America aches as China & Africa soar!

America aches as China & Africa soar!

While America groans about the economy, frenzied business in Nairobi on Wednesday.
I know it’s hard for my current and past East Africa safari clients to think of that culture as competitive with our own, but watch out, America, you’re missing the obvious. And by the way, how did you celebrate the Chinese National Day yesterday?

The development in the underdeveloped world is staggering. It’s as staggering as America’s faltering. Once at the top of every metric, today America health care is last among the most developed countries, consistently behind all other developed countries in education, and a continuing slip for more than a decade in personal incomes.

Our consumption increases faster than our production. Bad dynamic. We need to sheath our pride and look to Kenya and China.

These two countries in my life time were once considered abjectly impoverished and underdeveloped. Today they are rocketing into the new world with a potential impact much greater than America’s.

Yesterday, Kenya celebrated the Chinese National Day with elaborate ceremonies in Nairobi. While America was congratulating itself on its constipated legislature passing a law that did little more than slap China on its wrist for currency manipulation, thousands of Kenyans attended a Chinese trade fair in Nairobi on Wednesday, wholesalers buying from manufacturers – it was a madhouse.

The wife of my transport manager in Arusha has a suddenly prosperous business selling Chinese textiles and clothing throughout Tanzania.

And China is getting deep oil, natural gas and precious minerals from areas in East Africa that North American companies abandoned about ten years ago, before China had developed the deep-earth technologies.

The lethargy in America today with local politics, the fatigue with a failing economy and the general overall cultural malaise is a disease of complacency and over confidence.

It’s this presumption that we were always TOP and always will be.

Wake up, America. One of the few metrics we continue to command is military spending and number of wars. And those of us with some experience in the outer world can only keep screaming about what we know: “Foreigners are doing better!” Much better. So it isn’t a problem with the world; it’s a problem with America.

Should we care?

Of course I’m happy for East Africa. But I’m American. I’m not chagrined that I’m being bettered, I’m astounded that we refuse to learn from abroad. That we continue to shoot ourselves in the foot, rather than dare to step forward into a new world.

And that new world is one of Chinas and Kenyas, and if we’re to cure our malaise, we need to look to them.

Electing a Serengeti Highway Auction

Electing a Serengeti Highway Auction

Will this man if elected determine the highway route?
The imminent election of a formerly disgraced Tanzanian politician may determine the route of the controversial Serengeti Highway.

Tanzania’s disgraced former Prime Minister launched his political comeback yesterday by vowing to push through the Serengeti highway despite environmental objections.

But in typical Tanzania PoliSpeak, Lowassa left open which route he supports. I think the man is on track to become the final power broker for how the highway is built and that he’s essentially going to put the route up for international auction.

As with everything in Tanzanian politics, a lot of reading between the lines is necessary. There is a possibility that Edward Lowassa is just a loose canon trying to avenge his disgrace, being carefully rehabilitated by power elites, or just blowing populist hot air.

Lowassa’s flamboyant political rally in Mto-wa-Mbu, specifically where the highway is scheduled to begin, came only one month before the national election on October 31. He is running on a small, opposition party ticket (Chama cha Demokrasia na Maendeleo, “Chadema”) which currently has only 6 of the 295-seats in Parliament and no national officials.

(Chadema may be the biggest threat to the ruling autocracy in Tanzania, although it’s hard to see enough victories in Parliament to impact the balance of power.)

Lowassa cannot run on the ruling party ticket, because he was thrown out in 2008. At the time he was the second most powerful man in Tanzania, its prime minister, but he got mired in one too many scandals.

He resigned as Prime Minister on February 7, 2008, after being implicated in a corrupt deal with the Houston energy firm, Richmond Development, where it was widely speculated he received enormous kickbacks for electrical services that were never delivered.

His resignation and that of other implicated ministers which immediately followed saved him from any formal investigation into the extent of criminality.

Making the Serengeti Highway a primary campaign position allies him with his former friend and now President, Jakaya Kikwete, who is also the man who forced his resignation in 2008.

But unlike Kikwete, he hasn’t specified which route — north through the Serengeti or south outside animal reserves — he favors. And listening to him yesterday at his rally, you’d think the issue wasn’t whether to lay the tarmac north or south, but whether to build a highway for the common man or preserve lions for tourists to see.

“Environmental activism should change. [Activists] should not be more concerned by the welfare of the animals than that of our people who need development,” Lowassa shouted to the cheering crowd.

Lowassa began his career as the area’s police boss, and he remains very popular locally so is likely to win. His opponent is an evangelical minister whose main campaign issue is that the election, scheduled for October 31, should not be held on the Sabbath.

Lowassa is playing both ends of the field. He can win the election and still embrace either the northern or southern route.

And then, he will become the most prominent politician whose constituency is closest to the actual highway area. He will become crucial in any negotiations down the line.

I think this is what Lowassa is doing, sneaking his way into an issue that not even the ruling elite can control, one that is certain to ensure his political rehabilitation on the national level.

He’ll give Kikwete an acceptable path towards changing his own position, which is that the northern route is the best one, while ingratiating himself into the political elite once again.

Lowassa will be up for the highest bid. That’s the nature of the guy. So NGOs, start the fund-raising, because Lowassa’s victory will be a sure sign that the highway’s route is up for auction.

White Man Poaches

White Man Poaches

Manie du Plessis, mastermind of grand poaching syndicate.
Eleven professional WHITE people have been arrested and charged with rhino poaching in South Africa. The outcry from their colleagues is deafening and revealing. The story is fascinating.

I’ve written continuously that during hard economic times, poaching increases. Poaching is a relatively easy occupation, a job, a gig, when none others are available. The market is always there: in Yemen, especially, but also in Asia.

The mind set of those who buy poached ivory or poached rhino horn or poached bear feet is pretty simple: these are animals, which like trees to make our houses, are to be used by man. The final consumer feels no remorse and as evidenced by the many street window apothecaries in Kuala Lumpur, does not consider it a crime.

Quite to the contrary, the seller of poached animal products sincerely believes in their medicinal or symbolic value, and often claims that the legal restrictions strongest in the areas where the animal is actually killed are affronts by arrogant cultures.

And the archetypal culprit who kills the animal is usually an individual African down on his luck.

Well, guess what. There’s more to it. What wildlife conservationists have been telling us for years was underscored last week when 11 professional South Africans including veterinarians, professionally licensed hunters and respected local community officials were indicted for a huge poaching ring that South African police spokesman Vishnu Naidoo said was linked to “hundreds of rhino poaching incidents.”

The eleven respected wildlife professionals arrested in a multi-agency sting in South Africa last week included game farmer, Dawie Groenewald; his wife, Sariette; licensed veterinarian, Karel Toed and his wife, Maria Toed; licensed veterinarian, Maine du Plessis; and professional hunters, Tollman Room Erasmus, Dallied Gouws, Nordus Rossouw, Leon van der Merwe and Jacobus Marthinus Pronk; and a game farm employee, Paul Matoromela.

Naidoo told the press Thursday that the suspects are believed to be the “masterminds” behind South Africa’s poaching scourge, which has claimed the lives of 210 rhinos already this year.

White rhinos are flourishing in South Africa. There are many scientists, in fact, who claim there are too many and that culling should be considered in some places. (This in contrast to black rhino which remain seriously endangered. The horns, however, are not differentiated on the black market.)

CITES is the international treaty designed to stop such poaching, and it does a pretty good job. Its mandate, too, is quite simple. Have enough countries in the world sign a treaty that forbids the trade of certain animals across its borders.

That suffocates the market and means that the animal killer becomes much less important than the syndicate of criminals that distributes the animal product as contraband.

That’s why CITES is so important. The many parts of the distribution chain become criminalized, and ultimately when all parts particularly in the Far East are aggressively pursued by legal authorities, then the market dries up, and killing the animal becomes pointless.

Because killing the animal is the easiest thing to do.

A lot has been written about South Africa’s tourist boom this year, linked to the successful World Cup. But the truth is that when football enthusiasts are removed from the numbers, we’re still at revenue levels around 2004, 20% below where they were in 2007.

Game farms in South Africa, from where this particular atrocity was apparently managed, are kind of down on their luck at the moment. Farming a protected animal and butchering it for the black market was an opportunity these “professionals” felt they couldn’t pass up.

We don’t know if these 11 Afrikaners had lost their insurance, or couldn’t pay their kids’ college tuition, or had farms being foreclosed. I don’t know if any situation of this sort would garner them sympathy from you, any more than the poor African in Tanzania who poaches a wildebeest for food might.

That is the other side of the market, the darker one. The side that drives people to the crime. The side that is much harder to remedy.

The other fascinating part of this story is the local reaction. I am privy to an exchange of private emails among professionals in South Africa that I consider somewhat appalling. And there is plenty in the public blogosphere you can google.

Other … whites .. are reacting with ridiculous fury, as if whites would never do such a thing. As if poaching like this is something only the uncivilized black would do. Here is a piece from just such an email I received this weekend:

“Hello —– ,
I am APPALLED, SHOCKED, DEVASTATED, DISAPPOINTED, BLOODY ANGRY!!!!!!! How DARE these people, in positions of trust and responsibility, and WORST OF ALL, our own people, from whom we would LEAST EXPECT this uttterly disgusting and traitorous behaviour.”

The presumption that the criminals involved in poaching are not usually “our own people” unsheathes a terrible racism. It isn’t the animal killer who is most responsible. It is the transporter, contraband arranger and most guilty, the purchaser. These criminals have much more culture in common with Manie du Plessis than the unnamed black man in Tanzania.

And they are much more responsible for poaching in the first place.

Kudus to the South African police and wildlife agencies that managed this sting. Spread the world that poaching is on the rise and that aggressive police action worldwide is required. And most importantly:

Forget that these guys were white. And if you can’t, we’ve got a lot more blogs to write but it isn’t about poaching.

Let Africa Kill the Gays

Let Africa Kill the Gays

The puppet, David Bahati, and the puppeteer, Sen. Jim DeMint.
Can we not stop this insanity?
Polarization, craziness, lies near insanity does not a physical mark make. Until vigilantes bash heads in Cleveland and my safari clients are tortured in Ugandan prisons.

It hasn’t yet happened, but I have reason to worry. Yesterday, I blogged that we should take note of the violence occurring by Kenyan vigilantes as a trend developing here at home, and today we hear that the Ugandan MP promoting a bill to execute gays and imprison any who know of gays (including tourists) rigged his recent re-election.

David Bahati is the crazy, and the confident of President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, and “Christian brother” of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). Like so much vicious anger in the world, today, he’s the puppet of the American Christian Right.

His story, and his puppetry, is not news. Click here for a video condensing all the news in which he’s been involved for the last several years.

Basically, since our legion of crazy rightists has conceded they probably won’t be able to execute gays at home, they’ve decided to pour resources into Africa so it can be done, there.

If Bahati’s bill becomes law, and I have safari clients trekking gorillas in Bwindi National Forest (like I did last week), and those clients innocently remark about something gay-related, they could be arrested! And god (is there one?) forbid, if one of them mentions that he/she is gay, he/she could be arrested and executed!

And all of this, the polarization, craziness, lies near insanity, AND Cleveland vigilantes AND Ugandan homophobes all comes from the United States’ Christian Right, and pointedly, the “Family” who resides in “C Street” in D.C.

Bahati’s reelection was challenged by someone who was sane, Charles Musekura, who had strong support for a number of reasons not least of which is that most sane Ugandans don’t think you should execute gays!

But Bahati had the money. We can guess from where. And he had the tricks, too:

Michael Mubangizi, a respected reporter for the Ugandan Observer, reports that the recently concluded reelection campaigns including Bahati’s were rigged. They were rigged in quite simple ways. People were selling ballots that were then counted with names that didn’t exist. Up to 5,000 ballots illegitimate ballots may have helped to reelected Bahati.

Led by Sen. DeMint (R-SC), this “movement” that claims the moral high ground is one of the most evil social phenomenon ever seen in the world. I just can’t understand for the life of me why they are so prominent and hold so much power.

Just as I cannot understand why there are vigilantes in Cleveland.

But these machinations of hate are something that we must all try very hard to understand, whether in Cleveland or Uganda. They aren’t just wrong, they’re crazy. Their perpetrators aren’t going to be convinced by logical argument.

And as evidenced by Bahati in his recent reelection, nothing legal or sane alone is going to stop them.

Here is a list of the most prominent C Street players. Unless we stop them, this insanity will continue:

Chuck Colson, Watergate felon
Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI)
Rep. Chuck Pickering (formerly R-MS)
Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA)
Rep. Heath Shuler (D-NC)
Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA)
Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA)
Rep. Mike McIntyre (D-NC)
Rep. Zach Wamp (R-TN)
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)
Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Sen. John Ensign (R-NV)
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AK)
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY)
Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS)
Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK)

Whose Law? Yours or Mine?

Whose Law? Yours or Mine?

Everywhere in the world crazies are sprouting from the misery of the economic downturn. And we should take note particularly with what’s happening in Kenya.

Kenya may be the most dynamic emerging society in the world. It ended a mini-revolution with an imaginative coalition between radically different sides, then passed a new, modern constitution that in my opinion is an universal model for morality, human rights and dignity.

These clarion democratic ideals have empowered even the weakest sections of its society, as they should. And the weakest sections of a Kenyan society are far weaker than here, for example!

We may have an embarrassing one out of six Americans in poverty but Kenya’s is much worse off. It’s likely closer to one out of two!

But poverty in Kenya is a strata quite different from in the U.S. A huge portion of that half of its population still lives relatively calmly in subsistence, not in dependence of society as American poor, do.

But a growing portion of Kenyan poor are amassing in bulging slums surroundings its cities. And in these cesspits of humanity, political awareness and higher education combine in volatile ways.

That was why there was such violence after the contested election of 2007, an election which pitted two very different men against one another. It is very fair to call that an election one of the poor against the rich.

(It is also why the resolution of that conflict was so astounding. Of all the opposites in society, none is as irreconcilable as rich vs. poor.)

Rich versus poor is a pretty simple concept. In Kenya, as this fire burned, it morphed into Luo versus Kikuyu, tribe against tribe. An economic controversy has all sorts of academic qualifiers. Ethnic ones don’t.

What was a panoply of issues with lots of gray between, became black and white. A rich man could argue that the poor will get richer faster if they let him get richer, first! And the poor could argue that their drain on society impedes the rapid growth enjoyed mostly by the rich. So each side is blurred. Each side attracts advocates from the other.

But you can’t change the way you’ve been born. A Luo can’t convince his neighbor the Kikuyu that they share physical genes. That battle was demarcated by god.

That hate is more than visceral, it’s innate.

And it has lead in Kenya to vigilante groups springing up throughout the country. This is now Kenya’s greatest social problem.

And when one vigilante group grows very powerful and successful, a remarkable transformation albeit transitory occurs: Society as a whole begins first to tolerate, then later, embrace the thugs. It’s so simple, so nice. No complicated qualifiers, just a mafia leader to tell us what to do.

Mungiki is Kenya’s mob. Born in the slums, its leaders now live in grand houses and control huge businesses. From time to time the government indicts them, or even brings them to trial, and most of the time juries find them guilty of nothing. It started as a Kikuyu-based vigilante group. But today it reins across different cities the way mobsters did in the first half of America’s 20th Century.

There are places in Kenya where it’s impossible to become an elected official without the support of the Mungiki. And you know what that means.

And there are more and more wannabees around the country. Two days ago in a remote area of western Kenya, far from Nairobi and the Mungiki and modern life, 50 youths calling themselves “Sungusungu” stormed a village and hacked to death four people, then trashed their homes.

Sungusungu claims it was avenging the recent murder of a Kenya Assemblies of God church pastor, Mr Michael Onchong’a Nyakundi.

Yes, religion is an easy infusion into these vigilante movements. Ever watch the movie where the mob leader regularly goes to mass?

Kenya has an advantage in this stage of its development that America didn’t have during the years of prohibition. It has more facts, more history, more outcomes that proved how counterproductive the mob was over the long run. Kenya knows from America’s history that vigilante society is self-destructive and ultimately puts itself out.

And while these may be somewhat illusive concepts, they’re real enough I believe to help Kenya get through this period faster than we did in America.

Oh. Did we get through them?

Safaris are getting expensive!

Safaris are getting expensive!

Will increasing safari costs scare away new visitors?
As if you didn’t already know, it’s official! This year Africa (Cape Town and Nairobi in particular) saw the highest hotel price increases in the world!

Last week the HPI Index was released by the UK company, Hotels.com. Their biannual report is one of the most accurate and heavily used in the industry.

Of the 15,750 locations surveyed, the Number One city with greatest increase in cost from last year to this was Cape Town (54%), the second was Shanghai, and the third was Nairobi (31%)!

What is even more telling is that both Cape Town and Nairobi are inching their way up into the top ten most expensive hotels in the world. Right now, Geneva holds that rank ($232), but Nairobi is $216 and Cape Town $180.

Overall, world prices have recovered only to where they were in 2004. They peaked in the third quarter of 2007, at that time 20% higher than 2004. World-wide, therefore, prices remain depressed by about 18% from before the economic downturn.

But not African cities! Why?

Cape Town’s answer is simple: the World Cup. Nairobi’s answer is more complicated but is basically two-fold: China and political stability.

China is investing so incredibly heavily in Kenya that it’s pushing up all prices related to visiting one of Kenya’s principal cities (Nairobi or Mombasa). You can’t build a road or drill an oil well without thousands often tens of thousands of builders and consultants that need a place to stay.

And a close second is the marvelous turnaround Kenya has pulled off in the political arena: a new constitution is in place. The city has attracted some of the world’s most prestigious world conferences as result, with tens of thousands of delegates.

This incredible spike in prices in these two African cities has elevated safari prices in the bush, but that seems counterproductive to me. Because occupancies in the bush are falling, after a short surge in 2009. Nevertheless, most properties in the bush have their offices if not sister properties in the city, and the effect was unstoppable.

My prediction isn’t rocket science. I think Cape Town will slip (there isn’t another World Cup coming into town) and Nairobi will stabilize but continue its slow growth upwards.

As for safari prices, I think they will start to disentangle themselves from the anomalies in their cities. 2011 will be a good year for safari vendors, but not as good as 2010, so I think we’ll start to see an end to increases if not actual drops in prices by the end of 2010.

For those of you thinking of going on safari, though, I’m not sure you’ll notice anything. In fact, American resellers increased their costs three or four times greater than the hotels in 2009. This is because they had so heavily discounted them during the economic downturn.

So for the end-consumer, I predict prices will remain the same. What we may see, though, is a return to the great last-minute deals that characterized 2008 and 2009. These were often restricted to same company safaris or very specific lengths of stay, but if you could tolerate the lack of flexibility, it often meant savings of up to a third.

These were heavily booked especially by veteran safari travelers, visitors who had already been introduced to the safari world and knew what they liked and didn’t. So if you’re one of those, and capable of going within a month or two of an announced deal, keep that computer internet engine fired up!

Our Arthritic Fingers are Still Crossed

Our Arthritic Fingers are Still Crossed

Salva Kiir practicing for an election he has waited for for 27 years.
The years and years of violence, genocide, child soldiers and poverty in the midst of the world’s greatest riches may be coming to an end in The Sudan, even as new obstacles presented themselves this week.

Against all odds and every expert’s prediction, the beleaguered and troubled Sudan, Africa’s largest country and guardian of its greatest length of Nile, agreed nearly five years ago to begin a peace process that should end in a few months.

That final of hundreds of steps and missteps is a national referendum that will allow the non-Arab south of the country to secede. And with it goes 80% of Sudan’s enormous and mostly untapped oil reserves.

Who on earth would have thought that the recalcitrant government of Khartoum, the one which is headed by the only sitting world leader indicted by The Hague for war crimes against humanity, the man who cannot travel anywhere without being arrested, has agreed to excise four-fifths of his nation’s wealth?

The answer is not simple, but the simplest way to convey its myriad of complications is that believe it or not, Gen. Omar al-Bashir finally concluded (as half of his life passed before him) that not to do so would cost him greater than trying to keep it.

Patient world diplomacy, patient sanctions changed this dictator’s mind.

At least until last week.

As we race towards a finish line on this generational marathon, Bashir’s government is stalling. That doesn’t strike me as very odd. Imagine having agreed to settle a class action suit against your drug company by giving 80% of it away. It’s a rather tough decision to come to, and once made, there’s going to be a number of second thoughts.

No one’s taking any chances, though. Next week at the UN one of the few meetings that President Obama will hold, with the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, are two high ranking Sudanese officials. (They can’t meet with Bashir, because if he stepped foot in the U.S. he would be arrested with an international court warrant.)

Headlines around the world are calling this “Obama’s rescue” and in a sense, I can understand the headline but I think it’s mostly opprobrium.

Patience is the key, patience even as the marathon comes to an end. And when it does, is there a possibility we could apply this masterful patience to places like, oh say, Afghanistan?

Friends Traveling with Friends

Friends Traveling with Friends

An unusual short Saturday blog, just a bit off topic. But yesterday I began to wonder if friends traveling with friends is everything it’s cut out to be.

For African tourism it seems absolutely essential to our survival! In fact, the idea of a “family trip” – now propagated throughout the industry – began in the 1970s with “family safaris.”

But yesterday as I was invited to a presentation at a local service organization of an African safari that one of the members took, I happened to have the most dissimulating thoughts.

Don’t we enjoy vacations in part because we can “get away?” And doesn’t “get away” mean from everything normal, all our normal responsibilities and social chores? Surely “getting away” doesn’t mean eating every single meal at the same table with someone important to your board or next fund raiser.

Or bringing along the kids that you had to kick out of bed for school and reprimand after their first drunk!

Or, for that matter, making sure that Mom or Dad eats a good enough breakfast.

This sounds heartless! It is! Personally, being a bonafide tour guide, there’s no vacation I can think of where I wouldn’t want my friends and family.

But not everyone is like that. Yesterday, I stood next to one of the nicest persons I’ve ever met, who with me was watching this wonderful presentation of a safari, in a packed room where we were just onlookers like everyone else.

And I remembered how “responsible” she had been during the trip to the group of friends she had organized. And I began to ask myself, Was that fair? Did she have any time at all to relax and absorb the wonder?

Saturday morning thoughts. Good with a strong cup of Kenyan tea.

Serengeti Highway Update

Serengeti Highway Update

Keep on trekkin, guys! Relief just over the next ridge!
Unfortunately the American zoo convention ending today in Houston will make no statement about the Serengeti highway, but other news is promising.

You can think of the zoos inaction in either of two ways: (1) this seemingly impressive group of American conservationists is just too amorphous and internally divisive to reach consensus on anything; or (2) like so much of America right now, doing nothing is the greatest achievement possible.

This is particularly true in light of the recent Nature article in which virtually every important researcher in the Serengeti signed on. This included the Americans George Schaller of the Bronx Zoo, Anna and father Richard Estes, Andrew Dobson of Princeton and the adopted American, Charles Folley. They were among 27 prestigious scientists who contributed to an article entitled, “Road will ruin Serengeti.”

And there’s more at home:

Tanzanian media, which while not government controlled is certainly government suppressed, has been growing increasingly bold in opposing the proposed construction.

Dar-es-Salaam’s largest newspaper, The Citizen, today reposted an old story about UNESCO considering withdrawing the Serengeti’s World Heritage status if the road is laid. What’s so interesting about this is that the paper got the permanent secretary, the career civil servant who heads Tanzania’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism, to lie … sort of.

While it takes reading between the lines, I’m absolutely certain this is what the article intended. Dr Ladislaus Komba told The Citizen that UNESCO had “suspended its warning” after being assured that new environmental studies would first be conducted.

That’s probably not true. At least UNESCO will not confirm its true. The last policy report focusing on the Serengeti issued by WHC can be read by clicking here and that was in 2003. At the recent meeting in Brasilia, there was resolution statement that is, indeed, a warning that policy could change if the road is built.

But The Citizen has unmasked Komba for inverting events. The Tanzanian government offer to make new environmental studies came well before the WHC conference in Brasilia last month, where all the news and hearsay, and “warning” was reported.

There has been no official suspension by WHC of that warning. In fact the warning warns they better make good on past promises, which include a better environmental study than currently on the table. So no official suspension of anything, therefore. And page one news in Tanzania, now.

There’s been a lot of dosie-dose going around the ridiculous presumption that forceful opposition will make the Tanzanian leadership close ranks on this issue. First of all, that just isn’t true. There has been much forceful opposition (double-down on that Nature article) from the getgo. And now the Kenyan Government itself has become involved.

The wimps have claimed the Kenyans have been silent, because they too didn’t want to upset the Tanzanians any further. Balderdash. The Kenyans have had other things filling their agenda… like a new constitutional referendum, a World Court investigation of their politicians and war on the border with Somalia.

So I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised when Komba’s counterpart in Kenya, Mohammed Wa-Mwachai, issued a statement last week that said in part, “We have instructed our Tanzanian High Commission to set the stage for negotiations [about the Serengeti highway] and we hope to come up with an amicable solution.”

The Kenyans, actually, have the most to lose. Their one great remaining game park with large herbivore herds roaming the plains is the Maasai Mara, the top of the Serengeti ecosystem. The reduction of the current 1+ million wildebeest to less than 300,000 as estimated by the Nature article would cripple Kenyan safari tourism.

So we’re sorry that the American zoos were composed mostly of invertebrates, but keep the pressure up. In sum, the news has been good!

Delta Force not Safe in Kenya

Delta Force not Safe in Kenya

Who looks tougher?
The U.S. still doesn’t think Kenya is safe enough to fly a plane into. And it’s probably right if it’s an American plane.

There was an enormous brouhaha in Kenya this week as Delta Airlines began service into its sixth African city, Monrovia (Liberia). Tempers are still flared from last year’s debacle when Delta canceled service into Nairobi two hours before the inaugural flight was set to take-off from Atlanta.

Delta canceled when the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) exercised its veto authority over Delta’s FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) license to operate into Kenya.

Delta wants to fly to Nairobi. It has been expanding rapidly into Africa and had scheduled service to begin to Nairobi on June 2, 2009. The champagne was stacked on tables, officials were planning to line up on the tarmac, Delta had given 26 free seats to a seventh grade choral group from Atlanta, and an entire Delta business with offices and employees had been set up in Nairobi.

Today the airline flies to seven cities in Africa: Liberia (Monrovia), Accra (Ghana), Abuja and Lagos (Nigeria), Cairo (Egypt) and Johannesburg (South Africa).

But the inaugural flight into Monrovia last week dumped a keg of petrol on the simmering emotions. Liberia is less than ten years out of a near apocalyptic civil war that slaughtered millions. Its leader at the time, Charles Taylor, is currently on trial in The Hague for crimes against humanity.

One of East Africa’s most respected blogs yesterday quoted an unnamed Kenyan government official as saying, “Did Obama’s father not come from here? What issues does he have with us? We even gave him a special paternal home attraction near Kisumu and for what – that we can be pushed around by them?”

But the fact remains – and I hate to say it – Nairobi airport security isn’t good, and there’s not going to be any flight from America until it is.

Nairobi is an essential market for European airlines, but passengers on British Airways and KLM actually march through security twice before boarding the plane. Both BA and KLM bring down their own machinery and security personnel from Europe, and all passengers after passing through the normal gate security supplied by Kenyan airport personnel, then pass through the individual airline security.

Those second levels are good. The irony, of course, is that this diminishes even further the quality of the Nairobi security. The Kenyan security personnel know it doesn’t matter what they do, that the real security comes later. And these folks rotate between the many other airlines in the airport, carrying their laissez-fare attitude with them.

So it’s sort of a death knoll repeated time and again as far as Delta is concerned. TSA will not accept the airline’s own efforts, as authorities in Britain and the Netherlands obviously do.

But there’s another angle to the story worth considering. I’ve talked to a few people in Kenya who believe despite the posturing, Kenyan officials are quite relieved Delta isn’t going to fly in. They argue that America is so hated in the Muslim world right now, and they point out that Kenya is on the edge of all the controversies.

Delta might attract terrorism in a way British Airways or KLM don’t.

Be that as it may, TSA played the trump. And TSA is only concerned with at-the-airport security. Homeland Security and the FAA are the agencies that could nix the deal for those more global issues. And right now, they have both given a pass to Delta to fly.

I wouldn’t expect a flight from America to Nairobi for a long, long time.

Steel for Anemones

Steel for Anemones

No more Lamu.
Yesterday the Kenyan government invited you to replace the heavenly treasure of Lamu Island with Africa’s largest port.

Lamu, an ancient Arab kingdom and now a quaint beach retreat on the north Kenyan coast will become Africa’s second largest port in less than ten years, and shortly after that, its largest.

The half dozen paradise islands, the nearly two thousand years of quiet peace, the cars-prohibited stone streets, the sweet halva whose recipes have been passed down for generations, the white sands and azure seas will be replaced by supertankers and deep-water berths.

Oil.

Where oh where is cold fusion?

In order to get your piece of the $16 billion Chinese building fund, you have until October 15 to submit bids for:
– dredging 60 miles of coral reefs;
– plowing away several hundred miles of gorgeous sand dunes; and
– staking out the 1,000-acre port facility.

You can then submit bids for:
– surveying 800 miles of high speed rail from Manda Bay on the mainland opposite Lamu Island to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Juba in the southern Sudan;

or, if you’d rather:
– help with Africa’s largest and longest steel pipeline from the oil fields of The Sudan to Lamu.

Any way you look at it, there’s probably a job in it for your nephew.

Those of us who have watched with wonder the highways being pasted down on our sleepy Africa over only the last few years have little doubt this will happen.

We also watch from afar – not far away in distance, but in memory already drowning in nostalgia.

We can’t stop this and shouldn’t. The government white paper Mr Cyrus Njiru, transport permanent secretary, presented last spring is no longer being scoffed at. There are real and live economists in the world who believe the development transforming Kenya will create Africa’s largest middle class in less than two decades.

Right now there is only one deep water port in all of the east side of this huge continent at Durban, South Africa. The three berths scheduled to come on line by 2020 in Lamu will place it second to Durban’s eight. But ten years later (2030), Lamu will grow from 3 berths to 16!

This is not just the mission statement of a not-for-profit that wants to end polio among bonobo. This is the life story of the Chinese, the society quickly becoming the biggest and richest on earth, but a society with little oil of its own.

It’s a race between Chinese consumption and laying pipe, concrete and rail through the deserts and war zones of Africa. And that’s a story in itself, because it might be the first time anyone’s done something that might really bring peace to this war ragged area.

Can you imagine ExxonMobile or preboom BP planning a project of such historic dimensions in Iraq or Afghanistan? Of course, not! In fact, they refused.

This area is probably much worse than Afghanistan or Iraq. The pipeline and edges of the highway will skirt into territory currently held by Al-Shabaab (Al Qaeda in Somalia). The pipeline will transect the oil fields that have contributed to more than a million deaths, many of them child soldiers, in The Sudan.

But the Chinese can’t say, I’m not sure this is safe enough. This is where they’ve found oil and where they control the rights.

I know this will happen. And I hope it brings peace. The Chinese – unlike the moralists in the west – can care less if women are stoned to death for burning the toast or ancient monuments are used to fill potholes. I’m not saying this offers a rosy picture of our next world society; it’s just the facts, ma’am. Chinese are the world’s ace capitalists.

They need oil. Fast.

Kenya’s figured that out and knows how to deliver.

For a price, of course. The price of prosperity. Less infant mortality for a few miles of paradisiacal coastline. Modern agricultural machinery to grow hybrid corn. Fiber optic cable to create Africa’s Bangalore.

Steel for anemones.

There will still be many wondrous places on the Kenyan coast. Just not Lamu, anymore.

How Much for Censorship?

How Much for Censorship?

Will the proposed censorship law destroy South Africa?
Crippled and cowering, the South African government is shifting its attention onto the country’s media after essentially provoking then losing the devastating public service strikes.

South Africa’s problem at the moment is that it’s exhausted. Can hardly blame it. The current political framework is less than 16 years old, it keeps chugging along with an economy about 20 times bigger than all the rest of the countries of Africa combined, the divisions between its rich and poor get larger, and a private capitalist economy keeps fighting with socialist leaders.

Everyone on all sides had hoped that a successful performance of the World Cup would somehow have made roses bloom and smog go away. To be sure, an unsuccessful performance would have been dire, and kudus to the government for taking the dare.

But attention to the World Cup was a distraction. Apartheid was the ace capitalist tool. By sequestering rights and setting boundaries among populations, markets were more easily defined then exploited. Wealth was much more easily created, albeit by excluding the majority.

So this is to be sure an incredibly daunting situation, now that the majority is in power, even while the majority knows it can’t just divide the existing wealth without so diluting the economy that it immediately evaporates into the African thin air.

So it’s understandable that this society wants to retire to bed with a plaster.

But a much more serious distraction than the World Cup is now besetting this enervated society.

Press Freedom.

Frankly, I think press freedom is overrated, today. Even in societies with thousands of years of censorship, like China, the news gets out. You simply can’t stop every cell phone, iPad and their partner electrons from zapping around.

Don’t get me wrong. When the battle lines are drawn, I fall squarely with the blobbers. (Sorry, is that blogger or blabber?) I’m just trying to point out that… it’s a distraction.

The proposed “Protection of Information Bill” has not yet passed South Africa’s parliament. It is a bill – with similarities to Kenya’s press control bill passed last year – that in its purest form would punish lying or revealing government secrets.

Of course, that’s the problem. One person’s lie is another’s truth. One person’s secret is another person’s redemption. This is not to say a lie is a truth, or that governments don’t have rights to secrets, or vice versa, just that there are a lot of malicious and ignorant people out there who believe lies and would misuse secrets.

And protection of their right to be stupid seems inseparable from pure freedom. And so it is.

South African leaders have been so quirky and so beleaguered by scandals that it’s quite clear that the law is as much intended to stop the whistle-blowing as it is to keep a fragile society from being rocked apart by lies or taken down by being stripped buck naked.

And so the fight begins anew with this session of Parliament. The original legislation has been softened, a “tribunal” of mediation proposed to define the parameters when previously it was the government itself, but Cry Freedom has lost its resonance.

It would be a mistake to pass this bill. And it may pass because the real problems besetting this ailing country seem insoluble, whereas controlling the press seems so much easier. Passing it is neither going to end press freedom in South Africa or stop journalists from finding out who Jacob Zuma’s next wife is.

South Africa didn’t fare very well in the actual World Cup matches. But it pulled off the event just fine.

Democracy or Bust!

Democracy or Bust!

Yusuf Makamba: No Democracy in Tanzania.
The Tanzanian election is less than two months away and is really heating up. Yesterday, debates were banned!

Opposition candidates are furious, of course, and blogs and articles in the U.S. especially are denouncing Tanzania’s authoritarianism as wrong and archaic. I agree, but I also wonder if the squeaky clean critics understand how they’ve contributed to the mess.

Yesterday’s announcement by the CCM secretary general, Mr Yusuf Makamba, that forbid all party candidates from debates (on television, but there weren’t any scheduled anywhere else) is certainly because the election is unexpectedly moving away from the party central command.

But another reason is more philosophical: the power of opposition in a modern world, the power to … lie.

There is no better example than here in the US of A. Death Panels. A President Born in Kenya. No Global Warming. Weapons of Mass Destruction. And to wit: The Millennium Trade between Burning the Quran and Moving The Mosque.

Lies foul up democracy. Everyone agrees lies are bad, but it’s the bad guys who profit from them. And in this viral internet age, lies can be assumed truths for critically long times. Sometimes, forever.. as those who embrace them lager themselves against being called out.

Democractic Lies gain special traction in bad times when people are so angry. Like now.

Maybe, just maybe America can weather this extreme moment of national lying. But a young and uneducated country like Tanzania maybe can’t.

It’s been a long while since Tanzania has had a real opposition; in fact, almost never. Following the surprise resignation of the country’s first president, Julius Nyerere, after more than twenty years in office in 1985 there was a spark of opposition. It faded quickly.

Today Yusuf’s CCM controls 206 of the 232 seats in Tanzania’s parliament. That’s almost 90%, and the renegades in opposition rarely make it through a single term.

But this time it’s different. Mostly because of what was left of an angered media the government partially shut down, a number of scandals have become public.

Every Tanzanian newspaper is read mostly online, so these scandals went viral:

There were lingering issues with the former attorney general’s million dollar kick back for arranging a missile defense system around Dar.
The Tourism Minister’s side business selling illegal ivory. The World Bank withdrew development funds and the specified reasons of corruption – usually kept under wraps – were leaked.

And local issues, including the proposed Serengeti highway in the north, became contentious issues between the party and opposition candidates.

It was only just before the last election that the Tanzanian government allowed opposition parties. Its legacy is a single-party state.

Yusuf holds as much power as any elected leader. A small cadre of mostly past elected leaders constitutes what we used to call the “central committee.” Yusuf and this group call virtually all the shots in Tanzania.

But democracy is pushing through this old style politics. I feel the internet age makes it inevitable.

It would just be helpful to emerging societies like Tanzania if the veterans of this age-old ideal of democracy had citizens who acted on The Truth, not The Lie.

Burn America! Burn!

Burn America! Burn!

Africa grows increasingly Muslim while America grows increasingly anti-Muslim. Two steps forward to an embrace, then a terrible slip. Here’s my depressed take.

This time Fox News and MSNBC all agree on the facts: Muslims from around the world have joined forces with Sarah Palin et al, or for that matter all right-minded religious persons, to condemn the planned burning of the Muslim holy book by a little church in hicksville Florida later this week.

My first impression is, ‘Jesus Christ! What the hell is going on, here?!”

Jesus would answer: ‘Books are made of paper. Paper comes from trees. We are losing forests in Africa at the rate of an entire country of Jamaica every year. Don’t waste paper.’

Or he might answer: ‘There’s a bigger fire in Afghanistan.’

Or: ‘One out of eight people in America, one out of three people in the world, is hungry right now.’

We are all of us roped into hyperbole and symbol kicking and screaming. There are no tangible issues, here: it’s not a matter of raising enough money for food or finding enough water to put out the fire of war; it’s an …idea.

And then, we grudgingly concede that the reason we want food or water, is to allow us to produce beautiful ideas. And since those of us without food or water can’t think, it’s left to us comfortable ones to think for them. So back to our ideas to govern a fair distribution of man’s food and water.

So my second, forcibly contained impression is: ‘Grow Up!’

Part of America, today, is like an aberrant teenager. Comfortable to the point of decadent, fearful that his/her relationships have the tensile strength of butter, this side of America is thrashing back against itself, against its own ignorance and frustration with not having allocated enough free time for homework.

Yet this part of America claims the moral high ground. In fact, America’s highest point is not Mt. McKinley, it’s the Christian Church. It reaches way up there. It says it touches God.

Well, it doesn’t.

“Such a despicable act of destroying something so holy to another’s faith can never and should never be construed as an act on behalf of Christ himself. In fact, I would attribute such an act as guided by none other than the Devil himself.”

This blog by an average Joe in the world’s largest Muslim country speaks the language of the American Right. And it throws that language right back into their pitiful little faces.

I am angry that once again we are distracted by nebulous ideas that have literally captured the world, even those that desperately need food and water. Some argue that these distractions are just entertainment, a necessary psychological relief from death and destruction.

No. They are the harbingers of death and destruction. Get a grip, America. Go back to your cookbooks and fix-it sheds. Make something. Stop destroying.

Call your zoo NOW!

Call your zoo NOW!

American zoos could help stop the Serengeti highway.
Call your zoo director now and tell him to “Support AZA’s resolution opposing the northern route for the Serengeti highway.”

Towards the end of this week, zoo directors, research coordinators and many other zoo employees will be heading to Houston for the annual zoo convention.

Concerned members are trying to get the momentum going to pass a resolution that will oppose the northern route currently staked out in the Serengeti for a highway. They are encountering great resistance among the membership.

This isn’t because there are members who support the highway, quite to the contrary. I doubt you would find a single AZA member who supports building the highway.

But it’s because the organization is so nebulous. The excuses I’ve heard range from “it’s not our responsibility” to “it will cause a backlash.” Both extremes are ridiculous if not arrogant and presume an unrealistic character of what AZA actually is.

Zoos, today, have morphed into wonderful institutions, so different from what they were when I was a kid. Many of my clients’ jaws drop when I say this, and I have to agree with them that watching a captive animal is not my cup of tea.

But putting animals on display, today, is becoming a secondary role for the best zoos. You would be very hard pressed not to find a zoo in America today, which doesn’t have something to do – some money invested – in the Serengeti.

Zoos are turning into wonderful research institutions. Their captive animal populations have become ever more precious as the world’s biodiversity crashes. They have unleashed a scientific potential that exists in their employees that is doing wonder in Africa.

So they, probably more than any other group of institutions, has a real and immediate interest in what happens in the Serengeti.

What is true is that their association isn’t a very good one. One part of their association, the SSP groups which manage marvelously the placement and movement of one captive animal with another across all zoo borders, is a work of genius. But, I’m afraid, that’s about it.

So it’s time they step up to the plate and make a concerted effort to evince their missions and their ideals. They must join a growing chorus of wildlife NGOs opposing the highway, and it will definitely help.

So please, call your zoo now. Ask to speak to the director, and you’ll likely be able to. If you can’t, get his email address after leaving a phone message.

We must stop this highway.

To read my other blogs about the highway, click below:

Tanzanian President reaffirms doing the project.

Tanzanian Minister of Tourism has questionable links to highway.

World Bank withdraws funding for Tanzanian road building.

Serengeti Highway Alert and summary.