Ex Africa semper aliquid novi; buy an African farmer a chicken or a goat

There is always something new out of Africa. The latest being the website lastminute.com offering you, its customer, a chance to ‘buy a sheep, a goat or some chickens from FARM AFRICA.’ (I quote directly off their website) As you make last ditch vacation plans, you may also have a last minute change of heart about the dollar-a-day continent.

Imagine how good you will feel when you add a good deed to your vacation. ‘Not only will you be helping a worthy cause like poor African farmers or abandoned kitties (emphasis mine), but your lucky recipient will receive a gift pack with information about the charity and a unique gift to open on their special day.’

But lastminute.com does more than rouse your conscience, it desires to empower you. ‘So you’re not Gordon Brown and you can’t cancel the debt of the Third World. But with lastminute.com and FARM FRIENDS you have the chance to do something amazing, just by buying a gift for a friend (or even for yourself). You can choose a sheep, a goat or a brood of chickens. Of course, they won’t be delivered to you or the person you’re buying the gift for. Instead, they’ll get a really cute model of the chosen animal, while Farm Africa will give the real animal to a poor African farmer, who is struggling to feed his family. Just a few pounds buys the greatest gift of all – a happier, healthier future. A goat, for example, provides milk to fight-off malnutrition and any excess can be sold to pay for medicine or schoolbooks.’

Remember it is not just the right thing to do, it is also fun and educational. Or to let lastminute.com express it more accurately, ‘it’s a unique and fun present that also helps an African farmer feed his children. When you buy an animal, the recipient receives a FARM FRIENDS pack including a miniature sheep, goat or chicken, more information on how the real animals are helping poor farmers in Africa and most importantly, the knowledge that you are making a huge difference for someone in need.’

Out of Africa there is always something new and that never ages no matter how often it is repeated.

GROW (Get Rich Opportunity of the Week): Uganda’s Farmers Reaching for Global Markets.

Andrew Rugasira, CEO of Rwenzori Coffee Company, which exports coffee to Waitrose UK under the “Good African coffee” brand.

Says Mr Rugasira:

“As an African entrepreneur, I am not looking for handouts that I have not earned. I only want the same opportunities that British entrepreneurs coming to Africa have access to. We went to the same schools and universities, and in the global community we are all looking for the same things: markets and equal opportunities to exploit them.

Many Africans are condemned from birth to a future of poverty, disease and premature death. In addition to this, the prevailing perception of Africans and their capabilities never transcends the confines of their so-called limitations. You are poor because you are poor. While poverty is an undeniable part of the African reality, it is only part of it.

There is another side to the continent. For this we must go beyond the gloom and doom and see Africa as a land of opportunity and hope. I do not know of any Africans who wake up in the morning saying: “Today I am going to engage in ‘poverty reduction’!” This phrase, beloved by the international community, has no place in the vocabulary of the African citizen engaged in the everyday struggle to survive.

It is wealth creation that links the African struggle of yesterday, today and tomorrow. To understand this we must remove the blinkers and see an Africa beyond kleptocracy and Kalashnikovs.” More here and here. (A reporter visits the operation.)

England, the Country where Only Suckers Work

Africans, Woe unto you, ye shall hunger

I am in a sad mood today having just had an argument with someone very close to me and so have been seeing ill portents and darkness everywhere I look. And so this little story on Reuters caught my eye and seeing as I was already feeling kind of messed up, almost reduced me to hot little tears. Yes, I know, it is rather dramatic. It turns out that there is now food being made in factories just for starving Africans. Some of our societies have failed to the point that even food can no longer be taken for granted and charity has become a way of life. Plumpy’nut – made of peanut paste, sugar and a special vitamin – is not being made to feed people in hunger camps, it is being advertised as a charity intervention before starvation really strikes. In other words, preparations must be made for Africans even before they have started starving since it is reliably known that the need will be there sooner or later. “We wanted a product that doesn’t need to be mixed with water and fulfils all nutritional needs; we also believe food should taste good. Maybe that’s a French thing,” says Michel Lescanne, the creator of Plumpy’nut which is made in a ‘picturesque’ village in Northern France. Nutriset, the product’s maker, though formed as a non-profit, has few corporate rivals. With a staff of 50, its turnover is expected to be 15 million euros in 2005, a 50 percent increase on last year. It will produce some 2,500 tonnes of Plumpy’nut that will feed a quarter million children. So there you have it and good luck to them. If African entrepreneurs will not step in to create cheap food products then their countrymen shall either starve or shall provide opportunity for others. African misery is the greatest natural resource in that continent. While people argue about gold and oil, no one notices that there is far more money generated by the humanitarian industry on the basis of African misery than by mining or drilling corporates. It makes me wonder whether Niger has businesspeople at all. See more on Plumpy’nut.

Super Mum: The London Years

Read on for more on the ‘brain drain’ and the peerless mama mbugua…and then go to this link for another story on her.

Nursing a problem

Salil Tripathi

Tuesday August 9, 2005

Guardian Unlimited

Charity Kirigo worked long hours as a nurse at the national hospital in Kenya, finding it extremely difficult to make ends meet.
A mother of three, she did not see a bright future for her children if she stayed in Kenya – so she applied to the NHS, which was looking for nurses.

“Salaries in Kenya were very little,” she said. “Everyone had to have some side business – selling cotton wool, cooking, doing some other work at home – and it was very difficult to make a living. I had to take action.”

Ms Kirigo came to England in 1995, just as staff shortages were beginning to hit the NHS. Between 1990 and 1997, the number of people coming into the nursing profession in Britain fell from 18,980 to just over 12,000.

Nurses recruited from abroad accounted for 26% of the 16,000 nurses registered in 1997, and five years later that figure had grown to 43% of the registered total of 37,000.

Many came from the Philippines, South Africa and India. Even though the number of African nurses was relatively small, it nevertheless represented a large proportion of the health workers in their countries.

Life wasn’t easy for Ms Kirigo when she came to Britain, but she had access to a superior infrastructure and modern techniques.

She had to endure some humiliation from patients, who questioned her competence because she had come from Africa, but she saved enough money to send her children to university and to buy property in both the UK and Kenya.

Last year, Ms Kirigo moved back to Kenya. “I had a target to help my children get a good education,” she said. “Once I knew they could stand on their own, I decided to go back.”

Now in Nairobi, she is working to raise £437,000 to set up a telephone-based counselling service, HIV Helpline, to offer advice to families living with HIV, and plans to recruit 20 workers.

Her story humanises the debate about healthcare professionals in Britain. It shows what is happening at the micro level at a time when the macro outlook appears so dismal.

Nevertheless, organisations such as Save the Children are critical of the influx of nurses from developing countries.

“Many African countries have limited funds available for health,” Mike Aaronson, the charity’s director general, said. “Vulnerable children suffer disproportionately when these services are failing. It is shameful that many poor countries are spending millions of pounds training nurses and doctors to prop up the NHS.”

The crisis is acute – around 36 African countries do not meet targets of one doctor per 5,000 people, according to the World Health Organisation.

Even in non-conflict affected countries such as Zambia and Ghana, there is only one doctor per more than 10,000 people, while disparities are evident within a country such as Kenya. In Nairobi, there is one doctor for 500 people, but in Turkana district the ratio is 1:160,000.

Aware of the criticism, the NHS has adapted a code of practice that bans it from actively recruiting staff from developing countries. But it needs workers – and thousands of people living in poor countries want to work in a better environment.

It is true that Africa’s health sector needs more resources, but those resources will not become available by preventing skilled workers such as Ms Kirigo from coming to Britain.

What’s often left unsaid in this debate is the role of emigrating British nurses. That poses the moral dilemma that if a UK-trained nurse is free to leave for the US, Canada, or Ireland (the three most desired destinations) – and even beyond, to the Middle East, Australia and New Zealand – why shouldn’t Ms Kirigo and her compatriots come to Britain?

There has been a remarkable increase in the number of British nurses moving overseas. More than 2,000 left for the US last year, a quarter of the 8,000 who left the country overall. In 1997, the number of nurses who went overseas was half that.

Overseas recruitment is not the only reason African health workers leave their home countries. For many, there are simply no available jobs.

“When I was studying in Kenya, we were absorbed automatically,” Ms Kirigo said. “Now there are more nurses than the country needs or can pay for. If all the Kenyan nurses who work in the UK were to return to Kenya, there won’t be enough jobs for them … I am not betraying my country.”

Forcing people to stay at home will not work. As Kwadwo Mensah, Maureen Mackintosh and Leroi Henry write in The Skills Drain of Health Professionals from the Developing World, a paper published by the UK charity Med-Act: “Coercive measures to prevent departure work poorly; worse, they can intensify pressures to leave.”

There are inequities in this dilemma, but remittances partly mitigate the situation. According to the World Bank, migrant workers send more than $90bn (£44.7bn) to their home countries, the second-largest source of funds for poor countries after foreign direct investment. It is a significantly higher amount of money than that provided by development aid.

Health charities acknowledge the power of remittances, but remain critical because such flows go direct to families and do not replenish the loss suffered by the state in providing the subsidy in the first place.

With that in mind, the economist Jagdish Bhagwati, of Columbia University in the US, says states should tax their citizens who work and live abroad – something the US already does.

Several charities have argued that the UK should provide financial restitution and fresh development aid to Africa so that it can bolster its health sector. However, developing a grand plan would take time.

That is why individuals such as Ms Kirigo are so important. Granted, all emigrant health workers may not return home, but their remittances lift their families out of poverty.

What can be done about the skills gap? “Skilled Africans are going to emigrate. I would propose a Grey Peace Corps, where our ageing and early-retired skilled professionals can be tapped for two and three-year stints to work in Africa,” Dr Bhagwati said.

“While Africans, whom we must train in vastly increased numbers at our universities, will work here, our people must work in Africa until the need for skills can be met meaningfully.”

• Salil Tripathi is a London-based writer who specialises in Asian and international economic affairs. The article can be found here.

SocietyGuardian.co.uk © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Nairobi Woman Made a Slave, Police Investigator Says

By Jim Mbugua
For the Daily Nation

(See end of post for more information)

A Nairobi doctor and her husband are under investigation for making a woman a domestic slave in their household, the police said in court papers.

The victim worked 15-hour days six days a week, was locked in the Golf Course residence performed nearly all the domestic chores and was only allowed limited contact with guests to the home.

No charges have been filed.

Both the police and the prosecutor’s office in Nairobi declined to comment beyond what was in the public affidavit for a search warrant filed earlier this month in Kibera District Court.

The couple could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

According to police constable John Twende, the victim’s story started in Ogembo, Kisii where she supported her three daughters by working as a caregiver for the doctor’s mother.

In early 2003, she was asked if she would consider moving to Nairobi to work for the Osogo family.

The woman agreed, hoping to raise enough money to send her daughters to school and provide better housing for them, according to the court documents.

The Osogos agreed to pay her Kshs 2500 ($33) a month, take care of all basic living expenses and buy uniforms and books for her three daughters who attend a government school in Ogembo town.

They also said they expected her to care for the couple’s young son during daytime hours, the court papers said.

The Osogos arranged for the victim to accompany the doctor’s mother on a trip to Nairobi. The mother stayed for six weeks while receiving medical treatment.

Soon after the victim’s arrival, she told police investigators, she learned that the doctor did not intend to fulfil promises made as terms of employment. The doctor was pregnant, and the victim said she was told she would also have to care for the baby after it was born.

She told investigators she was expected to do all the domestic housework and cooking, and was given explicit directions on how to perform each task.

Her workday began at 6 a.m. and ended about 9 p.m., she said, according to court papers.

Although she had Sundays off, she was still expected to prepare meals ahead of time for the family. The salary was inconsistent, ranging between Kshs 500 and Kshs 1200 a month, she said.

The couple told her that if she refused to comply, she would be forced to leave their residence, arrested by local policemen friendly to the Osogos and returned to Ogembo without a job, documents said. “None of the terms of the employment … (was) honoured.”

She was socially isolated, the papers said, and told not to socialize, and that she could be fired for visiting friends.

On Sundays, she sometimes went to church with the couple, and was introduced to a man at church who agreed to act as a mediator to negotiate for better working conditions.

In September 2004, the negotiator wrote the couple a letter, saying he was concerned about the victim’s employment status.

The couple told the victim “to pack her belongings and directed her to leave their residence immediately,” court papers said. She was given an envelope with $3500 cash and a one-way bus ticket to Ogembo.

The woman called the mediator, worried that the Osogos might try and get her arrested by their friends and not knowing where to turn for the remainder of the money they owed her…

The story above is actually about a Kenyan woman who was cruelly and illegally exploited by her middle class employers in Washington State (United States). The Herald reported on the FBI’s investigations into her ‘enslavement’ and I was struck by how exactly the circumstances matched those of my recent post on the Nairobi housemaid. The post and the story are exactly alike except that I have replaced American references with Kenyan ones. Though housemaids are often treated much worse than this in Kenya, there are no investigations into the problem by the police or the media.

The Slavery in Our Midst: The Nairobi House Maid

There is much I could say about modern-day slavery in Mauritania, Niger and Sudan. But let me instead turn to the dirty little secret that so many of us Kenyans know but maintain a studied silence about. Yes, I am talking about the lot of the ‘mboch’, the housie, the maid, in good old Nairobi. It is common knowledge that many housemaids in genteel middle class Nairobi are never paid a wage; it is their parents, or ‘auntie’ who receives the pittance that they are owed every month. Anyone who has lived or visited the city for any length of time also knows that it is not uncommon to have ten-year olds doing the washing, cleaning and cooking for an entire family while enduring a steady diet of slaps and kicks. And I do not exaggerate when I point to the high frequency of maid rape in many households. If you ask your typical Nairobi ‘babi’ or middle class boy what his first sexual encounter was, he will spin a tall tale about the ‘older girl who lived just up the road’. Wrong. The first encounter, and the second and the third, is more often than not with the maid. She is shared among the boys in the house, their friends in the neighbourhood sometimes and very often the man of the house who after dropping off the kids and wife to school in the mornings, will sneak back for a quick one. This sexual access is usually procured forcefully with the implicit threat that for the maid to resist will result in instant dismissal. Here’s a little clue for HIV/AIDS health workers who decry the transmission of the disease from philandering husband to wife: it is the maid who is at the centre of a domestic sexual web that runs through the sons and their father, not to mention any other lovers she may take. This is of course not to blame her, it is to recognise that the helplessness that attends many maids – relentlessly mistreated, isolated from friends and family, and economically disempowered – exposes them to the malign actions of a class of people whose upward aspiration is often marked with a immense contempt for their ‘inferiors’. What dirty little secrets I am airing, and it is the most delicious post I have written in a while. When I have levelled contempt at the babi – a category that I unfortunately fall into though in traitorous fashion – I have only spoken about the public arena. But it is in the home that the moral contracts that underlie Kenyan life can be seen most clearly. Observe and recognise the pervasive violence, the disregard for the rights of the individual and the abiding conviction that might makes right. It is the oppressions in our homes that have made it impossible for us to consistently and successfully fight the oppressions of the dictators who have sat at State House or the injustices of the state. We moan and groan about the burdens of colonialism when right in our homes, or those of our friends, we have a cosy little ‘memsahib and bwana mkubwa’ system on the go.

To extend this washing of Kenya’s dirty laundry in public where it belongs, here is a chat room exchange on this issue. I will share just a few of the disgusting entries:

“nani hapa ashaimanga mboch wao cause it was so sweet mpaka even though i lost my uvirgo to her.” (who here has eaten (had sex with) a maid cause it was so sweet even though I lost my virginity to her)

“Am sure the rest of the people who did what you did aren’t as proud…how did u even start…yaani how did u even get hard in the first place….mboch….have integrity bana.Ama u can’t vibe a gal? Sweetie hebu mweleze huyu ndugu asiwe kama dude…”

“Lets cut to the chase people…how many here have done their mboches? (pop, is that ur hand i see raising?)”

“hehehehe…i think it is sweety! i think it is!”

Yes, it’s True, There are Slaves in Niger…

So here we have it. The latest call for food aid to an African country is by Niger, which coming under the usual media spotlight has been revealed to be a country in which human bondage is alive and well. Anti-Slavery International, a London-based human group, reckons that there are 43,000 slaves in Niger. These slaves, even when freed, are part of a stigmatized and legally unprotected class to the extent that their former masters or parents’ masters have often laid claim to their property.

Just two years ago, in 2003, Niger amended outlawed slavery, ruling it a crime punishable with up to 30 years in prison. The Economist reports that a chieftain in western Niger, faced with this jail term, offered to free 7,000 slaves held by him and his clansmen in a public ceremony. But the government in the week leading to the March 5th event feared that such a large release of slaves would draw international attention to the filthy trade’s existence in Niger. It declared that slavery does not exist in Niger and the ceremony was cancelled.

The problem gets worse when you consider that slavery also exists in Chad, Mali, Sudan and Mauritania. Woe to those who believe that this trade is at an end as I had for many years. Most of us associate slavery with the transatlantic trade that fed the plantations of the Americas and ended in the 19th century. If only it were so. Slaves still exist and many never left on a ship but were enslaved in Africa.

Of course I need not announce the moral vacuum that exists among us provided there are still people in chains, owned as property by others. I need not ponder why a country such as Niger is suffering famine when it has in its midst such an abundance of evil that has been translated into an economy that is the second poorest on the planet. Surely, in a world whose wealth and security has been enjoyed by those countries with the greatest protection of the individual’s rights, it is not strange that a slaveholding nation should turn to the world to feed and clothe it.

This issue depresses and infuriates me. What am I to do? Where are the Edmund Dene Morels of our time, the African versions especially? We have a Kenyan Nobel Prize winner running around decrying the cutting down of trees; an AU that says that Africa is ready to manage her own problems (with Western cash of course); billions of dollars in aid; Commissions for Africa; rock star concerts to Make Poverty History; a massive evangelical movement that announces to all and sundry that it is proof of a moral awakening; and yet here is slavery alive and well among us.

“For God’s Sake, Please Stop the Aid!”

I just had to put up this interview of my good friend James Shikwati (Director of the Inter Region Economic Network – IREN) who was being interviewed by Der Spiegel on German aid to Kenya. It is not very different from the stuff that has been on these pages often in the past, but I loved it for James’ outraged and uncompromising tone. Click here to go to the interview.

Gordon Brown Announces 25.5% of UK Budget To Be Spent On African Aid

(Report from the Reuters Wire Service)

Gordon Brown, Britain’s famously ambitious Chancellor of the Exchequer, yesterday announced that aid flows to Africa will be raised from 0.47% of the UK national budget to a whopping 25.5%. This will be effective immediately. Speaking at the Make Poverty Campaign Rally in Trafalgar Square, Brown emotionally announced that for too long Africans have suffered from the injustice of poverty and that a civilised world could not just stand by and do nothing.

“Africans must each have a bowl of maize meal everyday, schools to teach sustainable skills like brick making and condoms in case they feel like a little sex in the afternoon given that jobs are hard to come by and entertainment much in demand,” Brown thundered.

Looking back on the continent’s fifty years of independence, Brown expressed outrage at the poor record of governance that had destroyed so much hope after all the good work that the British had put into places such as Kenya.

“We did a real job helping them deal with terrorists, just like we are trying in Iraq right now,” he said. “In fact we killed more than a 100,000 of them, maimed and tortured scores more and suspended legal protections for another three million … this was the kind of responsible government that was demanded at the time and by jove we supplied it” he added.

Brown lamented the kind of weak-kneed government that the Kenyans presently have, promising that he will leave no stone unturned to help arm the Kenyan army so that it could pursue its disarmament campaign in the northern districts with more effect. “Just look at the job our General Erskine did on those bloody savages” thundered the chancellor.

In attendance was Kenya’s slightly befuddled Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chirau Ali Mwakwere, who nevertheless applauded enthusiastically. He reminded Brown that even though the rains had come this year and there was plenty of food, there was a possibility that they would fail in 2006 meaning that more food aid was needed now. He also lamented the British government’s inefficient delivery of sexual health aids to Kenyans: “How am I supposed to utilise my right to sleep with my wife without getting her pregnant if you do not deliver those condoms?”

Brown was apoplectic with rage that the African right to having safe sex was being betrayed by a callous, consumption obsessed and racist western society. He assured the minister that condoms would be had by all as would all the food, roads, schools, social halls, sports stadiums and clothes required by the deserving poor of Africa.

Africa Needs More Millionares – Not AID Workers

Africans should get off the AID band wagon.

What we need is for Africans leaving school to make profits. We don’t need more NON-Profit organisations!

Imagine how crazy it is for poor nations to have almost everyone getting educated rubbing their hands in excitement at the prospect of spending their lives doing NON-Profit work, when in all rich economies, people clamour to get into business for PROFIT, INNOVATION and ENTERPRISE.

They frantically look for goods or services that people might need, and fight for venture capital financing by proving that their idea will use the least money and produce the most profit!

We on the other hand have such gaping holes in our markets for all sorts of goods and services and yet the NOT-for -Profit route is what appeals to many of us. Call it intellectual sloth, or perhaps it is just being rational to choose the perks of NGO employment. But if the primary unit of economic activity and growth is individual economic growth, then we need as many people making profits (i.e. trying to find the most efficient way of spending our country’s savings to create more wealth) for our economy to grow.

We have to reject AID and encourage entrepreneurship and provide incentives for business in our countries.

In non-profit work and in government ventures the measure of success is how much money has been spent on a project (you often hear politicians bragging about the size of the project in terms of spending as they doll out taxpayers’ money – it is never their personal money).

On the other hand, the measure of success in a for-profit venture is invariably the size of the difference between what was made and what was spent, and the expectations of future profits when people buy company shares. The aspiration is to increase efficiency, find better ways to do things – faster, easier, cheaper – so that customers remain dedicated to their products. (There are benefits for everyone: owner, employees and customers)

We need to regard our problems as profit making opportunities rather than angles with which to beg from the West. That means getting off the paternalism of Western charity so that we can own and solve our problems.

The Indian Shopkeeper

This morning, I went to my local corner store here in London which is run by a family of Indian immigrants. Since it closes at 2pm every Sunday, I asked whether it was because of some government regulation. ‘No’, came the answer,’ I work everyday of the week and take Sunday afternoons off to relax’. He has been following the same routine for the past 15 years he added. Other than being awed at the level of commitment and persistence this implied, I was struck by the fact that most of the shop’s clients live in a large council estate nearby. I asked what he thought of working so hard to serve people who in the main do not work and are taken care of by the state. His answer was very brief and all the more profound because of it: ‘People here have been destroyed, there are druggies in here all the time shouting and abusing me. But we just ignore them, agree with them and continue working’. That is the difference between people owning themselves and building their lives on that understanding and those who are owned by the state.

Andrew Mwenda on the Impact of Foreign Aid on Uganda

I recently watched a documentary on the BBC by Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan radio journalist and Museveni opponent, which analysed Uganda’s relationship with aid. Uganda has been presented as an aid success story by donors and its government, and has even had its debt cancelled in the past. Half of its budget comes from foreign aid and President Museveni was famously announced by Thabo Mbeki and Bill Clinton to be part of an African renaissance in good governance. Read on for the reality…

Andrew Mwenda:

“I was excited when I heard that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had set up a commission to research solutions to the problems afflicting Africa – I felt it was an opportunity to breathe new ideas into the debate on Africa’s backwardness.

However I was disappointed.

After months of work they came up with the same old mantras: doubling aid, cancelling debt and reducing trade tariffs and subsidies.

They’re ignoring reality. For the last 40 years, Africa’s been getting more, not less, aid – we’ve received more than $500bn. But we are getting poorer not richer.

Let me show you, through the experience of my homeland Uganda how these recommendations don’t – and won’t – work.

Donor support

Uganda is considered one of Africa’s economic success stories. Yet we rely on foreign aid for nearly half the country’s budget.

You would assume that Uganda cannot fund its own development. But that’s not the case.

The government has got money, but chooses to spend it on political patronage and its army. It doesn’t even collect the taxes it is owed.

Allen Kagina, the Commissioner General of Uganda’s tax authority, acknowledges that Uganda collects only a fraction of the tax it could.

Uganda was forgiven its debts… as a consequence, government indulged itself in very luxurious expenditure… and invaded Congo and Sudan

She does believe the URA could fund the national budget – it would be “difficult but it is achievable.” And she also said that Uganda should aim to reduce donor support.

But Tony Blair is talking of doubling aid to Africa. Yet some African economies are so small that the amount of aid they’re getting is already skewing the economy.

Foreign aid enriches politicians, bureaucrats and aid workers, whose consumption fuels inflation.

The Ugandan government is receiving so much foreign aid that the economy is unable to absorb it. Treasury bills have to be used to suck the money out of the system. As a result, the Central Bank is holding $700m in treasury bills, and the interest on that per annum is $120m – which is incurred by the tax payer.

All in all, a very expensive exercise.

Fair trade

Uganda’s Finance Minister Dr Ezra Suruma said the country does consider finding better ways of managing aid to be “very important”.

“The problem is what we do with it – whether we invest or consume it,” she added.

“We need to invest more in equipment, technology, infrastructure and so on. Aid must be properly used to increase our capacity to produce more income.”

And what of Blair’s other proposal, fair trade?

Changing tariffs and subsidies in Europe and the USA will not lift Africa’s business out of the doldrums.

Again, why don’t we learn our lesson? This has been tried already and hasn’t worked.
Under the Cotounou Agreement for preferential trade with Europe, for example, Uganda has a quota to export 50,000 metric tons of sugar to the European Union – duty free.

But it’s never been fulfilled. In fact, not even one kilogram of Ugandan sugar has been exported to the EU. We can’t even grow enough sugar in Uganda to satisfy the domestic market.

It’s the domestic environment that holds trade expansion back.

At Ugachick – which produces 400,000 chicks each month and produces meat which it sells both in Uganda and surrounding countries – managing director Aga Sekalala wants to expand – but he needs affordable credit, and with interest rates up to 18% this is not available.

Then there’s the physical infrastructure.

Last week someone stole the electric cable linking Ugachick to the grid. It took five days to fix it, and it only happened then because Ugachick provided the manpower to carry the poles.

“The infrastructure, the roads, power – all of this is our headache, when it should be the government’s,” he said.

Entrepreneurs like Aga should be the engines for creating wealth in Uganda.

If he expanded, so would his contributions to the revenue. He’s energetic and ready to move forward.

But there is no imperative for the government to help him. Any financial gap in the budget, and they only need to turn to the international donors to fill it.

Unsustainable debt

If only foreign aid could be shifted from lining corrupt politicians’ and bureaucrats’ pockets to developing private enterprise, then Africa would have hope.

And what of the third of the Blair Commission proposals – debt cancellation? Many people think that debt cancellation is a clear cut solution to Africa’s indebtedness.

But think again. Common sense tells you it’s wrong to reward bad economic behaviour.

My friend Ben Kavuya, a money lender here in Kampala, deals with bad debtors by taking their property, their collateral.

He believes if you forgive bad debts it teaches bad lessons, creating a culture of defaulting. That’s certainly exactly what happened with Uganda.

In 1998 Uganda was forgiven its debts through the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative.

As a consequence, government indulged itself in very luxurious expenditure – increasing the size of Parliament – and invaded Congo and Sudan.

And not only that, it went on a renewed borrowing spree and today, seven years later, Uganda’s debt has more than doubled and now it is unsustainable.

Parliament is so foreign aid-dependent that even the chairs and desks are funded by Denmark.

And worse, with so much of our country’s budget in the hands of the foreign aid donors, the power of Ugandan voters to hold our government to account has been usurped by international creditors – precisely because he who pays the piper calls the tune.

In this way, foreign aid undermines democracy.

Foreign aid does not help the poor out of their misery – it exacerbates their problems and prolongs their agony.

Taxpayers in the west should not be asked to pay to keep corrupt and incompetent governments in power.”

Story from BBC NEWS

Choking on Aid Money in Africa

I just had to share these two links:

Choking on Aid Money in Africa
By Erich Wiedemann and Thilo Thielke
DER SPIEGEL 27/2005 – July 4, 2005
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363604,00.html

Does aid work? Yes – for Britain
By Chukwu-Emeka Chikezie
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,1072-1675882,00.html

Handy Advice if You Are About to Apply For a Food Aid Job

A few years ago, I read Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: The Ravaging Effects of Foreign Aid and International Charity and it fundamentally changed my attitude to aid. The book should be required reading for every literate person and I highly recommend it. Peter Uvin’s Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda is just as important a read. Uvin demonstrates how NGOs and other aid organisations contributed to the strength and survival of a Rwandan regime that turned genocidal in 1994. Last, but certainly not least, is Graham Hancock’s Lords of Poverty: The Power, Prestige, and Corruption of the International Aid Business which is the classic in this small, but critical genre. Below is a speech by Michael Maren delivered to a group of Cornell University graduate students who were preparing to work in international development during the early 1990s.

The Food-Aid Racket

by Michael Maren

As you prepare for and look forward to careers in international development, I am compelled to issue a warning. With the hindsight of someone who spent five years in the development business, I’m going to tell you that the development industry hurts people in the developing world. Its greatest success has been to provide good jobs for Westerners with graduate degrees from institutions like this one. I don’t expect that any of you will take my advice and start looking for careers elsewhere. AndI’m in no position to criticize you for going ahead and working in development even after you hear me out. You see, I had a pretty wonderful career in the aid business. I can’t remember ever having more fun. In fact, I was having so much fun that I didn’t want to stop, even after I realized that our programs were hurting the very people they were supposed to help.

In 1980, when I was twenty-five years old, I was hired by Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to administer food-for-work programs–programs that feed people in exchange for their work on local development projects–in Kenya. I was given a beautiful garden apartment in a nice neighborhood in Nairobi, a brand-new Land Cruiser, a great office, and almost a million dollars in a U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) grant to oversee the programs. As I began the job, shiploads of U.S. government surplus rice were leaving a port in Texas and heading to Mombasa. Meanwhile, CRS notified the country’s parish priests and government officials that this rice was available. All they had to do to receive it was fill out a one-page application describing their proposed project and specifying the number of “recipients”–the number of the project’s workers who would receive sacks of rice in exchange for their labor. Thousands of applications were submitted.

I took some of the U.S. AID money and customized the Land Cruiser, adding extra-large fuel tanks and a really nice stereo system, and then I set off across Kenya to inspect the proposed projects. It was a dream come true. I was driving absolutely free across one of the world’s most beautiful landscapes. I was so awestruck by my own good luck that sometimes I’d stop in the middle of a huge empty wilderness, or beside a herd of giraffes or elephants, and just yelp with delight.

I was having so much fun running around starting food-for-work projects–water projects, agriculture projects, forestry projects–that I completely overlooked the most obvious problem: I knew nothing about agriculture, forestry, road building, well digging, dam building, or any of the projects I was approving. But nobody seemed to care. Only once did anyone in authority at CRS ever go and look at a project. When I’d return to Nairobi every few weeks, my boss, who let me work completely unsupervised, had only one question: How many more recipients did you sign on? More recipients meant more government grant money, which meant we could buy more vehicles and hire more assistants.

When I slowed down for a moment to consider what was happening, it became clear: aid distribution is just another big, private business that relies on government contracts. Private voluntary organizations (PVOs) such as CRS are paid by the U.S. government to give away surplus food produced by subsidized U.S. farmers. The more food CRS gave away, the more money they received from the government to administer the handouts. Since the securing of grant money is the primary goal, PVOs rarely meet a development project they don’t like.

Of all the aid programs, those involving food delivery are especially prized by PVOs because they generate income, are easy to administer, and are warmly received by the public. Yet most food aid has little to do with need and everything to do with getting rid of surplus food. Kenya was not a country facing starvation when I worked there. Many of the projects I started were in the rich agricultural land of the central and western parts of the country. In fact, around the world, only about 10 percent of food aid is targeted at emergency situations. PVOs publicize situations such as the one in Somalia in order to raise money from the public, but most of their work is done in areas where there is plenty to eat, because there are simply not enough starving people to absorb all of our surplus food. Also, it’s easier to distribute large quantities of food in more developed areas.

Harmless as this might at first sound, sending food to areas where there is already food creates serious problems. It decreases demand for locally produced commodities, subsidizes the production of cash crops, and fosters dependence among those who receive the aid. Since PVOs can only operate with the approval of the host government, they typically end up supporting the government leaders’ political goals, rewarding the government’s friends, punishing its enemies, and providing fodder for a vast system of political patronage.

That’s exactly what happened in Somalia, where the government and the generals had been playing games with food aid for more than a decade before the Marines arrived. I was working for U.S. AID in Somalia in 1981, when we started pumping food into that country. It was clear to many of us, even then, that the program was working to prop up a corrupt dictator and turn nomads into relief junkies. Refugees poured over the borders and into camps, where they were fed day after day, year after year, by PVOs, while little effort was made to break their growing dependence. In 1987 a World Food Program report stated that Somalia had actually produced a surplus of food that year, yet PVOs continue to distribute free food and collect U.S. government money for administering the delivery. Inevitably, indigenous food-distribution networks withered and died. The country’s economy adapted to foreign aid–not to production. Meanwhile, the PVOs and corrupt government officials got fat and rich.

No one questions private voluntary organizations. Not the U.S. government, which needs to get rid of the food and wants to keep its aid bureaucracy functioning. Not the host government, whose officials often profit from the aid racket. Not the public, which sees aid workers as so many Mother Teresas. And not the press–especially not the press–which has, in recent years, become an integral part of the aid system.

The press’s role in that system is to convey to the West the PVOs’ view of Africa. And because the distribution of food aid is first and foremost a business, it is not surprising that the priorities of aid organizations dominate the West’s image of the continent–an image of helpless nations in need of our support.

This is not a new phenomenon. Aid workers are simply the latest in a series of recent western vanguards in Africa, each of whom put forward the image of Africa that best suited its own interests. The first Europeans to form a vanguard in Africa were the naturalists. Because of them, early European views of Africa emphasized the continent’s natural history. Later, as missionaries began to outnumber explorers, Europe began to see the continent through the eyes of those who were out to save its soul. And as Europe developed political and mercantile interests in Africa, merchants and traders were at the vanguard. At that time, Europeans were concerned with turning Africans into loyal subjects, workers, producers, and citizens of empires. No one really worried about feeding them.

Historically, the press has been willing to uncritically accept whatever image of Africa the western vanguard has been selling. In the case of the PVOs, the press has bought their line because reporters are as dependent on aid organizations as the organizations are on them. It would have been impossible, for example, for the press to cover Somalia without the assistance of PVOs. There’s no Hertz counter at the Mogadishu airport, and no road maps available at gas stations. If a journalist arrives in Africa from Europe or the United States and needs to get to the interior of the country, PVOs are the only ticket. journalists sleep and eat with PVO workers. When they want history and facts and figures, they turn to the PVOs. In press coverage of Somalia or almost any other crisis in Africa, it is always the PVOs who are most often quoted and are regarded as the neutral and authoritative sources–as if they have no vested interest in anything but the truth.

A typical example of the connection between journalism and the aid system is this analysis from a February 22, 1993, story about Africa in the New York Times:

The greatest danger now to Mozambique’s tranquillity, almost everyone agrees, is Mozambique’s tranquillity.

Lacking scenes of carnage and starvation to disturb Western television audiences, Mozambique is having trouble competing for attention with Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

The article goes on to quote numerous CARE officials whose primary concern is to raise more money to give more aid to Mozambique. The article never considers any alternatives to aid. No aid worker raises the possibility, for example, that Mozambique’s economy might improve if the country focused on exporting goods. No one mentions that in the absence of carnage, Mozambique might be a good place to invest. No one is talking about creating permanent employment for Africans. The only discussion is about raising more money to send experts there and preserve the jobs of expatriates and create more jobs for graduate students from programs like this one. The people who are called upon to diagnose and comment on Africa’s problems are the very people who stand to profit from the diagnoses.

I know that you don’t want to be part of this problem. You’ll tell me that you can change all of this, that you want to work within the bureaucracy to reform the bureaucracy. But in a couple of years you’re going to be in Ouagadougou or Gaborone making a very good salary. The years will pass and you’ll find yourself with two kids in an expensive private school in New England, and you’re going to have perfected skills that aren’t very useful outside of the Third World. You’re going to think about quitting, about raising hell, but you won’t be able to. Because by then you, too, will have become part of the never-ending cycle of aid.

Harper’s Magazine Foundation 1993
Harper’s Magazine
August, 1993

Go to http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363604,00.html to read Choking on Aid Money in Africa by Erich Wiedemann and Thilo Thielke in Der Spiegel.

Some Combative Comments On ‘Those Who Would Steal African Humanity’ Post

I thought that some of the comments made about my last post, Live8 and Those Who Would Steal African Humanity, were provocative and fun. It proved to be quite unpopular with some readers, which is all good but I am anxious to hear what Africa means to you.

It seems to me that Africa is more an idea than a place for Africans and non-Africans alike. It has never really been a place as much as it has been a type of darkness, a nightmare, a project and a cause. Of course there are many in Africa who are poor or starving or are the victims of horrific political violence, but these afflictions only confirm what has been thought of Africa since the period of slavery and colonialism. When King Leopold II of Belgium murdered over 10 million Congolese between 1880 and 1920, effectively halving the population, he claimed to be saving them from their wretchedness and poverty. I mention this not to claim that this is the goal today, but rather to emphasize that Africa as a hell has been an old idea that was used enthusiastically to dominate and exploit its occupants. Now it is an idea being trotted out in the very countries that just a few decades ago ruled it: this time to save us.

See I did not grow up in Africa. I grew up in very specific places: Ngummo Estate, Mombasa, Lenana School, Kibera and Westlands. I became African only at specific moments, most very rhetorical and sentimentalised. The Nairobi I consider my home town is full of poverty, but that is only one aspect of it. In the worst slums are flexible, assertive and innovative people. The demands of life are too urgent for anyone to seat around and wait for Geldof’s consciousness raising. Nairobi, outside of its growing NGO aid junkies, is not waiting for Geldof’s or the West’s attentions. Everyone is trading, making use of every shred of skill and effort that they possess. Trading, dealing, morphing into whatever ethnic, religious, sexual, national being that will confer the most advantage at particular moments. Nairobi, I find despite its crime and poverty, is innately a hopeful place. So many of my relatives have migrated there with nothing but an address and are now working and producing wealth for themselves. They would appear to be poor, and believe themselves to be so, but they are building lives and their hopes rest on their own abilities and not the government or the donors. If anything, the government is their constant roadblock: they encounter it at every turn with its corruptions, red tapes and oppressions.

Anonymous said…
While we wait for the revolution to be televised, what harm is there in getting a few dollars that we would never have seen anyway?

MMK said…
Ah yes, why not indeed get the aid cash and run? Because there is nothing for free. An entire generation of Africans has grown up begging and I think this has killed much greatness and potential. Aid is pennies on the dollar when compared to the money that a people with a sense of ownership over their lives would make. Just look at the flow of remittances by Africans outside the continent and those sending money from the cities to the rural areas for instance, it dwarfs aid flows by several factors.

Anonymous said…
An interesting perspective. Would it be better if the west just left Africa to its own devices? I thought part of the G8 aims is to enable fair trade by lifting the west’s imposed restrictions and opening the markets for African produce.

Not Glossy said…
Insightful commentary, thank you. It would appear though that celebrities have all the answers for us (everyone)… and thus we have no need for thought or even true debate.

Fred said…
MMK, I’ve read some of your stuff and watched your BBC debate today with the other Martin of Save the Children. Yes, you have a point. Of course we have to live with the fact of life, that there is no such thing as free lunch. Yes, it’s about music, exhibitionism and megalomania – but it is also about harnessing non-official Western resources and tapping on what they love best (e.g. music) for a good cause. They might as well do the same for gay rights, gender parity, and climate change so if they choose to do it for Africa, why is it a problem? It may be a simplistic approach, but it is welcome. It should be part of a concerted effort. It would be foolish to consider this as a panacea. Africans should also put pressure locally on their politicians like Biwott and Uhuru to give up part of their ill-gotten and unfairly acquired wealth, including cash stashed abroad in banks and investments not to mentions the thousands of acres owned by the Kenyatta family and generations of white settlers like the Delamares. OFM, Lecturer, CU.

andy said…
This is wonderful writing. It reminds me of the people who I met when I went to Africa in 1989. They were (and are) people of wisdom and immense capability that we in the west should learn from. They were they kind of people who could face and solve problems. At the time they were standing up against apartheid (and for a new future). Now they are leaders in the new South Africa. I just wish I could get on a plane and go spend more time with them. I think I visited your blog once before and didn’t make it back. This time I’ll mark the spot and be sure to return again.

el pupo said…
just a note to say I *love* your blogging.

owukori said…
The West has appropriated everything African for the past 500 years – now as you say even Africa’s problems. Excellent post and look forward to more

Anonymous said…
Am I missing something here? Pennies on the dollar are better than no pennies at all?
Arguably it would be better if Africans took control of their own affairs and created great potential. Newsflash – they have failed to do so for the past 30-40 years! So while we wait for the revolution, we will gladly accept the few pennies that your revolution has failed to supply. Who has chosen to get the fish instead of learning to fish?

Anonymous said…
Africans do not hold the exclusive rights and monopoly suffering and exploitation. It is interesting to see Africans argue for their place in this category given the fact that they have failed spectacularly to address their economic, social and political status in the past 30-40 years.

andy said…
Interesting anonymous comments…
1. The “failure” that you speak of really involves a relatively short period of time, considering that it took the Western world centuries to develop the political economies that you see today.
2. The “failure” dates back to just after the end of the colonial period. Are you thinking, “Look what a great and wonderful boost that colonialism gave to Africa? Why didn’t you make more of it?” Perhaps you don’t understand African history, or you just think African history is a subset of Western history (sort of a poor, handicapped version that is embarrassing the rest)?
3. You say Africans have failed to take control of their own affairs but ignore the point: that the West has never released control to Africans. That’s the point here (the control is tightening further).
4. You speak of spectacular failures, but in fact there are many spectacular successes in Africa. Those should be brought to light, though people who wallow in ignorance seldom learn anything that is uncomfortable or truly new.

dt said…
Great article!
Reading the comments thus far, perhaps the greatest challenge faced by the continent both from within and without is the tendency to lump all the countries together rather than address each country in its individuality. Even when Africans themselves speak, they speak as though they are a whole. You don’t hear such grouping coming from other continents. Singaporeans refer to themselves as Singaporeans not as Asians or South East Asians. Same goes for a British. He/she refers to him/herself as a Brit not as a European, or an indigene of the European continent. Last I checked not ALL African nations are poverty stricken with children dropping dead from the commonest causes. People talk of the ‘African problem’ the solution seekers in turn mouth its corollary the ‘African solution’. Africans themselves commit the same error in judgement; Africa is not one country for crying out loud! Perhaps what we really need is a great lesson on the axiom ‘every man to himself/every country to herself’ Perhaps if each man was left to his demise, he would think up the best means for his survival. With regards to your insightful piece, may I add that no one has stolen Africa’s humanity. It is us who handed it to them on a silver platter by the vice of not understanding the why’s of our very own existence. After all, like the old saying goes, “When you fail to think, someone else will do it for you”

MMK said…
It was a lot of fun going on the BBC and I offered up a much harder position that I usually adopt because I felt that a sceptical African voice was needed on the day. When I arrived at the studio, I met with Wangari Maathai – the Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize laureate – who is a wonderful person but who sadly was mouthing the same old begging sounds that every prominent African seems to make automatically.

DT – You could not be more correct. Africa is not a single country. But it is taken to be a blank slate on which anyone can write whatever they wish. The aid mongers, the West and our governments have mostly preferred to treat Africa as a space of unceasing suffering and helplessness. This is what keeps the monies flowing.

Andy – Ah, yes, the historical perspective is crucial. Just reading history, of whatever region, it becomes clear that war and corruption have been the rule rather than the exception and that the development of prosperity and peace has been a lengthy road.

Anonymous said…
Let get real, spheres of control are multifaceted; those spheres were most African governments have the ability to affect the have failed in a spectacular manner. You know the classic comparison case, the one between Ghana and Malaysia; you know the one about them being practically identical in all economic/health indicators in 1958 when they acquired independence from the same British government. The same economic/health indicators are not remotely comparable now 40 years later. One country has made huge economic gains while the other is still wallowing in abject poverty and is considered a success case when compared with its neighbours. I will let you guess which country is which. Maybe while you’re at it you can explain how the English never let go of the reigns of power and that is why Mugabe is busy laying millions of his fellow country men destitute by flattening their homes, the Zimbabwean form of ethic cleansing, perhaps those evil colonialists have been running round the country side in Darfur killing and raping. The Belgians are the ones that run amok in Rwanda and murder close to a million folks. Hey, it was those evil westerners that emptied the state coffers of most countries in Africa in the tune of billions of dollars. Those animals, they just gave Museveni the right to go over the Ugandan constitution and give himself one more term as president. These animals they are relentless, they made Mswati of Swaziland want to spend money on a presidential plane that was more than the countries budget on education. See, you understand that these Africans are innocent hapless children who despite their best efforts can not make any positive decisions, the west has robbed and beaten them into murderous, thieving but well meaning people. Like Children who have no understating of consequences of their actions these Africans can not be held responsible for failing to make any positive change in those little things they could change.

lex said…
Your argument is nothing but a string of eloquent self pity. Whilst it is obvious that Live8 or a decision to abolish debt will not make Africa’s plight disappear, the Western attempt should not go unwelcomed. Yes, there is no such thing as a free meal, but this constant banter about the thievery of ‘African humanity’ clearly reeks of a wounded pride. Whatever the West may have done in the past, its current attempts with Live8 can only be seen as a positive. Allowance for support nurtures the path to recovery – your desperate grip on all the suffering and struggle that has happened only adds to its suffocation. And all for what? To fulfil some arrogant self indulgent fantasy about overcoming the apparent ‘inverse inferiority’?

MMK said…
Lex – Methinks you misunderstand what I am trying to say. If anything, I am railing against the self pity of those in Africa who come to the West cap in hand attempting to parlay African poverty into an opportunity to gain Western charity. Their efforts are mirrored by a self serving aid industry and the appetite to turn the African into a cause and nothing more by a growing stable of rock stars and politicians. I am not about wounded pride, but I also know that pride is an absolute requirement if Africans are to triumph over their problems. I see this pride everytime I am home and I see it compromised and attacked daily by the beggary of our leaders. Surely Lex, you can join me in recognising that at the end of the day Africa’s march to wealth and stability will come from African effort. Live8 and similar efforts are an attempt to get around this fact. What recovery is this that you speak of? Aid has been in the card for decades, always with new strategies for “accountability, transparency and results” but this has never worked. The only wealth that has been built by aid has been among aid workers and local political elites. The poor, if anything have grown in number. So should I be grateful for this latest effort?

Critical Mass Vancouver said…
I think “Make Poverty History” is a pretty arrogant catchphrase. But there is so free lunch, and idealism is not stupid. All energy is of the sun, literally, and it never stops. I don’t think that honour is really such a wonderful thing. I don’t think that we do much useful by speaking of people in anti-democratic situations as a ‘nation’. I don’t know much about Africa except imperial history and genocide history. My part of the world, in Vancouver unceded Coast Salish Territory, the Aboriginal people were very rich because it is very green and rains a lot. I don’t think that Africa is really such a poor place. So much wealth flows from there and many believe it is the cradle of humankind. But it is a truism from the TV that there are starving babies in Africa which everybody already knows about OR nobody can do anything about it anyway. I wish your criticism was less about a media personality of this single unified/disunified entity called Africa whose honour and ownership of the problems have been besmirched. I think it should say that this is another straightforward attack under the deception of aid. It is about disempowering billions of people. Or it should be more positive and say that we should not be so simplistic and not assume the stupid things the Rock Stars say for the cameras, but every bit counts and lets make work what we have. Get specific and get less media spectacle more community. Anyway I just worry that while you are speaking truth to power you are not contradicting the worst part: that nothing can change. They kill optimism by overusing it and invoking it in a way that, beyond the shallowest sense, will evaporate under the weight of reality. You kill optimism by mostly being critical of their naive idealism. Let’s focus more on the Fair/Free Trade issues rather than the charity. Debt cancellation is not Charity but legally required in the case of onerous debt [that debt, which is in many cases the type of debt in Africa, where a dictator or other unaccountable ran up the bill and now the majority are expected to pay for what wasn't their will]. I think it would be great to be more critical of specific western colonial nations and get them to change their policy. Like American Drug companies or European Manufacturers that suck out raw materials and keep the value added activity in Europe. But I know almost nothing about this stuff, solidarity is a good thing but a locals need to lead. I think that the rock stars can perhaps be reformed to see this. There are no limits to their ignorance because of how they are sheltered on a pedestal. But mostly they are just trying to help and if someone with a more thoughtful program asked them they would prefer to help with that. It seems that the Live 8 is somewhat ‘better’ than the 1980s version which was only about aid, not the debt and fair trade. Those are facts that are already known in the television sphere. Why not pin that tail. Is it really such ‘progress’? Or is the assumption still about a kind of charity superiority racism as you contend. Anyway, good to see a thoughtful blog, keep it up!

Z said…
How can you condemn people for trying to create a fairer world? This isn’t about charity, it isn’t about ‘saving Africa’ it’s about extending a hand of friendship, not laying claim to Africans problems but recognising them and saying you’re not alone. People are tired of giving aid, seeing that it makes no permanent change, Live 8 is about changing trade laws to help, instead of hindering African economic growth, not just aid and debt relief. From where I was standing, I thought the point was to tell the world the truth, educating people, showing them just how complicated the whole situation is, am I wrong? There are people who want to give money for their own sense of moral self-righteousness, that’s true. There are also people who just want to help, people who’ve done their share of soul searching, triumphed over their own demons, and in the end just want the people of, not just Africa, but anyone else who’s ever suffered for whatever reason, to know that whatever you think of the rest of the world, some people in it actually give a shit. Stop being so damn cynical and realise that some people just want to help, even if they can’t or don’t know how, when something like this happens they go along with it and they do whatever they can to support it, just because it can be interpreted as ‘an exercise in white, Western megalomania’ doesn’t mean every person in that crowd is there for their own self gratification, like I said, some might just happen to give a crap as well.

Anonymous said…
A quick reminder for our Anglo-Saxon musicians and politicians: HISTORY MAKES POVERTY, union jackasses-

http://www.philosophyfootball.com/view_item.php?pid=262

Live8 and Those Who Would Steal African Humanity

Word on the street is that Gordon Brown, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer will march with protestors in the ‘Long Walk to Justice’. So who and what precisely will they be marching against? Poverty?

This is simply an exercise in white, Western megalomania. Now that the age of empire has passed for these British Isles, now that the economic consensus will brook no extremes of the right or left variety, now that there are no great foes to contend with, there are only two extreme conditions that remain in a world that has moved to the ‘middle’: Western self aggrandizement and African suffering. To the liberals and assorted ‘put Africa right’ brigades, they exist at the centre of the moral universe. Africans shall live or die according to their wishes. Now we are to be saved, but it could be just the opposite as it has been in times past.

They will be marching to display the rude health of their souls and to confirm their power and magnanimity over the huddled, miserable wretches of Africa. The monies that they give, no doubt in the billions of dollars, will be used to maintain and extend a vast system of spiritual and material privilege. Every dollar shall confirm their superiority and the inverse inferiority of the African. And of course because they are a pragmatic people, each dollar shall be used to employ that army of aid workers who would otherwise be flipping burgers or working in retail. Statistics will be thrown about with wild abandon. Eyes will get misty at the thought of ‘30,000 children dying everyday of extreme poverty’. Pledges will be made by mouths set grimly in the emotion of the moment. The rhetoric will be high flown and every speech will include words like Humanity, Universal, We, Justice, Suffering, History, Community, Brotherhood…

These words will be used to strip Africans of their problems in the name of brotherhood. Geldof and company will lay claim to the very last thing so many Africans own: our problems. And it will be terrible and evil beyond imagining for owning your problem is at the heart of what it is to be human. It is when we wrestle and suffer and triumph over our problems that we are most human, but this alas is not to be if the soul stealers on show succeed. I do not want anyone to suffer needlessly. I would prefer everyone to live in a democratic, prosperous community that knows no war or want. But these are conditions that must be battled and struggled for; they have never arrived as a gift from a stranger. And all those who promise them have always turned out to be thieves or murderers if not both. Geldof and the Live8, the G8, these governments and the eager little, statistic spouting NGO types are thieves of African humanity.

419 Scam: The Lawyer Prepares to Enter the Fray

This is a picture of Naomi Bangura, she of the $14 million Ivory Coast bank account. She sent it in response to my lonely roofer englishman character who it now turns out is in search of love having married a Croation mail-order bride who treated him badly. I had also created another character, Dick Ramahda II, who was going to be my lawyer meant to confirm that Naomi is for real but has instead decided to seduce her and get hold of her $14 million. I wanted the story to be filled with back stabbing, stupidity and loneliness.

dear naomi,
i am going through a lot with my employee accident and divorce. I maried a very bad woman naomi, she is from croatia and has treated me very badly. but you have been so nice to me even when we have never met, I wish you were here. I like your picture. do you think maybe when the money comes in we can go to brighton beach and maybe even become closer than close friends? I will make sure dick acts quickly for you. I thin you are nice.
with great love,
martin

I have blacked out her features since I am sure that this is not really Naomi. Notice the mansion in the background… 

See below for the continuation of ‘Can you find romance in a 419 scam?’ series. I post this with the usual sense of shame because if Naomi Bangura is a con artist, then I must be the idlest, nothing-to-do character alive to have engaged in this dialogue with her. This is just prior to the final series of emails when I introduce a lawyer called Dick Ramahda II who is meant to be representing me but actually wants to rip me off and take Naomi for himself. I wanted to see how the 419 crew would respond to such treachery…
To read the background to the series of exchanges below, please go to the following links:

Can a 419 Scam Letter Lead to Romance?
The 419 Scam Letter Romance Continues
419 Scam: Naomi Bangura’s Photo
419 Scam: Naomi Bangura’s Certificate of Deposit
The 419 Scam Letter Chapter 3

MMK,
Beloved Mr MMK am very glad to have a person like you on my way and i am sure is not a mistake because before i got your contact i prayed and fasted for 3 good days and this is divinely made by the power of Jesus christ.
And i will not stop praying for you and all the members of your family in Jesus name.
Please,sir i will you to contact me as soon as you contact the bank.
Have you received my picture and bank document?
God bless you is my prayer.
yours naomi.

MMK,
Sir,how are you today?am afraid because i have not been hearing from you for a long time,after sending my picture and bank document and contacts i want to ask you wheather you have received them or not;Have you contacted the bank?
Frankly,speaking i am worried for not hearing from you,remember you promised to help me,this money is all my hope and life you know there is political problem here in ivory coast for confirmation check this (WWW.ABIDJAN.NET).Being a young girl of my age i need your help and direction and if you cannot help me is better you let me know now so that i can look for another person that can help me.
I know that you might be busy of one thing or the other but you have to remember that am a young girl and human being and i see you as my father.
My greetings to your family and may GOD bless you
all amen.
Am waiting for your message.
Naomi.

Dear naomi,
I am sorry have been out of contacy. sory about you feeling so sad. as i told you one of my workerts got hurt ansd that is what we have beenn focusing on. really want to help you but am wondering about the money. just when you wrote me and even kindly sent me your picture (you are a very younf and atractive girl) someone wrote me a letter who is also in the same probliems like you. is this common problem? he was writing from liberia and had a lot of monery in the bank. almost fifty million which he offered to share if i helped him. i am tempted to also do busines wityh him, what do you thinlk? it would be good money for me and it would also help youbng people in trouble. tell me your thoughts.
thank you and cheers.
MMK

Dear Mr MMK.

I thank you so much for your letter at last. And I am sorry for what heppened to your worker.

Please, I will want you to be serious about my case and help me.

Here is the website of the bank,where my father depoisted the money (www.boahq.com) you can contact them for the transfer of this fund,so that I will leave here now that the political problems has not gotten worse.

For the person that contacted you.I do not know him in person,But there are many people here who lost their parents in the cause of the war.If your spirit direct
you to help him as well, I will not stop you.

I am looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks,

Miss Naomi Bangura.

MMK,
How are you sir?i see it neccesary to write you once again,i hope you are coping with the problem your company had in dead of your worker,i hope the situation is coming down.
I know the Lord is in control and i have been praying day and night to see that the lord see us through for this transaction,i still beleive that the lord brought you to be a help and it shall not be invain,you know am a young girl and don’t know much about business and i know with you everything shall go smoothly when i come to your country to work with you.Have you contacted the bank? i went to the bank to confirm if you have contacted them and i was told that you have not contacted them,pls sir don’t waist time remember you promised me,and they are still waiting for your lawyers to call them.
Sir, there is one thing i noticed from the bank director, he seems not to be much happy because i want to send this money abroad and he told me that he has a
friend in toronto canada who deals in diamond and he will contact him for me but i said no that i trust you and i cannot do business with anybody except you,tuesday last week i went to consult a lawyer concerning what the bank director told me,when two of us got to the bank my lawyer asked the bank director that as long as your name is in the bank file that he has no legal right to contact anybody who is not my
choice or desire,so my lawyer is with us here to ensure every thing go well and he is worried and he said you should do quick so that after the tranfer of this money i can come to meet you.
Please,sir call the bank director so that they can tell you what to do for the transfer of this money.
Thanks and GOD bless you and your family.
yours Naomi

dear naomi,

as always I am happy to hear from you. but worrid. i talked to my lawyer and he seemd a bit hesitant because he said my busines is very in debt. but then i told him that you seemed very nice and showed him the certificate of deposit. i hope that he makes a conection with the bank because he promised. how are you? tell me quickly when my lawyer contacts bank.
bye
MMK

Babylon System is the Vampire!

Why OGs and mababi, two generations of the African elite, are under attack

When I attended primary school in Pumwani in the early 1980s, babi was a teasing term for a softie: a spoiled kid who couldn’t hang. In the intervening decades, a babi has become a detested and shunned individual who cannot participate in most public spaces in Nairobi. His presence is experienced by most as an imposition, an invasion by a Babylon system that dirties all it touches with its contempt, sense of entitlement, foreign airs and corruption. To put it simply, a babi is a child of the OGs: the original gangsters who took over the reins of the colonial state in the 1960s and their hangers-on. While crime is widespread, to be identified as a babi marks you as a target for hyper-violent criminality; the failings of the political system that gave birth to him shall be visited on his flesh.

The Kibaki administration, the Official Opposition and the foreign-funded civil society are all mababi. While they are busy arguing about corruption, the constitution and speeches by Edward Clay, they have not noticed that they are speaking to themselves. People are hearing the political chatter, but listening is an act of faith that would be naïve given what has happened in the last two years not to mention the preceding forty. Many are realizing that the system has never worked for them. In fact, the problem is not that it has failed but that it was never designed to deliver. Those occupying the higher reaches of the state have not noticed that politics are moving out of the political arena. The people – that featureless mass perpetually invoked by the babi system as the recipient of its political efforts – have checked out of the building. But in many African countries, they have only been inside the national building for brief periods of postcolonial history.

Mababi cradle their drinks in expensive restaurants, often discussing, amid the sounds of tinkling glasses, mwa-mwa-mwa kisses and modulated Spanish music, politics. They tend to demand a return to a clean, green, criminal-free capital city – an Eden that only they, and the colonial settlers before them, ever occupied. Their concerns are reminiscent of colonial settlers who sipped sundowners during Empire’s high noon and complained that the city had gone to hell, that the Africans were becoming more criminal by the day. Can it not be asked whether the mababi are the colonialists of the 21st Century?

Their parents’, the OGs’, takeover of the colonial reins was a cosmetic change – the barest mention of words like revolution or struggle produces an uncomfortable shuffling of feet, clearing of throats – never meant to address the state’s toxic relationships to the many publics of the newly independent colony. The mode of OG governance was classically colonial: divide and rule, patronage, brutality and relentless speeches urging the ignorant rural folk to modernize and develop. They took over and whitewashed the colonisers civilizing mission: a confused, racist attempt to subjugate the ‘savages’ presumably in order to save us from ourselves.

Modernization and development in the OG dictionary have meant ‘come with me on a merry run-around where I pretend to do stuff for you while I pad my bank account with your taxes’.

It is true that the nationalists in their heyday captured the imagination of many people. Unfortunately many of them secretly aspired to be like the White dude they saw during a Speech Day in school. And so many of them became not the connecting voices of their different peoples, but the bridge between the village and the European metropolis, the commodity brokers who sold their people short. They turned their faces to London, Havana, Moscow or Washington; anywhere, provided it was not the smoky huts in which they were born. But they still sought to brandish those poor, church-attending relatives as a political base in order to get hold of the Governor’s Mansion or State House as it is now known.

The initial strategy was to shout down imperialism, flirt with socialism and declare that as panafricanists, they now represented all Africans. Simultaneously, switching from the language of revolution, they used their smooth talk to assure the colonial powers that it would be business as usual after independence. They were everything to everyone: fellow revolutionaries to Fidel Castro and Malcolm X; visionary leaders to many Africans; and business partners to colonialists.

The OGs in the next twenty years after independence engaged in an orgy of thievery. Its dire public cost was only relieved by infusions of Western aid, commodity exports and the fading memory of colonial administrative know-how. It is during these years that they gave birth to the mababi. Though OGs remain in control of the higher terraces of the state, their babi children are attempting the second inheritance. Where the former used nationalism and panafricanism to satisfy a hunger for power, the latter are using ideas from conferences held in Beijing, Davos and Monterrey. The cry is no longer yesteryear’s Viva La Revolución; it is now the Western liberalism of the UN’s Millennium goals, NEPAD, Feminism, Human Rights and Environmentalism. To mababi, the state is theirs to inherit. They are already working hard to create the impression that they are the representatives of – you guessed right – the people. They point an accusing finger at the OGs for bad governance – as if the opposite has ever been true in most of Africa – and conveniently forget that it is a sin to disrespect their parents. The citizen’s role in this plan: help the mababi clean up the OG system.

As the African publics endure insult heaped on injury, the numbers who still believe that forming legal parties, voting and raising kids to do well in exams can change the rules of the game shrinks. Increasingly, the view that it is not the rules of the game that are wrong but rather the entire class of people who dominate it is gaining a foothold. It is those who hold this conviction and have turned to crime that should concern everyone whose lifestyle seems babi-like even if they are not well connected members of this small tribe.

Adherents of the growing outlaw culture in Nairobi have a code that utilises violence above and beyond the call of criminal duty. When a babi is targeted, he commonly experience the whack of the pistol butt across the face, a humiliating undressing after a car jacking and unprovoked stabbings or shootings. The victim is held in such scorn that the assailants believe he deserve no humane consideration. Many innocents have been victimized and even the babi is often not personally guilty of any crime. But because so many have turned their back on the political process, and on the laws it is meant to create and enforce, they regard those on the wrong side of the babi divide as fair game.

To those who experience the quiet desperation of trying to survive in Africa – despite some personnel changes at State House – further talk of reform is a mockery. The only way out of this impasse is to ruthlessly limit the state’s functions and resources. Its reach should be shrunk to the point that there is little incentive for the OGs and mababi to control its coffers. The only institutions we need as people of initiative and industry are the judiciary, the legislature and law enforcement. Demands for privatization, decentralization, low taxes and the retreat of the state from the economy will not be bywords of a neo-liberal agenda set in Washington. Rather, they will be the start of a much needed and long-awaited process of decolonization. Africans do not want promises of better governance by the same old crowd or its anti-corruption rhetoric or seminars lecturing us about sustainable development. We want to be left alone by a vampire state and its little vampire children who never saw a con they didn’t like, a donor they could not kneel before and a poor person they couldn’t pity, hate or fear.

If Bob Geldof Cannot Even Write a Hit Song, How Can He Save Africa?

I was just about to comment on the upcoming G8 Summit and the hypocrisy of Bob Geldof who has been filling the air waves with his inane pleas for more aid to Africa. Then I came across the op-ed below, by Simon Jenkins, which says exactly what I had been hoping to express about the issue.

Aid sounds mighty nice, but it’s trade that feeds Africa
simon jenkins (In London’s Sunday Times)

To use the language of the “new” G8, I cannot get my head round next month’s summit at Gleneagles. Ostensibly it is running true to form. G8 summits have become a cynic’s byword for extravagance, platitude and glitz. But since Tony Blair unofficially signed up Bob Geldof as “G9”, the summit’s objective seems to have changed.

It is no longer to combat world poverty directly but to “raise awareness”. Since this can be defined in terms of airtime and column inches, a summit succeeds by doing what it anyway does best. The more it spends on itself, the more likely the target is met. The G8 is the New G8, with built-in cynicism deflection.

These gatherings are 30 years old this year. They were founded by the French president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, in 1975 as “library chats” between the heads of rich first-world governments. There would be no aides present and agendas would be ad hoc. By keeping meetings small and informal the exalted could commune “above the level of petty bureaucratic concerns”. Like Giscard’s doomed exercise in European constitution-building, things soon got out of hand. The group of five became eight. Canada was included but China, India and anyone black or brown were out.

Today the G8 outstrips Henry VIII’s Field of the Cloth of Gold in extravagance and posturing. Informality has vanished. Host nations spend lavishly on hospitality and call it “showcasing”. Officials are told to draft statements of stupefying emptiness. Favoured topics include free trade, energy conservation, climate change and, from some sense of shame, poverty. The last has predominated, as George W Bush curtly remarks, “as long as I have been president”.

Locations have been made ever more inaccessible to protect delegates from infuriated demonstrators. In 2000 the Japanese held a summit “to discuss world poverty” at a cost of £500m on Okinawa. The same theme was proposed for the most outrageous summit, Genoa in 2001, when Silvio Berlusconi regaled delegates with submarine protection, athletic masseurs, three tenors and £10m of security per head. The mob howled on the quayside and were beaten up by the carabinieri.

This so terrified the Canadians that in 2002 they decided to discuss world poverty deep in the Rocky Mountains. It was there that Blair felt the “hand of history” upon him. He had decided to “halve world poverty within a decade” and would start with Africa. When Blair talks about poverty today we should remember that this is his sixth successive bite at the cherry. The exploitation of global misery to justify a politico/celebrity extravaganza is global diplomacy at its most obscene.

Gleneagles is reportedly costing even more than Genoa, £12m a head in security. So paranoid are delegates that £50m is being spent on policing alone. Nine million pounds is going on moving, feeding and sleeping eight delegates “informally” for just three days. You need not be a rabid leftwinger to find these sums inexcusable.

This year’s gimmick is that the G8 will “incorporate its critics” by half-welcoming Bob Geldof’s music festival. Blair is now travelling the world on a pre-conference jaunt with celebrity endorsements from Madonna, Sting, Bono, Elton John, Ms Dynamite, Mariah Carey and a million wristbands. He has a backing track being rehearsed in London, Philadelphia, Berlin, Paris and Rome. Who says G8 is not reaching out? Nor does Geldof even mean to raise money, apart from the £1.6m he must give Prince Charles for evicting his charities from Hyde Park on July 2. He need only show airtime to meet his awareness target. Never say the British, led by the Irish, cannot do chutzpah.

The rich world has thus attained nirvana. The Good Samaritan need no longer cross the road. He need only be “aware” and cry, “Hey man, wow, right on!” The G8 and Geldof have accepted Margaret Thatcher’s exegesis: the real point of the biblical parable is that the Samaritan had to get rich first.

The meat in this beanfeast is supposedly supplied by Gordon Brown. His contribution is to repackage the familiar summit trio of aid, debt relief and trade preference. But which? The classic test of any discussion of world poverty is which takes centre stage.

Aid — Geldof’s “just give us the f****** money” — has become discredited, for reasons that run through Blair’s mostly admirable Commission for Africa report. The Americans have balked at offering more since they already give $7.5 billion and claim to prefer outcomes to inputs. I have some sympathy. The days are gone when the West sees any point in pouring money into Africa with no way of ensuring it is well spent. Blair’s pledge to “double aid in 10 years” is meaningless targetry. Nor have decades of bellyaching about corruption done any good. Why should an African leader promise elections in return for aid to his poor? Elections give someone else the Geneva bank account.

Debt relief is more complex. Brown’s idea of waiving it for tsunami states vanished when the states realised they might lose credit thereby. His pet international finance facility has been scaled down but remains debt by another name. Nor has anyone come up with a way of ensuring that relieving debt really helps Africa’s poor rather than its rich.

Debt certainly cripples the so-called Heavily Indebted Poor Countries, but Gleneagles is not needed to progress the existing British/American relief plan. The best way to help these states is not to press them into further debt, which is what Brown seems to propose. It is to help Africans repay their borrowing themselves.

Which brings us to trade. If the G8 really cares about world poverty, it will avoid Gleneagles and meet instead on a Glasgow dockside. There delegates will watch the unloading of a cargo of sugar, rice, fruit, cotton and coal from the Third World. Afterwards they will sail out into the Clyde and witness the ceremonial sinking of a ship crammed with their own surpluses, about to be dumped on African markets. That is not dumb awareness-raising. It is really tackling world poverty.

For the past six years the G8 has been preaching relief yet maintaining vicious trade sanctions against Africa and Asia. It has denied them markets for their produce and flooded them with surpluses. At this very moment, millions of tons of subsidised European and American sugar and cotton are being dumped on Africa, destroying local industries and impoverishing populations. This has nothing to do with corruption or lethargy or “ungovernable Africa”. It is economic warfare by the G8 against the poor.

The best thing Gleneagles could do is announce not another fancy aid package but a revival of Britain’s old imperial preference. This means more than debating the EU’s partnership agreements, promising to buy specific goods from specific poor countries and not dump on them in return. It means actually implementing such agreements. Yet I see from the spin that Britain is downplaying trade in favour of yet more aid and debt relief. The reason, I fear. is simple. Pledging taxpayers’ money costs politicians nothing. Since the pledge is seldom honoured, it also barely costs the taxpayer.

Trade is a different matter. It means confronting lobbies, upsetting producers, withdrawing subsidies. It means doing, not talking. Its benefits are seen not on western television but in the markets of Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, Mombasa and Dar-es-Salaam. That is why trade reform has no purchase on the White House, Brussels or the Blair/Geldof agenda. Aid is sexy. It makes its recipients dependent and its donors feel good. There is a neo-imperialist streak in the Make Poverty History movement. Trade is mercantile and often “unfair”. It is always scrutinised for a boycott.

If Blair is serious about “tackling world poverty” he should devote his present junketing to one objective, to a crash programme of preferential, bilateral trade deals with poor countries. This is the only action that offers a robust and lasting cure to world poverty. If, as seems certain, Blair finds all ears deaf to this demand, he has one recourse. He should cancel Gleneagles as pointless. He should send the £100m it will cost straight to Oxfam and present a urgent trade preference bill to parliament. If he and Geldof really need to bask in each other’s glory, they can stage an annual rally in Trafalgar Square naming and shaming the countries that refused at Gleneagles to take poverty seriously. All else is flam.

Fisticuffs, Bitterness and Fame

I have just got this sudden craving to watch black and white talkies; anything with Lauren Bacall or Elizabeth Taylor, who in case you were not schooled became a celluloid goddess after her performance in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’. I dare you to consider going through with a marriage proposal after watching that train wreck of a film!

The other evening, while weighing whether to endure the guilt of procrastination or completing two overdue dissertation chapters, I decided on the former and turned to the TV in the hope of catching some good old Jerry Springer. If you have ever wanted to feel blessed, brilliant, loved and morally upright, I highly recommend an hour of Jerry ‘take care of yourself and each other’ Springer. Unfortunately, there was nothing to appeal to such base tastes. However, I did came across a late-night screening of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. And was soon riveted by the emotional disintegration of Jake La Motta the boxer character played by Robert De Niro. The film is two hours of cringe and is based on the true story of La Motta who was a middleweight fighter in the late-1940s and early-1950s.

From winning the world championship with the kind of ferocity that only comes from deep issues, La Motta starts throwing fights, brutalises his wife, sexually exploits minors, takes to heavy drink and finally ends up as a washed-up grossly overweight stand-up comic at an obscure nightclub. All the while De Niro is matching his character’s weight gain and you can see him literally falling apart physically and psychologically. The film has all the elements it takes to make the ab&h list of celluloid fame, fisticuffs, bitterness and fame. And of course it is about boxing, a subject that has long fascinated me to the point that I am in danger of being one of those old men whose constant refrain will be, “I couda been a contender son, then your momma done gon an gotten herself pregnant…”

So a few days later, I am doing my little pre-summer jogging routine and I start daydreaming that I am wearing a hoodie, running with a grim determination to win an upcoming title fight. Before you can say “snap out of it”, I am at my laptop doing a Google search for boxing gyms in the neighbourhood. And behold, there happens to be one a mile or so away. So what other option did I have but to inquire about joining in the hope that at 34, the gym owner would run his bleary eye down my library ravaged body and spot the savage beast within.

And that is exactly what the elderly and laid-back – to the point of unconsciousness – owner of the Fitzroy Lodge did. His sceptical eyes took me in, concentrating to my surprise not on my bulging with skin, bone and blood vessels biceps but on my ever so slightly protruding belly. With what I hoped was a tone implying that I had banged heads with the toughest of them but did not wish to call attention to a dark past, I announced that I was there to “work out.” He extended his hand in greeting and I shook his dry palm with what I hoped was a squeeze that would let him gauge a hidden strength that I imagine must be someplace in me even if its stayed well hidden all these years. And no, don’t you dare suggest that my hands gained their hard grip hanging out with five-fingered Betty in boarding school. But this is a digression that is not to my advantage.

The gym was tucked away behind a line of FedEx delivery trucks, under an unused rail-track giving it the slightly seedy, industrial atmosphere anyone who has watched Rocky associates with such ventures. Inside, the ubiquitous and much described in every boxing story was an overpowering smell of sweat, chalk and leather. I was in: the first step to a fight in Las Vegas’ Caesar’s Palace ring!

The room was dominated by two boxing rings occupied by bouncing, jabbing, parrying, shuffling pairs. They looked clumsy to me, I could already tell that they were not going to match the athleticism that saw me into the Lenana School rugby team all of fifteen years ago. Heavy bags hung from the low ceiling like big, red fruits that had somehow managed to make a roomful of men angry enough to whack at them with varying degrees of violence. From all the boxing sagas I had read, and my lifelong fascination with the Kinshasa fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, I knew that ‘working the bag’, as the latter did so famously, is an art form of controlled aggression and playacting since you must visualise an appendage-less opponent who looks like a red, squat four-foot long sausage hanging from the ceiling.

Standing out from the crowd of young, mostly white males was a thin black woman who was bouncing clumsily from foot to foot with a kind of crazed energy as she tried to pummel the bag under the watchful eye of the whole room. You could tell right away that everyone was intensely conscious of her presence and I wondered whether I would come in for the same attention – perhaps even a challenge to spar with a brutal customer who would try and ‘blood’ me. These impressions were brief since our walk across the room to the office was all of thirty feet.

To be continued … my ego can take no more writing for now. I must save the triumph or the agony for later; my chapters are calling for some loving attention.

Anonymous Reacts to Africa’s Brain Drain With Uncommon Honesty and Courage

I just received the comment below to my recent post on Africa’s brain drain debate. The writer who chose not to reveal his/her identity had such a visceral and honest reaction that I wish I millions of people could read it. Anonymous, please reveal yourself and tell us more!

Survival first is the most real of all human existence.

Money, but not patriotism pays the bills.
What is often laughable is it is the same beggars in government that have the temerity to label acts of sacrifice by Kenyans …brain drain.

Some go as far as saying they don’t understand how someone will leave a good job in Kenya to go and wipe arse in America.

Well the answer is plain and simple.
Wiping arse in America pays me 10-fold what the paltry pennies in Kenya did.
Wiping arse in America has given me an opportunity that those beggars in government stole.
A chance to be somebody.
Wiping arse in America pays the bills and restores dignity to my family.
Wiping arse in America keeps my younger sibling well provided for so she doesn’t have to go the streets to get it.

While banking in Kenya what did I ever have?
Paltry wages, strained family relations, hopelessness and the list is endless.

Yes I wipe arse in America.
Yes I also don’t think the bank suffered very much when my behind left my position in the words of my boss … you leave, we hire someone else.

Well understood.

Unlike the people in the Kenya government I hate handouts. I hate pity. I hate pretending. I hate stealing from others to build myself.

I love to work with my hands, break my back and at the end of the day see the toils of my labour pay off.

Me and many like myself are the true patriots of Kenya.
We didn’t leave her or sit back and feel sorry for her.
We knew that we make her.
We knew that when we are better than she is better.
Unlike those taking comfort in appearing in infomercials about Kibera begging for food while there is plenty in Kenya to feed us for years to come.
The donations that are given go straight to that fat white woman’s pocket and that nasty funky looking meero who can’t wait for another summit on the brain drain being a bigger threat than AIDS in Africa.

We choose to hide Kenya’s nakedness by the little differences we make in our own way.
Kenya knows that and appreciates it.
That for me is enough.

The African and his Dangerous Loins

The piece below was published in the East African in the Fall of 2004. It is about a London conference that featured all the hypocrisies that I have been ranting about for the past week. It will be followed by a return to the The Matrix Redux: The African Version – stuff that is a bit lighter once this rant on donors and the aid-consuming elites leaves me, to return soon no doubt.

You’ve been hoodwinked. You’ve been had. You’ve been took. You’ve been led astray, run amuck. You’ve been bamboozled. — Malcolm X

African loins are dangerous to their owners and to society at large, especially when they pair up. At a late 2004 UN conference on reproductive health held in London – with the ominous sounding title of Countdown 2015 – African sex came under the spotlight for its almost unmitigated dangers. Speakers held forth on its unfortunate tendency to transmit lethal infections and failing that, to result in numerous babies who, contrary to popular belief, are actually destructive beings that impoverish their parents and undermine national economic aspirations. Countdown 2015 ended with the unanimous recommendation that Africans should make capacity building efforts empowering them to sheath their weapons of mass destruction in latex. Outrage was expressed that while facing the twin dangers of disease and babies, Africans are faced with the disadvantages dealt them by a destructive colonial legacy and the continuing neo-colonial attentions of the West. It was thus confusing in the extreme when this august body of scholars, reproductive health professionals and officials from African governments and NGOs concluded that Africans had a right to free condoms and healthcare paid for by those same Western nations.

The overarching goal of the conference was how to provide free sexual healthcare to the world’s poor by 2015. Its various motions lived up to the worst stereotypes of NGO-speak: impenetrable, pedantic and cursed with a hopeless idealism. Participants argued that unless all women and men have access to free contraception of their choice, it would be impossible for hunger, war and pestilence to be eliminated in Africa. The pressure civil society, which many attendees claimed to belong to, exerted on local governments and donors would result in funding being made available for contraceptives that would then be delivered by NGOs. The small talk back at the delegates’ $300 per night hotels was all about empowerment and the possibility of getting invited to the next conference at some exotic locale. Uplifting stories of poor folks’ ability to cope with privation were shared by our learned friends who spoke in hushed tones accompanied by furious little nods acknowledging the dignity of ‘the people’. I wondered whether the irony-free demand that rich nations were obligated to pay for the care of poor Africans was made in cruel jest or was evidence of an astonishing naivety. It also made me curious about the wider role that donors and NGOs and the so-called civil society play in Kenya.

Most of those attending the conference were united in the opinion that the industrialized West has an obligation to provide contraception and health for the African poor. In numerous speeches, the recipients of this aid were tagged as partners or even clients – in the case of NGO service provision – but there was little doubt that they exist downstream from the expertise and the money. They were relegated to a helpless, but dignified victim-hood beyond their ability to relieve save when their capacity receives attention from the NGO-donor crowd. So it was that speaker after speaker asserted the right to free condoms to be as fundamental as that of free speech.

Of course the glaring difference between the two is that while you can fight your government for the license to vote or speak your mind, you cannot marshal much of an argument if faraway governments do not safeguard your loins. Can Africans really enjoy rights based on Western charity? Is it possible that donor states are generous enough to provide free health and contraception to billions outside their boundaries? Common sense would provide answers that are resoundingly negative. But such conferences are not exercises in common sense, they are attempts to de-politicize African poverty so that it can be managed by a section of the upper class sustained on donor patronage and with no popular mandate.

It calls itself civil society. Even when it employs political language, for instance in railing against what it asserts is neo-colonialism or the devastating legacy of colonialism, the higher aim is to engender guilt in the liberal West and ensure the continued flow of donor money. Sections of this civil society – many who were present at Countdown 2015 – periodically make headlines for holding lively demonstrations against multinationals, regarding them to be at the forefront of a homogenizing globalization of capital and Anglo-American culture. The language employed is that of a class war whose European frontlines have since been abandoned by its originators – the revolutionary left. The paradoxical result is that NGOs funded by pro-globalization agencies such as USAID and DFID end up lauding poor Africans for being the ‘resistors’ of an ‘evil’ capitalism. Some are clever enough to spot the irony in this arrangement and usually extol themselves for being transgressive: ‘we take their money and then work against them…’ being a typical argument. One of the major reasons for these tortured exercise, which I will return to later, is the need to argue the need for social welfare programs. By identifying the source of the deepest structural problems to be Western, and thus making the case for where responsibility lies, they ensure that monies to apply band-aids will be available. Concurrently, they (rightly) assail African governments for lacking the capacity to implement these programs thus opening the path to their taking the lead in administering aid.

Countdown 2015 was billed as a follow up to a similar effort in Cairo a decade ago. Before then, population control was the rage in development circles. Policymakers regarded the birth rate in Africa – rapid compared to that of industrialized nations – as a leading cause of poverty. Kenya, if you will cast your mind back to the 1980s, had the distinction of being the world’s leading baby factory. Aid experts and the organizations they supported locally made strident efforts to communicate the dangers of the birth rate outstripping economic growth, which they concluded would inevitably lead to national destitution. In the two decades prior to the Cairo meeting, a top priority of international development organizations was to drastically slow population growth.

But the connection, whether real or imagined, between such a Malthusian outlook and the policies of countries that pursue forced sterilizations and compulsory abortions to control population growth proved to be a public relations disaster. It required a shift in tack. After Cairo, and prominently so in London a few weeks ago, the old population control ideas have now been repositioned as a human rights issue. This is partly for PR value, but is also an acknowledgement of new possibilities for expanding their domain introduced by the willingness of the donors to now countenance democratization with the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Cold War was underway – with Moi as a valued client of the West and thus above criticism on his human rights record – NGOs had been forced to steer clear of ‘political’ issues.

In the 1980s, the fight against KANU’s dictatorship democracy was mostly led by clandestine movements like Mwakenya together with a small scattering of individuals and aboveground groups such as the Law Society of Kenya. By the early 1990s, as Western patronage for the regime retreated, the political space available to the opposition broadened. It now stretched beyond covert efforts and developed into a broadbased pro-democracy movement that enjoyed the support of a majority. So much so that the American ambassador, Smith Hempstone, now became a proud member of an opposition that only a few years earlier he would have demanded to be dispersed violently if need be. With this momentous shift, donor money was soon funding the now-familiar civil society programs in democratization, voter education etc.

Considered in hindsight, it would seem that the focus on babies was only incidental just as the present one has little to do with creating a vibrant democracy. The problems addressed by the local development enterprise must accord to donor priorities just as its programs must take the shape of the available funding. Ideally, it keeps its language abreast of political developments to the extent that its aforementioned limitations allow. The more it succeeds in taking the rhetorical lead in solving or framing local problems, the greater the legitimacy won; this is valuable currency in the world of conferences and proposal writing. Possessing radical bona fides helps, especially when earned by stances that are no longer perceived as a threat to donor interests.

If they cannot get their hands on a hero, it suffices to reach for legitimacy with a garbled radicalism characterized by vague leftist terms and positions. Success in this exercise confers a two-fold advantage. First, it sells better to those remnants of the Western left who regularly staff donor agencies. Secondly, it accords the particular NGO or individual a good position from which to challenge the government’s adequacy thus ensuring that donor funds are increasingly directed away from it and to NGOs that are by leaps and bounds taking over the governance of the country.

Kenya’s self-identified civil society, like other sections of the country’s elite, has arrived at its lofty position by being a go-between. Its A-game is to scrap for the right to represent the public to foreign interests and vice versa. The public has problems – big ones, while the foreigners have a guilty conscience to assuage or geo-political goals to achieve by dishing out cash. That is why it is not surprising when civil society’s members join the Cabinet and effortlessly abandon the positions they fought for in the past. To either camp, ordinary Kenyans are the bait that provides a house in Lavington, cocktails in Westlands and air-tickets abroad for these bigwigs.

According to one of the reports handed out by the conference organizers, participants decided on a worldwide program to guide national-level policy making for the next 20 years in all countries that signed up. Given that many African governments have abdicated a substantial part of their mandates to NGOs and donors, after years of being browbeaten and allowed a sense of entitlement to foreign aid, they will surely sign up. Once they do, and with their policies ‘guided’ by external actors, will there be any need for democracy as citizens are relegated to passive charity recipients and not the ultimate guides of national policy?

But it is not only the paternalism evident at the conference that was so objectionable, it was also the poverty of the idea that reducing our birth rate is a necessary step to building a prosperous society. Once in a while, I inadvertently have a conversation with a Western layperson that imagines Africa is overpopulated, and that this is one of the causes of its extreme poverty. Their solution often goes something like this: if you have fewer babies, there will be better schools, a less burdened health system, more food to go around…etc. Save the Children adverts of starving children begging for a Westerner to ‘adopt’ them for $12 per month would then cease according to this view. I was surprised that the learned and supposedly informed health professionals at the conference shared this outlook.

The reason they ignore the growing body of statistical and anecdotal evidence that contradicts Malthusian policies toward the poor is that they must keep up a relentless drumbeat of negativity to keep their programs going. It does not matter that over a dozen studies, including one by Nobel prize-winning economist Simon Kuznets, oppose the overpopulation consensus so evident at the conference. Rarely do findings demonstrating that faster population growth is not associated with slower economic expansion make their way into conference speeches. Africa actually needs more people and a higher population density. For example, Hong Kong, though it has forty times the density of China, has still managed to build a vibrant enough economy to provide a comfortable existence for most of its citizens despite most of them having been dirt poor fifty years ago. This is repeated in all of the Asian Tiger economies. Even the NGO outcry about the growth of slums, brought on by rapid urbanization, rather than being a universal evil has been a crucial factor in the growth of capital and wealth in every industrialized country during the last century.

Limiting the number of babies, or having more capacity building conferences, will not make for more wealth or less misery. The solution lies in stopping government from its perpetual beggardom and from having its policies guided by donors and the civil society NGOs they fund. That the government is the biggest employer, spender and consumer of national resources, while it prostrates itself to the donors, means that its bankruptcy of ideas and lack of sovereign will is communicated to an inordinately large percentage of the social and economic life of the country. At present, this state of affairs faces little opposition. The very rich who it would be thought have an intrinsic interest in limiting the role of government in socio-economic affairs do no such thing despite such oversight usually resulting in higher business taxation and regulation. It is because that 50-year old guy with a Pajero is too often the one who, as part of the political elite, has made money on fraudulent deals in the ministries. Reducing the reach of government would reduce his ‘opportunities’. Thus his sense of relief now that donors are back to providing government with budget support after they had turned to the NGO sector as the preferred deliverer of services during the late 1990s. Alas, this state of affairs had even forced him to ponder dropping the businessman moniker and writing up a proposal to launch a charity. For their part NGOs welcome donor funding, but try and make the argument that government is too corrupt to take a lead in delivering aid.

The fight against corruption has only incidentally to do with its effects to these two groups, rhetoric notwithstanding. It is just another way that civil society haves wage war against the political elite have-mores. Both groups will deliver Kenyans to the bidders, and will continue doing so by fighting turf battles that the public assumes represent their interests – if these are served, it will only be incidentally.

What is not accounted for so far in this essay is the game on the donor side. Are the monies promised for condoms or commissions launched to investigate yet another African crisis motivated solely by liberal guilt or traditional geo-political goals such as that of expanding the donor country’s sphere of influence? Toward what are Kenyans being guided? The briefest answer is thus: to a world where democracy is good only for making limited service choices and the public has scant chance of fundamentally re-orienting its political sphere. Keenly awaited political goals such as most of those included under the human rights banner will, by virtue of the depoliticised approach to them and their spearheading by foreign funded bodies, replace an organic political dispensation with a global one. FGM will be eliminated, women freed from patriarchy and older people from ageism by agents drinking from the same fount, many who do not understand the grand vision that will be realised should their particular campaign reach fruition.

The result will be a legal and moral code that is everywhere similar, one characterised by its contempt and enmity to the political life of the multitude of publics around the world. The only difference between Missouri and Nyanza will in be their menus and traditional dances. Culture will be robbed of its animating power, robbed ultimately of the dynamism arising from difference and expressed as political opposition. An ostensibly neutral body of law which will be nothing but an enthronement of the powers that be will hold politics at bay for it is only in that domain that the public can express its will. But is it so bad to have this project succeed is the obvious challenge to the negative tone of this article. Would not a universal human rights regime and a technocratic management of social welfare be preferable to the deluge of crises that is our lot? Perhaps so, but this vision will never be realised.

We are caught in the march of history without being its beneficiaries. The donor monies from up north will always be too scant to fundamentally solve our poverty-induced problems. Funding will actually shrink with time, as it has been doing since the end of the Cold War. Yet our ability to generate entrepreneurial capital remains stunted by the statist instincts of civil society and the political elites whose hold on the levers of government – or their NGO alternates – are the key to their sustenance. What is being created is a new management system. The old one managed the war against communism. This one must cap the violence that may emanate from disparate and opposed political voices, which could threaten the security of the West – whether via increased illegal immigration or the creation of environments that generate anti-western terrorism. The system should appear to have all the working parts of a democratic polity: government, opposition and civil society. The rhetoric issuing from it will be stridently pro-people, while its proponents will wax lyrical about the universal goals and responsibilities of Humanity; anything to keep you engaged with the donor world and away from thinking or acting parochially, tribally, by sex.

Kenya, and countries like it, will remain in a state of suspension between implosion and sputtering progress, between crippling poverty and an over-taxed, over-managed petty capitalism. Being suspended in this miserly, degenerate state will be an invaluable benchmark for those other parts of the world whose production of capital is increasing rapidly. We shall comfort the despairing in those places for we are incalculably worse off. Our role is to be the other, except not a threatening other thanks to the management system. We will be pitied, provided with charity and used as the backdrop for societies whose nihilism has grown apace with its riches, and that is now in need of moral crusades that will not upset its applecart. We are consigned to be the blackspot that must be stopped from spoiling everyone else’s party and that allows for the modest appeasement of Western conscience.

Some Reactions to ‘Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan’

I just read these comments on the Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan post and thought that they were so passionate, they needed to be better displayed.

Anonymous: I stopped being guilty and apologetic for being a middle class Kenyan along time ago. Human beings are about interests and interests first. The difference between an action that is immoral and one that is evil is if the interest is broad and long term or if it is narrow and short term.The guy in my village defines his interests in term of his ethnicity and therefore he acts as such. Being middle class and cosmopolitan I define my interests in terms of class as opposed to ethnicity. So then, which interest serves Kenya better? I don’t particularly like poor people however, it is in my interests that there are fewer of them so that they leave me be to enjoy my life. I personally am tired of the b.s that middle class conversations about morality for moralities sake. The morality has to be discussed in terms of interests and the players and roles they play. This I believe is a lot more interesting and a better framework for addressing that, which ails us.

Deno: As a middle class Kenyan myself, I have to concur with our smug obsession with socially extricated from what is the real life of the AVERAGE Kenyan. We talk about it lots; it bothers me that the talk never goes beyond superficial concern. These ‘class tensions’ are exacerbated by languages evolving and growing within each class, languages whose sole intention seems to be exclusion. I think the first stop (as with any therapy session) is we sit down and speak the same language till we unearth the conflict. I may be slightly obsessed with blogging, but I really think that dialogues like these are the beginning of such a ‘therapy session’ for Kenyans. The goal now is to get a more diverse group of Kenyans blogging, since as Arunga correctly noted, most of your readers, if not all, are members of the Kenyan middle class.

Akinyi J. Arunga:
Deno, I recently began to listen to the music of Kalamashaka, and other underground Kenyan musicians and they are having the dialogue. It is just hair raising to hear the lyrics of their songs, they are literally fermenting a revolution and the rest of us are oblivious. If you are not familiar with K-Shaka… that is where the true politics of the mwananchi is done. All these things are expressed there, the treatment of Hawkers, the legislation of massive wealth acquisition by politicians, and the deep cry of the youth in the poor neighbourhoods, saying they are living the consequences of these things, and yet when they even sing about their plea, the MCs in the middle class radio stations will not even play their music, unless they sing about girls’ booty… That stuff can make you cry. It is detailed, it is potent, it is true and it is Kenya, the Kenya that we have refused to engage with. We buy tomatoes from the woman on the street, but never yell out in outrage when the NCC askaris, crush those tomatoes and throw her in their truck. It is as if she has no children to feed, to cloth, to educate and shelter. It is as if we conveniently have amnesia of the convenience she offers us on our way from work, being able to pick nice fresh juicy tomatoes for a fraction of what the cost at uchumi, where we have no time to go in the rush hour as we are trying to run and catch the Mathree home. But then we can hold conference after conference about poverty reduction and Millennium Development Goals… lofty things that give us power, since we assign ourselves the task to achieve them, forgetting that each of those Kenyans just like you and I, is precisely trying to achieve their his or her own realistic development goal, but get robbed blind, beaten abused (Do you know how many times the Markets have been burnt down?)… so that that power they have to do it for themselves is transferred to the people with better English, so that instead of innovating, being creative and excellent, people are now leaving school to get jobs at NGOs so that they can help Develop their fellow Kenyans! BTW, for offering convenience at better prices than other traders, people in the U.S become millionaires (See Wal-Mart); that is their reward… But in Kenya Alas!

Confessions of a Middle Class Kenyan

I have spent the last few hours listening to audio tapes of James Baldwin and Malcolm X, reading of the anti-slavery exploits of John Brown at Harper’s Ferry and reading the last letters that his fellow raiders wrote just before they were led to the gallows. I have done this as a result of a question that has been on my mind for at least a year, a question that has refused to let go: what are we and what is wrong? This I ask about my home Kenya: why is there a profound sense of dislocation between the majority of people and their government? Why are we beggars? Why is there so much violence in a country that prides itself for being peaceful? Why, I ask trying to avoid despair, are we not equal to our problems?

I have wondered what constitutes knowledge, what role I have to play in the Kenya that is or possibly could be. And I have concluded with some reluctance that I was raised to be a ruler, a governor and civilizer of the savage. That I, and the middle classes that birthed me, struck a great bargain on that day when Kenya won its independence all those years ago: to continue that moral mission that Britain set itself, to govern and civilize the native. We have become a pustule, an encroaching and violent class that with charity on our lips criminalises, exploits and yes, oppresses those who are not like us.

I have often written of it in the past especially in a March post called Babylon System is the Vampire, here and here. But until now, I have not come to grips with the moral vacuity of the class that dominates the state or terms itself civil society. We are mercenaries for hire, ready to do whatever bidding any foreign donor desires. We hate the poor, with their smells, strange accents and backward ways. Of course we never admit this since we prefer to hate them as we speak of their dignity and their ‘authenticity’, and even drop our Christian names to be more Afrikkkan. Yet we hate them for being lost – at least according to us – and even more because despite their inferiority in our eyes, they are the only meal ticket we have.

They annoy and embarrass us with their circumcisions, their patriarchy, their unreconstructed tribalisms, and their bible-thumping ways. We fear them as criminals – we quake at their approach at the traffic lights. Yet we feel a need to be joined with them because we know that we lack something that we suspect that they have. We middle classes have become obsessive seekers of authenticity, listening to Fela Kuti, being BLACK, taking on WHITE RACISM and praising tradition. Yet we are alienated here in our air conditioned cars and gated suburbs where we live on the money we earn being the purveyors of mercy (NGOs) or the enforcers of progress (Government and Development).

We are Soyinka’s tigers, ever proclaiming our tigritude. But hating doing this all the while for we know that what we are is a posture, an attitude aimed at the European who is at the centre of all we do. If he has a welfare state, so must we. If he is into environmental rights, so must we be. We mime like parrots except our mimicry is garbled and has no clarity; our works can never equal those of the European because we are infected with the lethal mediocrity bequeathed to us by our ancestor: the settler. We have the laziness and decadence of the slave owner. The language fails me because we have perverted it. When we say unite, we mean unite in obeying our dictates. When we say we are for freedom, we mean we are for our freedom to be in charge. When we argue that capitalism is right, we say it because we are charged to say so by our foreign sponsors. We cannot be capitalist because we do not respect the property or the person of the average Kenyan. When we say we are against capitalism, similarly, it is because we are miming attitudes suggested to us by a West/East/South/whatever that promises us some prestige and money. When we talk of our development partners, we are talking of our beggary. When we talk of security, we do not care about the insecurity that has been the lot of most Kenyans due to our actions, our stealing and let us never forget our killing. When we say up we mean down.

By our nature, at its most fundamental, we are liars. We lie to ourselves more than to anyone else. We mime nationhood when what we have is rip-off-hood. Our nature is to be corrupt because we are corrupted. We owe no allegiance to anything other than our self perpetuation. We do not believe in sweat or in the property that results from it. We do not seek excellence or innovation or competition, goals that are intuitive and instinctive to most honest people seeking to live well. We believe that we are owed the world, but have never put in a single decade of real effort to earning it.

The only safety for Kenya is for us to be boxed in, to be ushered off the stage or at the very least constrained. That is why I believe that our greatest aids in our vulturehood – the state and the development industry – must be curtailed, cut down to the smallest proportions. Everything our state has touched it has destroyed or stolen. But we shall not do this voluntarily; we shall fight to the end knowing that to curtail the state is to destroy our access to other peoples’ efforts and winnings. And that is why we have become targets of a growing violence and hatred that if you have not noticed, I announce to you now.

Politics has moved out of the political arena. It is now in the car jacker’s slap and the random killing. Observe the crime wave and understand that you are seeing the beginning of a culture that we have begotten: the democratisation of the crimes we have been committing against people for four decades and that are the fount of our privilege and power. We shall be its targets because this crime wave covets what we have, as we have coveted the land of the Taita or the Maasai; it shall rip what it wants from our tight grip just as our GSU and police and Provincial Commissioners and District Officers have ripped what they desired from the hands of millions.

When Baldwin warned of a ‘fire next time’ all those decades ago, he was warning not just the White people who refused Black folks the vote and lynched them, he was warning all those who would dare compromise others’ humanity. He was warning the middle classes that sprang up all over Africa and continue to this day to act like the mkoloni and who thwart the best efforts of people to just live.

After this rant, let me please beg you to ignore it if you will but read Chapter 3 of Franz Fanon’s ‘Wretched of the Earth’. It is the most incisive study of the middle classes in the former colonies. I will post it on this blog.

419 Scam: Naomi Bangura’s Certificate of Deposit

Naomi Bangura’s certificate of deposit to prove how much money she has in Ivory Coast and needs my help to move offshore. For the rest of the story, read the posts on the 419 Scam Letter.  

Dear naomi,
I am sorry have been out of contacy. sory about you feeling so sad. as i told you one of my workerts got hurt ansd that is what we have beenn focusing on. really want to help you but am wondering about the money. just when you wrote me and even kindly sent me your picture (you are a very younf and atractive girl) someone wrote me a letter who is also in the same probliems like you. is this common problem? he was writing from liberia and had a lot of monery in the bank. almost fifty million which he offered to share if i helped him. i am tempted to also do busines wityh him, what do you thinlk? it would be good money for me and it would also help youbng people in trouble. tell me your thoughts.
thank you and cheers.
MMK

Dear Mr MMKs.

I thank you so much for your letter at last. And I am
sorry for what heppened to your worker.

Please, I will want you to be serious about my case
and help me.

Here is the website of the bank,where my father
depoisted the money (www.boahq.com) you can contact
them for the transfer of this fund,so that I will
leave here now that the political problems has not
gotten worse.

For the person that contacted you.I do not know him in
person,But there are many people here who lost their
parents in the cause of the war.If your spirit direct
you to help him as well, I will not stop you.

I am looking forward to hear from you.

Thanks,
Miss Naomi Bangura.

MMK
How are you sir?i see it neccesary to write you
once again,i hope you are coping with the problem your
company had in dead of your worker,i hope the
situation is coming down.
I know the Lord is in control and i have been
praying day and night to see that the lord see us
through for this transaction,i still beleive that the
lord brought you to be a help and it shall not be
invain,you know am a young girl and don’t know much
about business and i know with you everything shall go
smoothly when i come to your country to work with
you.Have you contacted the bank? i went to the bank to
confirm if you have contacted them and i was told that
you have not contacted them,pls sir don’t waist time
remember you promised me,and they are still waiting
for your lawyers to call them.
Sir, there is one thing i noticed from the bank
director, he seems not to be much happy because i want
to send this money abroad and he told me that he has a
friend in toronto canada who deals in diamond and he
will contact him for me but i said no that i trust you
and i cannot do business with anybody except
you,tuesday last week i went to consult a lawyer
concerning what the bank director told me,when two of
us got to the bank my lawyer asked the bank director
that as long as your name is in the bank file that he
has no legal right to contact anybody who is not my
choice or desire,so my lawyer is with us here to
ensure every thing go well and he is worried and he
said you should do quick so that after the tranfer of
this money i can come to meet you.
Please,sir call the bank director so that they
can tell you what to do for the transfer of this
money.
Thanks and GOD bless you and your family.
yours Naomi

dear naomi, as always I am happy to hear from you. but worrid. i talked to my lawyer and he seemd a bit hesitant because he said my busines is very in debt. but then i told him that you seemed very nice and showed him the certificate of deposit. i hope that he makes a conection with the bank because he promised. how are you? tell me quickly when my lawyer contacts bank.
bye
matin

Dear MMK,

I thank you for your letter and I appreciade your
continued efforts.

Please, you have to force your lawyer to contact the
bank as soon as possible,so that this money will be
transferred to your account.

You are in a better position,to inform me when your
lawyer contacted the bank,because where I am staying
is very far from the bank,and some times I do not
have enough money for transport.

Please, psuh your lawyer to hasten up, I am very
worried.

Thanks and God bless you.

Naomi.

Can a 419 Scam Letter Lead to Romance?

I received a 419 email letter a year ago and on the spur of the moment decided to begin a dialogue with the writer, a Miss Naomi Bangura whose father “lost his life in the course of the crisis in Seira loene.” Fortunately for her, he had willed her $14.3 million in a Cote D’Ivoire bank account. Now she just needed my help in getting it out of the country. And of course in return for this help I would make my fortune. This is how the relationship got underway. My replies to her first two (un-edited) letters are in italics; please read from top going down, there will be future posts continuing this weird exchange.

From
Miss Naomi Bangura
Avenue 22 Rue 4
Treichville ,Abidjan,
Cote d’Ivoire

Dearest,MMK

I love your profile and i have Decided to get in touch
with you,to see if you can help me solve my problem.

My name is naomi bangura. My father had lost his life in
the course of the crisis in Seira loene .My father
willed in cash, the sum of $14.3M USD which he
deposited in a bank here in Cote D’ivoire in suspence
account.in Abidjan west Africa, with enabling
conditionalities for the release of the fund which are
as follows:

(1) That I must be 24 years or above.(2) That upon
request for the release of the fund, there must be
evidence of investment intentions especially outside
the west africa, I contact you therefore to confirm if
you can absorb me in partnership in your company or
possibly advise me on any investment opportunity in
your country.

When I reach agreement with you, the bank will release
my fund into an account that you shall nominate and I
will come over to you to commence business partnership
with you with the fund.

I expect your urgent response including your
addresses, your telephone and fax number.

Thanks for expected cooperation.

My regards,

miss naomi bangura.

dear naomi,
I am so sorry for your los. I have heard of Sierra leone on tv and know that it is having lots of problems. You appear to be ver young and I hope you can be helped. have you tried save the children? I give them money every year. my business is in tiling residential houses here in croydon in london so i do not know if that is the kind of business tjat the bank would accept. but if it is, write me an email and maybe you can do some business with us. I look forward to hearing from you and may the lord bless you.
MMK

From
Miss Naomi Bangura
Avenue 22 Rue 4
Treichville ,Abidjan,
Cote d’Ivoire

Dearest,MMKiam happy to read from you today and i know,
that God will use you to bless me. Firstly, i want to assure you of the safety of this transaction and i will invest it in your business venture as soon you claim this fund from the local bank in abidjan. i will also give you the deposit certificate my late father use to deposit the fund with the bank for proof. I will like you to enter into an agreement with me so that the business will be legal. I will go to the bank later today to ask the president of the bank if they will accept you you.I know that they will accept you, i will like you to send me your telephone number and fax number for me to submit to the bank to enable the bank to contact you for further directives regarding this fund that is still in their fix suspense account.

I am tired of staying in this country because of the political problems and the safety of my life. i want to meet you soonest so that i continue my education. God bless you and the family.

Mr MMK, I want you to re-assure me that you will not betray me immediately you confirm this fund to your account, i want to make it known that this fund is my last hope and i will not live to loose it.Awaiting your prompt response.

Yours Naomi Bangura

SIR
HOPE YOU ARE ALRIGHT IN HEALTH. IAM WONDERING WHY YOU HAVE NOT RESPONSE TO MY MAIL.

I WANT LET YOU KNOW THAT I HAVE GONE TO THE BANK AND THEY HAS ACCEPTED YOUR OFFER. YOU SHOULD FORWARD THE REQUIRED INFORMATION TO ME IMMEDIATELY SO THAT I WILL SUBMIT TO THE BANK LATEST MONDAY.

THANKS AND GOD BLESS.

YOURS FAITHFULLY,
NAOMI

Dear Naomi,
i am sorry that I hgave been out of touch for the last week, one of our employees died in a tragic accident faling of the roof of a building when fixing a leak. anyway, i am glad that the bank has accepted my offer of us doing busines together. but our lawyers need to be in contact with the bank directly so could you please send us the details and we can take it from there. also could you send a picture of yourself to me?
Take care.

This continues the curious correspondence that I had with a one Naomi Bangura who ‘loved my profile’ and decided to ask for my help securing a fortune her father left her in Ivory Coast. Since the letter found me while I was conducting research in Kigali’s jails last year, I was bored enough to seek entertainment wherever I could find it. So I adopted the persona of a working class Englishman who owns a roofing company in the London suburb of Croydon and has recently had an employee killed on the job. My replies are in italics and the first few exchanges can be found in an earlier posting on April 28th.

Dear Mr MMK,

I thank you for your letter,as I regret of the death
of your fellow employees. I pray for his soul to rest
in perfect peace.

I think I welcome your idea of involving your
lawyers,at least it will help to speed up this,so that
this money will be transferred without any delay.

Please here is the contact of the bank.

Bank of Africa,Abidjan
Tel:22507753535
Fax:22521341457
E-mail:info_boahq@financier.com

The contact person is Dr Kevin Idris,the director of
remittance department.

Please, I will appreciate if you contact the bank
immediately,and request them to transfer this money,so
that I will leave here as soon as possible,to live a
better life and continue my education.

I have attached the certificate of deposit and my
picture for you,and will be glad to see yours.

Thanks you and God bless you.

Naomi Bangura.

Dear MMK,
Beloved Mr MMK am very glad to have a person
like you on my way and i am sure is not a mistake
because before i got your contact i prayed and fasted
for 3 good days and this is divinely made by the power
of Jesus christ.
And i will not stop praying for you and all the
members of your family in Jesus name.
Please,sir i will you to contact me as soon as
you contact the bank.
Have you received my picture and bank document?
God bless you is my prayer.
yours naomi.

MMK,
Sir,how are you today?am afraid because i have
not been hearing from you for a long time,after
sending my picture and bank document and contacts i
want to ask you wheather you have received them or
not;Have you contacted the bank?
Frankly,speaking i am worried for not hearing from
you,remember you promised to help me,this money is all
my hope and life you know there is political problem
here in ivory coast for confirmation check this
(WWW.ABIDJAN.NET).Being a young girl of my age i need
your help and direction and if you cannot help me is
better you let me know now so that i can look for
another person that can help me.
I know that you might be busy of one thing or the
other but you have to remember that am a young girl
and human being and i see you as my father.
My greetings to your family and may GOD bless you
all amen.
Am waiting for your message.
Naomi.

Dear naomi,
I am sorry have been out of contacy. sory about you feeling so sad. as i told you one of my workerts got hurt ansd that is what we have beenn focusing on. really want to help you but am wondering about the money. just when you wrote me and even kindly sent me your picture (you are a very younf and atractive girl) someone wrote me a letter who is also in the same probliems like you. is this common problem? he was writing from liberia and had a lot of monery in the bank. almost fifty million which he offered to share if i helped him. i am tempted to also do busines wityh him, what do you thinlk? it would be good money for me and it would also help youbng people in trouble. tell me your thoughts.
thank you and cheers.
mmk

Rock-star economics are not helping poor Africans

Franklin Cudjoe, a friend of mine from Ghana who I met in London last year, recently wrote an op-ed for the Daily Telegraph whose sentiments and analysis matched mine so closely that I begged him for a copy to put on this blog. The absurdity, nay madness, of rock stars holding forth on Africa’s crises has driven me to distraction. Not only are the solutions they advocate – increased centralisation of governance and begging – completely futile, but the fact that I am supposed to get teary eyed with gratitude sickens me. Poor Africa, isn’t it enough that you must endure war and poverty without being subjected to mediocre, over-the-hill rockers come to save you?

I think Franklin says it effectively enough though. Read on.

Personal view: Rock-star economics are not helping poor Africans
By Franklin Cudjoe (Filed: 18/04/2005)

Have you purchased your obligatory white band? Did Sir Bob Geldof send you an e-mail recently, reminding you to ogle his celebrity colleagues “clicking” away on television? Did you join the all-night vigil at Westminster Abbey to shiver in the cold and “wake up the government” about the need to “make poverty history”?

This year, the UK’s “development” charities have joined hands for a high profile campaign which claims that politicians have an unprecedented opportunity to eliminate poverty in the run-up to the G-8 meeting in July.

Rock stars and charities can be powerful advocates for good causes, and they generally have good intentions – but in many cases their lyrics do not genuinely rhyme with the silent hum of the very poor they seek to protect. Their economics are just plain wrong. They ignore history, peddling the misguided belief that poverty, famine and corruption can be solved with foreign aid, debt relief and other policies that have already failed Africa.

One pillar of their current campaign is to eliminate farm subsidies in western countries, a noble goal which indeed would help to achieve a level playing field for agricultural producers around the world. Yet this view is rife with hypocrisy: the same organisations promote subsidies (what they call “fair trade”) for farmers and businesses in poor countries to shield them from the effects of competition.

Coldplay frontman Chris Martin has said that Ghana’s rice, tomato and poultry farmers need to be protected from cheap imports. Yet the problems of Ghana’s farmers lie elsewhere: they and other entrepreneurs are stifled by punitive tax regimes and the high cost of capital, not to mention our disarrayed land tenure systems which lead to low crop production.

Neither Mr Martin nor fellow celebrities have mentioned these problems: they claim that the world’s trade regime is “rigged” in the name of “free trade”, harming poor countries like Ghana and benefiting interest groups in wealthy countries. The only solution, they say, is to protect local economic interests.

If we did ban rice and tomato imports, just how would we feed ourselves? Ghanaians depend on rice as a major staple in our diets, yet local production caters for only 30pc of the rice we consume.

Subsidies to local producers also mean fewer choices for consumers. The average Ghanaian has suffered because of shoddy goods made locally by protected industries that do not face any competition. Who can blame consumers for buying higher quality and less-expensive foreign goods?

Indeed, some savvy Ghanaian businessmen have helped both local farmers and consumers, for instance by providing locally produced rice in packages that ensure the rice isn’t stale when it reaches the consumer. Similarly, other Ghanaian entrepreneurs now collaborate with their Italian counterparts to produce tomato paste brands with Akan names, Ghana’s widely spoken language.

Protection for local producers also means that African countries trade very little with each other, as illustrated by the World Trade Organisation’s 2001 statistics. Africa’s share of intra- and inter-regional trade flows to western Europe alone was 51.8pc, while it was a paltry 7.8pc within Africa.

Development charities loathe international agencies such as the IMF and World Bank – many people would agree though that dealing with these agencies is like playing with loaded dice. They have empowered our politicians to engage in shady liberalisation deals, where international contracts are rigged to favour their cohorts with fat kickbacks.

Such agencies have often advocated ill-conceived policies in the name of market liberalisation – while they simultaneously push foreign aid and flawed development strategies onto us. Even the average Ghanaian knows that these “reform” programmes have achieved nothing other than to enable our bureaucrats to procure gold-plated Mercedes for themselves and their cronies.

But the real problem is not the IMF, World Bank or “rigged” trade rules. The problem lies with us as Africans and especially our leaders, to improve our own wellbeing, and to encourage economic growth through political and institutional reforms.

The solution to all that ails us is not aid, debt relief or “fair trade”. It is to adopt institutions to harness the entrepreneurial spirit that exists in every African country, to enable Africans to trade with each other and anyone else in the world.

Establishing property rights would be an important first step; an effective, transparent and accountable legal system is another. Combined with respect for private property and the rule of law, these broad reforms would encourage entrepreneurship, trade, innovation and even environmental protection because they empower people – rather than the politicians.

As our economies grow and develop, people will be able to afford better technologies, clean water, superior energy sources, better healthcare, and insurance. But one is unlikely to hear such ideas from rock stars and development charities.

While these high-profile campaigns continue to blame western countries for our poverty, they simply give our own politicians more excuses to delay badly needed institutional reforms. Poor Africans would be far better off without rock-star economics.

• Franklin Cudjoe is director of Imani. He will speak at the Global Development Summit in London on June 28

The New Beggardom: Kibaki Catches a Cold

Have you guys read of the Kenyan government’s flailing during the Nairobi donor meeting on Monday April 10, 2005? Kibaki rolls in for the meeting an hour late saying that he has been delayed by a cold. The excuse struck me as having such a childish and chastened noisemaker-in-primary school note. Of course the dude went on to talk the usual nonsense of how the government was doing its level best to fight graft and had effected economic recovery successfully. Just tell that to the hawkers chased off the streets or the used-cloths (mitumba) dealers whose taxes were raised 200% a month ago. Of course after the meeting at 5-star Safari Park, the whole sorry bunch, beggars and none do-gooding donor do-gooders, after making noises at each other, all took off for their shared digs in Lavington.

Go here for the story: http://www.eastandard.net/hm_news/news.php?articleid=17763

Misericonomics: Who Will Win the Nobel Prize for this One?

There is a Commission for Africa that has just released its report. Bob Geldof, its chairman, has gotten a shot of fading publicity on the back of suffering Africans.

Is it unreasonable to argue that Africa’s greatest resource is its suffering?Bono, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair, Kofi Annan and other more junior members of the International Do-Gooder Club (IDGC) waste few chances to lecture audiences on their moral responsibility to the benighted African continent. Capitalized words like Justice, International Community, Conscience and Humanity are thrown about with reckless abandon. More radical members of the IDGC, safely making pronouncements between grant applications to the same institutions they purport to loathe, prefer to use Neocolonialism, Racism, the North-South Paradigm, Resistance and Solidarity. Their African counterparts have formed the International Beggar Elite Club (IBEC). They don’t care what words are used as long as the conclusion is Cash Money.

What both these clubs agree on is that Africa is blessed with a wealth of natural resources; if it is on the periodical chart then you can bet that a miner can find it somewhere beneath the continent’s blood-soaked soils. Lest they be accused of being rapacious neo-imperialist corporate types, interested only in exploiting this natural wealth, the IDGC never misses a chance to praise Africans as the greatest resource, as a people whose potential will one day be unlocked by capacity-building development programs.

On the thesis that Africa needs charity to throw off the deadly shackles of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – ‘it’s an emergency not a cause’ according to the ever-funky Bono – many billions of dollars in the last three decades have traveled from the pocket of the western tax payer. But what these secular saints do not mention is that Africa’s gold, coltan, diamonds, uranium, oil and copper, to name just a few, pale in value when compared to the continent’s single greatest resource: its misery.

While Asia, for one, is awash with profits made from the old fashioned and thoroughly discredited economic logic of buying and selling stuff, the IDGC and IBEC have hit on a new means of production. It is called Misericonomics or Misery Economics for the uninitiated and it operates like a giant employment and enrichment scheme for the two clubs.

This is how it works. First you need lots of death, disease and poverty for as many Africans as possible. This is easy after a few decades of yet another Western effort to save Africans from the communist embrace of the Red Bear left them saddled with brutal dictators, awash in cheap weapons wielded by rebels whose manifesto, shared by the governments they opposed, amounted to, ‘give me Cash Money and I press trigger’. The Africans have also been enthusiastic in the pursuit of maximum suffering by inventing forms of conflict that could teach trained CIA and KGB agents a thing or two. Whoever is to blame for the suffering, its supply is growing: many African countries are getting poorer at a time when most regions except parts of Western Europe are enjoying buoyant economic growth.

The next necessary condition for Misericonomics is the linkage of African suffering with Western paternalism. This is achieved by polemics blaming the West for Africa’s dire straits – by way of Neoliberal-driven globalization, slavery and colonialism – or hectoring it to act out of concern for a shared humanity. It does not matter whether the reasons are genuine or not, the point is to prepare the western taxpayer to fund the aid effort which has grown into an annual industry worth over $7 billion and that the clubs now propose be doubled. The final element of this new economic paradigm is for upwards of 30% and often far more to go into administrative costs for the IDCG while a significant amount of the remainder is commandeered by members of the IBEC.

Mkokoteni

The Essence of Nairobi: Effort, Entrepeneurship, Patience.

The War Against the African Who Refuses to Beg or Die

There is a continuing war against the poor in Kenya. Though the country purports to be capitalist, small businesses and entrepreneurs continue to be targeted by a relentlessly statist government. And since they are in business, the purveyors of mercy – the NGOs and their activists – will have nothing to do with assisting them. Yet entrepreneurs offer the country’s brightest hope.

Mary Kimani, writing in The East African Standard, takes on a draconian tax hike on mitumba (used clothes sellers).

The Ides of March are come for mitumba?
By Mary Mwangi

Today is March 15, the day dreaded by all mitumba (second hand clothes) traders and wearers. After today, smartness in empty bellies will be a thing of the past for those who survive on less than Sh80 a day. About 10 million people will lose an economic lifeline derived from imported used clothes and shoes popularly known respectively as mitumba, misumba or nguo kukuu in the East African region.

The East African Council of ministers gave importers of used clothes up to the middle of March to choose between abandoning the trade altogether or bringing in the stuff on the punitive tariffs imposed by the new East African Customs Union (EACU) ostensibly to protect local textile industry, promote cotton growing and raise revenue.

Kenyan ministers of Finance and Trade and their counterparts in Uganda and Tanzania in their “conventional” wisdom resolved to impose a tariff equivalent to 200 per cent on mitumba and shoes to stem cross border smuggling amongst other things. The increase of import tariff from Sh20 to Sh 60 per kg on imported clothes translates to Sh 1,485,000 up from Sh495,000 per 24,750 Kg container. This is punitive.

Informal sector complements government efforts to create jobs by providing employment to schoolleavers, drop-outs, retrenchees and retirees. It defeats reason and common sense to insinuate that what open-air traders do negates economic progress.

Kamukunji MP, Norman Nyagah, is a lone voice in the crusade to save millions consigned to poverty, early deaths and family breakups when their economic lifelines terminate. His colleagues in various House committees share in the complicity to promote poverty amongst the population in the informal sector. It is not in the interest of the people for leaders to preside over plans and deliberate on ways of stifling the business environment through restrictive laws, regulations and excessive taxation.

According to political leaders, mitumba remains the sole cause of the collapse of the local textile industry. Curiously the ministers failed to address the issue of cheap and low quality textile imports, which impact negatively on local production. The Asian imports are comparatively more expensive than mitumba clothes but cheaper than locally produced apparel.

Ministers agitating for the protection of local industries are avid consumers of foreign products. Most of designer clothes ministers wear, the poor can only find in mitumba at pocket-friendly prices.

Another reason advanced is that those in the informal sector have not been paying their share of taxes. That is neither here nor there. If mitumba peddlers were not paying taxes as alleged, why would the business people bother to petition authorities on the proposed tariffs? Statistics at the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) bear testimony to the fact that mitumba dealers are indeed taxpayers.

The cotton industry collapsed years ago and even before Kenya was given a quota in the African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) to revamp the industry, rehabilitation was the most unlikely dream. This is not in dispute and Agriculture Minister, Kipruto arap Kirwa and his counterparts in Trade and Finance can bear testimony to this. They have been conspicuously silent on plans to kick-start the scheme. There is no guarantee that cotton from Kenya will find good prices in the world market. Subsidies to cotton farmers make American cotton in the world market cheaper by 25 percent but will the Government have the money to sustain many years of subsidies?

Textile factories closed down due to mismanagement, corruption, and lack of raw materials, hypocritical policies, questionable prices and low quality. These have nothing to do with importation of mitumba into the region at all.
Independent studies confirmed that there is no link between mitumba import and the collapse of textile industry. In the year 2004, studies undertaken by Swiss Academy for Development (SAD) and German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) showed that second hand clothes exports to developing countries do not ruin their domestic industry. In a global economy, local textile industry can thrive if the country achieves the right quality specifications and minimizes the cost of production. This is not the case here.

The same can be said of their key supporter, Francis Atwoli of the Central Organization of Trade Unions (Cotu). The Cotu Chief Executive, claims that the closure of textile factories resulted in job losses because of second hand clothes imports. This claim is debatable. When Cotu affiliate Kenya Textile Workers Union fails to recruit or sell their services to the informal sector, who is to blame?

Mr Atwoli, who also leads the Plantation and Agricultural Workers Union, cannot say how much acreage is under cotton crop in the country today and out of his general membership, how many are from cotton farms. Reviving the cotton industry, as those in the know would like to put it, is still an obscure project.

For the ordinary middle class Kenyan, mitumba means a lot more than the mere economic rhetoric of the cotton and textile industry. Second-hand clothes provide a break especially when spending on clothes for the majority of the low earning population who find it ironical to fancy used cars, radios, refrigerators and houses but shun used clothes. The same people who advocate or decide to slap extra duty on mitumba, most likely may not be even adorning locally made apparel.

The numbers of people who depend on the mitumba trade, both in the rural and urban areas, are massive. For the government to ignore such an obvious fact in its deliberations is to say the least a betrayal of trust and confidence. Ten million people is not a small constituency to brush aside. At least, Kenyans can afford second hand items, dress decently and still spare extra money for other needs in the face of biting poverty.

Killing mitumba business to save cotton or textile farmers is not a solution to the economic woes. It is the same as killing one sugar factory in Ramisi and starting one in Garsen as a cost saving measure yet both are entitled to equal protection from the same system.

Mitumba traders some of whom were cotton farmers are not in the business because they fancied killing the local textile trade. They could not survive in the market because ginneries never paid for their produce or there were no alternative outlets.

No one forces anybody to buy mitumba because the market presents a variety of goods for the consumer to choose from according to quality and price. Second hand products have enabled many Kenyans to live a considerable comfortable lives for sometimes as economy nosedived and purchasing capacity eroded beyond redemption.

* The writer is a businesswoman dealing in used clothesCopyright © MMV . The Standard Group