Month: November 2013

Thanksgiving Holiday

Thanksgiving Holiday

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

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.

Desert Dreams

Desert Dreams

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

WestSaharaPeaceIn a war weary world, Iran is not the only place that conflict may be subsiding. In the sand blown desert country of the Western Sahara, Obama initiatives may be reducing decades of tension.

It’s hard to give all the credit to Hillary, Obama and Kerry, because I really believe the world is just getting tired of war. But chalk it up to being in the right place at the right time, the Obama administration’s foreign policy is winning a lot of peace.

The Western Sahara is a “non-self governing country” in Africa, a strange but apt name for a disputed and occupied territory whose last peace was brokered by the UN. It is mostly occupied by Morocco and claimed by Algeria, and from time to time, Mauritania as well. These are the three countries which border it.

There are fewer than a half million people who live in this mostly godforsaken land that is essentially little but Sahara Desert.

But in colonial times any piece of Africa that bordered the sea was important, and Western Sahara’s 700 miles of coast where Africa bulges out into the Atlantic were critical for safe passage of the early sea vessels.

Spain finally wrested control of the place from Portugal and administered it until 1977. It wanted to grant independence to this Colorado-size country earlier, but not even indigenous people were interested. Instead, Algeria and Morocco fought skirmishes over taking control.

I can’t understand why either Algeria or Morocco wanted control, but in the half century since their initial claims to Spain, the idea of incorporating the territory into their sovereign nations has become a kingpin of national pride.

Algeria and Morocco have been at each other’s throats for nearly that entire time. Algeria continues to struggle with popular, progressive if revolutionary movements that swing back and forth from military approval. Like Egypt, the military is all powerful in Algeria, and like Egypt, the tension between religious groups is intense.

Morocco, on the other hand, has been a placid monarchy for centuries. Conservative and very western leaning, there couldn’t be a different place from neighboring Algeria.

Spain was tired of administering the place, and forced a settlement in 1977 that resulted in an immediate fight between Morocco and Mauritania, that Morocco won two years later. Since then, Morocco has administered most of the territory, and Mauritania ceded all interest.

But over the decades since Morocco instituted control, a local population has become energized. The numerous little fights between countries and tribes have resulted in major refugee camps, all in Algeria, which are very left-leaning and pro-Algerian.

Basically this is a dustbin of Africa gripes and racism, swept into the desert where conflict has always had an upper limit of destruction.. There’s little there to destroy. But the world moves on, the internet reaches every sand dune, and the local population of now three generations of stateless persons is getting antsy.

The Polasario movement is the only legitimate political movement as a result, based from the refugee camps in Algeria and very anti-Moroccan. While they have had little success in any military action against Morocco, they have successfully rallied much of the world against Morocco’s dictatorial rule.

So it was extraordinary to say the least when the Moroccan King visited President Obama this week and sought assistance for his plan to transform the Western Sahara with massive development.

Whether it caught the other parties off guard or not, one by one the contentious parties started to fall in line. Basically, if America and its allies supply the dough, peace might break out.

The Obama Administration promptly said yes.

The Polasario seemed willing, too.

And together, the Moroccan King promised for the first time to consider autonomous government if only implied in the joint statement with the White House.

And by its deafening silence, Algeria will not object.

This may seem trivial. It is, in the greater context of world conflict. Some analysts suggest the Obama administration’s real interest isn’t so much with Western Sahara, but with getting the until now hostile neighbors of Algeria and Morocco to be civil to one another.

Simply opening the border between them could facilitate enormous international investment, for example.

That might be true. But I think equally true is an indication that a war weary world penetrates even the smallest political quarters on earth, and that for the first time in generations, peace seems to be the default, not war.

Travel Warning on Chicago

Travel Warning on Chicago

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

travel warningBefore heading to the Caribbean for world-class big game fishing in Honduras or beautiful beaches in El Salvador, did you check the State Department Travel Warnings? You should.

Both Honduras and El Salvador are much more dangerous than, say, Mexico, according to the State Department. And at last, I agree.

Nineteen African countries are on the U.S. State Department travel warning list. That’s more than half of the 35 countries listed worldwide and a third of all the countries on the African continent. Is this fair?

Yes, it is. And it’s just as “right-on” as last week’s French government warnings to its citizens cautioning them about travel to a number of U.S. cities including Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., and seven others. I’m not being sarcastic.

For many years I felt that government travel warnings were not fair. In fact, I felt that the warnings by countries like France and the U.S. were sometimes 180 degrees wrong: I fumed, for example, when Kenya was put on the list after a single tourist incident, but Egypt wasn’t after dozens of tourists were killed.

France warned its citizens about travel to South Africa, but said nothing about Haiti, where tourism strife was much greater.

Warnings existed from many countries on travel to Ethiopia, for example, long after conflict had ended. But few warnings were levied on Israel, where bombs were reigning weekly on border areas with Gaza.

It seemed that travel warnings were something other than nice advice for vacationers.

Until the last few years, travel advisories were often political tools used to pressure foreign countries into some policy. Or probably just as likely in the case of the U.S. in particular, the reflection of poorly trained state department officials.

But things have changed, worldwide. Most countries seem to be getting it right.

Slowly and surely under the Obama administration U.S. travel advisories have become imminently fair in my opinion. Under Hillary the professionalism of the State Department took a giant’s step forward from past years. I now regularly refer to the State Department website. We’ve become fair.

As have the French, and that’s an important thing to consider when you decide how much an advisory will effect your own travel.

So when Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel cut his bitter retort short to the French move with the rude but oblique remark
, “Don’t get me started on the French,” he was tacitly accepted the criticism.

Kenya in particular has been lobbying recently to get the U.S. warning lifted.

That’s not going to happen. The Obama administration has put Israel on the list, as it should be. And so neither Kenya nor Israel will be removed from the list until tensions are reduced there, and from my point of view, that means until they leave the neighboring territories that they occupy.

This is not a political statement, although I realize it could be viewed as one. But Kenya continues to occupy parts of Somalia, as Israel occupies parts of Palestine. The terrorism this spawns is undeniable. Until Kenya and Israel leave the territories they occupy, real danger persists inside their own countries.

Of course there’s more to it when you begin to consider your own travel. While Israel and Kenya may be in very similar situations, Israel is much more capable of managing terrorism than Kenya. Tourists have not been recently harmed in Israel; they have in Kenya.

The French are warning their citizens of traveling to parts of ten of the U.S. major cities because of violent crime. That crime is localized, even in the big rural cities. So if you know where to go and where not to go, your vacation should be safe.

And therein lies the problem for all of us. Knowing where it’s OK and where it’s not. The more foreign the destination is to you, the less you probably you know. The more important your vacation is for you, the less you want to worry about it.

Even the most educationally structured holiday is still supposed to be rest and relaxation. With the great variety of travel options available, today, why “tempt fate?”

If the top of your wish list is to see the great migration and you can only travel during our fall, then there’s only one place you can go to achieve that goal: Kenya. With careful planning, the risks attending a Kenyan visit that are concentrated in certain places in the country and its cities, can be avoided.

Similarly, France is not telling its citizens to not travel to Chicago. It’s telling them to not travel in areas of the city that have a mind-blowing number of homicides.

As Chicago’s Sun-Time newspaper said Saturday, “The French are right.”

Making Holiday Lists

Making Holiday Lists

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

BloodDiamondsAs the holidays approach, consider carefully what your gifts may be financing.

A controversial meeting ended today in Johannesburg ostensibly to curb the market in blood diamonds, but there is little evidence it’s working.

The “Kimberly Process Certificate Scheme” (KPCS) was set up about a decade a go by a number of countries deeply involved in the diamond trade as a response to growing public awareness that diamonds were being used to fund horrible wars and human rights’ abuses.

Much of this was popularized by the famous movie, “Blood Diamond“ which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and depicted the civil wars in west Africa that were the motivation to create the KPCS.

The convention was partially successful in the beginning and seems to actually have stemmed the trade of blood diamonds that were financing the Sierra Leone and Liberian civil wars. When those ended just before the movie was released, more than 81 countries with mining or marketing interests in diamonds had joined the KPCS.

Essentially the convention manages certification of all exported diamonds. If a dealer sells gems that don’t have the certification, it’s presumed they could be blood diamonds.

There is no country legislation or treaty enforcement; this is an entirely voluntary process, but in the beginning it seemed to be working.

Diamond sellers, particularly wholesalers, became quite sensitive to having the proper KPCS certificates.

But as the great West African wars ended that prompted the formation of the organization, so did enthusiasm for its job.

But the use of blood diamonds did not end.

Just as with ivory, coltan and other precious materials, the nexus of the illicit diamond trade has moved into central Africa, in the DRC-Congo and CAR.

But either dealers were being disingenuous or simply were too ignorant to have realized that these new areas of conflict were serious areas for black market diamonds. Whichever it was, fewer dealers are today interested in certification.

And there were other situations in Africa that KCPS should have outed besides wars. Political maneuvering between South Africa and Zimbabwe resulted in Zimbabwean diamond dealers getting certification, even when it had been proved they were using child labor.

This year’s South African chair politely referred to the internal controversies by remarking about the pressure the industry has been under since the Great Global Recession.

A coalition of civil groups proved unsuccessful as the convention closed today in trying to make mandatory what remains of the voluntary KPCS certification. Shamiso Mtisi described the convention as moving “very slowly” on such long-time proposals as certifying not only sellers but miners as well.

A variety of other groups had difficulty even being heard. Accusations were levied at Venezuela and Lebanon that those governments were turning a blind eye to blood diamond trade, but the convention did nothing in response to these charges.

And surprise, the new chair of the convention is Chinese. They’ve done such a great job in stemming the ivory trade, which after the earlier West Africa wars succeeded the blood diamond industry as the principle financier for illicit African conflicts.

Blood diamonds seem to be on the comeback, and not because there are fewer conflicts in this post Recession world, but because there are fewer regulators of the capitalist system.

Equatorial Success

Equatorial Success

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

nestingtropicbirdThe short-term, visible effects of climate change on equatorial Africa are destructive to human populations but seem to be less damaging to overall species survival than elsewhere in the world.

Not sure that’s good news, but recent reports from such places as the Seychelles on current equatorial seabird populations suggests they are doing much better than seabirds in northern and southern climes.

Seabirds provide good evidence for relatively short-term effects of climate change. This is because they are most closely associated to the most effected natural phenomenon on earth, the sea temperature.

Worldwide as we would expect, therefore, seabird populations are in a steep decline. In fact, of 346 seabird families almost a third (98) are “globally threatened,” an IUCN term suggesting that intervention will be needed soon to stop extinction.

The most critical of these declines is in the northern hemisphere. Puffin populations, for example, in Maine and tern populations in northern Britain are in currently very critical conditions.

The opposite of these declines — although it’s hardly robust growth — are the seabirds found in the equatorial regions, and in Africa the Seychelles provides an excellent place to study them.

This August count of the white-tailed tropicbird and other seabirds that nest in the Seychelles was encouraging, although the study has yet to be published.

The group performing the study did release an interesting single statistic, though, that 57% of the nesting population survives. This is the most critical period in the life cycle of any bird, because once fledged survivability increases dramatically.

It’s also particularly interesting for the tropicbird, which like many seabirds doesn’t actually build a nest. With feet incapable of balancing the bird (they are designed for swimming and flying), the bird must nest on the ground.

Seabirds choose island nesting sites that are as safe from predation as possible. In Hawaii, for example, the white-tailed tropicbird nests on high cliffs. In the Seychelles, where the islands are mostly predator-free, it nests right on the ground.

This dynamic that’s possibly being clarified by how seabirds are adjusting to rapid climate change, gives us a good insight into the workings of natural selection.

Given enough time, environmental changes allow species to evolve and reposition themselves, and as a general theory, increase. As slow change allows for niche exploration, more specialized species arise.

But when change happens as unnaturally fast as it’s occurring, today, the normal mechanics of natural selection are compromised. Water temperatures are just increasing too fast for the northern hemisphere puffin to adapt or be replaced by other species. So instead, it just dies out with nothing replacing it.

Whereas in the equatorial belt the decline is not as dramatic. Basically, warmer is better than colder for our petri dish of life on earth. But at the fringes of ecological system, the great norths and the great souths where our life forms have specially adapted to colder temperatures, a rapid warmer is dangerous.

In the equatorial regions, it’s almost ho-hum.

At least until some threshold of warmth is reached, of course. But thanks to the Seychelles field workers, we know it isn’t happening, yet.

Getting to the Bottom of It

Getting to the Bottom of It

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

getting to the bottom of itWhile the battle against corruption in Africa is mostly going well, it’s hit a brick wall in Tanzania. Yesterday, most of the aid-giving free world (less the U.S.) chided Tanzania for dragging its feet.

The donor group, calling itself the “General Budget Support” (GBS) Group, gives Tanzania approximately a half billion dollars annually as direct cash into its general budget fund, about 10% of the country’s projected national budget.

The U.S. in comparison plans to give Tanzania this year approximately $1.15 billion.

The difference with USAid is that it doesn’t flow without conditions into the country’s general fund as is the case with the GBS, but towards specific projects and programs, many of which are outside the Tanzanian government’s budget programs.

Specificity in aid is a hallmark of U.S. assistance, and a controversial one. It’s not only a hallmark of USAid, but of Tanzania’s other principal donor, China.

By specifying what the money is supposed to be used for, the vendors receiving the funds are often U.S. and Chinese companies.

And the U.S. usually does a pretty good job; China often doesn’t.

It’s been less than a year since China finished the Namanga/Arusha/Dodoma road, and it’s collapsing already.

I’ve traveled that road multiple times annually since 1973. It’s rare to be in very good shape, but the best period was from about 2000 to 2008, a legacy of Japanese aid and workmanship.

But no road lasts forever, and even less so when a country is developing and its trucks and commerce are growing.

So we were all extremely excited last year, despite the delays of construction, that this “new road” would bring new speed to the country’s prosperity.

Junk aid is the controversy that surrounds specificity of aid, which is the practice of the Chinese and Americans. Many European countries that have developed real expertise in aid to the developing world, like the Netherlands and Norway, prefer to work through world bodies like the World Bank, or directly with country authorities as is the case with the GBS.

So while it may seem counter-intuitive that giving unspecified aid battles corruption, that’s exactly what this does, as evidenced yesterday by the sweeping indignation of the GBS and its threats to hold back some of what is being pledged.

It’s the same policy that the European Union applied to Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. There was no specificity to the cash, other than you better get your house in order.

That’s what the GBS is doing in Tanzania, and from my point of view, it has a lot more effect than America and China’s grandiose claims that their aid avoids causing corruption.

An enormous percentage of USAid, for example goes to a handful of corporations, like Halliburton. (The exact percentages take institutions to figure out, and clearly are being intentionally made difficult to determine.)

Just as in Tanzania the Chinese road corporation, China Geo Engineering, received the funds to rebuild the Namanga/Arusha/Dodoma road.

These mega corporations then pay themselves and their country cronies for such things as equipment, and often for expertise and management as well. The Chinese actually are far more guilty of this than the Americans. It is hard to find a Chinese project with any locals above basic laborer.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t help the local economy, but advocates of the GBS form of aid argue it leads to much greater corruption.

And the corruption begins at home. Halliburton, like China Geo Engineering, is rife with nepotism, cronyism and just simple outright graft. Removed from many of the accounting restraints that would attend them for projects within their home country, they are essentially set free to work as they wish.

Bribing is par for the course.

And whether a Chinese or American capitalist monster, the bottom line is what counts. And that doesn’t seem to be effected by where the bottom of the road goes.

Killing Off Fence

Killing Off Fence

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

canned huntThere’s a growing worldwide link against sport hunting and culling with the world’s fatigue with war.

A macho lady, Melissa Bachman (not to be confused with her fellow Minnesotan and not closely related Michelle Bachman) recently drew the ire of much of the world when she proudly Tweeted about the lion she killed recently on a “canned” hunt in South Africa.

Bachman is a long-time cable show producer and presenter for the radical outdoors including sports hunting, although some of her antics finally broke even the now despicable threshold of National Geo’s cable production.

Nevertheless, her fame (and now possibly infamy) was born specifically of her military like approach to sport hunting, out to prove that a dame was just as good as a dude with a big gun.

The specific incident over the weekend has an important nuance to it, though, and it has provoked so much negativity in South Africa that Bachman actually took down her Twitter account, where the trophy was first posted, as well as several of her associated websites.

The specific criticism is that Bachman shot the lion on what is known as a “canned hunt.”

Canned hunting is done all over the world, especially in the United States and South Africa. The hunt is on private land that is beyond the regulation that the larger government may impose on hunting in wild and federal areas.

The South African Parliament is wrestling with a recent court decision enjoining a government regulation that allows canned hunting after a two-month period of “wilding.”

According to that regulation, wild animals like lions may be bought as captive or even tamed onto private land, set free for two months, and then the owner may sell that animal’s hunt to whomever he wishes.

With no regulation: and that’s a big part of the problem. It’s presumed that many of these canned hunts are hardly fair: that the animals aren’t very wild, and in some places, even tranquilized for the inexperienced hunter.

This is hardly a South African disease.

One Texas canned hunting ranch, the Circle ERanch offers the following African animal hunts:
Kudu – $15,000
Nile Lechwe – $8,000
Nyala – too expensive to quote on-line
Sable – too expensive to quote on line
Red Lechwe – $4,000
Waterbuck – $4,000
Wildebeest – $4.750
Zebra – $5,500

You don’t have to study ecology in an univeresity to know that the natural habitats of those animals mentioned above spans nearly an entire continent, and that not even Texas is big enough to provide any kind of natural environment for all of these animals at once. They have to be fed and cared for like cows.

Likely then, their ability and/or desire to avoid being hunted is greatly diminished.

Canned hunting isn’t so different from contrived wars. And we’re all getting sick and tired of them both.

Anti-hunting sentiment is similar to anti-war sentiment. It crosses ideological boundaries. Just as many of Africa’s most prominent big game hunters are now coming out against canned hunting, so do many of America’s most liberal politicians oppose Obama’s militarism.

When Obama announced his “red line” in Syria last September, conservatives like Rand Paul joined liberals like Alan Grayson in denouncing the strategy.

In fact in town meetings right across the country last September, the sentiment against any type of Syrian intervention was overwhelming. The shared position was simply that we don’t want anymore war.

And the coalition “against killing” is growing well beyond American politics. Whether killing be for sport hunting or preemptive national security: offense is no longer defense.

Secure that Terrorist

Secure that Terrorist

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

terrorwarNigerians are fiercely divided on whether America’s decision Wednesday to label Boko Haram a terrorist organization is good or bad, but one thing is clear: they don’t like America turning Africa into the principle field in the War Against Terror.

The arcane political moment when the U.S. State Department labels this or that organization a “terrorist organization” doesn’t attract much notice in the U.S., but it should.

The “Foreign Terrorist Organization” (FTO) amendment to the country’s standing immigration law gives the President and State Department wide powers of interdicting U.S. citizens from virtually any type of engagement with an organization so labeled.

Ohio University African political professor, Brandon Kendhammer, sent a letter to Hillary Clinton in May, 2012, signed by twenty other prominent academicians in the U.S. as well as the Council on Foreign Relations, urging Clinton not to designate Boko Haram an FTO:

The professors explained that the law is so sweeping that it would even keep them from contacting certain organizations and individuals in Nigeria essential to their research.

“Now it’s going to be very hard to contact … or even to just work with communities where members [of these designated FTO organizations] might be present,” the letter complained.

What is normally reported on CNN is the top of the law, that financial holdings in the U.S. linked to an FTO organization are frozen and that specific individuals named as leaders are banned from travel in the U.S.

But like so many of America’s terrorist and spy laws, today, FTO goes much further and gets increasingly sinister. Prof. Kendhammer can no longer even send an email to fellow Nigerian academicians, for example, who might be listed in a deep appendix at the State Department as having “connections” with Boko Haram.

The analysts who make these designations are not academicians, themselves, and might designate an individual doing a Ph.D thesis, for example, “connected with” Boko Haram.

It’s unbridled powers like these which are so chilling. They are powers, like those currently being debated around the NSA controversies, which technically cannot be applied within the U.S. or sometimes as well, U.S. citizens abroad.

Nigerian officialdom mostly welcomed the U.S. move, Wednesday. But the Nigerian public is more conflicted. African governments usually approve, because it usually means getting a lot more guns.

But yesterday a group of Nigerian journalists filing a combined opinion in the Leadership newspaper reminded us that only last year, Nigeria’s ambassador to the U.S. urged the state department not to issue the designation.

There is the obvious disincentive to future foreign investment on the national level, but on the individual level the additional scrutiny that will now befall Nigerians traveling in the United States is a terribly daunting prospect to them.

That would seem petty in the scheme of a War Against Terror if the War Against Terror were not so duplicitous and extra-American. By that I mean almost all the great rules and morals that make America great which are supposed to be preserved by a War Against Terror are blown to smithereens by the way America has been conducting this war in Africa and by the powerful use of the FTO law.

Last month Navy Seals or some such Batmanned into Benghazi and jumped out with Abu Anas al-Liby. He has now been charged in New York with masterminding the attack on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi in 1998.

The crack kidnapping would be illegal in the U.S., as by the way it is in Libya. The week-long interrogation which followed by a U.S. ship at sea violates many worldwide war conventions. But, hey, he’s a bad guy.

Or is he? This was not the first time al-Liby was arrested.

One time was in 1999 by British intelligence. But then with American prompting he was released and likely put on the pay of the CIA to assassinate Gaddafi.

This and other similar intrigues, including of course the training of Osama bin Laden by the CIA to fight the Russians, were listed yesterday by Syracuse professor Horace Campbell and other experts to demonstrate that “means justify the ends” in America’s war on terror.

And right now, the means is all in Africa. And it “means” that African don’t know what it means, because it could change.

It’s nice to think that Obama’s steadfast and incredibly militaristic assault on known terrorists that are now being, literally, rounded up in Africa might be making us safer here at home. And that’s Africa’s problem. It’s making us safer by making them less safe.

Terrorism can’t be blown out. It can be contained, and that’s precisely what Obama is doing, and whether by design or happenstance the containment has become Africa. And you can imagine what that means to Africans.

Containment in the War Against Terror has no limits. Bush and Cheney thought torture was OK, so we tortured. Obama thinks snatching al-Liby is OK, so we snatch al-Liby: all the human rights laws and freedom safeguards of great America mean nothing.

Play bin Laden or al-Liby for however you can, but to your advantage. Leftover armaments can be thrown into a Nairobi mall. Start a little war over in Somalia with your Kenyan proxy, ignore the Ugandan dictator’s threat to execute gays so that your Navy Seals can chase a mean guy into the CAR.

Do whatever you want. There are no rules. Means justify the ends.

That’s the essence of the FTO.

Terrorism can’t be blown out. It can be contained and it can minimized by addressing the desperation of the peoples it appeals to so that it loses support. Those are the only two remedies, and only one of them is right.

A Flowering Relationship

A Flowering Relationship

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

ProteaMeetRoseLast week America’s Marriott announced it was acquiring South Africa’s Protea, a fireworks signal of how tourism is changing in Africa: Fewer groups, fewer inclusive guided trips for individuals, and much more opportunity for the independent traveler.

It’s no surprise and continues the long-term trend powered by the internet that brings consumers closer to their travel product, slowly but surely reducing the use of a travel agent.

It further reflects the shortening span of a vacation in America, and the near hysterical price competition Americans bring onto the world market. Marriot will become the largest single hotel player on the continent, a revered market position that will be able to control price with manipulations of capacity.

Protea Hotels in its current form began in 1984. In those days, still deeply shackled by apartheid, South Africa’s hospitality market to survive had to develop a home-grown component rather than strictly relying on foreign visitors.

The growth of foreign visitors to South Africa in the 1980s was inhibited by apartheid, not just by the policy which many travelers found distasteful, but by a growing number of sanctions which, for example, excluded South African Airways from easily refueling anywhere on the continent.

Ronald Regan’s sanctions on much of South Africa’s businesses extended to its hotel and hospitality industry as well.

Protea was a creative solution. In the beginning it marketed strictly to South Africans. The famous and then ingenious Protea Hotel Pass, which would later be adopted and expanded in such places as New Zealand, allowed frugal travelers to buy a certain number of nights, then use them anywhere throughout the chain.

South Africa had a vibrant internal domestic tourism, as well as considerable business travel especially between the main cities of Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. The Protea chain exploited what was then the South African business culture: hell with the rest of the world, we can go it alone.

And they did it quite well. The hotels were simple but much more attractive and comfortable than a comparable American motel chain like Holiday Inn at the time. The rooms were more colorful, more completely furnished, more individualized, but smaller and more compact than a traditional hotel’s.

Restaurants and bars were functional and well priced but served much more fresh food, for example, than an American motel restaurant. All told, it was a very pleasant, warm and inviting environment.

Most importantly, though, was Protea’s direct marketing. Even back in the 80s, when practically every tour and hospitality vendor gave handsome commissions to travel agents and tour operators, Protea was stingy. Its business plan didn’t allow for a large margin, so it was clear the hotel had to hook the customer directly.

That isn’t to say it didn’t partner with other components of the industry, like at the time large local tour operators such as Springbok Atlas, but it did so with hesitation.

When EWT was a very large wholesaler in the 1980s, sending several thousands of Americans annually into Africa, and when I had a personal office in Johannesburg preparing for the end of apartheid, one of my main tasks was to find a South African hotel partner.

Protea just wasn’t interested. Or I should say more honestly, not interested in serious commissions. At first I felt we were positioning ourselves incorrectly, but then I learned from my colleagues that it was the same across the board.

It seemed very strange at the time: And it was a bad idea for the eighties and nineties and was probably the reason the company’s growth stalled with the end of apartheid.

But the business model that relied nearly exclusively on cutting out the middle man is now the way of the world, and whether Protea was prescient or just enjoyed a lot of dumb luck really doesn’t matter, anymore.

Protea succeeded. In some ways you can argue that Protea anticipated the internet.

When apartheid ended Protea snuck into neighboring countries. It never blossomed anywhere outside South Africa, and I think that’s because direct consumer transactions in places like East Africa simply didn’t exist until recently.

So in places like Nairobi, Arusha and Dar-es-Salaam Protea staked its fortune on South Africans traveling there, and that was never a large enough market for sustained growth. Nevertheless, Protea has stayed in East Africa, and the new endorsement by Marriott is a certain affirmation that both companies believe that even in these less developed parts of Africa, direct consumer sales are coming.

Most hotel bookings, today in America, are done directly by the consumer, and so in that sense Marriott isn’t changing its game plan. But the earthquake statement Marriott is making is that American consumers are now ready to use that style when traveling to Africa. Anywhere in Africa.

And there’s no better quick way to reap that market than acquire Protea. They’ve been doing it for years.

The War by Climate

The War by Climate

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

climatecalamityThe season is changing all around the world. Unusually heavy rains are pounding sub-Saharan Africa. It snowed early at my home near the Mississippi River. Typhoon Haiyan may be the world’s biggest storm. Is Africa, or any of the developing world, ready for climate change?

NOAA estimates Hurricane Sandy’s final economic destruction approached $65 billion. Originally, Bloomberg estimated it at $20 billion.

Today Bloomberg estimates that Typhoon Haiyan will destroy 5% of the Philippine annual economy, which if adjusted to America’s economy would represent more than a half trillion dollars. If Bloomberg’s current estimate is as low as it was for Sandy, the representative destruction to America by a similar situation would approach a trillion dollars.

It’s a simplistic comparison, I know. Half of Sandy’s destruction was insured; less than 10% of Haiyan’s destruction is insured. Virtually none of sub-Saharan African destruction outside South Africa is insured.

And climate destruction in the developing world is far more devastating because there is so little preparatory relief, so much difficulty in rebuilding much less just clearing the debris.

November is when the monsoon changes in sub-Saharan Africa. The change ends a long dry season, not so completely different from spring in the northern hemisphere ending the relatively dry winter.

Every year we waited with utmost impatience for the rains in November. We were ready to plant our gardens, the endless heat which grew steadily was tedious, and I remember sitting on a small boulder behind my house looking up hopefully at the sky.

The first rain was usually a good, hard rain. There was immediate change. Temperatures dropped, as did tempers. The dust was cleared from the air. We had to close the doors to keep the snakes out, and literally overnight new grass grew.

But it’s much different, today. The “good hard rain” is now a torrent.

Robin Pope Safaris in Zambia reported yesterday that Zambia’s Luangwa National park “received an inch in just over an hour – a lot of water created a lot of mud!”

In Rwanda, unnaturally high winds combined with excessive rain Friday destroyed 120 homes.

An area that normally gets very little rain all year long in northern Kenya was so flooded over the weekend, relief efforts are stalled.

And in another desert area of Somali, 100 were killed by rain and wind over the weekend by a freak cyclone that made it up the Red Sea.

Any one of these stories would be unnaturally big news ten years ago. Now, it’s just one of dozens if not hundreds of news reports of climate calamity. Nothing is “freak” anymore.

It snowed at my home, yesterday. This is two weeks earlier than normal. No big deal, right? The temperature was 13F when I walked the dog at dawn. The normal low is 31F. Nothing to worry about, right?

Maybe not in northeast Illinois. Maybe not even in New York City right now with its elaborate weather disaster plans and remarkable disaster insurance.

Not quite the same for the guy who would like to get his millet planted in Somalia, or the young businesswoman in Tacloban. Or for the child trying to go to school in Mfuwe.

There are other ways to dominate your adversaries than by war.

Veterans Day

Veterans Day

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

VeteransDAyToday is an American holiday. Banks and other federal agencies are closed and most American school children are also staying home. It’s known as “Veterans Day.”

First declared by President Woodrow Wilson after the end of World War I and later codified by The Congress, it’s a holiday in America that evokes many different emotions from different groups of people.

During my life time, which began just after the end of World War II, America has fought far too many wars. And when someone like myself becomes critical, it’s an intellectual challenge to praise the soldiers who carried them out.

Immediately on the other hand, however, foreigners should realize how radically different our armies are today than when I was a boy.

Today America’s fighting forces are entirely voluntary (with the subtle distinction that “reserve” soldiers, those who have technically retired or enrolled mostly as home guards are now being routinely called upon as active troops).

This differs radically from when I was young, when the bulk of the armies were conscripted from young men. It was a mandated responsibility for young men approaching their third decade to be prepared to serve in the military if called.

The transition to an all-volunteer force was accomplished fairly easily by raising soldier pay and benefits. As America became more of a war fighting country, the rich also become more powerful, the poor parts of society enlarged, and for much of this time unemployment remained high.

Joining one of America’s armies not only provided reasonable and regular pay, but gave the recruit enormous valuable training in all sorts of skills, and at least until recently, when released from even the shortest contracts also provided excellent extended benefits, such as healthcare and higher educational subsidies.

Much of America’s armies, like ancient Rome’s and Persia’s, are opportunities for the oppressed and downtrodden to break out of an endless cycle of hopelessness. It’s therefore hard to criticize these young people for joining the American military.

So today there are many of us reluctant to celebrate anything that has to do with America’s wars. Yet we can’t ignore the life stories of those that have become conflated with them.

Charging Up

Charging Up

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

AfNukePowerWorried about Iran’s nuclear power plants? How about Nigeria’s?

I think America’s frantic concern of Iran’s nuclear capability is linked to two irrational fears: that Israel is threatened by Iran and to the even more irrational fear of nuclear power itself.

Let’s calm down and take a look at the African experience, and maybe begin to see modern nuclear power as ordinary and necessary.

Large uranium deposits in Namibia, Niger, Malawi and most recently Tanzania are attracting good amounts of foreign investment ever since raw uranium surged in price to more than $100/pound several years ago.

(Canada is the world’s main source of raw uranium with Australia a close second. But the four countries in Africa exceed both Canada and separately, Australia.)

But today’s market for uranium, the use by nuclear power plants, is concentrated in places like America and France. And yesterday uranium’s spot price fell below $35/pound.

As an index as to how Americans and others in the developed world feel about nuclear power, the uranium spot market is excellent. The fact it sits at about a third of what it once was is a clear statement that there is only a third as much support for nuclear power today as only five years ago.

Until Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukishima there was only minor although very vocal resistance to nuclear power reactors.

But each one of these events garnered more public antipathy to the idea, and for some anti-nuclear activists, Fukishima was the nail in the coffin for further nuclear energy development in the west.

Personally, I think this is terribly short-sighted. When time allows us to quantify the human and economic damage of those three major accidents compared with the same for the extraordinary emissions of coal-fueled power plants, I doubt there will be much of a contest.

But meanwhile, “.. almost all [African uranium mining] projects have been on hold since the collapse in prices that followed Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster.”

African officials remain optimistic. One South African called nuclear power “inevitable” this week in an on-going dialogue within Africa that riases this whole topic onto a completely new level: perhaps Africa should use the uranium for itself. Like Iran.

South Africa has had nuclear power since probably the 1980s, and four new nuclear power plants are planned to go online by 2020 or so, with additional plants under study.

Note that South Africa remains a leader in new coal technology, and that there is a vocal minority among South African leaders against nuclear power.

There’s lots of coal in South Africa and throughout the whole of the continent. Right now almost 90% of South Africa’s power comes from coal, but even post-Fukishima there’s a growing sensitivity to carbon emissions, and more importantly, just the long-term costs.

Minister of Public Enterprises Malusi Gigaba told a group in Cape Town this year that the South African government believes that the cost of nuclear electrical power eventually “evens itself out” especially when set against carbon emission savings.

I think what we have to learn from South Africa in particular is that the fear of nuclear power is very introspective, and that when more properly considered in the framework of a greater society, there really is no alternative.

South Africa is head and shoulders in development above the rest of Africa, but it is still Africa. Its public needs are far more desperate than in the developed world. That mix of development with desperation for minimum standards is exactly the right social culture in which to best weigh the good and bad of nuclear power development.

Africans throughout the continent are realizing this. And since they sit on most of the raw material needed for this power it’s not irrational to imagine a world a century from now where the center of global power, literally and figuratively, is in Africa.

A century is a long time. But Africans are already anticipating the day. The best, most completely and sometimes most daunting detail of how the world thinks about nuclear power is compiled and published in Cape Town.

So while the developed world, which is comfortable enough to believe its myths and run from its fears and still have a good meal and nice bed to go to sleep on every night may criticize nuclear energy, the developed world is moving right along.

And if America or China or Britain don’t want Niger’s uranium, well gosh, maybe Niger will just use it itself.

Although it has not yet moved beyond grand announcement, Nigeria of all countries says that Russia is ready to build a nuclear power plant there.

Wednesday’s UN General Assembly’s press release hailed the development of more than 400 new nuclear power plants scheduled to go on-line this decade.

Nor is it surprising that four of the world’s leading scientists on climate change would mount a huge PR campaign this week to promote nuclear power.

Africa is already over Fukishima. The disaster there pales in comparison to the disaster that might just be ending after 53 years in The Congo.

I see the current dip in uranium prices an opportunity for all sorts of good investing. Let’s just hope the developed world gets some of it.

Plant the Corn

Plant the Corn

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

what now my childDon’t turn away from the DRC-Congo just because NPR says peace is imminent. There’s much more to the story.

I, myself, predicted a type of peace would come to the DRC-Congo just about a month ago. And this morning on NPR’s Morning Edition, former Senator Russ Feingold in his capacity as Obama’s special envoy to the region, said fighting was ending.

Good. We’re all glad, and the story behind why this decades-old fighting might, in fact, be ending is an extraordinary one that goes all the way back to when Belgium and the US colluded to disrupt the first democratically elected government of the newly independent Congo in 1961. I called that “Where Terror Was Born.”

The many fascinating chapters of barbarism and war that have followed have included X-Boxes and your cell phone.

To understand the current “peace” it would be helpful to understand all the foregoing but that’s challenging. Let me try to simplify it not too much.

The decades-long fighting in the eastern Kivu province of the DRC-Congo is very much unlike anything in the rest of Africa. The rest of Africa’s wars (excluding those that involved South Africa) are mostly guerila-based, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram jungle and mountain fighters, characterized by suicide bombings and village terrorism.

Traditional military action is pretty new for modern Africa. Obama started it when he came to the presidency and it became apparent to all the world when Kenya invaded Somalia in October, 2011.

Kenya, armed anew by America, trained by America, advised by America, we even saw American soldiers, was America’s proxy. And they “did well.” The Kenyan Army effectively disrupted and ultimately dislodged al-Shabaab from Somalia.

But prior to that 2011 action, organized military action of the sort undertaken by the OAU and UN in such places as Somalia, Rwanda, Angola and so forth, either suffered from a total lack of training (the soliders just didn’t know how to fight, didn’t want to, or just didn’t), or there was no good equipment.

That changed with Kenya’s action in Somalia and it radically continued this year when the UN Security Council approved an aggressive military unit to enter the DRC-Congo, the first ever for the UN in Africa.

And that unit was immediately joined by crack and very well trained and equipped South African troops.

And that’s what defeated the main military group in Kivu, the M23. On Monday they announced a cease-fire and on Tuesday they surrendered.

That’s good, as Feingold said. But it’s hardly the end of the story.

There are many rebel groups in the area, although the dominant one was definitely M23, and I don’t mean to minimize the good news this is. But keep in mind that M23’s leaders have all escaped.

The respectable Think Africa Press said today that M23’s “senior command has dispersed to Uganda and Rwanda,” while many of the expert soldiers of M23 have “gone into hiding, whether fleeing out of the DRC or dispersing into the Virunga forests.”

NPR’s foolish question about accountability, whether the M23 leaders will be tried for crimes against humanity, begs the question whether they will be first captured.

And even if they are, the OAU has already ordered all member states to cease cooperating with the ICC in The Hague, and Kenya’s two leaders on trial there have both been given extraordinary passes from attending their own proceedings: The ICC is falling apart and Africa is instrumental in bringing Humpty Dumpty’s walls down.

Rwanda is furious. Rwanda is ruled by a minority ethnic Tutsi dictator who came to power after the genocide that tried to wipe out his people by the opposing Hutu majority in 1993/94. M23 was formed by Tutsis fleeing Rwanda at that time.

So Rwanda has been supporting the rebellion in The Congo led by M23 for some time. It has facilitated not only an increased clamp on its own oppressed Hutu minority, but an extremely profitable rare earth mining industry overseen by M23 commanders in Kivu.

Here’s what will determine the next stage:

If the UN reaffirms its unusual aggressive mission, peace will be maintained. That itself is so unusual for this area that I wonder what exactly will then happen. Consider that there have been three generations of Congolese in Kivu who have known nothing but warlords.

Peace means fewer people will be killed. That means more people need to eat, have jobs, become somehow productive in a society that has not existed for 53 years.

And that’s where current global and western society fails so miserably. Once the field is cleared of tanks, no one plants the corn.

Just the Keys to His House

Just the Keys to His House

by Arusha ♥ 5 Comments

AminAndSonIn the dark and dangerous hole that Ugandan dictator Museveni has cut out of his country, a new face has emerged to challenge him: the son of Idi Amin.

Yesterday, Hussein Juruga Lumumba, announced his candidacy to become Uganda’s next dictator.

Well, not exactly. What he did was write an open letter to the current dictator, Yoweri Museveni, published in the country’s main newspaper as a lead news story, requesting the Ugandan dictator to return to him the homes and other properties confiscated from his father.

Seemingly benign enough, in the feudal Shakespearean politics of otherwise modern Uganda this is better than Ted Cruz spending a weekend in Iowa.

It appears to be the only letter ever written the current dictator, although anyone else who tried this would likely never write, again.

Let’s stipulate a few things quickly, first.

Uganda would be better without any dictator. Kenya has demonstrated that freed from oppressive politics, a country can bloom, grow incredibly fast, and truly become both an economic and cultural powerhouse for modern Africa.

Ugandans were just as well educated, maybe better than Kenyans. They were the colonial favorite of Britain (that considered Kenya a simple stepping-stone to Uganda), and in the short few years of independence before Uganda slipped into its endless dictators’ cycle, it was forging well ahead of Kenya.

And even during the rest of my lifetime in Africa, even when under the repeated oppressions of horrible leaders, Ugandans wrestled up some wonderful accomplishments, including vanguard research and implementation of many public health initiatives including malaria control.

All that keeps Uganda down is its love affair with dictators.

No credible representative leader has ever made it to any of the top echelons of Ugandan government. Rife with ethnic divides (but so is Kenya), shackled with an urban population that still reveres an ancient monarchy, Uganda just can’t break the habit of being oppressed.

My wife and I lived for two years on the Kenyan/Ugandan border during the height of Amin’s terror. The fear that every sane person felt, no matter how secure they might have been inside Kenya, was horrible.

The two weeks that we spent driving from one end of Uganda to the other during Amin’s regime might have been one of the most foolish things two 25-year olds had ever done. But what we saw and heard and experienced became fundamental to my understanding of Africa thereafter, that the continent’s enormous potential was hamstrung by its inability to shake paganism.

And now, forty years later, it comes back to haunt that poor country.

Times have changed. Hussein Juruga dresses nicely, writes and speaks with the fluency of a privileged child educated in both France and Britain. And lacking any actual job, he lists his occupation as “politician” in his blog.

His resume includes being a “media consultant.” And while it’s difficult to find many in Uganda willing to write Op Eds in the country’s newspapers, Juruga often waxes eloquently therein on the modern media, espousing greater freedoms.

Sounds pretty right on, no? And the country’s main newspaper, arguably the mouthpiece for the current dictator, gives him a glowing recommendation
 as a former employee.

But dig into his prolific blog, and you find that’s he’s homophobic and dangerously militaristic, and he avoids ever discussing other current challenges to the current dictator, except his own.

Kizza Besigye and Erias Lukwago, for instance, are the two most prominent dissidents in Uganda and fairly well known outside the country. But Juruga hasn’t mentioned either of them, ever.

But the overriding evidence of Juruga’s intentions is the bone-chilling defense he constantly mounts for his father.

Claiming that all the bad stuff attributed to his father is rumor mongering, Juruga insists the smear campaign “is peddled mostly by individuals who want to access political support and for others to try and maintain political relevance today.”

He argues that it was actually the Tanzanians (whose army ultimately deposed Amin) — not his father — that caused the most misery and destruction in the country.

He admits threatening Giles Foden, the author of The Last King Of Scotland, with a libel suit.

He may be more polished than his father. His power is indisputable, given the public nature of his rages within Uganda’s current clamp on media freedom.

And a simple change, it seems, is all that he wants: Just give him the keys to his house.

Dēmos Gravitas In Spades

Dēmos Gravitas In Spades

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

USEgyptCARfailing democracyThe trial of deposed Egyptian president Morsi, the bloodbath looming in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the new tribulations of Pennsylvania Congressman Shuster are all linked by the power and failure of democracy.

I’m not giving up on democracy, yet. But it needs some work. Here are the facts:

EGYPT
If ever there was a “Show Trial” in our lifetime it began today in Egypt, where the deposed president Mohamed Morsi is charged with murder. He and his co-defendants were defiant, shouting until their voices were hoarse. The trial, which carries the death penalty, next convenes on January 8.

CAR
The country of 5 million in the middle of Africa will likely soon be the world’s next site of major genocide. NPR, the BBC and others interviewing UN staff in the country report today that genocide is imminent.

PENNSYLVANIA
Seven term Congressman and committee chair, Bill Shuster, a man about as conservative as you can get, faces a credible challenge from a Pennsylvania T-Party right-winger for having voted to end the government shutdown.

My take on the three ongoing events:

EGYPT: I’m glad Morsi was deposed by the military. He was destroying everything progressive in Egyptian society, defying the constitution including the judiciary, and essentially wrecking vengeance on a society for the long oppressed Muslim Brotherhood of which he was an important leader.

He had not yet quite started “rounding up the Christians” as former military leaders including Mubarak did to Muslims like himself, but he moved modern Egyptian society radically backwards, away from representative governance towards a dictatorship of Muslims that was polarizing society and aggravating the Christian/Muslim cleavage in society.

There was no mechanism in Egypt to get rid of a bad president, and that is the mantra used by progressives in Egypt today to justify the military coup. The irony, of course, is that had there been such a mechanism, Morsi would have prevailed over it since the fairly elected majority of the country and their elected representatives would never have voted to convict.

From far away, though, I feel the generals are going too far. They do not seem to believe that any compromise with the Muslim Brotherhood is possible, and that bodes very badly for the future of Egyptian stability.

CAR: What is happening, today, and going to happen in far worse measure very soon in the CAR is a failure of global institutions precisely because global institutions can’t navigate well the growing enmity between Christians and Muslims.

Note with great importance that in such a deep part of Africa, “Muslim/Christian” is actually a misnomer for any conflict. The ethnic divides, which are at the root of the conflict, existed long before Islam was born and perhaps before Christianity was born.

And as in Rwanda, all these various ethnic groups have lived together and intermarried and even shared languages for generations.

The Banda, Hausa, Fulfulde, Runga and similar ethnic groups in the north of the country, consider themselves “Muslim” especially in the current conflict. This is true even though practicing Muslims of the sort that pray regularly towards Mecca are rare. Many of these tribe were pretty undeveloped, remote jungle villages.

Almost all the rest of the ethnic groups are “Christian,” and they roughly occupy the south of the country and represent about two-thirds of the overall population including the only legitimate city and capital of Bangui. But they have no military support. The French long ago abandoned them.

The Muslims have no state support, either. But as the Obama/Holande alliance to crush al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Africa succeeds, the CAR is where the last guns, missile launchers, grenades and IUDs get dumped, and they are being dumped by fugitive Muslims on those in the CAR who call themselves native Muslims. So the one side is armed, and the other isn’t.

And the way it looks right now, nobody really cares. It seems the general consensus in the world is to just let everyone in the CAR destroy themselves. The UN Special Representative on Genocide said over the weekend, “We are seeing armed groups killing people under the guise of their religion…and decisively I will not exclude the possibility of a genocide occurring.”

PENNSYLVANIA:
Rep. Bill Shuster, like the father before him, represents a very rural part of southern Pennsylvania. Like so many other nonurban areas in America, it has not done well over my lifetime.

Median income has fallen, traditional life ways like independent farming have declined, even health statistics are worse than they were. In a nutshell, a father can no longer presume anything except that his children will be worse off than he was.

The reason for this is clear to me: a redistribution of wealth to the top of the pyramid. A cluster of power at the top oppresses those below with feudal outcomes like Walmart and phony mortgages followed by foreclosures.

But armed with money, the forces in power manipulate these folks to such a degree that they work constantly against their own self-interest. The most poignant example is how school referendum after school referendum is defeated.

Education is compromised to the point that no one in southern rural Pennsylvania has a clue as to why they’re more miserable than their folks. So…

… they blame the government. Add a pinch of “it couldn’t get worse than it already is” and a rather healthy American dose of revolution, and why not just close the government down?

All three of these examples are outcomes of failed democracy. Because all three situations are the result of democratic institutions paving their paths.

Egypt is clear. It was truly a fair and free election that brought Morsi to power.

In the CAR, which suffered ethnic conflict short of genocide for centuries, ethnic conflict is now oiled by the democratic processes of the west that permit if not encourage the sale of arms, by the “democratic choice” of Presidents Obama and Hollande to allow the CAR to be the “fire that burns out,” and the democratic (if highly filibustered) UN Security Council that has decided this spot on the world isn’t worth saving.

And in Pennsylvania it is people manifesting power in such a way that it returns to oppress them.

In each case, the value of self-determination turns against itself and democracy ends up destroying itself. Self-interest is compromised not for the betterment of the whole, but to destroy self-interest.

As I said, I’m not abandoning democracy. But someone with a really good stethoscope needs to take a look at it.