directors lack the requisite diversity and representation where critical decisions are made.
I want Kony captured and I hope everyone uses their power to push our governments to act. But when I say everyone, I mean everyone – including, and most importantly, Africans.
Semhar Araia is founder of the Diaspora African Women’s Network and an Eritrean-American advocate for Africa conflict resolution and stronger US engagement with Africa and its diaspora. A lawyer by training, she previously was Oxfam International's Horn of Africa Regional Policy Advisor, a congressional foreign policy staffer, and an Africa analyst for The Elders, an organization established by Nelson Mandela and eleven other world leaders. She also served as an attorney on the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission hearings. She was born in New York City to Eritrean immigrant parents and currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Follow her on Twitter @Semhar.
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An Indian worker works amid installed solar panels atop the Narmada canal at Chandrasan village, about 25 miles from Ahmadabad, India, Feb. 16. The western Indian state of Gujarat is all set to become the first state in the country to generate solar power through panels mounted on a water body. (Ajit Solanki/AP)
Solar power: the fix for Africa's frustration with the grid?
• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, www.sahelblog.wordpress.com. The views expressed are the author's own.
This is another post where I get myself into trouble by venturing into a new area – infrastructure, in this case – but this post from the environmentalist blog Treehugger caught my eye:
In Uttar Pradesh, one of India’s poorest states, a pair of US-born entrepreneurs is creating a new model for energy delivery to villages far from the grid. The founders of Mera Gao Power build and operate solar-powered micro grids to provide low-cost lighting and mobile phone charging to village houses, giving many rural people access to both light and power for the first time in their lives.
[...]
Mera Gao Power’s low energy design calls for just four solar panels for each system, which are sufficient to supply a village of 100 households with both light and mobile charging. And because most light is used at night, but generated during the day, banks of four batteries are used to store up to two days of power are also installed near the panels. Power is then distributed from the batteries to the other households in the village.
“Micro” strikes me as the key word in that passage.
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If India, why not Africa?
The idea of using solar power in the global South generally – and Africa specifically – is not new. The UN was talking about it, and funding it, by the early 1990s:
Electrifying rural areas poses unique challenges for African governments. Remote and scattered, rural homes, unlike homes in urban areas, are costly and often impractical to connect to the grid. Under the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), countries are seeking innovative alternatives to give rural families efficient means to cook their food and light their homes. Stand-alone sources of energy, such as solar, wind and mini-hydro generators, can help fill the gap.
[...]
In the early 1990s, numerous villages turned to solar power in parts of Africa where one might least expect to stumble upon an oasis of lights shimmering in the pitch-black night. Perhaps the most ambitious project of this nature, and one that is often cited, is a Zimbabwean project supported by UNDP through the Global Environment Facility (GEF). The initiative, jointly funded by GEF ($7 mn) and Zimbabwe ($400,000), installed some 9,000 solar power systems throughout the country in a bid to improve living standards, but also to curtail land degradation and pollution.
Such efforts have continued. And here’s a recent profile of a private company, SolarNexus, that is attempting to spread solar in Africa by selling a “contained system of solar power generation that can be installed relatively quickly and easily.”
The idea of solar power generation becoming more efficient and affordable, and solar panels become smaller and easier for individuals or small communities to own and operate, makes me think immediately of the rapid spread of cell phones in Africa, a spread that occurred without (in many countries) a widespread landline infrastructure in place. Similarly, the trajectory of electrification in India, Africa, and elsewhere is not necessarily following that of the US or Europe.
I am neither a scientist nor an engineer and thus I am in no position to evaluate how solar stacks up against other power sources at present. But from a political and societal standpoint it seems to me that many people who lack reliable electricity and rely instead on intermittent government power or gasoline-powered home generators, as well as people who don’t have electricity at all, would switch to solar if the equipment was cheap, available, and effective.
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Finally, solar’s growth could have interesting effects on relationships between citizens and governments in countries like Nigeria and Senegal, where spotty power is a frequent source of popular anger. Cheap solar could assuage that anger, or it could – especially if solar equipment is provided primarily by private companies – simply reinforce a sense that governments are impotent and corrupt.
– Alex Thurston is a PhD student studying Islam in Africa at Northwestern University and blogs at Sahel Blog.
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Opposition presidential candidate and former prime minister Macky Sall addresses journalists during a press conference at a hotel in Dakar, Senegal Feb. 29. Sall said that if he wins a presidential runoff next month, he will revise the constitution to reduce the presidential term from seven to five years and that he will apply the shorter term to himself, as well as the two-term limit that is already present in the constitution. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)
Senegal's Wade faces tough competition in runoff election
• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, Africa Works. The views expressed are the author's own.
In a recent article for the Atlantic.com, I complained about the vanity of Senegal’s president, Wade, who rather than stepping into retirement after two terms has insisted on running for a third. He even went so far as to alter the constitution to do so. Senegalese voters responded [last] week by repudiating Wade, who received barely more than one-third of the vote. Now he must stand in a runoff against a challenger who nearly matched his vote totals. The challenger, Macky Sall, is already appealing to the 11 other challengers in the race. So far, he’s won an endorsement from the third-highest vote-getter.
Senegalese politics is highly stylized, and this election is essentially about a generational transfer of power. Wade claims to be 85 years old and is part of an elite born into French colonial rule and weaned on a detached, arrogant top-down style of leadership once distinctly French but now not even employed by politicians in France. By contrast Sall, who is 50 years old, represents a generation who has lived through Senegal’s stagnation and continued economic dependence on France. Unlike other Africans that have avoided civil wars and experienced rapid economic growth in recent years, Senegal has not. Sall need to say little more than that he stands for change. In fact, he stands for youth. In a country of political geriatrics, Sall seems positively youthful. His victory in a vote scheduled for either March 18 or 25 would not transform sleepy Senegal but at least bring the country into the 21st century.
Most importantly, the democratic process in the sub-Saharan, which often merely ratifies the status quo, would send a powerful message to other presidents who bend laws and abandon past promises in an attempt to become legal monarchs. To many African democracies are coming dangerously close to being undermined by political dynasties based on personality cults. For this reason alone, the next Senegalese vote looms large.
– G. Pascal Zachary is a professor of practice at Arizona State University, where he teaches a seminar on technology, development and sub-Saharan Arica. This blog first appeared on his blog site, Africa Works.
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Instability in Nigeria hurts neighboring economies
• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, www.sahelblog.wordpress.com. The views expressed are the author's own.
Attacks by the Islamist rebel sect Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, along with border closures and expulsions of foreigners by Nigerian security forces, are beginning to hurt the economy of neighboring Niger.
IRIN reports:
For generations, Diffa, the arid southeastern corner of Niger, has benefited from being closer to Nigeria than to commercial centers in Niger: Staple grains, fuel, clothing and other items at attractive prices have made their way across the border.
Diffa’s main outputs – livestock, dairy produce and red peppers – have also found a ready market in Nigeria. Common languages and family ties have strengthened links to such an extent that the Nigerian naira is Diffa’s main currency.
But Nigeria’s latest export, Boko Haram militants, is less welcome: It has forced the authorities to close the border, with tragic consequences for Diffa, just as it is trying to deal with the worst drought in recent years.
(See a map of Diffa here.)
IRIN adds that these problems come at a bad time for Niger, given that drought is already pushing up food and livestock prices. Local markets, deprived of customers from Nigeria, are suffering.
The loss of cross-border trade and workers’ remittances from Nigeria could really hurt Niger – closing, in a sense, the economic “safety valve” that has formerly allowed people from Niger to seek money and work in Nigeria when times are tough at home.
Boko Haram’s violence in Nigeria is also having an effect on the security situation in Diffa:
About three weeks ago, the authorities arrested 15 people suspected of affiliation to Boko Haram, seized home-made explosives and grenades, and uncovered a plan to bomb several public places in Diffa, said Tinni Djibo, assistant secretary-general of Diffa.
So far there have been no Boko Haram attacks in Niger that I know of, but this incident certainly raises concerns. Nigerian authorities’ efforts to drive foreigners out of the country could mean that some Boko Haram members end up in the surrounding countries, where they may attempt acts of violence.
In other Boko Haram news, Wednesday saw another clash between militants and authorities in Kano, site of a major attack in January. The clash reportedly began when security forces “invaded” a neighborhood seeking suspected sect members, so arguably it falls into a different category than attacks that the group carries out on its own initiative. Still, several incidents involving Boko Haram have occurred in Kano since January, which points to a continued effort by Boko Haram to establish an enduring presence in the cities located in the center of Northern Nigeria, such as Kano and Kaduna. The movement continues, in other words, its attempt to expand beyond its base in the northeast.
– Alex Thurston is a PhD student studying Islam in Africa at Northwestern University and blogs at Sahel Blog.
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Somalia's Prime Minister Abdiweli Mohamed Ali (l.) shakes hands with Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron after a press conference following the Somalia Conference at Lancaster House in London on Thursday. (Peter Macdiarmid/Reuters)
Diplomats meet in London to talk Somalia, but where are the women?
• A version of this post appeared on the blog jinamoore.com. The views expressed are the author's own.
Lots of powerful men – and a few powerful women, including the American secretary of state – are meeting in London to talk about the dire "security threat" that is now Somalia. Or, in the words of Britain's foreign minister, "the world's most failed state." (Because that's a rational metric...)
Nevermind that international interest in Somalia peaked only now that we've recognized that its internal strife could be an external threat – to us. Nevermind that this is a pattern repeated constantly in diplomatic rhetoric about countries all over the world. We're not suddenly discovering this idea, nor Somalia.
Pay attention, instead, to this good question: Where are the women?
It's a point raised not in any mainstream news article I've read this morning, but instead by the website Women's Views on the News. In an article there, Asha Ahgi Elmi, of Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government, points out the obvious: “If women are not part of the process they cannot be part of the outcome."
She also makes two other key points: the crises that have suddenly put Somalia on the international agenda – including piracy and terrorism – are not new or surprising. They are, she argues, "by-products of prolonged negligence."
So when all the people running the show are being so negligent, who's stuck being responsible? You guessed it: women. Elmi continues, “During all those years of conflict in Somalia, women have had to take up non-traditional roles as breadwinners and entrepreneurs, and it is the courage of women that keeps Somali society in existence."
I acknowledge that writing a blog post calling out the myopia of world leaders is easier than finding ways to bring Somali women into the process. The article referenced above was prompted by a report that said leaked documents on the future of the state say nothing about women's rights or women's participation in whatever government comes next (assuming, you know, that you can just order these things up from London). Actually doing so would be difficult; there are cultural and contextual challenges. And if you're a diplomat, you can anticipate those challenges. You probably think raising these issues would kill any possible agreement. And you might be right.
You'd also be yet another diplomat joining in a long line of foolish and facile decision-making. If Elmi is right – and from what I've seen in my own work, she is – you'd be practically guaranteeing women won't have a role in the future state.
That's a state that won't function, no matter how well-worded your conference declarations, if Somali women don't keep up the breadwinning (and bread making). And those are jobs we can thank them for doing, even if we can't promise them the political moon.
There's a lot of talk among the people I interview about the tussle between "the field" and headquarters. The world looks so different depending on where you work. But here's the thing I think headquarters most often (indeed, reliably) misses: Women aren't an agenda. They are a reality.
To say, as I imagine many in London might, that political participation for women would kill progress on Somalia in general is to treat women only as part of a political agenda. They can – and often should – be there, too. But whether or not the powers that be dare (or deign) to advance that conversation, women are cooking meals, sending kids to school (or teaching them themselves), maintaining relations with the neighbors, and finding some product or skill to sell so that tomorrow morning they can buy food and repeat the cycle.
If it's too soon to promise Somali women the political moon, let's at least acknowledge we know they're there – and doing a better job of running the show, quietly and often from the home, than the men have done.
–Jina Moore is a freelance multimedia journalist who covers Africa, human rights and women in conflict zones. She blogs here.
Eritrean opposition takes its politics online
• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, www.sahelblog.wordpress.com. The views expressed are the author's own.
Eritrea, which gained official independence from Ethiopia in 1993, is infamous for the tight control President Isaias Afewerki's regime exercises over the country’s politics, media, and economy. Human Rights Watch has called Eritrea a “giant prison.” Eritrea is a pariah in the regional politics of the Horn, and its neighbors have accused it of supporting rebels, such as Somalia’s al Shabab.
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Yesterday AFP broke the news that an Eritrean opposition figure has disappeared:
An Eritrean opposition party official has been missing for two days in eastern Sudan and there are fears he may have been kidnapped by Asmara’s security agents, the party alleged on Thursday.
Mohammed Ali Ibrahim, a member of the People’s Democratic Party central council, left his house in Kassala town at 8:00 am (0500 GMT) on Tuesday and has not been seen since, the party said in a statement emailed to AFP.
(See a map of Kassala here.)
The story about Mohammad Ali Ibrahim’s disappearance made me curious about the Eritrean opposition. Given everything that one hears about the political repression inside Eritrea, it is not surprising that a figure like Ibrahim had taken up residence outside the country. It is also not surprising that the Eritrean opposition has made substantial use of the internet for broadcasting their message. What did surprise me, however, is the sophistication of their websites and the speed with which they are updated – by last night, the Eritrean People’s Democratic Party (EPDP), to which Ibrahim belongs, already posted a story about the fears of a kidnapping.
The EPDP was established in 2009/2010. It is a union of three parties, the Eritrean People’s Party (EPP), the Eritrean Democratic Party (EDP), and the Eritrean People’s Movement (EPM). The EDP still has its own functioning website, and the EPM’s is online but apparently not functional. The EPDP emerged out of a pre-existing opposition umbrella group, the Eritrean Democratic Alliance (EDA), which also has a website. This cluster of websites is impressive, but I imagine it is only the beginning, as far as Eritrean opposition activists’ online presence is concerned.
The websites of the EPDP, the EDP, and the EDA all have content in English, Arabic, and Tigrinya, one of the main languages of Eritrea. Clearly the proprietors have multiple audiences in mind, national, international, and diasporic.
That the EPDP seeks an international audience is even clearer in its Frequently Asked Questions, a document that emphasizes (in English) the party’s commitment to electoral democracy, nonviolence, secularism, media freedom, human rights, and capitalism. I believe that the party holds these values, and I do not want to sound overly cynical, but I also believe that these values are carefully presented with an eye toward winning Western governments’ sympathies.
Since at least the 1990s (see Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large), observers have been thinking about the powerful ways in which diasporic flows and new media might change, or are already changing, local and global politics.
In some ways, nothing has changed. Opposition figures in exile have used the cutting-edge media of their time to distribute political messages for decades (think Khomeini and cassettes). But the Eritrean opposition’s heavily diasporic character and strong online presence exemplify the new kinds of political strategies that are emerging. If nothing else, the movement of ideas and people is getting faster. And I think that the internet has brought ways of addressing multiple audiences at once that are new.
Controlling events on the ground, physically, has not lost its importance, and I do not believe the Eritrean opposition’s sophistication online means it is anywhere close to toppling Afewerki. But if one needs a sign of the importance of the internet, there is the fear it inspires in governments. For example, during periods of protest in Burkina Faso and Uganda last year, those governments attempted to block text-messaging. And if it turns out that the government in Asmara did kidnap Ibrahim, then it may indicate that the Eritrean opposition, confined to exile and the internet though its partly is, still worries the president.
– Alex Thurston is a PhD student studying Islam in Africa at Northwestern University and blogs at Sahel Blog.
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Congo army reclaims two mines from rebel groups
• A version of this post appeared on the blog "Enough Said." The views expressed are the author's own.
The Congolese army captured two of the largest minerals mines from rebel groups in eastern Congo last week—the enormous Bisie tin mine and the Omate gold mine. If the objective is to enable conflict-free minerals from Congo to be sold in international markets, the Congolese government should ensure that the army hands these mines over to the mining police as soon as possible. The army and the United Nations peacekeeping force, MONUSCO,could then deploy around the perimeter of the mines to protect from armed incursions. Without these steps, the demilitarization of mines that occurred in 2011 could lose important ground.
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The Congolese army vacated these two mines in early 2011, and the rebel groups Mayi-Mayi Sheka and the Democratic Liberation Forces of Rwanda (FDLR) have been controlling the trade from these locations in recent months. Following Congolese government decrees and international pressure not to purchase conflict minerals, Bisie mine, which accounts for nearly 70 percent of North Kivu's tin production, is currently only operating at between 10 to 25 percent of normal production. The rebel groups were controlling the minimal production, and are believed to have been selling to Chinese buyers at about one-third the normal price.
The government, with MONUSCO backing, started to demilitarize several mines in eastern Congo last year as part of a multi-step reform program aimed at cleaning up the minerals trade. The model was to train Congolese mining police and deploy them directly to the mines, in place of the army. Then the army and UN forces would deploy at a perimeter around the mines. So far, 200 new mining police have been hired and trained by the UN and the International Organization for Migration, creating a total of 300 mining police in North Kivu province. Over the past week, Congolese civil society groups and mining cooperatives in Goma and Walikale have publicly called for the mining police to deploy to the mines, in order to ensure civilian control over the minerals trade, not military control.
Mining police officials informed Enough that they were still waiting to hear from the military on when they could re-deploy to Bisie and Omate after the army’s recent takeover.
"The mining police should be deployed at the mines,” said Sadok Kitsa, the head of the regional association of minerals dealers ANEMNKI, explaining that now that the mine is out of the hands of Mayi-Mayi Sheka, it is a good time to put the multi-tiered deployment into place.
“This should enable traceability,” Kitsa said. “Dodd-Frank came to help us to implement a traceability system, and this system will get the armed groups out of the mines."
– Sasha Lezhnev blogs for the Enough Project at Enough Said.
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Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade waves to supporters during a campaign rally in Dakar, Senegal, last week. (Gabriela Barnuevo/AP)
Will President Wade push Senegal toward an uprising?
• A version of this post appeared on the blog "Freedom at Issue." The views expressed are the author's own.
As Senegal prepares for a pivotal presidential election on Feb. 26, some citizens and outside observers are weighing the possibility of a popular uprising akin to last year’s Arab Spring revolts, with large numbers of Senegalese taking to the streets in defense of their political rights. Another, even more troubling scenario would entail a violent postelection standoff between the entrenched incumbent and forces loyal to his would-be successor, as occurred a year ago in Côte d’Ivoire. The fact that such outcomes are even being discussed illustrates how far Senegal has fallen under the stewardship of President Abdoulaye Wade, who is seeking a third term in office.
Senegal is one of the few African countries that has never experienced a coup d’état, and it is often considered among the great postcolonial success stories with respect to its record of civilian rule. In Freedom House’s Freedom in the World report, Senegal has been rated at least "partly free" since the mid-1970s, and even climbed into the "free" category during Wade’s first presidential term.
Wade was quite popular at home and abroad when he first came to power. He had forged his reputation as an opposition leader during the two-decade presidency of Abdou Diouf, and faced arrest in the violent aftermath of the 1988 elections, which the opposition had denounced as fraudulent. His rise to the presidency as the candidate of the Democratic Party in 2000 marked a significant milestone for the country, which had known only two presidents since independence in 1960, both from the Socialist Party.
However, political tensions increased during Wade’s second term, which began in a climate of doubt surrounding the legitimacy of his 2007 reelection. Since that year’s poll, the government has amended the constitution more than a dozen times, and the public has grown resentful of the 85-year-old Wade’s apparent attempts to ensure that his son Karim eventually succeeds him as president.
Political sources of popular frustration have been compounded by high unemployment rates, continual power outages, and the flagrant misuse of public funds. Some 48 percent of Senegalese are unemployed, and 54 percent live below the poverty line, even as energy and housing costs are on the rise. Electricity shortfalls have already triggered civil unrest. In June 2011, power was cut to homes in Dakar for nearly 30 hours, leading demonstrators to attack the headquarters of the national power company. Security forces responded with a harsh crackdown. In an egregious example of wasteful spending, the government recently erected an enormous, North Korean–made statue called the “Monument of African Renaissance” at a cost of $27 million, and Wade has said he is entitled to 35 percent of any revenue generated by visits to the site.
It is in this atmosphere of political and economic disrepair that Wade has decided to run for a third term, a step many view as unconstitutional. The Constitutional Council, siding with the president, reasons that because the two-term limit was imposed in 2001, it does not apply retroactively to Wade’s first term. At one point in the summer of 2011, the administration also attempted to lower the vote threshold for a first-round victory from 50 percent to 25 percent, in a bid to avoid runoff elections. The move set off violent opposition protests. More recently, on Dec. 22, opposition Socialist Party youth leader Barthelemy Dias allegedly shot and killed a man during a confrontation with Wade supporters in Dakar. Since then, clashes between protesters and police have become increasingly violent, spreading throughout the country and touching the lives of ordinary citizens. On Jan. 30 in Podor, a quiet town some 300 miles north of Dakar, two civilians were killed when police fired live rounds at protesters.
Growing antigovernment sentiment has fueled the formation of several new opposition movements with mass appeal. Foremost among these are Y’en a marre, or “enough is enough,” and the June 23 Movement (M23). The latter is a coalition of 60 opposition and civil society groups, while Y’en a marre is led by socially engaged hip-hop musicians from the group Keurgui, who strike a chord with younger Senegalese. However, this popular mobilization has not resulted in a strong and unified opposition. The well-known singer Youssou N’Dour hoped to challenge Wade in this month’s election, but the Constitutional Council rejected his candidacy on the grounds that he lacked enough valid signatures. A total of 14 candidates remain, and none appears likely to pose a serious threat to Wade in the first round.
Many Senegalese feel that Wade has taken everything and they have nothing left to lose. If the incumbent is seen as having stolen the election, the country’s long record of peaceful transfers of power could come to an end. France, the United States, and the United Nations have begun to take notice of the deteriorating situation, but Foreign Minister Madicke Niang recently rebuffed external criticism of Wade’s bid for a third term, saying, “Senegal has nothing to learn from anybody concerning democracy.” The international community will clearly need to show unity and determination in insisting that the upcoming vote be conducted fairly, transparently, and peacefully; that the police refrain from using excessive force against protesters both before and after the election; and that any postelection complaints be adjudicated impartially, in accordance with the rule of law and democratic norms. There are only two weeks left before the balloting, but it is not too late to shore up Senegal’s wavering democracy.
Brendan Harrison is a Program Associate at Freedom House.
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Rumblings of renewed militancy continue in Bayelsa, Nigeria
• A version of this post ran on the author's blog, www.sahelblog.wordpress.com. The views expressed are the author's own.
Few were surprised to see that Nigeria’s ruling party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), won Saturday’s gubernatorial election in Bayelsa State. The PDP controls not only the presidency but also a super-majority of the nation’s governorships, and it has dominated Bayelsa politics since Nigeria’s Fourth Republic began in 1999. The victor in Bayelsa, Henry Seriake Dickson, had the strong support of President Goodluck Jonathan.
As mentioned in a post last week, Bayelsa, which lies in the Niger Delta, has faced not only political tension but also renewed violence. Some of this violence is electoral, some targets the oil industry, and all of it is in some sense or another political. The election is now over, but that does not settle questions about where the politics of the region are headed.
For one thing, there are signs of discontent with the electoral process. Turnout was low, reports Leadership. Minor clashes have occurred between rival partisans, reports All Africa. And the deposed former governor of Bayelsa State, Timipre Sylva, is still awaiting a court date in April to determine whether or not he was unfairly prevented from running in this election, reports Business Day. Somehow I doubt that Sylva will win the legal victory he seeks – but the wait for the hearing means that in some ways the election is not completely over, a feeling that could cast something of a shadow over the first two months of Dickson’s tenure.
More important still are the rumblings concerning the possibility of renewed militancy in the Delta. Fears focus in particular on the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), whose attacks disrupted oil production in the region before some militants agreed to an amnesty deal with the Federal Government in 2009. MEND has claimed a recent pipeline attack as a well as the bombing of the home of the Minister of Niger-Delta, Elder Peter Godsday Orubebe.
According to MEND’s recent statements, the fresh attacks have come about for a number of reasons, including the alleged incompetence of President Jonathan, the alleged corruption of the government, and what MEND sees as the misguided use of amnesty funds. One of MEND’s communications reads in part, “Rather than address serious issues facing the nation and its citizens, Goodluck Jonathan squanders public funds on tribalistic sycophants and thugs calling themselves ex-militants.”
The discontent surrounding the question of who has benefited from the amnesty and who has not is critical. One analysis of the potential for renewed violence in the Delta elaborates:
The Presidency and security agents may have underrated the capacity of a group of ex-militants who claim that they were not included in the ‘largesse’, coming from the amnesty programme.
Their colleagues, enlisted in the programme, collect moneys from the federal government...Some have received training abroad; some have been sent to schools abroad. Ex-militant leaders are those who commanded ‘troops’ and called themselves ‘Generals’ during the militancy era.
Many of them are millionaires now. They have access to the Presidency, top government officials and high profile establishments. The presidency pacifies the ex-militant leaders to sustain stability in the Niger Delta since the leaders are thought to have control over their foot soldiers.
Indeed, many of the ex-militant leaders ... have significant influence over their ex-militant members.
...
The ex-militant leaders are however the envy of many youths now threatening fresh militancy. Some of them feel unsafe, that some of their boys could harm them. This is mainly because the leaders have become so rich, leaving behind some of their members in anguish.
The boys insist that they fought the wars while the leaders argue that they took higher risks of providing arms and being the main persons hunted by security men prior to the amnesty regime. Some of the youths (called boys by the ‘generals’), simply cannot feed now, others want to go to school, some want to be rich, some want to drive posh cars and fly on business class seats in airlines as most ex-militants do on domestic and international trips.
The whole piece is worth reading. If this diagnosis is correct – namely, that there exists a class of former footsoldiers who received little or no benefit from the amnesty, and are angry enough over their exclusion to contemplate picking up weapons again – the violence seen in the lead-up to the gubernatorial election in Bayelsa could be just the beginning of another round of problems for the Delta.
– Alex Thurston is a PhD student studying Islam in Africa at Northwestern University and blogs at Sahel Blog.
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Rap artist and actor 50 Cent (l.) mingles with residents and officials during a visit to a Somali refugee camp to see firsthand the effects of hunger in Somalia on Thursday. (Challiss McDonough/WFP/Reuters)
Rapper 50 Cent joins battle against Somali hunger
Move over Bono, Angelina Jolie, and George Clooney. Here comes 50 Cent.
The rap star from New York flew briefly to the Somali town of Dolo along the Ethiopian border to visit a refugee camp run by the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights. 50 Cent, or Curtis Jackson as he is also known, has committed to providing 1 billion meals to the hungry, and according to the Associated Press, he is donating 10 cents from the purchase price of every bottle of a new energy drink called Street King, which he promotes. Ten cents covers the cost of a typical meal provided by the World Food Programme, the UN’s emergency food relief agency.
"What I am seeing is devastating -- these women and children have risked everything to come to this Somalia camp, just to get food,” he said, in a statement released through the WFP. “They need our help.”
In addition to his visit to Dolo, 50 Cent also visited the Nairobi slum of Kibera, billed as Africa’s largest slum.
When stars get involved in global issues, there is inevitably a frisson of excitement in the entertainment press about that star’s commitment and bravery, and in the news press, there tend to be a slew of snarky articles about how such trips are self-serving, self-promotional branding exercises. Both can be true, of course. And when powerful aid agencies such as the United Nations Children’s Fund asks a starlet like Angelina Jolie visit refugee camps in the Darfur region, they can be almost assured that her visit – and their agenda – will gain the attention of the world’s media. In a world of short attention spans and decreasing foreign news budgets, it’s a logical choice to make.
Rap and rock stars, action heroes, and yes, even comic book characters – DC Comics recently sent its Justice League to take on hunger in the Horn of Africa – do their job well, raising public awareness about world crises.
But some critics have begun to ask whether any of this attention does any actual good.
In her biting critique of the reporting of influential New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, published this week by the W.E.B. Dubois Institute at Indiana University, Kathryn Mathers writes that the twin events of the growing AIDS crisis and the post-traumatic shock of the Sept. 11 attacks created a new mood of American humanitarianism. Laudable as it is for Americans to want to contribute to solutions – rather than, say, launching another war – this new humanitarianism was wrapped up in some very old and repulsive assumptions about Africa as a helpless and hopeless continent, which had almost no role in contributing to those solutions or determining its own future:
This was also when the desire to save Africans became the dominant story told by American travelers. While a very real tragedy for too many people and families around the world, the AIDS story was also a perfect “African story.” It increasingly brought up all the old lemons about Africa: tradition versus modernity; patriarchy and hyper-masculinity; tribalism; over-sexualized black bodies; government failures and incompetence; etcetera. It was all too seldom a story about global inequalities, or the structural causes of poverty that contribute so much to HIV infection rates in Africa, and hardly ever about local health care providers, family and community support systems, and the flawed but willing health services all over the continent. Africans could not escape HIV/AIDS and nor could the Americans who cared about Africa. Suddenly there were no conversations about new democracies in Africa, or investment opportunities; the potential consumers were represented as too sick to labor, let alone to shop. This became the burden of caring Americans whose consumption practices can give a sick child in Africa ARVs or provide mosquito nets against the ravages of malaria.
For the news media, these are very valid criticisms. Are we being led by the nose, and by our desire for increased readership and viewership, to cover the stories that Mr. Clooney, Ms. Jolie, and Mr. Cent – and their backers – want us to cover?
By giving so much attention to their issues, heightening awareness about war, conflict, drought, and disease, are we diminishing the importance of other trends in Africa – the emergence of new democracies, the growing economic strength of resource-rich nations, the blossoming of technology?
By focusing on foreign celebrities, do we in the news media end up diminishing also the efforts of ordinary aid workers and activists who work on issues of hunger and conflict year-round? I would welcome a discussion on this issue on Twitter, by the way.
As for the rap star 50 Cent, his entry into the humanitarian field is not entirely new. It has its roots in a concert tour of Africa that the rap star took last year.
“I grew up without money but I didn’t grow up hungry. A lot of people out there are hungry right now – no, actually dying of hunger. It’s our responsibility to come together and do things to create a solution for this problem.”
That first African trip gave him the impetus to use his fame as a platform to make a difference.
“What I’ve seen from this actual run, when I was out in Africa was unbelievable, the devastation and desperation of people who don’t know when they’ll receive their next meal, or if they’re going to receive their next meal,” he said. “I want to feed a billion kids and I need your help to do it. I need you to utilize your energy, your voice, to provide additional motivation for me at times. My new project is called SK, Street King and y’all know the plan. I just told y’all the plan. I want to feed a billion kids.”
Follow Scott Baldauf on Twitter.
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