The progressive social movement’s success worldwide continues to befuddle me when set against so many political setbacks, and no better example than what happened in Kenya over the weekend.
Three Kenyan Anglican clerics fired by the church for being gay were reinstated with back pay and damages by a Kenyan court that also enforces Kenyan anti-gay laws.
On the eve of Eid-Al-Adha, Kenya’s highest court today ruled that schools can’t prohibit girl students from wearing Muslim attire, including the hajib.
Kenya now stands in marked contrast to Europe led by France and Belgium which have banned religious attire in public areas. The U.S. sides with Kenya. So who is right?
Haunted by doping, having to bribe to get their uniforms then left with no tickets home, the Kenyan Olympic team placed 15th in the overall medal list – the best ever for an African country.
And par for the Olympics. I can’t understand how anyone places a thread of trust in any privately organized world athletic organization.
Obama is trying to be the Great Mediator in Africa having failed in America. Don’t hold your breath.
John Kerry is completing a whirlwind tour of Africa, today, dolling out money like carnival candy and telling the McCoys and Hatfields that they’ll be a lot more if they have Thanksgiving dinner together.
Kerry’s bitter sweet journey carries cargoes of carrots and sticks.
We were among 30 cars on one side of the Mara river – there were another 30 on the opposite side.
I don’t like crowds in the wilderness, and I avoid them pretty successfully. But this is an exception. If you want to see one of the most dramatic still truly wild components of the world’s last great animal migration, you’re going to be part of a crowd.
True, there are plenty of river crossings on the great migration route that don’t draw crowds, and I’ve enjoyed them. But the classic and most dramatic crossings are in the Mara, and there are only a couple dozen favorite crossing spots.
Unlike so many animals, wildebeest are very finicky eaters. All they will consumer is grass. Grass comes after rain. The wilde’s instinct forces them to “follow the rains,” which generally recede over the course of the year in a northwesterly direction onto Lake Victoria.
Before reaching the Mara, the great herds have crossed at least two and sometimes four or five other great rivers as they move north.
The Mara is the last and furthest northern river before the herds are turned back by developed farm fields, towns and villages. Here they cluster and start moving backwards and forwards across the river seemingly without purpose. The instinct to move is too great, and if the movement is a rebound, so be it.
This has been the case for at least the last half century. Before that they may have continued all the way to the Lake before turning around. The boundary is not natural in the wild sense, of course, and it results in the mass confusion, exceptional drama and photogenic scenes that have become the trademark of the great migration.
A bit further south the herds’ decisions to move back and forth across rivers is governed much more by actual rain. Particularly now with climate change, the intense micro-climates may mean a healthy rainfall a few miles to the north, or a drought, a few miles to the south.
I’ve often watched the herds move north out of Tanzania to Kenya right on schedule in June, but then return months early in August because of early, heavy rains in northern Tanzania.
Keep in mind that a wildlife documentary is simply an edited version of what the Miller Family saw this morning in person. I remember encountering a BBC/Nova film crew once shooting a river crossing here in the Mara, and there were at least 20 vehicles just in their team.
We were watching a newborn zebra being defended by its mom against a hyaena when we spotted massive clouds of dust several miles away above the river.
Our camp driver, of course, knew exactly what “favorite crossing place” was near the dust and we headed for it posthaste. Wilde will jump 20 feet into the river and then try (usually unsuccessfully) to scale the other side of a 20-foot canyon, but they prefer easier entries and exits, often dry river washes merging with the great Mara. There aren’t many, and everyone knows them.
To reach this crossing place, we had to drive through the herds, and that in itself was fabulous. I estimated between 3500-4500 in this particular group. They were racing in multiple files and converging on a plateau just above the crossing point.
We slowed down among their incessant blarting mixed with the anxious barking of the zebra. Clearly this group was getting psyched up to cross!
By the time we got to the crossing point most of the prime spaces were already taken by other cars. But our driver knew the river so well that we went down river all of a few hundred meters where it turned and found a beautiful viewing area right there.
Across the river were four giant crocs, pulled out onto the sun with bellies already bulging with previous crossings.
So then, like everyone, else, we just waited.
After about an hour, all of a sudden, we were surrounded by wilde! They came so fast the dust came after them! This wasn’t the crossing place, this was our secret viewing area, and it was very rocky and steep at the river’s edge.
Then almost as quickly, they moved away back into the riverine forest. For some reason, they weren’t going down the “favorite crossing place.”
After about another half hour some cars began to leave. We thought we would, too, but just as the engine turned on we could see upriver that the first of the group had reached the river’s edge at the end of the wash.
At first they didn’t seem to do anything but grow in numbers and drink the water. After about five minutes, though, the pressure of the racing wilde behind them forced them to start the swim across.
They walked until the depth of the river forced them to swim, and wilde do this by successive leaping. Water was splashing all of the place. I watched a croc leap out and grab the side of one wilde. It was soon mayhem. Six or seven abreast were swimming across, many getting drowned by others behind them, some actually swimming back across the river!
A half hour later it was all over. A very small group of about 25 wilde for some reason remained on the wash and didn’t cross, but the bulk had move onto the other side and were congregating on the plains and starting to graze.
We found a nice place much further down the river to set up our wonderful breakfast, but the river runs fast here, and numerous “floaters” or dead wildebeest passed by us.
The great migration is like one little muscle in Mother Earth. It’s a reflection of the ecological heritage that makes our planet so awesome. Until we free ourselves completely of our biological roots, we need to truly experience the power of our organic world so that we can concede that we’re only one piece in an infinite universe of life, beholden to the great migration as the wildebeest are to the rains.
Lest this be too technical for those unfamiliar with Africa, this morning is a mess.
“Chaos has been unleashed and we all will be poorer,” writes a commentator this morning in the respected journal, African Arguments.
Many former British colonies in Africa are forcing calm while quietly panicking about Brexit, especially South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
I can’t see this getting better. Even if the hoped for British pivot occurs and somehow Article 50 is never triggered, the genie is out of the bottle. Economies don’t pause for politicians to catch their breath.
The biggest single concern with South Africa and Kenya is the plummeting pound. Kenya is also worried that a new British executive will be less disposed to foreign aid. Nigeria’s concern is the increased dollar which puts downwards pressure on oil prices, Nigeria’s lifeblood. South Africa suffered a 1.2% retraction last quarter and Brexit is likely now to dump them into a full blown recession.
There is even widespread concern that money transfers will be more difficult, something that will effect all aspects of business and trade.
By 0730cdt this morning all the indicators were moving in terrible directions. Former African colonies’ currencies usually move with the pound. Although weaker currencies are often spun positively for manufactured exports, most former colonies import more than they export so their economies become stressed when their currency weakens.
Add to this a 10% drop in the price of oil (as of 0730 cdt) and Britain’s former colonies are in a terrible mess this morning.
“Politicians paint a very beautiful picture of a very bad idea just to ascend to power,” writes one Kenyan about Brexit, today. “They dupe [the electorate] into voting for them, knowing very well that whatever they are promising cannot work even under any circumstance. That is exactly what Cameron did.”
Most Americans have never traveled to Kenya or South Africa or Nigeria, much less even the UK. Our economy remains the largest on earth so likely the one that can be least hurt by any other. But we are not immune to the effects of Brexit, and I mean that as much politically as economically.
Every Britain should have known what a disaster this would be, but their politicians duped them, to use the Kenyan’s words. The Leave Campaigners promised all sorts of things that they are today retracting like yo-yos, essentially admitting lying.
But there were even double-dupes like Cameron bringing up the whole idea then trying to turn it back; and triple-dupes like Corbyn only half-heartedly campaigning against the Leave because he really wants it.
In the end the electorate was only given one choice: leave or not. I think what the electorate manifest was a protest vote, a No vote, a vote against politics, against the status quo, because like many of us around the world, that’s the only power we’ve been left by our hoarding, power hungry politicians.
The most terrifying lesson to learn from this mess is that Donald Trump might win.
Britain’s dominant tribe, the Conservatives, has been hoisted by its own petard. Long live the Queen.
As Shakespeare might say they’ve undone themselves. Kikuyu Kenyans, American Republicans, Le Pen Français and ANC South Africans better take a very hard look, because tribalism simply won’t work in today’s world.
British conservatives preached a stew of tribal policies like austerity, go-slow immigration, social services cutbacks, retraction from the EU and now they’ve eaten it. So they’re dying.
Tribalism is a cancerous phenomenon: once it takes hold it’s hard to stop. It grows much faster than other social phenomena like welfare or desegregation. It forces those around it to also become tribal, even against the better judgment.
Brexit likely means that Scotland will secede. Conservative movements throughout Europe get an enormous boost. This morning tribalism is all powerful.
One of the first western anthropologists to study tribalism was Margaret Mead, and one of her best current disciples is the Australian, Roger Sandall.
Sandall was intellectually marginalized by a now going-out-of-date notion that ethnic identity is preeminent in any social situation. He suffered unfair criticism that he’s racist.
But Sandall’s interpretation of Mead is perfect for what happened in Britain yesterday as well as the growing sentiment worldwide to retract into small social units and “go it alone.”
(Make America Great Again means building walls, voiding trade agreements and impeding immigration.)
Sandall wrote that Margaret Mead understood “culture [is] more valuable than its people… that the intellectual features of tribalism cannot be defended; that its moral code leaves much to be desired; that its economic assumptions obstruct and stultify.”
Tribalism is Africa’s greatest single plight, and I’m constantly inspired by how vigorously young Africans try to shake it but to date simply haven’t succeeded. The trend is there, however, and I’m convinced in another generation or two Africa will have become one of the least tribal areas on earth.
Then why this regression in our (theoretically more developed) world?
People are fed up. But they don’t yet understand – as the Brit does this morning – that the wealth, power and glory that they strived for all their lives is exactly why they’re in the state they’re in today. There just isn’t enough wealth, power and glory to go around satisfactorily. Everybody can’t have it.
So when some Joe gets his hands on it, he has to do everything possible to keep it from the rest of us.
One of Joe’s most successful ways of doing this is to flaunt his wealth, power and glory, to convince us nincompoops that we can all be like him if we just do what he says.
And what he says in clever ways secures his wealth, power and glory at the expense of us ever being able to achieve it. He convinces us to act, to vote, against our own self interest.
That’s lying. That leads to a whole new set of techniques to make us think it isn’t lying, or that lying doesn’t matter.
So against simple commonsense, straight-forward grammar and very complex economic data, the poor British sot just chose to make his life infinitely worse.
That’s too bad. But it could be good for Kikuyu Kenyans, American Republicans, Le Pen Français and ANC South Africans. If the pound tumbles quickly enough there might be time enough to witness the British sot getting sotter before these others start to destroy themselves, too.
Ultimately tribalism won’t work. Mead and Sandall are correct. The requiem for British conservatism is now our formal example. American Republicans might be the next.
Today perfectly demonstrates how America helps lead Africa out of the ignominy of racism and bigotry.
Africa often moves with about a ten to fifteen year lock-step delay to America’s own progress on cultural rights. Today is the 40th anniversary of the Soweto uprising that began the last great offensive against apartheid. Twelve years earlier America adopted the powerful Civil Rights Act after a decade of protests.
Today the LGBT community in Kenya lost their first high court battle against the country’s anti-gay laws, yet the very fact it reached the court indicates that LGBT community’s growing influence. Consider how fast the LGBT movement’s successes have occurred here.
In fact cultural changes throughout much of Africa are happening with even greater speed than they did in America, because much of emerging modern Africa is hardly a few generations into self-governance.
It’s Youth Day in South Africa. The moniker honors the mostly primary and secondary school students who 40 years ago marched in protest to new apartheid laws and got massacred by South African police.
The horror of the mass slaughter of hundreds of children was immediately transmitted around the world with the photo taken by photojournalist Sam Nzima showing the dying student child, Hector Pieterson, being carried from the protests.
Each time I take a group to South Africa we visit the incredibly moving Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto. As in the Apartheid Museum many displays are mostly black-and-white, such an appropriate adjective for the times and the struggles which ended them.
The Soweto protests attacked an apartheid regulation requiring non-white South Africans to be taught in Afrikaans rather than English or any of the native languages.
Many protested – as so well documented in the Hector Pieterson Museum – for very practical reasons: Soon to graduate students had spent their lives being taught in English but were suddenly confronted with final exams in Afrikaans.
Today quite a few South Africans are remarking on this Youth Day that it is the youth, again, who are integral in the country’s current protests, this time like 40 years ago, fired by controversies over the language of public education.
Most of the horrible apartheid laws were passed in the 1950s to virtually no opposition from the outside world. The end of World War II gave Afrikaans leaders sufficient cover to legislate a horribly repressive regime.
But as the anti-apartheid movement grew within South Africa, there was a wicked resurgence of new laws and regulations that greatly tightened the noose around South Africa’s majority non-white population.
Yet even by 1976 South Africa remained under the public radar of most of the world. The western world was in the depths of the Cold War and South Africa was considered the lone and essential partner in a continent increasingly socialistic.
But the Soweto protests began the galvanization process worldwide. European sanctions came not too long afterwards, and President Reagan suffered a humiliating defeat when Congress overrode his veto of American sanctions against the apartheid regime.
So it was the Soweto protests more than any previous event that moved the anti-apartheid forward.
Equality irrespective of race is a human value that because of our Civil War probably has more currency in American society than any other. The battle never ends, of course. The racist backlash in our current political discourse is proof enough of that, and the current student protests in South Africa are as well.
But for as long as we uphold and protect these civil rights, the unthinkable murder of Hector Pieterson will not have been in vain.
Richard Leakey’s conservation organization just announced that “poaching rates [in Kenya] have decreased dramatically” and that “Kenya’s elephant populations are now on the rise.”
This is, of course, good news but the May 25 press release was bereft of references or statistics. “Dramatically” needs to be substantiated, and frankly what I intuit here is that wildlife organizations are resyncing to reality: e.g., poaching was never as “dramatic” as had been suggested.
The group, Wildlife Direct, is one of the most respected in Africa. Leakey’s involvement goes way back to when he was the Wildlife Czar for the country in 1989 when poaching really was out of control. More than almost any other individual in Africa, he was instrumental in stopping that horrendous decimation of elephant.
He was integrally involved in Kenya’s collaboration with the U.S. prior to that which created the CITES treaty, which remains the mechanism worldwide for regulating the conservation of endangered species.
The recent Wildlife Direct report that monitored the creation, passage and implementation of wildlife laws in Kenya gives very positive ratings to the system in Kenya now used to prevent poaching.
It points out that many more persons are being prosecuted, including major black marketeer distributors, and that many more have gone to jail and that these represent “significant improvements.”
The group actually credits itself as well, claiming that its courtroom monitoring team is the principal motivation (for the courts, anyway) to implement the laws and put poachers behind bars.
But the battle’s not over, the group points out:
“The team of lawyers also warn that endemic delays and corruption mean that too many criminals are still walking free from the courts… The undermining of wildlife trials by corruption is the elephant in the room.
“Numerous cases are failing due to … the loss of evidence, witnesses fatigue, loss of files, wrong charges, wrongful conclusions, and illegal penalties. What’s worse is that there are no consequences for those involved in undermining these cases.”
Those criticisms apply to almost everything prosecuted in the Kenyan courts. Anyone remember why the President and Vice President of Kenya were let off their International Criminal Court prosecution for crimes against humanity? Loss of evidence, loss even of witnesses.
Wildlife Direct’s actions continue the long and uninterrupted integrity of Leakey’s involvement in all aspects of his native country, and bravo to that.
But when the stats arrive as they must, and as they trickle in from elsewhere in Africa, I think we’ll learn a couple very important things:
First, poaching in the last few years – as horrible as it is – was never as bad as we were told. I wonder how many media groups are publishing this current finding, that things are improving, compared to a couple years ago when anecdotal statistics were used to suggest an apocalyptic decline in elephants.
Second, as the individual stories of poachers get reported — as journalists study those who are prosecuted and jailed — I think we’ll learn that most poachers are ad hoc individuals just trying to survive: Criminals, if you will, forced almost against their will into illegal activity simply to get food and provide for their families.
Poaching is not cut-and-dried, and now we’re learning, it’s not even well documented.
How do we get rid of bribing? We get rid of tipping. Use your cell phone!
Bribing is a universal, world-wide phenomenon … sometimes called tipping. Africans have been unfairly cited by westerners all my life for bribing while it’s actually they who bribe ten times more each day than an African ever could.
We sugarcoat a lot by calling it tipping: Journeymen’s gifts at Christmas, an apple for the teacher, flowers on Secretary’s Day, or how about those popcorn baskets to truculent vendors at the end of the year or Godiva candies to past clients?
“Expressing our thanks,” replaces decent pay and benefits, or put another way, ensures there isn’t decent pay or benefits.
Social media powered by cell phones is getting rid of bribery … and tipping … in two ways. In Nairobi as in New York, Uber and Yelp and a dozen other media sites are bringing sanity back into service, while mass demonstrations are sealing the deal.
Big tippers get cabs in Manhattan. I spoke to a cabbie recently in Brooklyn who said he can spot a big tipper across the Hudson. Their jacket is unbuttoned. They’re looking uptown even if they want to cut a hard right just ahead and go downtown. They step out into the traffic lanes. He said sometimes they even wave dollar bills in the air.
Same in Dar-es-Salaam or Lusaka. Look rich, ooze currency, and you’ll get a better deal in the end. At least until … Uber.
No charade. No cash? To comply with the reality that a lot of Africans don’t own credit cards, Uber now takes cash there! But… no tip! Often, no wait.
Big restaurant tippers tend to be loyal customers. Tipping levels often were the best rating restaurants had … at least as far as the owners were concerned. No more. TripAdvisor be damned. Looking for the best grub in Joburg? Go to yelp.
In Kenya they’re falling all over themselves to get the Yelp franchise… stay tuned.
There is no question that this is grass roots change and that the cell phone facilitates it. You can’t really optimize either Uber or Yelp without a cell phone at the time you need their advice and service.
But cell phones are working from the top, too.
Kenyan truckers are among the best paid, best educated and roughest individuals on earth. They often speak softly but could crush you with their thumb. They have to be this way in order to bring food into war zones or plastic pipe into a desert without gas stations for 300 miles.
It’s not a happy life, though. One of my top guys in Nairobi started as a trucker. It’s how he got his capital to buy his first vehicles. But he hesitates speaking about those days the same way a cousin I have who was a PT boat captain in Vietnam hesitates speaking about the war.
About the only thing that can disrupt a Kenyan trucker is … Kenyan police.
Kenyan police are generally fatter and less muscular, so in a brawl they’d lose. But they have power and saw horses that stop traffic. Ostensibly this is to check the safety of the vehicles: the tires, mufflers, etc. In reality it’s the way they get paid.
Truckers call these “road-block” taxes.
So to start the week in Kenya, today, thanks to Kenyans’ massive mobile phone networks, the entire country is coming to a halt as truckers turn off the engine on major highways.
The actual demonstration was prompted not by police bribes, but by the deaths of 37 truckers carrying cargo into troubled South Sudan. Truckers want Kenyan military escorts.
But they also want the end of road-block taxes.
So happy start of the week, Kenya! Make sure your phone is charged!
Increasingly worried by Trump, Africans are beginning to explain his errant behavior in terms of all of America, not just one crazy individual.
“We thank madman Trump,” writes Nairobi journalist Charles Obbo, editor of the influential Mail & Guardian. “He has opened the eyes of many.”
What Obbo and others are arguing is that Trump is not just … Trump, but an embodiment of America.
“He has millions of passionate followers… If Trump were an African politician, the international community would be threatening him with the International Criminal Court. The national integrity commission would be investigating him for hate speech.
“But in the US, the leader of the free world, he has cowed many. Some people, even very rich ones, are afraid of him and speak of the real estate tycoon anonymously.”
Obbo concludes: “Trump is beginning to suggest to us that what we see in the West is … the acquiescence of the public” to his madness.
Trump has been particularly hard on Kenya. Last fall in Iowa he called the Kenyan Beijing Olympic winners “cheats and con-men.”
When Kenyan president Kenyatta went to Paris to negotiate the climate deal, Trump claimed the president’s main purpose in going was to shop at Paris’ malls.
He so infuriated Kenyans that they created the #SomeoneTellTrump hashtag, and one of Kenya’s most successful businessmen is currently marketing toilet paper with Trump’s photograph on it.
It’s hardly only the Kenyans who are worried.
“So it is time to start thinking the unthinkable,” a South African journalist writes from Washington. “IT IS now entirely conceivable that Donald Trump will be the US’s next president.”
Obbo and others worry that someone like Trump is completely capable of ignoring all the institutions of democracy intended to check the crazy.
“The idea that institutions in developed countries work to prevent dictators from abusing power and becoming dictators might be a lie.”
Why do they think this way?
Because hardly 6 months ago the country’s most astute analysts broke into hysterical laughter on a Sunday TV talk show when a Congressman from Minnesota suggested Trump would be the Republican candidate.
For my entire life time The West purported to know what was best for Africa. Is that remotely possible when The West clearly doesn’t even know what’s best for itself?
Kenya did better yesterday. Three people were killed in demonstrations near Lake Victoria. There was teargas in Nairobi; part of the city closed down in the afternoon, but the police in Nairobi seemed more restrained.
Kenya’s problem is tribalism. Forget about all the momentary issues (the current is over legitimacy of the IEBC). Get to the core: the battle between the Kikuyu and Luo.
Tribalism doesn’t lend itself to modern social engineering. It’s ingrained and stubborn, like a bad habit. It’s not easy to shake.
Yet more than any other African country in history, Kenya has the potential to resolve this incredibly difficult problem.
Kenya is the one country in the large quarter of the continent known as eastern equatorial Africa that is most advanced: most educated, most worldly and most integrated into the world community.
If “Kenya can do it,” then maybe Tanzania and Uganda can, too. If Kenya can’t do it, then a lot of us are going become terribly pessimistic about eastern Africa.
Kenya stands with only two other countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Nigeria and South Africa, where social and political conditions are similar.
It’s probably the most junior member of those three countries, and that’s the reason right now democracy is so violent. Remember that Nigeria was an extremely violent place starting with the civil war in Biafra, and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa was far more violent than outsiders remember.
The question for Kenya is whether it will emerge from this period as Nigeria and South Africa did from theirs, more democratic and free.
(Please don’t exaggerate me: the problems in Nigeria are enormous and South Africa is currently flirting with ascension into a fantasy world, but by the measures of sub-Saharan Africa, they are both solidly democratic and stable.)
Rwanda went through the most catastrophic trial ever in this regards in 1994. A millennia of bitter rivalry between Hutu and Watutsi turned into genocide.
Rwanda came out squeaky clean, a horribly totalitarian state where you really can leave your car doors unlocked on the streets of the capital, but you dare not even whisper a criticism of the president. In cases like this, only one tribe can enforce peace. The Watutsis rule. The Hutus live peaceably.
It’s hard to criticize Rwandans for this after what they went through, but it really could have been different: Nigeria – at least its eastern parts – had just as awful a history as Rwanda, but they didn’t choose the level of authoritarian rule that exists today in Rwanda. They don’t imprison every journalist, politician or blogger who dares express an opposite point of view.
Freedom is unequivocal. By its very nature it allows violence; some would argue it foments violence. It’s a terrible trade-off that we who live in more mature societies don’t have to live with: our predecessors did that.
So we sound rather solicitous when we tell others to suffer the moment for a better future.
None of us want the Rwandan solution for Kenya, yet that is exactly the potential direction if the current period through next year’s elections doesn’t work itself out in a peaceful way.
Read the thousands of comments on the Facebook edition of my blogs and you’ll see the incredible rancor and hate of tribalism in Kenya. You’ll understand what an enormous task is presented Kenya.
Kikuyu vs Luo. What’s so interesting is that it once was Kikuyu vs. Kalenjin, but in a masterful political move last election, the Kikuyu and Kalenjin formed a coalition to defeat … the Luo.
This is a powerful suggestion that politics might be as powerful as tribalism. So let’s hope that politics this time can pull out another win.
The African diaspora in North America is a vital component of today’s modern African societies, and Africans are now worried that Trump could change that.
The possibility that a large number of Americans will emigrate to Canada in reaction to a Trump presidency is not a sarcastic joke, but a realistic threat to many Africans.
Concerned that Americans will be able to ‘break the queue’ getting residency rights to Canada, Africans worry they’ll be displaced from the pipeline.
Sunday, Nairobi’s main Sunday newspaper published a page 3 story assuring concerned Kenyans this was probably not the case.
Discounting several new websites in the States like “Maple Match“ the article interviewed “businessman Neil Katz,” a well-known agent who helps Kenyans obtain dual citizenship, for his take on the possibility that ‘Americans will flee to Canada.’
Katz told the Daily Nation, “Americans opposed to Trump hardly meet the UN definition of a refugee.”
Katz assured the interviewer that Canadians would not alter their policies for fleeing Americans, although he conceded that the Canadian “break the queue” loophole allows anyone with $100,000 to invest to go to the head of the line.
This could be someone who uses that money to buy a home, and this is the type of “mass emigration” that worries the Kenyans.
Diasporas are something quite foreign to Americans, since as of yet there really isn’t an American diaspora anywhere. In contrast, the 80,000 Kenyans, 40,000 Ethiopians and 120,000 Nigerians with residency in the U.S. are integral components to their homeland’s economy.
Jobs in North America pay roughly ten times the wage for a similar job in their African homelands, and many more jobs are available in North America than Africa.
Many of the jobs taken in North America by African immigrants are in nursing, home care and maintenance for which there aren’t enough American applicants. But there are also many very successful business people.
These folks create networks that stretch back home, bringing everything from high tech startups to simple manufacturing industry skills to these rapidly emerging economies.
Expecting the “largest increase in housing values” for years, one of American’s favorite Canadian holiday destinations, Cape Breton, is enjoying a remarkable housing boom.
A controversial Cape Breton website explicitly inviting Americans to emigrate was widely circulated in February, and has toned down in reaction to concerns like those expressed this Sunday in Kenya. It now emphasizes that it welcomes everyone around the world, not just those fleeing Trump.
It remains, however, the perfect example as to why foreigners considering emigrating to Canada are worried that Americans will displace them.
The average housing price in Canada is just over $80,000. The average home in Cape Breton is 50% higher, reflecting a genteel, modern and up-scale community. But that price is actually well below what most retirees in America considering emigration already hold as equity in their current home in the States.
The $100,000 threshold to break the queue in Canada is thus no big deal at all for these retiree ”asylum” seekers.
Note that a similar move by the well-off, older middle and upper class occurred in the Weimar Republic, not long before a populist became the leader of Germany.
If the Kenyan police don’t clean up their act for next Monday’s protests, tourists should pull out.
Yesterday’s police brutality in Kenya is unacceptable. Property can be protected and citizens safeguarded without beating to death someone who has fallen helplessly onto the street. It’s a despicable, cancerous mentality.
The police action yesterday was worse than in Ferguson or Baltimore or anywhere in the U.S. It reminds me of the late sixties during the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights’ demonstrations.
According to Kenya’s respected religious leaders a “volatile political environment” now threatens to undo the country.
Societies go through these difficult times. I’m very proud of having participated in the protests of the sixties and the result of those protests makes me even prouder and made my country stronger. I wish the Kenyan protesters well.
But now as then, in Kenya as worldwide, police action must be kept just and measured.
Kenya’s main opposition party, Cord, announced some time ago that every Monday until the August-2017 national elections, it would stage a demonstration outside the Nairobi downtown offices of the IEBC, the government entity that oversees elections. Cord opposes the current commissioners who it claims are biased against them.
Until the last several weeks these marches attracted hardly a few dozen people. They grew with the police action that clobbered them to a pulp and choked the city with tear gas.
Political leaders made an absolutely wrong decision to meet these rather benign protests with such force. Only now – possibly too late – are the leaders acknowledging negotiations over the IEBC should begin.
But riots are popping up all over the country now: in Kisumu, in the Kibera slum … even shutting down Nairobi university over an issue as pitiful as whether the students should be allowed to cook in their dorms.
Seemingly random police gunfire even broke a window in the government run coffee exchange office.
Yesterday the Nairobi mayor demanded the prosecution of police caught acting mercilessly brutal on hundreds of cameras and phones.
It’s too late to return to the simple issues that triggered all of these demonstrations. The central issue now is police brutality.
Good politicians and astute public leaders don’t allow issues to fester like this. Kenyan leaders did, and they’re now boxing themselves into a situation of relying more and more on the police.
Most of Kenya’s leaders are old, perhaps too old and arthritic to act with the deliberation and speed now needed to restrain the police.
If they don’t, the situation will spiral out of control. No amount of new police violence will stop it.
The news is not good out of Kenya. Not totally worrisome yet but troubling.
Several public demonstrations which I see as markers of robust democracy have been met with too much government force. We all know the counter reactions this brings, and that’s what worries me.
If the Kenyan authorities don’t soften their act soon, all the progress Kenya has made in the last 12-15 months will be lost.
It began last month with university demonstrations. In the last few days two completely separate incidents, one involving a protest of the election commission and another regarding the arrest of a Muslim cleric both degenerated into a real mess when the police unnecessarily fired teargas, shot into the crowds and starting beating protesters.
We know what using too much force does: spawns more violence. This morning more protests continued in the streets of Nairobi and so far, anyway, the police are behaving themselves.
The issues aren’t really the issue. University demonstrations are chronic through Africa, protests over election officials seem endless, and the mounting religious tensions all over the continent are leading to religious demonstrations.
Nothing’s wrong with all of that. Healthy protest is a reflection of a healthy democracy and is supposed to generate a mediation or negotiation process that leads to lessening tensions.
But in Kenya recently, just the opposite is happening.
The government is clamping down like never before. Police action is brutal. At least five protesters in the demonstration against the arrest of the Muslim cleric were killed by police. Photographs suggest some police state in creation.
In the case of the protests over the election commission, there were less than 80 or 90 people protesting, almost the same number of police who confronted them.
That one is particularly troubling as it could be harbinger for the 2017 national elections, and even more poignant because among those tear-gassed was Raila Odinga, the leader of the opposition.
Almost simultaneously other small violent protests erupted in other parts of western Kenya where Odinga commands the polity.
Even a hint of upcoming election violence could doom all of Kenya’s progress in the last few years.
Kenya has enjoyed remarkable peace over the last year compared to the terrorist inflicted violence that destroyed tourism several years ago. Its economy is good and the people seem prosperous.
It’s all on the table, now, and it’s all a simple matter of how to deal with opposition.
The answer is not police batons and tear gas.