Month: October 2015

Life Goes On

Life Goes On

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

cleaningupfromtheelectionTanzania’s president-elect John Magufuli is the best outcome from an election that was free-and-fair enough. The disgruntled country seems to agree.

The exception is Zanzibar, where tensions are rising. Travelers should avoid Zanzibar now. The rest of the country went back to work, today. There were few celebrations even in the strongholds of the ruling party. Winners seem to know how seriously disappointed the opposition is.

Losers seem to be accepting the outcome.

Zanzibar is different and always has been. The “marriage” of the independent countries of Zanzibar and Tanganyika in 1964 has never been fully accomplished. The island has a very autonomous government, but in the last several cycles the mainland’s ruling CCM party has held power even there.

This year the island opposition claimed the election count was fraudulent, violence erupted and was quickly contained by what seemed to have been a premeditated arrangement between mainland authorities and those supporting the CCM candidates.

Shortly thereafter the Election Commission annulled the election. Today the island is very tense. Almost exclusively Muslim, Friday is normally a rest day. The island, though, is so heavily invested in tourism a normal Friday would have had far more activity than reported today in Stone Town, the island’s only city.

International observers give the election a passing grade without too much enthusiasm because of the Zanzibar annulment. Foreign observers generally concluded several days ago that that was a mistake.

It was an election of surprising switches and previously unimagined allegiances. Tanzania’s Shakespearean politics twisted onto itself creating a contest between two men who had been close friends and colleagues for years, loyal leaders of the CCM with ideologies and policies that were essentially identical.

Since neither had any substantive difference with the other, both let the electorate fashion their difference: the supporters of each claimed only their standard bearer would reduce the enormous corruption of the country which denies so many millions the basic services they need.

Magufuli was a dark horse from the ruling party. His opponent, Edward Lowassa, was expected to be the ruling party’s candidate virtually until Magufuli was chosen instead.

Lowassa comes from the better developed and more rebellious north, so the north was ecstatic when he defected from the ruling party to join Chadema, the main opposition based in the north. Then within days of realigning his allegiances he brought four other opposition parties into a giant opposition to become the first real challenge to CCM’s near 60 years of ruling Tanzania.

Just the simple idea that the ruling party might be undone sent young and educated Tanzanians into the stratospheres of extreme hope. There was no debate over the complicated new constitution, no question about taxes or budget or even schools – which is normally a very important issue, no scrutiny of the fact that Lowassa and Magufuli dropped from the same tree.

No one charged Lowassa with sour grapes for having been dumped by his life-long party. His own scandalous past in that party, his confession to playing a major role in a hundred-million dollar aid scam that resulted in his being fired as prime minister, was hardly mentioned.

Instead, the entire point of the election devolved into nothing more than the possibility that the ruling elite might be defeated, albeit by … one of its own.

Well, it wasn’t. And despite unusually numerous election irregularities, all the outside observers are coming to the conclusion that after serious qualifications to the notion of “free and fair,” the election really does represent the will of the people.

John Magufuli is a good guy. I would have voted for him over Lowassa, simply because to this moment Magufuli remains uncorrupt if complicit with the corruption that suffuses his colleagues. Lowassa is a confessed crook.

Magufuli has worked his way up the ladder of political succession step-by-step over many years. He holds a Ph.D. in chemistry. He’s known for his corruption-busting antics, including hiding in situations to bust unsuspecting corrupt policemen that wander near him unawares.

He comes into office with all the credentials that hopeful Tanzanians actually say they want. But then again so have past presidents like the current one, Jakaya Kikwete. A few years into the role and the glitter is shed, and a poor elected official suddenly has Swiss bank accounts and shares in world hotel chains.

All Tanzania can hope is that this pattern of good guys turning bad might be less easy to do in today’s growing internet world, especially with Tanzania’s youth so currently fired up.

So skeptical but satisfied. Like the country, resigned to what hope remains.

Winter Winner

Winter Winner

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

magufuliwinsTanzania’s ruling party’s candidate has won the presidential election, the opposition has rejected the results, and the election in Zanzibar has been annulled.

The Election Commission declared John Magufuli the next president with 67% of the popular vote just as the business day in Tanzania ended.

The country is tenser than ever. The slow live announcement of constituency results was viewed suspiciously by the European Union whose election observers issued a preliminary negative report on the validity of the election.

America expressed “alarm” with the Zanzibar annulment.

Normally a mouthpiece for all East African leaders in power, the EAC (East African Community) commission watching the election said it was “concerned” with the large number of disputes so far filed.

Earlier, the main opposition party UKAWA announced it was rejecting whatever outcome would be announced. German radio opined, “Transparency is crucial. Tanzania, which has been a force for stability and peace for decades, cannot be allowed to descend into chaos.”

Were this Kenya or South Africa, the situation would represent serious potential violence. I don’t think it does in Tanzania.

The opposition was hastily put together, an unlikely amalgam of disparate parties. It is itself fractured, and I just don’t think its leaders are capable of organizing any real protest.

A rerunning of the election in Zanzibar cannot change the presidential outcome. Even if every Zanzibari vote was for the opposition it would move the percentages less than 2%. (Zanzibar’s population is 1.3 million of the country’s 53.6 million.)

Nevertheless, the decision to annul the Zanzibari election squarely places it in the center of any violent reaction that may now develop in the country. The fact that nearly an entire day has now passed since the election was officially annulled there, and that violent reaction and police response has been less than expected…

… suggests to me that the party in power will prevail, that some violence will occur for a rather strung out period, but that within a month Tanzanians will have settled into a terrible disquiet of acceptance.

I have many Tanzanian friends on Facebook. Before the election Facebook and other social media were exploding with election bombast. Today it’s eerily quiet.

Night is descending on a freakishly bleak Tanzania. More tomorrow.

Lesser Lions

Lesser Lions

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

lion under sign NNPLike tigers, truly wild lions in Africa may becoming a thing of the past.

A prestigious group including Africa’s leading lion researcher, Craig Packer, claimed today in a report published with the National Academy of Sciences that lion populations will decline 50% in the next two decades.

I have already seen the decline in East Africa, most notably in Ngorongoro Crater. The report, by the way, claims that the adjacent Serengeti lion population remains healthy and is less likely to decline.

According to a summary by CBS News of the lengthy report, lions “are threatened by widespread habitat loss, depletions in available prey, preemptive killing to protect humans and their livestock along with poaching and poorly regulated sport hunting.”

The most serious decline will be in west and northern Africa, although as much as a third of the sub-Saharan lion population will decline. Sub-Saharan populations are healthier, according to the report, because of adequate protection in Botswana, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

The very interesting detail in the report as to what exactly explains southern African countries’ better protections has much to do with fenced-in private reserves, a situation which today is about all that is left for Asian tigers.

Although most of these fenced-in, private reserves are not zoos as such since they are large enough with enough variety of prey game that the lions do not need to be fed, disease and/or injuries are often treated.

The lions in virtually all these cases become very habituated to people. Unwittingly, similar situations can occur in completely unfenced and unmanaged reserves like Nairobi National Park when visitor populations grow unusually large.

Fenced-in reserves and too many visitors change the cats’ behaviors. They begin to tolerate one another more than natural, adapting to a confined if imposed territory. Fewer larger prides, of the sort we see today in Ngorongoro Crater, replace more smaller prides with a net overall decline in numbers.

This usually makes them more dangerous, at least in the initial phases of this recalibration of behavior.

I’ve often written of a similar situation occurring in East Africa with elephants.

It was hardly a decade ago that I would tell clients traveling in the dry season that on a typical ten-day safari they could expect to see more than 125 lion. (A wet season prediction was around 80.)

In my most recent safaris those numbers declined by a third.

In addition to the crater I’ve noticed obvious declines throughout central Tanzania, southern Kenya and the Mara.

It’s likely that part of the “health” of the Serengeti is due to Mara lions moving out of the congested Mara. The Mara and its border of private reserves is also then itself bordered by intense agricultural lands and growing numbers of small towns.

Seeing a tiger in a reserve today in Asia, or a lion in a private, fenced-in reserve in South Africa is in my opinion massively different from those observed in truly wild situations.

The fenced-in lion is usually healthier but not as strong, fatter and not as lean, seemingly more disinterested in everything and more likely to allow approach, or even to approach the observer.

“Saving lions” will not be difficult. There are already too many lions in zoos and euthanization is now regularly used for older and infirmed animals when in years past these animals would have been nursed to health or kept alive for their genes and research potential.

And as with captive lions in zoos, fenced-in lions do extremely well, positively responding to a reduction in their territory when offered an adequate food supply.

So lions will be around for a very long time.

But not necessarily as I would like to remember them.

Vicious Volunteerism

Vicious Volunteerism

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

molestationChild predators in the guise of foreign volunteers to Africa are at last facing prosecution when they return home.

I’ve often written how volunteerism in Africa by (mostly western) foreigners is usually a bad idea. Child predation is an extreme matter although it’s increasingly used in Kenya as a reason social organizations should be less welcoming of foreign volunteers.

In a detailed investigation by Nairobi’s Destination Magazine (DM), a 20-year old American Christian volunteer repeatedly molests children in a Kenyan orphanage over a period of several years until new American legislation results in him being arrested at his Oklahoma home and ultimately imprisoned.

The young American was finally convicted this summer after a lengthy defense mounted in Oklahoma courts by a star-studded legal team that included the lawyer who defended Timothy McVeigh and Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE).

According to DM: “In Africa …people serving with the church …are bestowed with a great deal of respect… So much so that individuals in these capacities …can carry on a double life for years without detection.”

DM published an excellent and detailed report of the story of the Oklahoman teen who traveled multiple times to Kenya from the United States, ostensibly for Christian missionary work.

He was considered by both the community he came from in Oklahoma and the religious African community that welcomed him into their orphanage as reliable. In fact after several visits to the orphanage to volunteer he requested to live with the children rather than in volunteer dorms.

“Even though his request was peculiar, it was nevertheless granted.” An African manager on a routine check of the orphanage’s dorms then caught him having sex with the orphans.

Kenyan child activist, Kevin Wasike, also asks, “How could a volunteer be left alone with children at night, without any kind of supervision whatsoever?”

Wasike’s indictment of an organization for not properly vetting its volunteers extends well beyond the heinous social crime of child molestation.

I estimate that most – more than half – of African organizations that receive charity from abroad end up regretting it.

Most volunteers come on a lark: They volunteer in part to get a better deal for the cost of traveling. They are untrained or poorly trained for whatever they ultimately try to do. They rarely make long-term commitments, which should be an essential requirement of any employee of a social organization.

So the organization ends up dedicating more resources to “taking care of the volunteers” than the volunteers give back.

Finally, most volunteers are not certified.

Since 2003 British citizens may not volunteer anywhere abroad for any child organization without first obtaining an International Child Protection Certificate (ICPC).

The certificate is a police check on the individual intending to volunteer abroad. The Certificate is currently required by 73 countries worldwide, but not yet by Kenya.

The 2006 U.S. law that was used to convict the American teen also provides for sharing of child molester databases with countries abroad, including Kenya.

But the American legal process is weighted not just to the defendant, but in this category of cases against foreign allegations.

Though there was a video made in Kenya accompanying the defendant’s 10-page confession, together with medical exams of some of the kids shortly after sex with the defendant, the legal team delayed the trial for more than a year.

The team claimed that the video was by children who were not mentally fit, that the confession was coerced, and that the team was unable to visit Kenya, alluding to Kenya’s terrorism incidents.

Americans ascribe a near divine right to volunteering. Certainly this example is extreme, but it is often in the extremities of things wrong that we come to see the light.

A Little Bit Too High

A Little Bit Too High

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

porterstrikeAt least 20,000 people try to summit Mt. Kilimanjaro every year, but those planning to do so next month have an even greater risk of not making it.

The Tanzania Tour Guides Association (TTGA) and the Kilimanjaro Guides Association (KGA) are threatening a three-week strike over pay.

Now this isn’t the first time porters and guides on Kilimanjaro have threatened a strike. It’s actually the third time since 2011, each time running up to a start date before the government finally mediated.

Each of those times meetings were convened and agreements made that were never kept.

“They are furious over the apparent failure by the government to implement the terms the two parties had agreed” in August, which was to be implemented in 60 days, according to a reporter for the Arusha Times.

The dispute this year came to a head on October 7 when guide and porter representatives went to attend a meeting arranged during the August negotiations to evaluate implementation of the agreement. No one from the government showed up, ironically because the government later claimed it didn’t have the funds to convene the event.

A porter on Kilimanjaro usually gets paid between $15-20/day. The better climbing companies then recommend to the clients that a tip equal to an average of $5-8/day be given at the end of the climb, resulting in actual wages of $20-28/day.

But there are many companies which delay paying the porters. At last check 290 companies were registered with the Tanzanian tourism authorities to operate climbs on Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Porters normally carry up to forty pounds, although some have been recorded carrying sixty. As a daily wage the level is actually above average for most Tanzanian tourism workers, but the amount of work they get fluctuates greatly, is very seasonal and never guaranteed.

Because there are few qualifications required to become a porter, the industry is never without applicants. New applicants are generally paid less than veterans, and this results in a constant race to the bottom. Many porters will spend the first several years working less than 30 days annually.

The fact that there are many more applicants than there are jobs, it makes the idea of a strike somewhat illusory, and this may be part of the reason a strike has never actually been staged despite repeated confrontations with the government.

On the other hand, the last-minute government mediation and various agreements made – even if not implemented – suggests the government takes the threats seriously.

While I have seen reports that there are upwards of 60,000 climbers annually government numbers suggest about a third of that. More than 80% of climbers travel the relatively inexpensive “Coca-Cola” route known as Marangu, a 3-days up and 2-days down, 4-night excursion that retails for around $1000.

Twenty percent travel more scenic and less challenging routes that take 2-4 days longer and are generally outfitted by more reputable companies. These week-long climbs can cost as much as $5000 but absolutely attract the more seasoned porters and guides.

Regardless of the route or style chosen, the government mandates that each climber have at least one porter. The more expensive, more scenic and longer climbs often field a staff of up to 25 for as few as 4-6 clients.

Climbing Kili is a bucket list item that attracts a huge range of people, mainly because it really isn’t a climb. No implements are required and it’s a well traveled path that’s followed, regardless of which of the six routes are taken.

The challenge is altitude, with 12,000′ being the make or break point. The summit is 19,347′. About half of Kili’s climbers are unable to make the top because of the effect of altitude.

If the porters strike, and if scabs aren’t allowed (which is normal government labor policy) then the climbs will stop. But frankly it’s hard to imagine.

Despite the government’s posturing that suggests a serious concern with the threat, it’s hard to see it happening this time. I think everyone might just be aiming a little bit too high.

Changing Too Fast

Changing Too Fast

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

changingtoofastWhat happens when all the new Kenyan apartments start collapsing? Or when all the new highways cave into the earth?

The developing world might be developing too fast: Its super-development is terribly flawed and in as few as ten years everything being built now might collapse.

To understand this premise you’ve got to grasp how quickly things are developing in the emerging world, today. The already iconic internet example is from China, where a 57-story skyscraper with 19 atriums, 800 apartments and office space for 4,000 people, certified earthquake resistant, was completed in 19 working days!

The previous record was a 30-story skyscraper opened for use in 30 days, also in China.

Today a 60-story skyscraper in the U.S. normally takes 2½ years of construction from ground-breaking to open-for-use.

The Chinese records are ever so bit exaggerations, because in these two cases each floor was prefabricated and basically inset level by level into the exterior frame. But even so they represent remarkable feats.

Unless, of course, in ten years they fall down. It seems to be happening already.

In many cases it’s simple corruption, as with the collapse of the important Ugandan Katuugo-Kaweweta road only months after it was newly rebuilt.

Journalists discovered that the money for the project was massively diverted into the pockets of officials. While low-level corruption like this continues to plague much of the developing world, the more sinister prospects for new infrastructure collapsing is much more complex.

There seem to be two main reasons to expect the developing world’s infrastructure to collapse prematurely:

First is the simple notion that haste-makes-waste. The demand for new infrastructure in the developing world is unbelievable, hard to imagine by us in the developed world:

“The world is moving from agrarian to urban at a startling pace,” Michael Bloomberg wrote recently.

According to South African business developer, Wayne Duvenage, “We sit with … many costly capital expenditure debacles in Eskom‚ Passenger Rail Agency of South Africa‚ South African Airways and other inefficient state-owned entities” because “Our government’s ministers … are far too hasty in their acceptance of major capital expenditure projects” with no time for due diligence.

The second reason, though, is more subtle and more sinister.

“Urgent demand [for infrastructure] is already overwhelming adequate risk management and urban governance capacities,” according to a senior manager at the Institute for Sustainable Communities and former Director of the Clinton Foundation.

Today when a new interstate is built across America it is laid with exquisitely new technology that in many ways builds upon the old road that it lies over and replaces.

There is no old road being built over by the new highways in the developing world, but they are still being built with new practices and materials and high-tech engineering.

Modern buildings pose a similar problem, not because they may need the foundation of the older building, but because the inputs of water, electricity, internet and cable, etc., require that those fundamental infrastructures have already been built first. That’s simply not always the case.

The result is a mismatch that could prove fatal.

It’s pretty obvious, but contemporary politicians in developing worlds overseeing new infrastructure are loathe to embrace this. “Adequate risk management” is generally side-lined.

Lack of “governance capacities” is considered a liability that best not be admitted, and this leads to numerous projects being fast-tracked without adequate preparation.

“Kenya is building huge infrastructural projects [that] have been accompanied by malpractice in construction, land grabs, displacements [and] environmental degradation,” writes Kenya’s permanent ambassador to the UN, John Kakonge.

Finally because of the above red flags private investment normally attracted to these mega development projects is lacking. As a result many specialized projects that should be built by the better equipped and specialized private sector are instead built by less specialized and well-equipped government agencies.

This recipe for a disaster in the offing will not be easily remedied. Certainly head-on attacks on corruption will help, but the more sinister components of over demand and mismatching current technologies with historical situations have no easy solution.

It could be the world is just changing too fast.

Messy Mashujaa

Messy Mashujaa

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

mashujaadayIt’s “Heroes’ Day” in Kenya, Mashujaa Day, and one of my Kenyan heros, journalist Macharia Gaitho, just displayed our time’s most painful paradigm: hypocrisy.

Like many long-lasting, courageous journalists in Kenya Gaitho is analytical and penetrating, seemingly nontribal, usually grumpy but without fail calls a spade a spade.

Today he berated his country’s national holiday in its most widely read newspaper:

“Unfortunately, we no longer celebrate our mashujaa, our heroes. We celebrate tyrants and thieves.”

Mashujaa Day was a social compromise of Kenya’s fabulous 2010 Constitution. Prior to then, “Kenyatta Day” and “Moi Day” were celebrated much as Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays were once celebrated separately here.

Jomo Kenyatta was the country’s first president and Daniel arap Moi was its second. Mashujaa Day combines them, as we combined our presidents’ birthdays into Presidents’ Day, but goes further than we have.

Mashujaa Day extends the celebration to the average bloke who perhaps without any notice helped to create a better Kenya through self-sacrifice. This addendum to the celebration was added because Kenyatta and Moi represent the two most powerful (although often opposing) tribes without acknowledging the remaining 40% of Kenyans.

“Mr Kenyatta … thought Kenya owed him all its riches and spent a bit too much time ensuring perpetual riches for his heirs.

“The Moi regime … [was] one [of] a rapacious orgy of slash-and-burn economics.”

Here’s what’s important in Gaitho’s roast of his national holiday: For some at first inexplicable reason, he ends today’s column (after seven asterisks) with the following:

“I really fail to understand the Obama doctrine. Syria and Iraq are in danger of falling to Isis, that monstrous Islamic supremacist movement spreading its tentacles across the region and beyond.

“But instead of backing the Syrian government against the monster, President Obama insists on a self-defeatist support for the armed rebellion against President Bashir al-Assad, that he assumes can also be used to fight Isis.

“You can’t have your cake and eat it, Cousin Barry. On this one I am with Russian President Vladimir Putin, if his military intervention is what will strengthen Assad and keep terrorists from our shores.”

Gaitho is right, history is turning out to harshly judge Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi. They were not the heroes “Heroes’ Day” intended to praise. And I’m pretty sure Gaitho will agree that neither is Bashir al-Assad.

For the record I don’t support the Obama policy in Syria, which is widely supported here. I really believe we should cut and run, and there are few on either side of our gaping American political divide who join me.

But I can’t understand Gaitho’s criticism of his first two presidents for their failure at fair governance when the real legacy of Kenyatta and Moi was that they kept the country stable and so much so that it was protected from outside forces.

So why does Gaitho now support Assad for the same reason?

Alas, heroes crumble easily in today’s extraordinarily complex world.

Terrorism Today

Terrorism Today

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

CGTerrorismFour countries in sub-Saharan Africa are at increased risk of terrorism: Uganda, Ethiopia, Burundi and the Central African Republic.

The warning is issued by the 2014 Global Terrorism Index, a massive compilation of each year’s terrorist incidents.

The report is good news for Kenya, continuing good news for Tanzania and all the rest of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa. Although the index has only been produced for the last five years, its track record so far is good.

Uganda and Ethiopia’s increased risk is linked directly to their increased authoritarianism. Burundi is essentially an ethnic conflict.

In fact last week Uganda’s principal opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, was arrested and put under house arrest to end his organizing protest rallies. This stands in marked contrast, for example, with Tanzania’s heated up but very free presidential election and Kenya’s exceptional transparency in government.

The GTI is by some measure overly thorough and as a result some of its lesser predictions might be seen as premature, but the overall index suggesting increased or decreased terrorism will be used in critical decisions by many global businesses including tour companies.

The index is not without controversy, since it refuses to view Israel and Palestine with the same parameters as the rest of the world. The much less used but competing British index, the Verisk/Maplecroft Terrorism Dashboard actually suggests an increased terrorism risk in Nairobi.

The GTI report is less of a chronology of terrorist events than it is a measure of those events’ impact on the country. In other words larger economies more capable of shrugging off terrorist incidents, like the United States, will be less impacted by terrorism than smaller economies like Kenya.

As a result Kenya continues to be seriously impacted by terrorism, because the index is a 5-year weighted average, and Kenya’s terrorists incidents in 2008-2013 included severe attacks like the Westgate Mall.

From this perspective Kenya ranks the 13th most impacted in the world of the 162 countries studied, compared to the U.S.’ 30th, even though there were more actual deaths and injuries in the U.S. considered terrorism than in Kenya.

Terrorism as defined by the GTI includes such acts as school shootings.

The bottom line is that mayhem from terrorism is increasing substantially, although localized and heavily a result of the ongoing conflicts in the Mideast. GTI dissects nine organizations it has determined are the main terrorist organizations worldwide:

Hamas, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, Al-Qaida in Iraq & Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, ISIS, The Taliban in Pakistan, Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram.

(Currently, the Tamil Tigers have signed a peace agreement in Sri Lanka, Al-Shabab is almost gone and Boko Haram is retreating in Nigeria. That leaves today’s principal terrorist organizations all from the Mideast.)

Terrorism is as old as time itself. Were the GTI Index to be applied to all the years since the American Revolution, it’s likely that America would vie with the Mideast for the most terrorism overall.

Our revolution, Indian wars, Civil War, presidential and other political assassinations and today’s contemporary school shootings would likely add up to as much all the trouble over that same time in Africa.

What’s changed is technology and the likelihood that every person with a smart phone knows what bad things are happening where and when. That’s good for the possible resolution of bad things, if you believe as I do that we are all basically good.

But it causes us great angst when forced to try to understand such wanton harm. My novel, Chasm Gorge, tries to help you understand that.

There was a time when those who considered themselves good easily sheltered themselves from those they considered evil. Today, what is “good” and what is “evil,” as well as the ability to “shield” onself, are no longer quite as certain as in the old days.

Terrorism is as much an intellectual challenge to understand as a political challenge to stop.

The darker the red, the more impact from terrorism.
The darker the red, the more impact from terrorism.

Lower Education

Lower Education

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

StudFeeProtestFree higher education is becoming an explosive issue in Africa.

Until the turn of the millennium most higher education throughout Africa was completely free, as in much of Europe it still is. The model, in fact, for most African countries was Germany.

But today about a quarter of an African university student’s costs are borne by the student. In South Africa it just became more than a third.

South Africa’s most prominent university remains closed today after protests against fees that began Wednesday.

The University’s CEO, its Vice-Chancellor, raced back to Johannesburg to address today’s massive student demonstration morning and was followed on national TV by the country’s Minister of Education, but the students have not been placated and the protest continues.

You can follow this massive and explosive event on twitter at #WitsFeesMustFall.

The 10.5% increase in fees announced last week will push a university student’s contribution to just over half of all estimated costs.

The arguments on both sides are identical to arguments in the United States, Kenya or virtually anywhere in the world where higher education is not free:

“The government needs to invest significantly more … for public universities. This is the kind of expenditure that will pay for itself… Money given to universities is money that alleviates poverty, creates employment and drives cutting-edge research and innovation,” writes student leader, Saul Musker, in today’s Daily Maverick.

“Indeed, the actual social, political and economic costs of under-investing in higher education are far greater than the additional expenditure…. If the ultimate goal of the government is to create an equal and prosperous society… this is an obvious choice.”

From the university:

Contractual costs particularly salaries are increasing much faster than government subsidies for them; utilities and other operating costs are unexpectedly high, and unique to South Africa, the Rand has fallen by 22% against the dollar and much of the university’s costs are dollar based.

In fact, government subsidies have actually fallen, as they have throughout much of America.

So as in America we have an extraordinary situation where both the protesters and their targets are in agreement. The problem, of course, is the government that funds them both.

Governments ordinarily reduce their subsidies with additional loan mechanisms and “bursaries” or scholarships. But in many places like Kenya that’s proved self-defeating, because the loans can’t be recovered and the process of awarding scholarships is cumbersome and often corrupt.

The result is a spiraling downwards of government support, as forward budgets are often based on presumptions of recovering loans while funds for bursaries are often underused for getting tangled in confusing regulations.

Opposition politicians often clamor onto the bandwagon that there should be more government support, but once in power, they become hamstrung by budget necessities.

Governments are rarely so forward-thinking as to invest in a student whose productivity is many political cycles in the future. Mature, successful governments like Germany and the Scandinavian countries should be a model for us all, but in the U.S. archaic conservative forces hold us back, and in Africa, the critical capital mass capable of this policy just hasn’t yet been achieved.

So the gap between the haves and have-nots widens even further.

Only this time it’s not just a gap of wealth, it’s a gap of intelligence.

Elephants Do Not Have Souls

Elephants Do Not Have Souls

by Arusha ♥ 8 Comments

EleRoverElephants do not have souls, and countenancing this myth is a sure fire way to accelerate their extinction.

The brilliant and stunning film, “Soul of the Elephant,” which aired on PBS’s Nature yesterday evening was rife with untruths and speculative science. It was as bad a nature documentary as a Fox News report.

The exquisite beauty of the film, the rhythmic narration and the beautiful background music including outstanding African-like acapella created a media poem of the finest sort. I wish it had been a feature film, because the main proposition that elephants are like people is something that can ultimately never be proved or disproved but as a fictional piece it would have been very strong.

Unfortunately, it’s untrue.

Before I list errors of fact, let me remind you why this is such a mission for me: Anthropomorphization in my view does more to harm African conservation than wars or poison. Films like this hasten the end of the African wilderness and its wondrous wildlife.

As I’ve written numerous times before, the almost exclusively western attempt to anthropomorphize Africa’s wildlife draws a red line with emerging intellectuals in Africa who are dedicated to the development of their social and political fabric in an extremely stressed part of the world.

It’s akin to America’s own political battle with the Citizens United/Campaign Finance controversy where corporations are treated as people.

If animals are considered people, inalienable rights attend them that make compromise if not impossible considerably more difficult with issues of land and agricultural development, highway construction, potable water reservoirs and innumerable other absolute necessities for human development.

But it isn’t just the outcome that bothers me. The proposition that elephant are “sentient beings, thinking thoughts, having ideas” and that they “think” — all of which is quoted directly from the film — is wrong. There is no science whatever to support this, only media poems.

The world of life is composed of a myriad of wondrous forms, each in my view essential to our fabric of existence. Biodiversity is the only goal we have left that can preserve our understanding of our own existence, but biodiversity resides in the notion that some living things “think” and some “don’t.” Elephants and virtually the vast majority of all other animals don’t either.

Man thinks.

Many of the Joubert’s errors are not egregious, but the plethora of them evidences their lack of scientific diligence. They created a wonderful poem, not a nature documentary:

They claimed there were once 5 million elephants. We’ll never know, because paleontologists have not yet collected enough evidence of prehistoric times to create population statistics. What we do know is that before the atrocious elephant poaching of the 1970s, there conceivably had been a population that “might” have approached a million.

Ivory harvesting by Arab traders began as early as the 13th Century, so it’s plausible that the apex of the population was prior to then. But even the 7 centuries of Arab harvesting on the scale that was possible back then could not have possibly eroded a 5 million animal population down to a million.

The exaggeration of numbers in the film continued to discussion of the Selina Spillway and that of Botswana itself. It was only this August, well after the film was near completed, that the first elephant count of the continent ever was done.

“There are no credible estimates for a continental population prior to the late 1970s. Thus for the continental (global) population, an extrapolation back to the beginning of three generations is plagued with high levels of uncertainty,” writes the Bible of Biodiversity, the IUCN Red List.

Exaggerating bad situations into catastrophes is a technique of terrorists and fools.

In one section alone Joubert claimed that “Seventy years ago a little baby [elephant] had less than a 10% chance of surviving.” That would have been in the 1940s, long before poaching ramped up and is an absurd proposition. Nearly as absurd as his claim that where he was filming “was a 5-day drive from the nearest town.”

I have often been in various parts of the Selinda Spillway. EWT will lead a Botswana trip there next March. There is no place that is more than 2-3 days from Kasane and possibly less from Maun. These are modern if rural towns.

Joubert concludes at some point that his love of elephants is best reflected by the “eyes that shine with a deep intelligence” which stretches poetic license to the limits, since many elephants eyes close perpetually after they reach their teen years.

I think what bothered me most about the film was trying to tell a story that didn’t exist. There was no baby elephant that was drowning. The film showed a baby elephant frolicking in the mud; it was not drowning.

It then cut to lions, that were not shot in the same vicinity. It then cut to the attack of a lion on a baby elephant. That was still a different set of lions and a different baby elephant altogether. The editing wasn’t even good enough to equalize the lighting that revealed deeply different seasons in the three different scenes, purported to be one.

I actually laughed when he suggested that the aggression the elephants were causing might have to do with the memory of the two dead elephants in the vicinity. The elephants were aggressive because he was too close! And imagine how many other pontoons and boats and canoes and cameras were there shooting him shoot!

It’s OK if it’s just a story. This is not a documentary. Elephants do not have souls. Elephants must be protected along with their environment, and Africa must have the freedom to grow and develop, and that is a puzzle that this film does everything in its power to prevent from being solved.

Death & Destruction

Death & Destruction

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

EndofICCSouth Africa moved yesterday to begin withdrawing from the World Court (ICC), which would effectively destroy the institution.

Africans across the continent have been complaining for some time about The Court and serious threats to leave have come from such important countries as Kenya, Egypt and Nigeria.

If South Africa leaves it’s over and done.

I love the World Court and I’m in the American minority, again. All the European countries, Canada and almost all the African countries have signed on to The Court. Among the 70 or so countries that have refused to join The Court are the U.S., China and Israel.

To me the birth of The Court in 1998 was David conquering Goliath. For the first time in human history, there was an arbiter, a judge, with absolute power of law over the majority of countries in the world, including all of Europe.

Communists, capitalists, dictators, socialists, politicians and leaders of opposite stripes and convictions, they were all beholden to the court’s singularity: the only, and the ultimate adjudication of four grievous infractions of world order:

– crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.

Wow. Up yours Scalia.

It’s bound by the Security Council but has an irritating independence from it. It can develop prosecutions on its own, but so far prefers to “accept” cases transferred to it from sovereign nations or institutions like the UN.

Because the thresholds for evidence and of proof are so severe, far greater than in the United States or virtually any of its member states, the court has moved glacially, but it’s moved. It’s convicted perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide, of the Blood Diamonds Wars and it’s in the thralls of trials about who caused the horrible Kenyan violence of 2007.

Hm. No cases in South America? Nothing from Asia? Currently there are 23 “cases” grouped into 9 “situations” being investigated by the World Court. They are all in Africa.

The drumbeat of imminent collapse until today was that the Court is prejudiced, perhaps racist. But with South Africa’s move today, that changed however subtly:

“There is a subculture in global politics that say some are equal but not equal to others, a ‘holy cow’ culture in which the US and other human rights violators are untouchable yet African nations are subjected to the rule of these ‘holy cows’,” writes South African businessman Bo Mbindwane in support of his country’s move to withdraw.

This, now, is the newer theme African proponents are making to leave the Court. No longer is it that the Court is racist, but that the creators of The Court — the U.S. principal among them — have refused to join and are therefore immune to its powers.

Yet America can still – and has – through its power on the Security Council referred cases to The Court, even though America cannot be prosecuted by The Court.

To me this is a much more powerful argument than that The Court is racist. The reason that Africa is exclusive to ICC prosecutions is in part because so many African countries were courageous joining. Other human rights violators like Mynamar, Syria and Laos didn’t join.

And that’s a terrible weakness of The Court: it can only go after its own, and its own are not necessarily the worst offenders.

Nascent institutions like this – even without the wholesale endorsement of all the world’s powers – may prosper when the world has a single focus on challenges likes 9/11 or the Great Recession.

Remove these overriding global horrors and space is created for more political introspection, and I think that’s what’s happening, now. Albeit that The Levant is an abject mess, worldwide the stresses of imminent hunger and economic collapse — or world war — are absent for the first time in nearly a generation.

In this qualitative and relative calm of finally surviving, the grievances of inequalities grow clearer, whether that be inequality of income, gender or … World Court jurisdiction. It’s no longer a matter of just grasping to survive, but demanding to be equal.

It’s not a done deal, yet. The call to leave The Court has come from the ANC not the government of South Africa, but as you can tell I fear this time the drumbeat means war.

Columbus or Indigenous Peoples Day

Columbus or Indigenous Peoples Day

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Today is the Columbus Day federal holiday in the United States.

“Columbus Day” puzzles many African readers of this blog. After all, Columbus didn’t land in America but in the West Indies. So it seems a fickle holiday in a country that’s known to not have many.

Many Americans are as puzzled as Africans and recently a movement among larger American cities is growing that would change “Columbus Day” to “Indigenuous Peoples Day.”

The idea began in Berkeley, California, where it has been the law since 1992. But there it sat unmoving anyone until just a few years ago when Sacramento, then Minneapolis and then the largest city so far, Seattle, also adopted the new orientation.

Today, regardless of what they day is called where an American lives, almost all government services are suspended, schools are closed, all banks in all states must be closed, and there’s no mail delivery. The holiday was proclaimed in 1937 on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus into the Americas. So this year, with so much of the federal government also closed, America is really chilling out.

Many large cities, including New York, have huge parades. Over the years the celebration has taken on an ethnic tone, celebrating Italian heritage.

Many of us take short road trips to country house BnB’s and tiny towns further north to enjoy the fall colors, because the holiday traditionally marks the end of summer and warm fall, and the start of dreary fall and frigid winter.

Queen to Pawn! Check!

Queen to Pawn! Check!

by Arusha ♥ 4 Comments

queenofivoryThe high profile arrest of a Chinese woman for ivory trading in Tanzania means a lot more than just the arrest of a Chinese woman for ivory trading in Tanzania.

Her arrest is proof that the ruling party in power in Tanzania fears losing the national elections in two weeks. Probably even worse is the naivete of conservation organization’s glee at her capture:

Yesterday conservation groups went ape over the arrest of Yang Feng Glan, the 67-year old vice president of the Tanzania China-Africa business council, a resident of Tanzania since the mid 1970s.

The Elephant Action League calls her the ‘Queen of Ivory:’

“She has been trafficking ivory since at least 2006, working with the most high-ranking poachers in the country and in the region.”

Glan is not new to Tanzanians and clearly her crimes have been known for some time. Remarkable, isn’t it, that the police superintendent announced yesterday that she’s confessed to everything.

This means that she won’t be presenting a defense. There will not be lawyers to assist her in allocating the blame. She won’t be “naming names.”

It was all her fault, all 30,000 elephants or so, all hundreds of thousands of tons of ivory, all immigration and customs passes … she did it all herself, and she’s confessed.

No need to question any officials now who might have approved such important matters as unmarked cargo bins, or police who never checked those giant warehouses down by the dock, or those wildlife officials who left butchered elephants lying in the veld to be investigated not by forensic detectives but striped hyaenas. They’re all off the hook, now. Fang confessed and so the issue of elephant poaching and the illegal ivory trade…

… won’t disrupt the upcoming October 25 national elections.

And I’ll bet my bottom dollar that Mrs. Fang won’t be sentenced for her confessed crimes before the elections are over, and that the complexity of the deals over her “confession” will haunt politicians on all sides for years to come.

These idiot politicians are making deals with the devil, and I can’t wait to see how it pans out. For the time being, of course, all they can see are the ballot boxes on October 25.

That’s what I think is the key to all of this. The party in power is in trouble for the first time since independence. One of the greatest bastions of support for the opposition is in the country’s north where elephant populations are safe and well protected, where tourism is so important.

Last month a hastily arranged seminar by local conservationists and journalists followed the ruling party’s promise to double tourism revenue if elected.

It received wide publicity and finally elevated conservation and the elephant problem into the national consciousness.

“I need conservation and the future of tourism to be part of election issues,” said the Director of the Serengeti Preservation Foundation (SPF), Meyasi Mollel.

“Conservation is a key issue in Tanzania, because the country’s economy is entirely based on natural resources. So for political parties to ignore conservation is a grave mistake,” Adam Ihucha, a brave journalist for the East African, said while keynoting the conference.

Note that the ruling party recently banned then unbanned his publication.

So in the last month as the election heats up, so finally did the conservation crisis in the country. That crisis is nearly entirely composed of the decimation of elephants in the center of the country, which is a stronghold of the ruling party.

If the ruling party loses the center of the country, it loses the election.

So the Queen of Ivory is nicely behind bars, has confessed, and guess what, won’t have to say a single other thing.

At least not until October 26.

South Africa Eats the U.S.

South Africa Eats the U.S.

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

SouthAfricaEatsUSWhat has fewer points than a South African samoosa?

For the record, a South African samoosa has three points.

Answer: The U.S. Rugby team in its match with South Africa. Lost 64-0.

Yesterday’s qualifying match for the Rugby World Cup followed America’s loss to Samoa. Not getting any points in a World Cup qualifying match is something normally left to the Maldives and East Timor. Should America even be playing rugby?

Rugby is South Africa’s soul game. They have always been so much better than most of the rest of the world.

I remember a number of years ago when Kathleen and I were taking our children on a “Garden Route” trip east of Cape Town. I didn’t know that weekend the South Africans were playing the New Zealanders in rugby.

Instead, I presumed the end of the world was beginning. We were the only car on several different highways. There was no one at a gas station to pay for fuel. When with trepidation we arrived our hotel in Outdshoorn, the doors were open to reception, but there was no one to be seen.

Everyone was plastered in some room to a TV.

When commenting on the pitiful U.S. team’s performance, South Africans were polite about the trouncing they gave the U.S.

“Finance cannot be attracted away from the big American sports,” one of South Africa’s leading sports commentators, Mike Greenaway, explains to his puzzled South African readership.

Isn’t the U.S. first in everything? Especially when brute force is a critical component? Greenaway points out that the U.S. Eagles Rugby team isn’t really a team at all, composed of part-timers, most of whom are foreigners living in the United States:

“Samoans, Tongans, Englishmen, Irishmen and a South African by the name of Kruger. Niku Kruger went to Pretoria Boys’ High and is the son of Afrikaans actor Ben Kruger, who is still performing in South Africa.”

So really, who cares? Would you believe that the Wall Street Journal cares?

“… it takes about four seconds of watching rugby to grow tantalized with the possibilities, to realize this game is right in the U.S. wheelhouse. It requires speed and strength and creativity and a love of watching massive bodies bang into each other at high speeds.”

Massive bodies banging into each other at high speeds is actually how I view rugby. True, there are many serious injuries in American football, but I think American football is a much better expression of team strength and physical prowess.

I’m not alone.

The Brain Injury Law Center reports that the incidence of a head injury is four times greater in rugby than in American football.

The NFL played a game in London Sunday and about three-quarters of the stadium was filled. This is the fourth year since the NFL began trying to develop interest in the sport in Europe, and … well, it’s not going too well.

Rugby still reigns supreme as the attack dog sport in the UK as it is in South Africa. Unlike South Africa which would rather prostrate itself before the World Court for past apartheid crimes than submit itself to scrutiny of the health of rugby playing, the UK is beginning to recognize the beastliness of rugby:

“In rugby it is spinal injuries from scrums that are the most dangerous (110 rugby players in Britain have been paralysed by playing the game),” London’s Guardian newspaper reports.

I don’t like boxing, either. I rather think Nascar hedonistic sado-masochism. Actually, a lot of sports that tear children away from childhood to produce the world’s best tennis players and ice skater twirlers … well, that seems rather bad, too.

So that leaves football as a moral sport of supreme power choreographed with some of the most beautiful and precise moves the human body can achieve.

So come on you beasty Boks, I’d like to see you take on my Packers!

Breaking Up is Hard To Do

Breaking Up is Hard To Do

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

LowassaandPMMany believe Tanzania’s elections in three weeks will be violent. I’m not so sure.

The contest between the presidential candidate of the party that has ruled Tanzania since inception, John Magufuli, and the first viable challenger ever, Edward Lowassa, is in many ways a setup for violence.

Lowassa is a former prime minister in the ruling party and until July one of its elites. Many expected he would be anointed the new presidential candidate, including himself. When Magufuli was chosen instead, Lowassa united four opposition parties that had been at each others’ throats for decades and became the single candidate of the opposition.

Lowassa is not a nice guy. Whether or not he really was responsible for one of the most scandalous incidents in his country, he was fully aware of it.

Yet he has the support of many in Tanzania who are fed up with the one-party state and – at least in situ – he represents the first real break with that ideology.

The only reason I concede violence is plausible is because of the recent emergence of militias to “protect” the different party candidates.

“Tanzania has been one of Africa’s most peaceful countries …and has been regarded … as one of the continent’s strongest democracies. A close and hotly contested election might challenge both of those assumptions,” writes former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, Johnnie Carson.

The respected and somewhat leftist U.S. media magazine, The Hill, carried an op-ed recently from the chairman of the ruling Tanzanian party that upped the tone for the election, claiming “If [opposition candidate] Lowassa … wins, then the country stands to become a new front for terrorists.”

Many of us felt The Hill was irresponsible publishing the piece, because the assertion is so ridiculous it exceeds even those of Donald Trump.

Nathalie Arnold Koenings, an African anthropologist writing in African Arguments, dismissed the article as a purely an incendiary swipe at the opposition, countering:

“As to the possibility of violence erupting in the upcoming elections, if there is extremism to fear in Tanzania it may be that of a ruling party bent on suppressing the political will of its citizens.”

Carson elaborates: “Questions have also been raised about… replac[ing] the very experienced Director of Elections with a novice election chief, who might be more easily manipulated.”

Hilary Matfess of the National Defense University listed a series of recent government actions suggesting a premeditated stricture of the political life in the country, including clamps on freedom of the press and use of the internet, to give the ruling party an unfair advantage.

It’s the militias which are troubling. Zanzibar has often erupted in violence after national elections, in part because of the gunshot marriage between it and the then country of Tanganyika that formed the current Tanzania, and for more contemporary reasons that pit its near universally Muslim population against mainland Tanzania’s Christians.

But never before have opposition parties or candidates on the mainland organized their own protective militias.

It reeks of Kenya’s 2007 violence following its closely contested election.

Nevertheless, I still see a peaceful outcome for several reasons:

First, I don’t think the opposition will win. Much of the current party‘s power is certain to be eroded as many opposition members are elected to Parliament, as I’m certain they will be. But the main party is so entrenched in most of mainland Tanzania, it’s hard to see the only national candidate, the President, coming from other than the ruling party.

Second, I think a lot of Tanzanians – like me – are disappointed that for the first chance ever to oust the main party, the leader assuming the charge was until July a part of the main party! And probably as corrupt as all the others he now contests.

So what would really change?

So ennui and apathy may result in a low turnout, favoring the party in power.

But stay tuned. I’ll stay on top of it.