Month: January 2015

#2 : Terrorism is Down

#2 : Terrorism is Down

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

-Terrorism is declining in Africa, my #2 Story of 2014.

Terrorism is an almost meaningless word. At its root is war but differentiated from classic war by tactics of brutality and special cruelty.

Yet as we’ve seen in America this year, not even torture is easily associated with American definitions of terrorism. Conflict becomes terrorism in most people’s minds when they are so frightened that they react impulsively and thereby often become unable to defend themselves properly.

Napoleon at Waterloo or Bush at 9/11:

Scared to death. It’s a tactic that the Davids of the world retain as their most valuable, since today’s Goliath’s are incapable of being defeated by weapons other than fear.

Terrorism in Africa was definitely down in 2014 over recent years. From Mali to Egypt to Uganda to Mozambique, the incidents of terrorism were fewer in number than in 2013.

Readers of this blog will be focused on Kenya, because Americans control the narrative of terrorism in the world, and because Kenya is an African country they know more about than most other African countries.

Kenya has a close association to America. Its new constitution is modeled more by America’s than any single other country in the world. More recently Kenya became America’s proxy in the war in Somalia where Kenya remains the occupier and governor of a very fragile peace.

2013 was a horrible year for terrorism in Kenya. Since the horrible Westgate Mall attack in 2012, the Kenyan government began to react like most western governments when terrorized: clamp down.

Kenya beefed up security, increased military and police forces and began passing draconian laws. Much of this was counseled and paid for by America and undertaken exactly as America did after 9/11.

From my point of view, Kenya is even doing better than America after 9/11, because its reexamination of some of its draconian security laws is happening faster than it did in America.

America’s Patriot Act was enacted in October, 2001 and Obama ended all but 3 of its 10 provisions which will die if not renewed this year. Many persons myself included believe it had limited if any impact on reducing terrorism while greatly inhibiting personal liberties.

Kenya’s version of the Patriot Act was passed last month, but Kenya’s High Court suspended most of its key provisions Friday.

I hope the Kenyan High Court perseveres and strikes the law down for good, and I think there’s a good chance it will.

The Kenyan High Court is much more progressive than America’s Supreme Court. The Kenyan constitution, in fact, is more progressive than America’s.

The reason security has improved in Kenya, and the reason security improved in the U.S. after 9/11, had little to do with draconian new laws that culpable legislators hurried to enact.

The increased security was simply because of increased vigilance that was lacking before 9/11 or the Westgate Mall. We all know now how dismissive the Bush administration was of reports of imminent terrorism. Kenya’s dismissiveness may have been similar but was likely something else: lack of resources.

America and Britain have now beefed up Kenya’s resources, so while the explanation for why Kenya and the U.S. suffered dramatic attacks differs, renewed vigilence was similar in both countries, and given the west’s support, I think Kenya will continue to improve its security.

Should Kenya also put the kibosh on its horrible new security laws it will have also learned from America’s mistakes and will retain citizen liberties in a way America did not.

I think at that point the whole world – including America – will realize that America’s knee-jerk response to 9/11 was counter-productive and that “terrorism” is an eternal threat requiring measured but constant vigilance, not draconian security laws.

It’s fair to extrapolate Kenya’s experience to more or less all of Africa, with the notable exception of Nigeria.

Nigeria has never coalesced into a single republic well. The Biafran War was not a civil war like America’s. It was a much newer conflict of issues of ethnicity, class, privilege and income.

Boko Haram is the newest iteration of this contemporary conflict. There’s no question that its tactics are brutal and extreme, although the kidnaping of the school girls or the executions of young students is not a new technique in African conflicts.

Boko Haram’s ideologies are less global than local. This past weekend powerful Boko Haram forces overran a military base in Nigeria and could have easily taken more territory in neighboring Chad but didn’t.

Boko Haram is on the ascent because the Lagos government is on the decline. Crippled by a falling oil price as much as weak governance, Nigeria’s threat from Boko Haram is a serious internal one that ought not be extrapolated to Africa as a whole.

No conflict, no terrorism, is comforting. But in my long view of Africa, I’d say that things are getting better. More optimistically, Kenya’s chance to reframe how to deal with “terrorism” might be a model for the whole world. Take note, America.

#1 : Ebola

#1 : Ebola

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

EbolaNbr12015The ebola epidemic is the Number 1 story in Africa for 2014, and for a slew of reasons.

(To see a list of all my Top Ten stories in Africa for 2014, click here.)

The epidemic started in March and will likely continue well into this year, but the spread is slowing and increased public understandings have reduced global fears and improved people’s sensitivities to poverty and war.

Today just under 7,900 people have died of ebola from a known 20,000+ cases in seven countries: Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, the US, Mali and the UK.

The UK’s case occurred just this weekend as a health worker in Glasgow became sick after returning home as a volunteer in West Africa.

Of the nine people who became sick with ebola in the United States, one died; more than 3,400 have died in Liberia and 2,700 in neighboring Sierra Leone; 1,700 in Guinea and eight in neighboring Nigeria.

That makes the U.S. the only country where this specific outbreak has caused a death outside of West Africa. Not Kenya, not Tanzania, not South Africa. Just the U.S.

The public’s control of its initial panic comes from a growing understanding that the disease while extremely serious is not uniquely so.

Had polio, HIV, SARS, MERS or even the current flu epidemic in the U.S. broken out in this part of Africa at this same time, it is likely an epidemic would have occurred just as it did with ebola.

The control of the disease is relatively simple where hardly more than a basic public health infrastructure exists, as was demonstrated in Nigeria. Similarly so in the U.S., where another lesson was learned:

Health care in the U.S. – at least at one hospital in Texas – is not what it’s ranked up to be.

A month ago I wrote ebola’s “Epilogue.”

As explained then, this was not an epilogue to the outbreak in West Africa, which is likely to continue for some time. Rather, it was an epilogue to the irrational concepts of what this outbreak was exactly.

Initially, the world panicked.

Fox News, not exactly your Bible of Reality, reported in late September that there could be more than a million cases as of … today. But note that the Fox report was based, if in a skewed way, on a CDC report.

As school opened this fall, Americans in remote farm country in Nebraska were keeping their kids home.

American movies were taking over American’s minds. American greed for the macabre made it worse. Worldwide racism exacerbated notions that what was happening in West Africa was not the human normal.

In fact, what we learned was that an infectious disease is one of the best long-term indicators of the devastation of war.

Americans know of the wars in West Africa. “Blood Diamond” was released just as the wars there were finally ending. But Americans are hesitant to embrace the magnitude of these wars, just as we are hesitant to embrace the near apocalypse we’ve caused in the Levant.

It is, in fact, that near total devastation of Liberia and Sierra Leone that among so many other horrible outcomes left a densely populated area without any public health care.

Our inability to understand that parts of the world – even in Africa – might actually be better off than us came when South Africa reported it had recently and in past outbreaks adequately treated and totally contained ebola when … in Dallas, they let it walk the street.

Nothing requires public health care as much as an outbreak of an infectious disease. We learned that inside out, I’m afraid, when we first reacted to this outbreak by believing increased monitoring at airports would be valuable.

As predicted and now as proved, it was meaningless.

We learned the power of public health policy when Chris Christie quarantined an incoming health worker, and the fallacies of knee-jerk reactions that were equally meaningless.

America as the single largest economy contributes disproportionately to the health of tourism in Africa, and African companies were spinning like tops trying to figure out what to do when the ebola panic began to effect them.

Never mind that the centers of big game safari travel, in East and southern Africa, were often more distant and cut off from the ebola centers than New York. “Africa is Africa” was the juvenile mantra.

The companies responded with equally juvenile policies that tried to protect their unthreatened backsides, although that lasted only briefly. After I and many others shook Africans back into their senses, it was a simple matter of doing what any good hotelier in San Jose, California, would do if ebola broke out there.

Because, of course, it won’t.

Some tell me I’m too calloused in my blogs about ebola. They’re dead wrong.

Just because I’m as distressed with the level of child poverty or gun homicides in the U.S. or as miffed by Americans’ fear about health care while traveling in the country that performed the first heart transplant doesn’t mean that I underestimate the severity, misery and desperation that ebola causes.

It’s just that I see that same severity, misery and desperation in many places. Like Dallas.