No More Grains of Rice

No More Grains of Rice

Susan Rice’s performance on the Sunday Talk Shows incorrectly explaining the Benghazi attacks is a perfect example of how she has historically allowed political considerations to trump more important foreign policy or human rights considerations in Africa.

She’s been acting like this for years. She seems incapable of intricate analysis and quiet diplomacy. She’s no engineer of foreign policy. She’s a cheerleader. Africans don’t like it. I don’t like it. Americans should not make her the Secretary of State.

Her list of failures in Africa is impressive: Blackhawk Down followed by the Rwandan genocide followed by the East African embassy bombings followed by the escalating instability of Darfur followed by the poorly created South Sudan and most recently, the mishandling of the growing violence in Kivu and Goma.

There are more, but these are the main ones.

Contrary to the Huffington Post that I usually love, there were plenty of warnings that the Kenyan embassy was going to be attacked in 1998.

An Egyptian agent, or double agent initially set up by the FBI gave warnings of the attack on East African embassies about nine months before it happened. The details were published long ago by the New York Times.

After years of further investigations, Frontline organized all the evidence in a way that was resounding proof that plenty of warning had been given, warning that had been ignored. At the time, Susan Rice was advising President Clinton on African affairs and had to have been involved in the decision (or lack of decision) to do something about the intelligence.

Today in Nairobi the “August 7 Memorial Park” stands as America’s remembrance of the bombing and in particular remembrance of the 238 Kenyans who were killed. I’ve visited the memorial often and it includes a short movie that also describes a workman who came into the embassy hours before the bombing and tried to warn everyone to leave, but who was ignored.

The memorial has had a website for years: memorialparkkenya.org. The URL is confirmed by Google. But the website no longer works… for some reason.

I was in Nairobi and heard the bomb go off. It is a day I will never forget, and I will never forget what I’ve learned about it, even if websites die.

But worse than the 1998 bombing was the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The U.S. and France are specifically responsible for having allowed the genocide to happen by their actions blocking the Security Council from sending in more peace-keeping troops as desperately requested by the Canadian General at the time.

France refused to increase peace-keeping because of a complex historical feud with Belgium and France’s blind support of the Hutu who at the time were plotting the genocide but had been seriously repressed by the existing Rwandan regime.

Clinton backed France because of his being burned by BlackHawk Down. It was a cowardly response, and one for which he has since apologized.

There is a wealth of literature on this. The two best are the movie “Hotel Rwanda“ and the book, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families.”

According to a former President of GenocideWatch, Dr. Gregory Stanton of Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars:

“The U.S. government was forewarned of the impending genocide. Communications were sent by cable, e-mail, and secure telephone… [But] Policy makers in Washington, D.C., especially Anthony Lake, Dick Clarke and Susan Rice at the National Security Council… did not want the U.S. to get involved in another African “civil war.”

The decision to “not get involved” hooked America into a mind-boggling expensive refugee and human rights initiative, followed by billions for Rwanda aid that continues today. But beyond the expense, we’re talking of at least a million lives lost.

The guilt of supporting Rwanda is something Susan Rice knows deeply and is deeply entrenched in. As the DRC Congo/Goma crisis deepened this fall, she specifically in her capacity as UN ambassador engineered multiple softenings of European led initiatives to impose sanctions on Rwanda to restrain its wanton support of the turbulence there.

A few weeks ago, America began reversing this overly cautious policy. It was terribly wrong in the beginning and has certainly led to more violence than was necessary.

Perhaps the best example of Rice’s inability to perform more than a political role was her performance in The Sudan, including Darfur and the creation of South Sudan.

The secession of South Sudan from the greater Sudan is overall a diplomatic victory for the world and most certainly a good move for the citizens there. It took more than 20 years and involved a serious civil war that the U.S. was deeply involved in.

But the creation of the new state was poorly done. Two years after independence, South Sudan is still mired in military difficulties with the north in a modern way, and with several ethnic groups in ways reminiscent of William of Orange. The untold oil wealth is not being mined because of this instability and a refugee problem within the country has grown severe.

Rice must shoulder much of the blame. She consistently created PR moments, sound bites and veneers of western institutions neglecting the much more difficult and intricate process of creating social institutions.

At a critical juncture in the negotiations that were leading to the two-country solution in The Sudan, Rice actually organized a rally of blurry-eye Juba citizens hurriedly rounded up for something more akin to an American political rally.

As reported by Matthew Russell Lee of InterCity Press who was traveling with Rice at the time:

“‘Are you ready to protect your country?’ [Rice shouted to the small crowd.]
Yes!
‘Are you ready for independence?’
Yes! … Another diplomat … would later call it a “political rally” and deem Susan Rice’s organization of the Juba leg as inappropriate.”

Rice has never displayed the insight or vision of a Hillary Clinton. She is schooled in American bureaucracy where she has percolated through the ranks and become one of its best soldiers.

One of Obama’s most serious failings is his inability to freshen up government. Rice like Geithner and others in his close circle, are old boys/girls who have rarely lived on the outside. While you might say the same of Hillary Clinton, it could be that rising to the top as fast as she did insulated Hillary from the strictures of soldiering Rice has not liberated herself from.

I’ve come to believe that Obama chooses people like Rice and Geithner not completely from a lack of his own personal courage, but because he very deeply believes in the American government status quo. He eloquently describes government’s ups and downs, but he sees overall America as on the right path.

I’m more radical. I’d like a visionary who shakes up government and doesn’t rely exclusively on old people with old ideas to join him at the helm. Africa has changed so quickly and so radically in my lifetime, I don’t think someone schooled and processed through American bureaucracy for her entire life is how we as Americans should be represented to Africa.

“Susan Rice’s chances of succeeding Clinton as secretary of state look slim,” writes a respected South African analyst.

And he, and I, think that’s just the way it should be.

Goma Solution

Goma Solution

Starve Rwandan and Ugandan dictators of any aid, significantly beef up the UN peace-keepers in Goma, allow the “Arab Spring” to develop and let the chips fall where they may.

That’s my solution for the Goma catastrophe.

It surprised me that Goma has stayed in the news. I’m not sure why, as the current crisis is probably less severe than multiple other ones in the past.

But suddenly there are Congressmen, movie celebrities and evening nightly news casts all talking about the catastrophe of Goma. Yesterday morning NPR featured a story and that was followed by an excellent hour of OnPoint featuring a Goma resident as panelist who writes the blog I have closely followed for several years.

This is so surprising but too overwhelming to explain. Anyway, we’ve got the attention that has been lacking for nearly 20 years.

Goma in particular and the Kivu province in eastern Congo of which it is the only large city has been an ungovernable cauldron of unspeakable violence, bubbling with untold natural resource riches, for more than two decades. The question is – and always has been – how to achieve the peace to release its mind-boggling riches.

While technically a part of the country of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), not since the ruthless and crazed dictator Mobutu has the DRC effectively governed, there. The city and the province are controlled alternatively by thugs, crazies on drugs, and ruthless militias all competing for the vast wealth under its soil.

The UN has had a peace-keeping force in Goma almost continuously since the Rwandan genocide. It’s had some success, but as demonstrated last week when a tiny militia of only 1500 rolled into Goma, the UN force is too weak to provide real security.

There are three players in Goma’s world, each with their own story:

RWANDA
Susan Rice is an important component in “what to do with Goma” and it’s not good news for her. I’ve never liked Susan Rice. My feelings probably originate with the fact she was Clinton’s closest adviser on African affairs, and she shares blame for much of what is happening, now.

Clinton could have prevented, at least for a time, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 but he specifically refused to do so. He has since apologized. Rice has been less forthcoming, although she was the person advising him. The presumption is that she concurred with if not crafted the decision.

The genocide and its aftermath resulted in more than a million Rwandan Hutus fleeing into Goma and Kivu. There they stayed, prospered as warlords and gangs that later became known as the Interahamwe soon posing a real threat to the Tutsi in control of the Rwandan government.

American guilt has never been so expensive. The amount of money the U.S. poured into Rwanda is absolutely mind-boggling. The stated mission was to provide security for Rwandans, especially from the Interahamwe, and to create a life style that has proved truly the envy of any African anywhere in east or central Africa.

But all this has happened at extraordinary cost, and there is no strategic need for America to do this, and the result has been to create a western country-oasis in central Africa.

No other country in Africa has fiber optic cable laid to its most remote locales. No other has a satellite “Museum of Photographic Arts.” No other African country offers a completely free 12 years of primary and secondary education to virtually every child.

The quality of medical care in Kigali hospitals rivals South Africa. Every Rwandan family is guaranteed at least one cow. The government intends that every single school child get a free laptop, with 32000 having been distributed before this year.

This is not a typical African country. It is a construct of western guilt. And it has created a monster:

Paul Kagame as president has imprisoned and assassinated every whisper of opposition. To him Goma and Kivu become a threat to him if they grow stable, as they will most certainly be ruled mostly by Hutus and at the very least provide sanctuary and training for his enemies.

From Kagame’s point of view, the only alternative to promulgating instability in Kivu is to give it to him lock, stock and barrel.

UGANDA
Uganda is the thug in the triad. Uganda’s western border is much longer with Kivu than little Rwanda. The Mountains of the Moon separate the two, but they are hardly a buffer to the experienced militia of the area, in fact they provide sanctuary.

Uganda like Rwanda has benefitted from the black-marketeering of rare earths in Kivu, and the current ruthless dictator president, Museveni, is a Tutsi. It’s abhorrent to him that his neighbor be ruled even moderately by a Hutu. And even more abhorrent that he be cut out of such rich black market rewards.

American support of the Museveni regime is even more embarrassing and immoral than its support for the Rwandan regime. I’ve written tomes on the horrible history of American involvement in Uganda’s repressive regime.

THE CONGO (DRC)
It’s ironic that the legitimate governing authority is the least important of the triad. The DRC has become an incredibly corrupt country. The president stacked the last election’s ballot boxes in almost comic ways yet succeeded. But the world recognizes the DRC as the legitimate governing authority, and so anything the world does will have to include it.

The U.S. is adrift in the jungle, still guilt ridden and not acting properly. The worst of American history is repeating itself. We are creating colonial proxies for our incorrectly presumed interests, regardless of the legitimacy of those powers and their history of human rights abuses.

We are propping up Museveni in Uganda and Kagame in Rwanda the same way we propped up the Shah of Iran and the Contras of Nicaragua. Will we never learn?

And with regards to Goma it paints us into an untenable position of broker between dictators. The actual people of Kivu, the students of Goma, the radio stations and attempts at free press, have no faith in America.

It is time to let the chips fall where they may, but our responsibility to redeem our malevolent past means we must first reduce Rwanda and Uganda to a natural state, a state without American blood money.

I don’t doubt that in the 4-5 years this will take that the turbulence in Goma and Kivu will escalate, and that absent the paymaster, Rwanda could teeter on new genocide. We can counter the worst of this by putting all our own chips in the UN basket, by considerably beefing up the UN forces and giving them a more aggressive mandate to maintain peace.

But it’s time to stop trying to master puppets whose strings slip from our hands with our tears. We are so terribly terribly sorry.

Animals, Plants or People?

Animals, Plants or People?

East Africa’s hirola antelope may soon become the second antelope in 100 years to go extinct. So what?

There are 91 species of antelope left in the world, 90 of which are native to Africa. There are currently 350-450 hirola left in the wild in East Africa, down from 14,000 in the 1970s.

If hirola become extinct they would join the Bubal Hartebeest as the two antelope which went extinct in the last 100 years. An allied species, the Schomburgk’s deer, would make three.

And the extinction in all three cases is due to habitat loss, aggravated by hunting. All three would likely be survivors if man were not also competing for their territories.

In the last hundred years 12 other larger mammals (in addition to the 3 mentioned above) have gone extinct:

5 predators: 3 tigers, 1 lion and 1 wolf.
Plus 1 rhino, 1 seal, 1 ibex and 2 wallabies.

The rhino, wallabies and seal were hunted to extinction. The ibex suffered the same fate as the antelope above (habitat loss aggravated by global warming and human competition). The predators likely went extinct because the food source they depended upon diminished.

So what? This doesn’t seem like very many.

Wrong. Big mammal extinctions are the itty bitty tip of the iceberg, and you’d have to go back multiple centuries to obtain the next 12 bigger mammal extinctions. And mammals represent only a very tiny fraction of the life forms on earth.

The rate of extinctions of all life forms in the last century is massive, exponential in fact when compared to previous centuries; indeed, when compared to millennia.

So… what?

Species conservation as a social and political goal began about a 100 years ago with Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir. In those early days its justification was mostly to preserve lovely things for future generations when preservation did not require considerable resources to succeed.

A half century ago preserving lovely things for future generations became trumped by the mandate to maintain as great a biodiversity on the planet as possible. The arguments for biodiversity are powerful but often complicated. They’re best summed up by a 2010 Cornell University study that essentially argued that biodiversity is a defense against the greatest threats to humankind like viruses.

Lately, though, the public isn’t buying the science. Most polls show that a very slim margin but more than 50% of Americans no longer believe there is anything wrong with extinction.

But I tend to ignore about half of America, that also disbelieves global warming and evolution. Ignorant Americans are a danger to the future, but they haven’t at least as yet deterred good science. And we can hope that in a relatively short time, good science will prevail, again.

But what about the hirola? Should Nature Conservancy and its partners conduct a fund-raising campaign that will net tens of thousands of dollars for land purchase and management, anti-poaching and veterinarian services to protect a single species of antelope in the wild?

Or, should the tens of thousands of dollars that need to be spent to do so better be used to manage the Dadaab refugee catastrophe that is very nearby?

Or, should the tens of thousands of dollars better be spent to save 100 species of plants in the Amazon?

Or, should the tens of thousands of dollars to create and maintain The Ishaqbini Hirola Community Conservancy better be spent to actually pay for building the rerouted Serengeti Highway?

I could go on and on. Northern Kenya where the hirola exist is one of the most stressed areas on earth. The focus there should be on the Dadaab refugees first, not the hirola. And the loss of the hirola in the wild does not mean an extinction of the species, just of the species in the wild.

And the resources that seem would be required to do this job are enormous relative to hundreds of other projects to maintain the planet’s biodiversity.

Should the hirola be saved. Yes. But not at the cost of so many other possible species rescues.

No matter they might be little green vines that don’t elicit tears from rich people.

Frostbite Kills: Help Norwegians

Frostbite Kills: Help Norwegians

Recent climate change has led to extreme climate conditions, everywhere, and in Norway temperatures are at historic lows. Africans are mobilizing to help.

Young people from all over South Africa are responding to the climatology crisis by collecting radiators to send to Oslo.

“Frostbite Kills Too” is the slogan embedded in a new South African music video by South African lead rapper Breezy V. The mission: “help freezing Norwegians by donating a radiator today!”

So in solidarity with the generous South Africans my Thanksgiving family household joined in the movement which is sweeping across the world. We have a particular attachment: we have Norwegian roots.

The day after Thanksgiving is traditionally at my house a time of baking Norwegian Christmas cookies: Berliner Kranz, Fattigmandsbakkels and other multiple syllabic overly consonant cookies.

As is custom, the men go out to bars and the women bake. At the end of the day, the women divide the cookies.

This year in solidarity with the South Africans we set aside one cannister of Fattigmandsbakkels to send to the poor Norwegians. It’s a particularly ironically sad moment when you return to a certain sector of humanity something that was once theirs to begin with.

(Like survival.)

Norwegians, of course, are speechless. At least in English. Except Norwegian students, who are embracing the aid as an indication of heart-felt human compassion.

As one told me, “Du har frelst oss fra kulde med fattigmanbukels!”

This gesture to help warm a freezing part of the world ranks right up at the top, not just of earth, but of goodwill. It meets my minimum standards of what my clients should bring to Africa to help out.

Like Bic pens and used clothing. Especially shoes.

Outpourings of shoes, for instance, will go a long way towards helping Africans to walk the walk. And for talking the talk, we can leave them our unused throat lozenges at the end of the safari.

For once we’ve all demonstrated, here as we bake Christmas cookies, and there in South Africa as they rap up the radiators, that government aid is nothing but a corrupt monster of goodwill, and that our individual efforts alone can change the world.

Think, for example, of how warm Norway could be if everyone in Africa sent them a radiator! It’s mind-boggling.

Climate change would no longer matter, because it would never be cold in Norway.

There are many fewer people in Norway than you think. So just one radiator from every South African household which usually has at least two would more than completely solve the problem.

It’s messages of this sort that we must spread across the world. Breezy V’s next music video will be sponsored by Coca Cola and we will all hold hands.

Warmed, at last, by radiators!

Thanksgiving Holiday

Thanksgiving Holiday

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. (Canada celebrates it earlier.) Thanksgiving is one of Canada and the U.S.’ major holiday celebrations, characterized by copious amounts of food featuring seasonal recipes and lots of sweets. The traditional meat served at the feast is turkey.

The two-day holiday originates with the first permanent settlers to the New World, people who called themselves pilgrims fleeing England’s restrictive laws on religion and who arrived the northeast coast of America in between 1620 and 1621.

They faired poorly in the beginning until two local native Americans, Wampanoags of the Algonkian-speaking clans, both of whom spoke English (because one of them had previously traveled to England in 1605) befriended the settlers. The “Indians” taught the pilgrims how to farm and build homesteads, and the summer planting season was so successful that the pilgrims invited the Indians to a “Thanksgiving” harvest dinner in November, 1621.

Click here for much more information about the history and meaning of Thanksgiving by a native American school teacher, who dispels not only the myths about the “primitiveness” of native Americans, but also about the pilgrims’ history and beliefs.

So Terribly Terribly Sorry

So Terribly Terribly Sorry

The genie is out of the hell hole, again. Sorry to burden you with another war but Goma fell, today. Rwanda’s imperial strategy worked and a man indicted for Crimes Against Humanity is in control. We’re all so terribly terribly sorry.

Goma is the biggest city (300,000) in the eastern DRC Congo, where the countries of Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC converge. Since colonial times it’s been an important commercial center and crossroads for interior Africa.

And in modern times Goma found itself sitting upon some of the planet’s greatest and most precious treasures: tantalum, uranium, and other unpronounceable and growingly essential rare earth metals. Not to mention such chip-change resources as copper, oil and gas.

Movies have been made, books have been written about Goma. I’ve written unendingly about its importance. If there were peace in the area it would be one of the most important, richest cities on the continent.

As it is, it’s a desperate pauper’s slum for would-be soldiers collecting the world’s discarded weaponry. And there’s a lot of that.

The only reason Goma fell out of the control this time of its appointed government, the DRC Congo, is because neighboring Rwanda and Uganda wanted it to. Especially Rwanda: the country’s paranoid president, Paul Kagame, has become an iron-fisted dictator obsessed that his ethnic Tutsi tribe will never again fall from supreme power.

So the newest unimaginatively named militia, M23, is a remarkably small force (probably less than 1500) Tutsi celebrities. The commander is already a candidate for war crimes in The Hague.

The U.S., Germany, France and just yesterday the most knowledgeable western power, the former colonial master Belgium, have all severely reprimanded Rwanda, withdrawn aid, withdrawn diplomats and even now imposed sanctions. To little avail.

M23 has been nipping away at DRC Congo troops backed by 1500 UN Peace-Keeping soldiers, kilometer by kilometer. Today the prize of Goma fell; it is in the hands of M23.

The age-old ethnic feud between the Hutu and Tutsi is at the crux of the whole problem. For nearly a thousand a years, Tutsi has been the overlords of the much more numerous Hutu, who in medieval times were the farm workers and slaves.

And to a Tutsi overlord that’s quite alright. Because it keeps the peace. It’s the old American southern mentality that the slaves love their masters because the masters provide them with food, lodging and basic security.

They forget about freedom.

Hutu, on the other hand, become enraged, out-of-control predators when given the chance, and on multiple occasions just in my life time have gone on rampages massacring Tutsi, the latest being the now well documented 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

That happened precisely because Bill Clinton refused to increase American support for the pitifully 500-weak peacekeeping force from the U.N. Because he was so embarrassed having lost a dozen or so marines in the fall of Mogadishu, commonly known as Black Hawk Down. He has publicly since apologized for this mistake: And we’ve all been so terribly terribly sorry about what has happened to Somalia since.

Clinton found a willing ally in the French who always supported Hutu, the French who were encumbered by their historical enmity to the Belgians who supported the Tutsi from the earliest times as their own henchmen to keep the troublesome Hutu at bay.

After the genocide was over and the Tutsi with Kagame firmly in control of Rwanda all the great powers of the U.S. and France and even Belgium felt so terribly terribly sorry. They poured millions into the little tiny country of Rwanda. Kagame grew ruthless, jailing his opponents and stifling journalism of any kind. The terribly terribly sorry western powers kept pouring billions and billions into Rwanda: They built McDonalds and call centers and Stella Artois factories.

But Clinton and all the other terribly terribly sorry world leaders forgot about the million Hutu refugees growing mad in Goma and Kivu. So child soldiers were conscripted to machete to death their parents, more rapes occurred than births, drug kings became precious mineral kings. There were more militias with eastern European weapons as big as SAM missiles than teams in the NFL.

Since real trouble broke out in Kivu in 1998, more than 5.8 million people have been slaughtered.

You do realize, of course, that this is more than all the deaths of all America’s wars in my lifetime, the Balkans wars, the current Syrian wars, all the intifadas…

What it approaches is the period of Stalin through the holocaust. It’s a terribly terribly sorry situation.

Principally money from Sony, Intel and Apple that were desperate for the raw earth metals has funded this cesspool of militarism and terrorism. Rwanda was the eager broker, the place to launder the funds. It was always in Kagame’s interest to keep the Hutu in Kivu active.

Meanwhile, Rwanda grew to become one of the cleanest and most modern countries in Africa. And with the most heavily armed and best trained military in virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa north of the great South.

And then tinctures of peace appeared in The Congo in not small part because of the Dodd-Frank bill that restricted Sony, Intel and Apple’s billions. The UN had some success in teaching the Congolese left in Kivu how to grow corn instead of marijuana, and how to bring their buckets of Coltan to a government warehouse rather than into the blackmarket of Rwanda.

Kagame got worried. It was never in his plan that the Hutu would actually become civilized.

So he started funding militias he liked. He started stirring up trouble until he found in that cauldron of opportunity a nice tall Tutsi he could trust. Commander Bosco Ntaganda, dutifully indicted by The Hague for war crimes, was the perfect candidate.

Then, with little resistance from the terribly terribly sorry western powers, he maneuvered Rwanda onto a seat of the Security Council. All was in place. Today, Ntaganda governs Goma.

There is, of course, a historical explanation for this mess, and it rests squarely with Belgium.

The former colonial power’s king was a masterful scam artist. King Leopold wrecked the Congo and raped its treasures from the getgo. In order to accomplish what probably was the greatest colonial scam in history, he created the mega myth known as “the country of the Congo,” which should never have been created in the first place.

Between the eastern sliver of precious earth resources of which Goma is the center, and the principal commercial and the developed regions of the capital, Kinshasa, there is … well nothing but impenetrable jungle. For a 1000 miles. For the distance from New York to Des Moines there is nothing but tangled weeds, swamps, marshes, malaria, heat and pristine jungle.

The geographical imperative makes Kivu and Goma truly more a part of Rwanda or Uganda than a society whose nexus is divided by a thousand miles of impenetrable jungle.

So terribly terribly sorry Belgium formerly apologized to the Congo in 2002.

And today Goma sits as the center of a new … something or other. Succeeded section of the country? Mafia headquarters? Wars-Against-Humanity criminal sanctuary?

Or, new colony of Rwanda.

We’re all so terribly terribly sorry.

Better the Beast You Know

Better the Beast You Know

"Gorilla Taxes": original construct by pborgbarthet at worth1000.com
The second greatest conservation success story in my lifetime may be out of control. Mountain gorilla populations may be prospering because so are bribes and corruption.

The first mountain gorilla trek I brokered was in June, 1979. At the time Dian Fossey reigned on Karisoke volcano with no aplomb and great madness. But science had arrived and the population count was reliably put at 285.

That is a dangerously low number for any life form.

Last week a consortium of field biologists announced the current mountain gorilla count is right around 800. “Right around” is the euphemistic scientific phrase that means “we can’t get an exact count in The DRC Congo because there’s a war there.”

Nevertheless, the number is fabulous. The population of this awesome beast is not going extinct, at least not right now. And really the sole reason is tourism.

Mountain gorillas live in two places near to one another: Bwindi Forest almost entirely within Uganda, and the much larger Virunga Mountains (which is actually the highland forests connecting seven dormant volcanoes) which is mostly in Rwanda but a bit in Uganda and a bit more also in The DRC Congo.

Bwindi is separated from the Virungas by a 50 kilometer long forest corridor that gorillas likely could use to migrate, although little field science has confirmed this.

Three years ago when guiding a prominent American zoo group I experienced first-hand how a large portion of Bwindi “tourism” works: illegally. It had been often reported before, but this was my first personal experience. Years before, when Uganda tourism was not yet mature, I had a similar experience with my daughter that was actually far more dangerous. This zoo experience was not dangerous, it was simply corrupt.

I knew what we were doing from the getgo. Most tourists do not. A blog I found posted by an enthusiastic traveler last March is a perfect example of a tourist who doesn’t realize she’s engaging in the black market, and it’s a perfect blow-by-blow description of just such an experience.

I’m not want to extol the virtues of capitalism, but the dynamic is a perfect indicator in this case. In Rwanda’s Parc de Volcans, where mountain gorilla trekking has merged art, science and commerce to near perfection, the cost of seeing a mountain gorilla for an hour is $750. In Uganda’s Bwindi, permits are currently going for under $350.

It happens usually with “walk-in” tourists or tourists who have booked too late for a legitimate permit. Real gorilla permits are controlled in Uganda in a very nepotistic way: a mix of officials playing strictly by the rules and demanding full nonrefundable payment at the time of reserving, or by holding a few residual permits in reserve that are allocated to relatives and friends in the tourist industry.

This means that if you book your trek through a reputable local ground handler far enough in advance, you’re probably playing by the rules. In my case three years ago, my choice of a “reputable operator” was flawed.

For a number of years I had relied on a small but extremely dignified man who had deep connections with the Ugandan government which gave me singular but above-board benefits. He had a heart attack only weeks before we arrived, long after we had fully paid him, and his tourist company fell into the control of his far less reputable nephew.

What the disreputable operators do is bribe soldiers or rangers to “guide” tourists to gorilla families that are not yet fully habituated, so to gorilla families that are not yet “on the list” to be visited. At a serious discount to the official permit price.

There are eight habituated gorilla families in Bwindi and nine (soon ten) in Rwanda’s Parc de volcans. With a maximum of 6-8 tourists allowed per family visit, that caps legal permits at right around 125 daily. The demand is far greater than this. It also means that only a fraction of the mountain gorillas alive today are a part of habituated groups. Most are wild animals ripe for exploitation.

Legitimate permits are usually sold out a year in advance. Walk-in tourists usually don’t have the funds, they are generally savvy on the internet, and they know that someone in Kampala will sell them a permit for much less. That wasn’t my unique situation of course, three years ago, but it’s the case most of the time.

There is danger in any black market, and in this one it’s physical as well as the risk that you won’t see gorillas at all. The physical danger comes from approaching a powerful wild animal before it wants you to. “Charging” very rarely happens with habituated gorillas, but you’ll note in the blog I’ve chosen above that this was central to her tourist experience. It’s not a good thing.

But missing the experience altogether is as great a risk. The chance of not encountering a gorilla family on a legitimate non-black market experience is today next to nil. But trekking to non-habituated families usually means it’s much longer, more difficult and easily aborted if weather turns bad. It also means the so-called “guide” probably knows how to shoot better than commune with a gorilla.

Ugandan society at large is much more corrupt than Rwanda, and the shenanigans in Bwindi is pretty typical of the whole range of Ugandan society from permits required to starting a business to parading in public.

The iron fist government in Rwanda, for which I have an equal tome of criticism of a different kind, is insurance that black marketeering of gorilla permits there won’t happen.

Nuff said? Almost, but there’s more. I can’t figure out if the Ugandan official response to the black marketeering was good or bad. That government response was to lower the official permit price to what the black market was commanding, $350.

(In my personal experience three years ago with eight other people, I discovered that the “guide” was given only $150 per person. We had of course paid $500 – the official rate at the time – so there was quite a profit in the capitalist chain that one morning.)

Lowering the price to the black market level is creative, but my assumption is that the black marketers will simply go lower still. Whatever the case, official Uganda is now considering raising the official price back to $500. This remains $250 below the Rwandan level.

What we have happening with mountain gorilla trekking in Uganda is a dangerously unregulated market, because official Ugandan control of Bwindi has been lost to racketeers and corrupt rangers. And I don’t think official fiddling with the price will stop it.

The free-for-all capitalism of Bwindi has led to all sorts of tourist attractions linked directly to less and less good science and wildlife management. Gorillas regularly wander into tourist lodge areas there, for example, something the Rwandans understand is neither good or safe.

Yet the fact is that the mountain gorilla population in Bwindi seems to be increasing faster than in the Virungas. Is ecology linked to an unfettered free market?

According to Uganda’s Minister of tourism, “’This result confirms beyond reasonable doubt that Uganda’s conservation efforts are paying off.”

Or something else.

Statistics are Just Cosmetic

Statistics are Just Cosmetic

The American demographic is changing, the earth is heating up, and lipstick is the only way to understand how well Africa is doing and how far behind America is falling.

A U.S. presidential election provides an incredible snapshot of America, because so much data and polling and social introspection goes on. Much of it confirms my long-stated beliefs that America is yet impeded by racism and sorely crippled by under education.

And that means much of America just doesn’t accept reality. Like global warming. Or like how Africa is becoming so modern, innovative and holds the potential to outdistance America on a number of fronts.

I’ve written about energy, for instance, and the aggressive use of solar and biofuels; I’ve written about the many inventions like the competitors to iPhones; I’ve written about software development and imaginative financing.

And now I’m writing about a topic I know so much about: cosmetics.

A new Kenyan beauty products company is achieving some unique success and might well enter the American market. We often criticize foreign-made products (particularly from China) because they often have a great price advantage. An advantage sometimes associated with inhumane labor practices or outright government subsidizing.

Not the case with SuzieBeauty. Her products might cost less than Lancome but it’s not because of slave labor. It’s because the division of wealth on earth is so skewed that the “richest” in places like Kenya are still less rich than in America. But that not by as much as you probably think!

SuzieBeauty is a perfect example of how American accomplishments are being exploited and enhanced faster by non-Americans than they are by Americans.

Suzie Wokabi is the founder of SuzieBeauty, and she’s Kenyan, of course. But she spent some time in the U.S. where she graduated from college and then joined the fashion industry. She became certified for media make-up and then worked for five years in New York before returning to Africa in 2007.

There and then in Africa, educated and experienced by everything wondrous in America, she really blossomed.

SuzieBeauty’s main standard-size bright colored lipstick costs about $10. A similar lipstick from MAC in the U.S. costs $15. This 50% difference is true through almost all of the beauty products offered by each company. One Kenyan and one American.

There are several interesting things about this.

The U.S. government says that the average wage of a working person in American in 2011 is $42,979.61. According to the Kenyan government the average wage of a working person there in 2011 was under $1000. (According to the CIA it was $1700.)

The big difference between the Kenyan government’s own determination and the CIA’s has to do with many factors, most notably the exchange rate which organizations like the CIA weight over longer periods of time. But regardless, either figure when compared to the American one suggests a society in Kenya of abject paupers. And it’s these numbers that teachers often use in high school much less college.

Africa and most of the third world have been growing so rapidly over the last several decades (as high as 10% per year, compared to developed countries 3-4%) that their societies have become radically divided economically.

The difference between Kenya’s richest and Kenya’s poorest is nowhere near as great as between America’s richest and poorest, but that’s because America’s richest are off the charts. But the difference say, between the top fifth-or-sixth of Kenyans and the bottom fifth-or-sixth is a chasm compared to that metric in America.

And that stat applies to most developing countries. And to be sure that’s an enormous problem. In Africa that metric is most pronounced in South Africa, where the country is fairly rich but huge portions of its population are abjectly poor. The labor unrest and social disturbances plaguing the country right now reflect this division.

Redistribution of wealth is a hot topic in the U.S., and one that few politicians are ready to embrace. But it is taken for granted in the developing world, because it’s understood without it their societies will explode.

But the point of this blog is not to lobby for redistribution. It’s to demonstrate that America’s top 10% and Kenya’s top fifth-or-sixth are not chasms apart. They’re about 50% apart, the difference of the cost of Suzie’s lipstick and Mac’s.

And that’s a remarkable fact, because only ten years ago it was probably 100%, and twenty years ago it was probably 1000%.

The developing world benefits from the youth of its societies which are unbridled by hundreds of years of law to be sure, but which are also unfettered by custom. But most of all the developing world is willing to experiment and explore new if radical social constructs which old places like America are so afraid to do.

You’ll never hear Kenyans talk of “founding fathers” or restricting their social responsibilities to what men in wigs 200 years ago thought was right.

SuzieBeauty’s mission goes well beyond value for stock holders. It includes “…innovative research …training and education, social responsibility and environmental awareness.”

Not your normal lipstick manufacturer. I can hear Kenya smacking its lips right now!

Animal Lover

Animal Lover

Hillary Clinton’s anti-poaching campaign isn’t much about saving elephants. Five days ago Clinton began a relentless assault on poaching in Africa, each day calling for increased anti-poaching efforts.

Yesterday in Australia she veered the topic away from the more weighty subject of Australia’s role in the world to antipoaching, as America’s acting ambassador in Nairobi opened a fat wallet to the Kenya Wildlife Service.

I think it all well and good that we Americans support Kenyan anti-poaching efforts instead of paying down the deficit or increasing funds for green energy.

Really?

No. And that’s not the point. Anti-poaching is not normally in the portfolio of America’s Secretary of State. Remember Hamas and Israel are bombing each other, Iran is boiling hot, and New York is floating away.

There’s more to Hillary’s campaign than to save animals.

In September the outstanding Africa correspondent for the New York Times in Africa, Jeffrey Gettleman, reported that terrorists on the run (probably from Obama’s special forces) were slaughtering animals and selling them for their operational funds.

Obama had earlier through the Dodd-Frank Act and other clever means dried up the main source of African terrorist funds: Those black dollar bills in the millions if not billions were amassed through Rwanda’s brokering of black market precious metals like coltan which Apple, Intel and Sony need to make things like Xbox, Droids and iPads.

Unable to sell coltan on the black market, more sophisticated terrorist groups started to call in the favors from the Rwandan government, that had depended upon their trouble-making in the DRC to complement their own draconian police measures at home against Hutus.

So the U.S. and France quietly started to squeeze Rwanda by unmasking its decade-old support for DRC terrorist groups as if it were news. It worked. New and sharper eyes from the United Nation began to monitor Rwanda in The Congo closely and after a few diplomatic swipes back and forth, Rwanda started to close the vaults.

Further afield funding for the central African terrorists was available from the big guys in Yemen and Somalia. More difficult but possible. Until Obama quietly nudged then aggressively supported the Kenyans who bombed the hell out of the banks (and everything else) in Kismayo until the city fell in October.

What’s left? Well, we had to get the election out of the way. And then:

Elephants.

China’s growing influence in Africa has been going on for nearly two decades, and right now there are Chinaman everywhere in Africa. They come to build roads and dams, to manage hydroelectric plants and all to help China get oil. But in their spare time they broker illegal ivory.

This rather incidental avocation has been growing for years, and of course will never reach the level of brokering illegal coltan or funneling in laundered millions from Saudia through the Kismayo National Bank.

But it’s all that’s left.

War on terror going well (if secretly).
Sources of terror funding drying up (as Kismayo, Somali, the bank deposit for the continent, falls to the Kenyans).
New Chinese leadership announced (at elaborate parties using ivory decanters).
America’s presidential election finally over.

Hillary announces an anti-poaching campaign.

I’m not making light of this. Just sense.

Beach Bums

Beach Bums

Angelo Ricci, a member of Kenya's Italian community, listens as a Kenyan judge acquits him of any crime for having 2,500 pounds of cocaine in his beach resort cabin. (AP)
Don’t feel sorry for the harassed billionaires of the world; they’ve found a place to hide from those nasty journalists linking them to blood money, laundering and drugs: the incomparably beautiful beaches of Malindi, Kenya.

This summer Brian Dabbs writing for The Atlantic unmasked the Italian cartel in Malindi, Kenya, that uses “Eden” as a likely place to headquarter a global mafia increasingly on the run from Europe.

Ten days ago Silvio Berlusconi joined billionaire friend and equally maligned Flavio Briatore in Malindi, Kenya, where they remain today cloaked in a secret “billionaires retreat” with much younger women, and many believe this is a don convention to divvy up the Joker’s World.

They are “holidaying” at the Lion in the Sun Resort, owned by Briatore, and which TripAdvisor ranks as #6 of 17 resorts in Malindi. E-Travel calls it a HotSpot hotel. (No mention in either TripAdvisor or E-Travel about money laundering or the drug trade.)

Berlusconi is the deposed and disgraced former Italian prime minister and now convicted felon. Briatore has a longer list of accomplishments including conviction for fixing Formula 1 racing.

When Italian billionaires convene like this in Malindi (this is hardly the first time), the Kenyan Post newspaper puts out this clarion call: “Nairobi ladies, there is a cash cow in Malindi, better hurry up!”

Two things really bother me about this.

Most troubling is that while Italian mafia, drugs and global crime is not news for Malindi, it is growing worse just as Kenya is about to turn a new page next March with its first election under a new and fabulous constitution.

While I see an increasing transparency and honesty with Kenyan politicians as a whole, the crew in Malindi has been totally corrupted by the Italian criminals.

Dabbs interviewed several Kenyans, including the local police boss, who essentially confirmed that they turn a blind eye to all the criminal goings-on among the Italian billionaires. Even local judges have acquitted the cartel of cocaine trafficking that excellent Kenyan investigators had all but proved.

Add to this the growing political instability of the coast, where a new political force called the “MRC” (Mombasa Republican Counsel” is increasingly linked to terrorism and many warriors fleeing Somalia, and you have all the ingredients for mob reign.

And secondly, travel tools used by so many people are doing nothing but white washing this horrible situation. It’s an incredible travesty, from my point of view a crime of its own:

Online travel portals like TripAdvisor, E-Travel, Luxist and get this, Conde Nast’s OnLine Tatler awarded it the Best Life Changing Spa – Tatler Spa Award Winner 2010. You can say that, again. And you won’t find that link leading you to Conde Nast or Tatler, because they’ve since discharged their noble duty of killing that award without explaining why.

But I guess the occasional legitimate guest Lion in the Sun gets irritates Briatore, anyway. He’s building a new exclusive “billionaire’s condominium” in Malindi, claims that half the units are already sold and that “For this project, I will choose who will come here.”

I guess that won’t be any clients I have.

Look Out! Peace & Prosperity!

Look Out! Peace & Prosperity!

Watch out! A period of political stability is looming, and with it economic stability. From South Africa to Kenya to Egypt and across the pond to the U.S. tranquility looms large for a while, perhaps the rest of the decade.

I guess it’s the end of the Great Recession. Like a patient recovering from a near life-threatening disease, the initial feeling of weakness is actually relaxation more than a loss of a power. The juices are strong, again, and confidence is returning..

The Arab Spring has settled into what extreme progressives like myself fear is ennui and may be, but whatever it is, nothing much more is going to change from what we see this morning. And coasting along for a while isn’t such a bad notion, really.

With all the potential turbulence in the Mideast, it struck me that Egypt’s Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the current regime, was one of the first to congratulate President Obama on his reelection with unnecessary gusto:

The politically allied Ahram Online said that President Mursi “hailed” Obama for his reelection. In polispeak that’s pretty strong stuff. I think it means more than just don’t twist the $2 billion life line.

And there’s no question that if Obama’s policies in Iran don’t lead to positive movement, the errant child of Israel, the perfectly bilingual Netanhayu, could pull the trigger. But even he seemed remarkably humbled by recent events. Or maybe more correctly, the tiger’s been caged.

Whichever it is, the tension meter in the Israel/Iran war zone plummeted last week.

I think the area cooled in large part because of clever Mursi of Egypt. Mursi has all his life worked in the background and we criticized him on his democratic assumption of national political office for continuing to do so. But his messages are pretty consistent: no more war. Perhaps even heavy handed: no more protests.

Mursi is not want to restrict his ideology to The Nile. He wants peace in the whole area and he has begun to coalesce his Shia partners in a way that compliments western sanctions against Iran’s crazy Shiites. His efforts are truly masterful and little known because he prefers the shadows.

In South Africa I think the circus which has been its politics for the last decade or so is coming to an end. President Zuma’s long theater of the absurd comes under public review when the ANC convenes next month to decide if he should continue as leader.

It’s one thing to be a dancing bear, and quite another to chase the audience out of the tent. Zuma’s multiple wives (I think for PR purposes alone), his absurd pronouncements about AIDs, his annoying suits against critics and most recently, his gross mishandling of the country’s growing labor unrest has cooked his goose.

South Africa’s doing well, more so when compared to the west and less so when compared to nearer South America but sure enough that Zuma’s incredible even public graft is likely over. Watch the December conference carefully, but I think it will herald in a new, better and more stable political regime in South Africa.

And all pivots March 4 on Kenya, and I will be in Nairobi if briefly, and I expect to hear the olive thrushes not bazookas going off. It’s been a laborious often agonizing process as this remarkable country rereates itself from the devastation of its 2007 violence.

But recreated they have, and while Kenyan politics is forever unknown until the day it happens, the man in waiting to be the next President ever since his unimaginable concession five years ago of his legitimate election as President back then, will likely be Kenya’s next leader. And its first leader of the “New Era.”

New Era, indeed. In America we won’t slip off the fiscal cliff, or if we do it will be short-lived and not significant. This doesn’t mean not without drama. I heard this morning that Dancing With Stars is critically losing viewers, and my 7-1 Chicago Bears forgot last night how to play in the cold and sleet. We need drama in America, and I’m sure the fiscal cliff will step to the fore.

But some of the most radical thinkers in America before the election are remarkably sanguine if subdued right now. That means for the time being the fire’s gone. And maybe, that’s not so bad.

But when it’s all said and done, which will be in a very short time, we’ll all recognize that we were the patients who almost died but didn’t, and whose juices are now flowing stronger than ever.

Wild Animals Aren’t Nice Anymore

Wild Animals Aren’t Nice Anymore

Pepper spray, moats, blow horns, flashing lights … nothing seems to work. People around the world are getting fed up with wildlife.

And it’s becoming frighteningly unclear if the benefits of tourism are greater than the disadvantages that local communities now believe they must bear to support that tourism. And which is more important: agriculture or tourism? Resource development or tourism? A relaxing Sunday walk in the park, or tourism?

And as a result the greater question of biological diversity gets subsumed in this more immediate question.

Last week officials from the Kenyan Wildlife Service held town meetings in southern Kenya to admonish citizens not to try to move ton plus buffalos themselves, while in the west of the country exploding populations of wild dogs have begun to attack farmers’ sheep.

With nearly 15% Kenya’s land wilderness reserves that protect wild animals, it’s hard to find any human area short of the megalopolis of Nairobi that isn’t effected.

But it isn’t just Africa, of course. It’s worldwide. From India to Indiana. From elephants to wolves to beavers. And what’s worse is that the conflict is becoming tinier and tinier!

Two years ago Amanda H. Gilleland of the University of South Florida (USF) completed a meticulous study documenting a growing intolerance for wildlife by the citizens of southern Florida. But not just to cougars and alligators, but to armadillos, possums, racoons, squirrels and … even frogs!

More poisoning, more illegal shooting, more often cruel and unnecessary “eradication.”

Man against Beast.

What’s going on?

Two simple things: (1) increasing wildlife populations which have been unexpectedly even more increased by (2) global warming.

Obviously global warming threatens a few species like the polar bear, but for the vast majority of the planet’s mammalian biomass it’s actually a boon to survival. Wild animals adapt to changing weather much better than people do and warm is better than cold.

When elks move north from Isle Royale because it’s getting too hot for their food source, wolves are then left without a meal. So with the first warm breeze, wolves move towards their next easiest dinner: the nearby sheep farms of northern Wisconsin.

When excessive drought and flooding caused by global warming in the equatorial regions threatens the grass dinners of the African buffalo, the massive herds simply move into people’s backyards and irrigated farms.

And all of this is happening after decades of successful work to conserve wolves and buffalos, boosting their populations even without the help from Chinese factories.

It isn’t as if scientist haven’t been trying to do something. But conference after conference from my point of view seems to slam into the brick wall of the simple fact “there is too much.” There are more people. There are more animals. There are too many.

The host for the black bear/human conflict conference held this year in Missoula characterized his responsibility to sum up the gathering’s scientific findings as “the guy with the broom at the end of the parade, sweeping up the horse apples.”

“Bear managers in North America are victims of their own success,” he concluded.

It’s incredibly ironic that successful big game management, which the Kenya Wildlife Service inscribes as Kenya’s “posterity,” is a main source of the problem. Wild dog is the best example.

Nearly extirpated throughout Kenya ten years ago, a large scale project to vaccinate pet dogs that lived on the outskirts of wilderness areas essentially controlled distemper that had been migrating from those pets into the wild population. Now pets and wild dogs are distemper free, but sheep farmers have become quite ill tempered.

Of course a huge part of the problem would be easily solved if we solved global warming. (Oh, and by the way, that solution would create a few other benefits to humankind as well.)

But even if a sudden, miraculous consensus was found in the world to deal with global warming, it would take a lot longer to accomplish than some sheep farmers in Kiambu or Wausau are willing to tolerate.

Besides, it’s only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that animal populations are growing. In some cases like elephants it’s fair to say they’re exploding, and in almost all cases so are the human populations sitting next to them. “There is just so much flour you can put into a loaf of bread,” my grandmother used to say.

But not resolving the issue to at least some extent will create the defacto solution implicit in the USF study:

Wild animals won’t be considered nice, anymore.

Africa may have presented us with the solution, although it’s expensive.

First accomplished in Namibia with Etosha National Park in 1973, the 500-mile 9-foot reenforced double electrified fence with moat, successfully divided big game from ranchers, and over the last 40 years both ranching and tourism have prospered.

And more recently in Kenya, the Aberdare National Park is now fenced in. The 250-mile long fence included 100,000 posts hand driven into the ground. But it cost what amounts to the average annual wage of one million Kenyans.

There’s no alternative, folks. Some places like Tanzania’s Serengeti and Botswana’s Okavango Delta may remain mostly unfenced for another generation or two, but the day is coming. If we don’t stop the war of Man Against Beast, we know who will win.

How To .. do everything.

How To .. do everything.

We all know the media is the message. And we all deny it: the media seriously effected the U.S. Presidential election. Africans are more honest and thereby less self-destructive.

Today and tomorrow in Dakar, African intellectuals gather with African media moguls to continue work on a continent-wide framework for developing media. This is the 5th annual “Africa Leaders Media Forum” and they know that they control much of Africa’s destiny.

Last year’s conference closing declaration said, “as demonstrated by the Arab Spring…, media have a profound role to play in social transformation, giving voice to people, and promoting freedom.”

Just like CNN, MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh and the NBC Nightly News. The difference is that we Americans staunchly refuse to accept the obvious brashly insisting a good journalist can be “objective.” Africans know better.

That doesn’t mean that objectivity isn’t a plausible tenant of news reporting; it just means that it’s unattainable. With that realization a reporter is able to temper his own bias better, while clearly accepting and admitting it. There is then much less suspicion between her and her readers.

Today’s agenda began with an open public forum at a nearby university that was covered by Forbes contributor, Elise Knutsen, writing for AllAfrica.

“Panelists at the meeting spoke with manifest passion as they discussed issues related to media, governance and inclusive citizenship,” she reports. Again and again the electrified forum affirmed how powerful the media is: Whether to “promote citizenship” or “empower women” the media had a critical responsibility to frame itself correctly, otherwise it would do so intrinsically, out of control.

Is that what’s happening in America?

This is communist stuff to many Americans, despite the fact that Marshall McLuhan’s the-medium-in-the-message theory was widely accepted with his first publications in 1964.

Tomorrow’s opening session acknowledges the massive revolutions, new constitutions and increased turbulence in much of Africa. “How is the media exploiting citizens’ new wave of awareness?” the session narrative asks.

Because the media alone is the thermostat for so many public events. You dial up the enthusiasm or you dial it down. The media does this more than government organizations, schools or dining room table conversations over dinner. It’s the media, stupid!

In America we’re so afraid of power. We’re certain that power of any kind has a preeminent evil, and that any corralling of it is generally for greed and misuse which will right away curtail our own free will.

That’s really laughable, because power is power and if it isn’t corralled there’s at least an equal chance with anything else that it will curtail our own free will, and that’s the point!

Combine these notions with the false hopes that objectivity can be followed and you’ve a formula for master disaster.

What the African media understands it lacks is the technological know-how of America. Later sessions will explore the new technologies, and that will be followed by a session that then asks, “Are the African media fit to report on these multiple challenges?”

As with so much in Africa’s rapidly progressing institutions, today, there is a concern there isn’t enough money (resources) to properly develop. But the question is broader than getting enough video cameras. It includes, too, the moral and temporal fitness of the people who will be using those cameras.

Ooooh. Once again, socialism, communism whatever you want to call it, right? Yes, actually, that’s right. Media is community of-the-people and by-the-people more than many other institutions in society, certainly more than the elected assemblies and officials whose paths to power are wrought with obligation.

Media is much more dynamic. It reflects the moments of truth, and it’s those aggregate moments that we need to display, analyze and preserve.

Following Dakar’s stellar example, I intend to invite Brian Williams, Rush Limbaugh, Robert Murdoch, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd to our own American conference on how the media needs to become morally fit and responsible to the will of the people.

I’m going to call it, “The How To Do Everything” conference to attract a broad audience.

… Although I might have to run for President, first.

The Big Election Day

The Big Election Day

Today is America’s Big Election Day. This blog is for my African friends and readers, many of whom are involved in crafting new, dynamic constitutions.

Every four years America holds its largest election. This includes for the president; all House of Representatives; most state, county and city representatives including elected judges. It excludes officials whose terms are scattered including two-thirds of the Senate, half of the state governors and a few other positions.

But by far and wide, this four year cycle is “The Big Election.” The first Big Election I voted in was in 1968. I’ve voted in every election since then; this will be my 11th Big Election.

Who gets to vote, when and how, have been issues that America has addressed and redressed for centuries, and we still don’t have it right. In America’s earlier days – in fact for the country’s first 150 years if not longer – there really was no “One man, one vote.”

Most election regulations have always been left to the individual States to decide, and historically voting laws have disenfranchised many citizens in many States. For our entire history, individual states have tried and often succeeded in suppressing the vote of people traditionally unable to secure power, like Afro-Americans.

Voting suppression was effected by requiring special taxes or demonstrations of income, by proof of secure employment and other means. The suppression always effected the least powerful and tended to keep those in power for longer.

My first Big Election in 1968 was the first election in the nation governed by the Voting Rights Act (VRA), federal legislation that for the first time regulated and tried to homogenize the various States’ laws.

The VRA helped enormously to stop voter suppression, and freer voting occurred right until this very election. This time, though, a barrage of Republican state legislatures changed state laws again suppressing the vote of the poor, disenfranchised, disabled and elderly. These are all constituencies that normally support Democrats.

Successful court challenges have been made against most of these, but not all of them. Last-minute rules, such as that promulgated Friday by the Secretary of State of Ohio, may not allow for enough time for a court challenge before today’s voting.

So it remains to be seen what effect this incredible reversal of nearly a half century of improved voter enfranchisement will do. If the election is close for any of the races in the states with these voting regulation controversies in play, then the results could be delayed for some time until the court challenges are complete.

And in many cases – the Pennsylvania “billboard controversy” is a good example – illegal regulations that the court ultimately vacated were in place for a long enough time to still effect the outcome.

No political party or power can impede the growing transparency of our elections. The free access of the internet and the explosion of media outlets, more journalists and infinitely more blogs, has assured that very little if anything can be kept secret. If someone is cheating, it will be revealed.

But that radical freedom is not without its own disadvantage. It means that the sometimes truly infuriating right of anyone to lie in a political campaign and promulgate that lie without legal redress is guaranteed. Any politician can say anything, can make the most outrageous and mendacious charges against her opponent without fear of any retribution.

The argument that prevails against interdicting such behavior is the argument of transparency. As with someone cheating – if someone is lying – it will be revealed.

The problem is that the revealing takes energy, intellect and time. And a large portion of the American electorate doesn’t have any of that. A large portion of the electorate is easily fooled, even as we work tirelessly for them to be able to cast their ill-advised ballot. That’s one critical curse of democracy: that many people will vote against their best own self-interest.

Egypt, Tunisia, Kenya and likely Tanzania are all crafting new societies based on democratic elections. Lacking America’s long history of democracy can be a benefit in this modern age. Learn from our mistakes, and perhaps we can learn from your accomplishments.

Just Child’s Play

Just Child’s Play

The Grimm brothers, DOOM II, and the Lord’s Resistance Army all agree: terror is child’s play.

Uganda is a good geopolitical source for understanding terrorists. I don’t mean this is where most of the fighting goes on or is even planned; those places like Somalia and Afghanistan are well known.

But Uganda gives us an entre into the world of terrorism. Uganda keeps one foot in the world of sane civilization and one foot in the underworld, and so it’s a place for those of us who believe we’re soundly placed in sane civilization to try to understanding the other.

Uganda is where the Lord’s Resistance Army began and flourished. The country has been a target of numerous al-Shabaab attacks including the group’s most spectacular one, and it’s run by a old dictator who can’t decide if gays should be executed or not.

Today Uganda’s main newspaper published an interview, “Confessions of an ex-al-Shabaab Fighter.” It’s remarkably pro-forma and stinks to high heaven of considerable editing if not outright alteration. Even if the teenager ostensibly giving the interview is real and can be vetted by better journalists, I doubt he remembers correctly his nefarious life.

It’s not the first time that an “ex” teenage terrorist has dumped what he remembers of his terrorist life into the media. Moses, James, and Robert are among some of the LRA child soldiers whose lives became media stories. There’s even girls: Lily.

The meticulous journalist, Peter Eichstaedt, summed up all the foregoing and more in his book, First Kill Your Family.

What’s interesting about today’s interviewee is that he’s not LRA. Isa Ali Senkumbi went more or less of his free child’s will to Somali to train as a terrorist. It’s about al-Shabaab, Africa’s al-Qaeda.

That’s a significant difference with the LRA and other similar militias in mostly central Africa. The LRA usually abducted and drugged the kids before turning them into killers. The LRA is much crazier than the organizations which bombed the twin towers. It’s really more of a cult than an ideological movement. To this day it’s not clear the LRA has any sort of political or social agenda.

Just like most of the Grimm Fairy Tales and many of the (I consider objectionable) teen video horror and apocalyptic games. But whether you side with me that the Cinderella is OK because she always becomes a princess, and that DOOM II isn’t OK because from time to time the world is destroyed, we’d all agree they’re both terrifying with minimal moralism involved.

Not so with ideological terror. At the least your act of jihad can earn your family considerable money. And at most you get the key to eternity.

The LRA drugged and abducted its recruits because the younger a child is the more likely she will be convinced to do something with candy rather than philosophy. So when Isa decided to join jihad he didn’t actually.

He thought he was going for “Islamic training” and did not realize the older friend recruiting him “was recruiting me into al-Shabaab.”

Isa was 13 at the time, and over the next four impressionable teen years he claims to have become an exceptional fighter and terrorist capable of the most daring escapes and missions. But for some reason not explained, he never fully embraced the ideology. So he left.

I think it likely one of the reasons is that he’s too African despite being a Muslim. The well-discussed antipathy of American Jews to American blacks and vice versa is mirrored in that between African and Arab Muslims. It may be less true the further north in the continent with Boko Haram and similar groups. But in East and Central Africa I think it critical.

Isa is now smiling in front of a computer, reformed and protected by an NGO. His story as portrayed today is far from complete and I doubt much of its veracity. The voice in the interview does not sound like a teenager’s.

But when layered with the many other stories of children embroiled in terror it helps us realize: the understanding of good and evil comes at a very young age.

For Hitler, Claudius, Cheney and bin Laden, terror is but child’s play.