Category: “Modern” Africa

Africa’s Process of Elimination

Africa’s Process of Elimination

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Three African despots down. Eleven to go. Here’s my list and predictions of when the last of the African dictators will fall.

Is it possible to think of a world without dictators? Can you imagine no Kim Jong Il, the “Stans” with free wifi elections, Hugo sent back to his banana farm or Ahmadinejad retired as a Fox News anchor?

I can’t speak about the rest of the world, but yes, I can imagine an Africa without ruthless despots, and Twevolution is knocking them down the continent from top to bottom. Only a few years ago I would have thought this impossible.

What’s happened in Africa started with this near obsessive demand for education, and over the years I was so critical of all sorts of different African forms of education for all sorts of different reasons. But that all seems so trivial, now. Whatever flawed system might have delivered it, delivered it it did. From Tanzania’s mandated free education in the early years of independence, to more sophisticated forms in Egypt, it worked.

I think I was too focused on what was being taught, the curriculum, rather than just the teaching itself. Teaching young kids – even when forced down their throats or teaching “incorrect” things – obviously instills curiosity.

In my life time, Africa has made the longest journey in education of any part of the world. When I began my career there in the early 1970s, there were vast portions of the continent that didn’t even know there was more to the universe than themselves.

My wife and I brought the first refrigerator into a remote part of western Kenya. Powered by natural gas, it nearly installed me as a local despot myself, or a shaman. When ice cubes were placed on the hands of children, they thought I was burning them to death.

How remarkably different that place in western Kenya is, today, with nascent global call centers and plans for a solar panel industry. What must grandma think?

The second critical component to today’s dramatic political change is the internet.

That’s twevolution. A young Kenyan woman started the whole social networking organization of civil disobedience when Kenya imploded after its last election. Ory Okolloh spearheaded the founding of Ushahidi and is now Google’s Policy Manager for Africa.

But while the internet may be the new “weapon” of revolutionary change, it had a much much greater impact much earlier. I remember before cheap cell phones and easy access to computers in Kenya the dozens and dozens of internet cafes in Nairobi.

And the kids were packed into them like sardines! What were they doing? Playing games? Looking for a job? Or, maybe, learning about the better things in the life… Or, maybe, about the gross injustices that divide the world’s privileged from those who serve the privileged?

There are still pretty bad guys in control of 11 of Africa’s 54 countries. I can imagine every one of them gone in the next decade.

They fall broadly into two categories: 7 zealots and 4 victims. The victims will fall last and perhaps not with more than a thud. But the zealots will tumble into al-Jazeera videos screaming.

The zealots are composed of widely different men whose path to tyranny was varied. But they now share a narcissistic certainty, a near divine belief, that they should rule no matter what. Their countries of Zimbabwe, Sudan, Gambia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea and Uganda are in various stages of abject servitude.

They are making themselves, their friends and families wealthy often with impunity at the expense of their citizens. They believe so much in their self-conceived right to rule that they often fail to hide their crimes, deluded that they can do no wrong, or perhaps that there are none remotely capable of challenging them.

How wrong Gadhafi was.

These guys go first.

The second batch I even find sympathy for, but they’re on the way out nonetheless. I call them victims because essentially they started as true liberators with extremely lofty ideals and plans, but they got ensnared in societies with the deepest ethnic divisions in the continent, and with a concomitant division of education.

Rwanda, Chad, Eritrea and Ethiopia are today headed by ruthless men who are nonetheless loved by a large segment of their population, the segment from which they were born.

They believe, quite possibly truthfully, that loosening the reigns of dictatorship will bring catastrophe on their entire country as it reverts to the chaos from which they long ago thought they liberated it. These victims at least ostensibly put “country” before “self.” The zealots don’t even have this as a pretense.

That’s Africa. Where education delivered the dreams and the internet facilitated revolutionary change. Will the rest of the world follow suit?

African Thinkers on OCWS

African Thinkers on OCWS

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

Clockwise from top left:

South African Richard Pithouse, Egyptian Gamal Nkrumah, Kenyan Rasna Warah, and Nigerian Rotimi Fasan

Occupy Wall Street is seen from Africa with a clarity we’re missing here at home. As Africa sees it, American youth’s frontal assault on unbridled capitalism is not going to end quietly.

The “unbridled” is an important distinction from the sister movement of the 1930s which gave rise to an unique version of South African communism that has continued as a political force, there, until today. Back then capitalism was going to fall lock, stock and wall safe. Not now.

South Africans, Nigerians, Egyptians and Kenyans in particular see capitalism as here to stay, but as something that needs to be hugely reigned in, and they see the OCWS as an indication it is really going to happen this time.

There have been only a few placards in Nairobi, and a greater but still smallish response in South Africa’s three main cities, but a massive amount of discussion in the media, there. I think one reason the demonstrations are smaller, is because relative unemployment has not spiked so high as it has here. The discontent relative to before is more intellectual than economic.

And African economies are much more regulated to begin with than ours.

Few Africans are in a better position to compare OCWS with the Arab Spring than Egyptian Gamal Nkrumah. The son of Africa’s first independent president (in Ghana), he married an Egyptian and has lived there permanently for a number of years. Recently Kkrumah asked about OCWS:

“Will this spontaneous outbreak of angst be hijacked and neutered or will it become, like the anger of Egyptians, the backbone of a new social contract?”

Nkrumah isn’t sure. He worries that the established financial system in America is just too hard to crack:

“The game of global finance is as dirty as hell… The international meltdown is a harsh indictment of the global financial system [but] bankers don’t seem to have a conscience and [all] the people [can do] is strike the fear of God into them.”

Nevertheless, my survey of African analysts suggests Nkrumah is in the minority. Although cautious and not suggesting our entire system is going to be revolutionized, most African analysts believe OCWS foreshadows significant change in America.

Everyone knows America with China at its heels controls the world economy. So what happens in America effects everyone, without exception. African’s interest is not simply academic. In fact what happens to the OCWS may have a more immediate effect on the everyday lives of Africans than it does on most Americans.

The very influential young thinktanker in South Africa, Richard Pithouse, has often written that the developing world has been consciously subordinated to us – the developed world – by a brute and unfair force called DEBT. Think about it. Where is most of the gold in the world? South Africa. Where is most of the oil?

But who controls the gold and the oil? Neither South Africans nor Nigerians, but Americans and Europeans.

“Debt,” Pithouse writes “became a key instrument through which the domination of the North was reasserted over the South.”

But that suffering has now come home to roost in America, according to Pithouse. The “servitude of the debtor is increasingly also the condition of [American] home-owners, students and others” who are being made to pay for the financial crisis created by their overlords, the bankers.

At last, Pithouse exclaims, OCWS in America is “a crucial realisation that for too long society has been subordinated to capital.”

“The prevailing capitalist economic system has clearly failed. It has deepened inequality between people and nations and caused much misery. Its excesses must be curbed,” writes , Kenyan analyst Rasna Warah in her article “Is the End of Global Capitalism Nigh?”

She answers her own question with a “Probably Not,” essentially what all the analysts in Africa concede. But she opines that as Africa emerges from the Arab Spring it will invent “a hybrid, more humane capitalist-cum-socialist system … where wealth will … be used to promote the greater good rather than individual and corporate interests.”

The Nigerian analyst and sometimes poet, Rotimi Fasan, compared Wall Street bankers to the worst of his own corrupt Nigerian autocrats. And like many, many writers throughout Africa he wonders if what is happening now “might be the beginning of the West’s version of … the Arab Spring.”

He refers to the west’s “crumbling economies” and cautions that “things may not take that shape immediately. But they might over time. Those who imagine that such eruptions could only happen in Africa of sit-tight leaders” do not fully understand what’s happening.

Which leads me to another dominant theme throughout all of Africa’s reflection on the protest:

Our media is minimizing the demonstrations.

“If these protests were occurring in any other part of the world, Western [media] would be describing them as an ‘American Spring’ that could topple a government,” Warah writes.

Warah and other Africans believe that the American media is part and parcel of the greater problem. “The large [American] media networks are part of the very corporate culture that the protesters are against,” Warah explains to her readers, so naturally they are minimizing the story.

Using last week’s celebrations of Martin Luther King, Pithouse claims that the famous statement that young blacks in the 1950s faced life “as a long and desolate corridor with no exit sign” applies to all American youth, today.

The South African continues: “The time when each generation could expect to live better than their parents has passed. Poverty is rushing into the suburbs. Young people live with their parents into their thirties. Most cannot afford university. Most of the rest leave it with an intolerable debt burden.”

And what does this mean about America to an educated outsider?

“The borders that surround the enclaves of global privilege are shrinking in from the nation state to surround private wealth.”

Wow. Poetic but how insightful. I think Pithouse reflects many many intellectuals from abroad, especially from developing and emerging, youthful nations. They no longer look to America for direction, but for lessons as to why things went so wrong.

“When some people are living like pigs and others have land lying fallow, it is easy enough to see what must be done,” Pithouse says. “But when some people are stuck in a desolate corridor with no exits signs and others have billions in hedge funds, derivatives and all the rest, it … is more complicated. You can’t occupy a hedge fund.”

But OCWS protestors understand that “finance capital is … the collective wealth of humanity. The money controlled by Wall Street was not generated by the unique brilliance, commitment to labour and willingness to assume risk on the part of the financial elite. It was generated by the wars in the Congo and Iraq. It comes from the mines in Johannesburg, the long labour of the men who worked those mines and the equally long labour of the women that kept the homes of the miners in the villages of the Eastern Cape. It comes from the dispossession, exploitation, work and creativity of people around the world.

“That wealth, which has been captured and made private, needs to be made public.”

Pithouse concludes and warns us directly, “When a new politics, a new willingness to resist emerges from the chrysalis of obedience, it will, blinking in the sun, confront the world with no guarantees.”

Beware the thinkers of Africa. They bear the truth of experience.

Styles for Africa

Styles for Africa

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

From Spring 2012 Fashion Shows in New York and Nairobi.
I’m so tired of the incessant charges some of my less appreciative readers make of my understanding of the facts that today I’ll tackle one of my most solid areas of understanding: men’s fashion. In Kenya and the U.S. On safari or off.

Over my many years as a guide, friends and family alike have remarked on one thing I always got right: how to dress for safari. (Admittedly I tend to keep things longer than perhaps I should. I have a blue sweater my mom knitted for me in 1984 that I wear constantly on safari.)

Fashion, particularly for safari, like a safari, is timeless. Safari fashion has not changed much over the years. It’s distinguished by one overriding characteristic reflecting the excitement and magic of safari traveling: it’s expensive.

But of course it must be useful, because a little slip here or there, one two few pockets on your vest, and poof, you’re dust! That’s the greater point: appropriateness costs more:

“Pack fashionable safari style clothing such as bikinis,” Safari Clothing Wear tells us, “because this may be the kind of weather they may probably find at any safari.”

It was so clever of Herb to wear his bikini on that walk with Maasai that we did several years ago. Herb’s confidence in his attire allowed him to actually lead the walk. He strut out ahead of Elai, the Maasai guide, qho was particularly envious, because his shuka was too loose and risked constantly falling off.

Ricky’s two-piece attracted more animals than we normally see in the Aberdares, and everyone was grateful for that!

What’s particularly interesting is that safari style clothing is directed more often to men than to women, and in my opinion, it’s about time. It was back in the 1990s when “being a dork” was about the most horrendous opprobrium anyone dare give you. That was when I decided that I should begin studying safari attire.

It was also when clothiers began concentrating most on men’s safari wear rather than women’s. The Marlboro Man was on his way back!

“The fashion of casual clothing is actually a more important issue for guys,” says SingleGuyAdvisor.com. “Think about it, when was the last time you thought, ‘That purse is ugly.’ But women look at men everyday and think, ‘He looks like a dork. I hope he doesn’t talk to me.’ And that dork might be you.”

Our information manual gives clear recommendations on what to wear on safari, and believe me, you won’t look like a dork!

Colors are very important on safari. Our manual explains how animals are often distracted by brightness coefficients that are too high. One of the problems we have in writing our information manual is that readers often aren’t intelligent enough to know what a brightness coefficient is.

Fortunately, this season is taken care of, because according to AskMen peach and pink are the colors of the season, both of which usually have a low brightness coefficient:

“Peach and pink project calming characteristics, as well as good health.”

And that’s what we need on safari above all, calmness and health.

What is most satisfying about “getting it right” when you, as a man, dress properly for safari, is that you are communing not just with nature, but with the long history of African peoples.

“Some popular types of earrings worn by men are studs and hoops made with metals like gold, platinum, copper, steel and silver,” writes the men’s fashion blogger Anamika S.

Go native.

“There are several references in the Bible also concerning earrings,” she continues. “Wearing earrings in one ear (on the right lobe) is considered as a mark of homosexuality. But this is just a misconception. There are also criminals using this misconception to misguide people. Some parents also think that wearing an earring means that person is becoming a hippie.”

We have banned both hippies and criminals from safari ever since 1983.

So as you can see, a man’s enjoyment on safari is linked part and parcel to his wardrobe. Above all don’t forget the two Bs you’ll need, dude: Binoculars and Bikinis.

As usual only Gary Larson tells the truth.

Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai

by Arusha ♥ 2 Comments

Wangari Maathai was known above all for planting trees, and last week she will be cremated since she insisted she not be buried in a wooden coffin. Few people carry such a presence in life that it continues into their death.

Many discounted Maathai’s 2004 Peace Prize as the Nobel Committee’s trend towards politicizing peace, for Maathai was an activist who often put her foot in her mouth, managed to personally offend almost all her opponents, and relentlessly represented the poor against the rich.

She framed the degradation of the global environment as a rich man’s plot against the poor man. But she never wavered in her beliefs, not when she was repeatedly beaten by police, divorced by her husband for being too “unwomanlike” or ultimately kicked out of government because she wouldn’t toe the party line.

She didn’t do well in groups. She was a lone, articulate and very powerful voice. I’ve read an astounding range of the number of trees that she’s been credited with having planted in East Africa, enough to reforest Jamaica. And clearly it was her voice, not her hands, which got each sprout into the ground.

Her foundations faltered and recovered, her short stint as a Member of Parliament caused more divisions in her own party and arguably jeopardized her own causes, and her inability to assume direction from others meant that journalists were cautious about interviewing her.

But her legacy will prove so much more powerful than her remarkably successful Nobel Price Peace life. She’s a woman in a Third World, so a soldier in the legion of radicals that in my life time has created more women in power proportionately in the Third World than in America. She was instrumental in creating the still debated section of the new Kenyan constitution that mandates a third of all elected officials be women.

She’s was scientist, a rare commodity among upcoming individuals in the Third World. She was divorced, something that condemns many Third World professional women to long if not eternal periods of ostracism. She was notably unstylish, wearing pseudo-traditional garments (mainly because they were green) that never fit well.

And most odd of all, she was green. Green is a concept in business and politics and society that is either a hedge or anathema to fast developing Third World governments that dare to cap their steam stacks or scrub their coal mines at the peril of inhibiting growth.

And that principal characteristic of Maathai places her allegiance squarely on the planet as a whole, not just Kenya. This anti-parochialism is far too lacking, today, in America and the rest of the developed world where more and more we see ourselves in smaller and smaller containers.

There’s no one in my sights who replaces Maathai. But my vision is restricted from outside her world. The final judgment of her legacy will be if others in Kenya and The Third World now assume her role. All of us worldwide should hope so.

Overland Samburu is OUTlawed

Overland Samburu is OUTlawed

by Arusha ♥ 3 Comments

Just as Russia’s leap into modernity created a powerful mafia, so it now appears that Kenya’s is doing the same. And for travelers this unfortunately means you can no longer travel overland north of Mt. Kenya.

I’ve found myself becoming peculiarly cautious in my golden years, so I reflect when I was a twenty-something year old gallivanting through Idi Amin’s very dangerous Uganda, or even daring to cross the Omo in the presence of desperate, armed thugs. So jungle on, you young’uns, but keep your eyes wide open.

And if you’re one of my clients, I’m afraid we’re staying clear. Of where? Of some of the finest wilderness left in Africa: Samburu and Laikipia, to be precise.

Now there’s still a very safe way to visit these places: fly in. If you fly into the reserve’s airstrip, I’m absolutely confident that you’ll be as safe as the Queen of England shopping at Harrods. But that spectacularly gorgeous drive off Mt. Kenya onto the Great Northern Frontier, or those amazing landscapes between Samburu and Laikipia seen only from the ground … it’s over. At least for the foreseeable future.

This past weekend saw one of the most spectacular, clearly well planned cattle raids ever seen in the history of Kenya. Seven people were killed and scores wounded and a thousand cattle whisked away.

It happened about 50 miles northeast of the Samburu National Park Archer’s Post gate, and about 35 miles north of the nearest lodge in Shaba National Park.

Now admittedly this particular raid is pretty far from tourist areas, but its size got me, and it’s one of a series of raids that’s been increasing in the area. Last year, for instance, there was a gun battle in broad daylight right on the bridge over the Ewaso Nyiro River at Archer’s Post.

This is the only way tourists can enter the area overland.

The weekend raid is about 20 miles from where Joy Adamson was killed by bandits more than three decades ago.

And that’s what gives me perspective. The “Northern Frontier” has always been a lawless land. It’s just too hard to patrol. I remember only 4 years ago having to charter an aircraft for a group of only 11 of us who wanted to drive all of 20 miles from Samburu to a lovely retreat in the Mathews Mountains, because bandits had been sighted on the road we were scheduled to drive.

But bandits stopping cars and taking an occasional goat are way different from what is being reported in today’s modernizing Kenya.

First of all, in order to steal 1000 head of cattle in a single raid, you’ve got to have someone who has a 1000 head of cattle to steal from. That never existed in the days of subsistence herding, where a man with 25 head was a royal chief.

Second, it’s rather hard to conceal 1000 cows. These guys had multiple trucks, using the new Chinese paved road built through the desert to whisk their booty into the markets down south.

According to the police commissioner of the area, law enforcement was outgunned. Shotguns against AK47s.

Recognizing this danger was coming, the Kenyan Government has been aggressively trying to disarm everyone in the area. But according to Member of Parliament from the area in which this giant raid occurred, Abdul Bahari (Isiolo South), “people in Samburu have not been disarmed and even if they have, we have not seen the effect as they seem to have guns during the raids.”

And playing to his constituency as I suppose he has to, a neighboring MP, Adan Keynan (Wajir West) continued during the press conference with a warning to the government.

“We’re giving them seven days, or else we’ll tell our people to protect themselves. We cannot be perpetually talking to a government that does not see, does not hear and does not sense the value of life,” said Mr Keynan.

The drought has something to do with this, of course. It makes the weak, weaker, and it makes the markets more ready to take on stolen goods.

And finally what concerns me most is that the old days’ criminals were very respectful of us tourists. Sometimes, it took a bribe, but nary a hair was mussed. I felt we were respected as distant foreigners interested in a distant land, and part of a movement that in the end everyone living in the area really gained from.

A thousand cattle is a hefty haul. You’d have to have a pretty good tourist season to reach that booty. So I just don’t want to be on that new Chinese road when these guys are in the midst of a heist.

This Just In!

This Just In!

by Arusha ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Here’s something really, really important, and I know you’ll think I’m being sarcastic but I’m not. Kenyan judges can’t wear wigs, anymore.

I think this is one of the most wonderful stories of the year.

Kenya has been undergoing a legal transformation the likes of which I really don’t think another country in the world in my life time has accomplished. After approving a new constitution a year ago, Parliament has been madly passing law after law to make the constitution real.

They’ve done away with numerous unnecessary civil servants in the old regime, consolidated the political boundaries of the country, enfranchised gays and other fringe cultures, mandated a third representation in Parliament by women … the list goes on and on.

I’m not saying that everything newly accomplished in this country born of corruption, tribalism and nepotism is beyond reproach, and this isn’t intended to survey the whole process. But I’m truly impressed by the creation of the new judiciary.

Kenya’s old judges were miserably corrupt. The recently appointed and approved judges to the new Supreme Court are mostly fabulous individuals, pretty free of political baggage and ideology. Oh were that day possible here at home!

As hard to believe as it might be, Kenya even considered chief justices that were not Kenyan! Good lord, can you imagine the U.S. considering some extraordinary foreign justice for a position of meter attendant?

And their approval by Parliament was not without a lot of grumbling and backdoors’ maneuvering mostly by one tribe claiming another tribe was not fairly represented. The appointees sat in the wings, like our own Presidential appointments waiting to be confirmed, just like our dozens of judicial appointees waiting for confirmation.

But unlike here at home, they have all been approved!

I’m not sure this is because the existing Members of Parliament have seen the light, or come round to “country first” or are just exhausted. But the bickering stopped, and these stellar and extraordinarily well qualified individuals have all taken their seats on the bench.

And the oft shouted warning by those who opposed them, that they would be massively disruptive to the current culture, legislating from the bench a cultural autocracy … well, these are among Chief Justice’s Willy Mutunga’s first decrees:

– No judge is to be addressed “My Lord” or “My Lady.”
From now on, it’s “Your Honor” or the Swahili version, “Mheshimiwa.”

– No wigs.
Finally trumping its colonial power, Britain, as more hip, “No head gear of any type will be worn except by the kadhis.” The kadhis is a brilliantly conceived lower court to deal with family Muslim issues and the traditional Muslim headgear will obviously be appropriate.

– Robes to be decided later.
The judges’ colloquium gathered after all appointments had been confirmed just couldn’t reach a consensus on this one, yet. Many said that robes instill a feeling of respect. But Deputy Chief Justice Nancy Baraza said many Kenyans say robes instill fear, not respect.

I’ll let you know how this works out.

But how wonderful that social turbulence, tribal infighting, ideological bickering and political gamesmanship seem to be matters of the past.

And they had no problem increasing their debt ceiling, either.

How is Your Kenyan Landlord Doing?

How is Your Kenyan Landlord Doing?

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

This house in a Nairobi suburb costs 3-4 times what it would cost in Houston.
Get this: it’s now cheaper to buy a three-bedroom house in Houston than a comparable three-bedroom house in one of Nairobi’s better suburbs. Rich Kenyans know this, and they are now entering the U.S. market as significant players.

Joseph Wang’endo of Nairobi’s Realty Capital Agency says more and more of his time is spent brokering homes in the U.S. to Kenyan investors.

According to Wang’endo, a typical $150,000 bid at auction for foreclosed property in Houston will render a home similar to those now being sold in Nairobi’s Lavington suburb for $400-450,000.

He says that most buyers are not usually individuals who want to live in the U.S., but rather Kenyan investors or limited liability companies who then become the landlords for a rental property that he says can generate nearly $3,000/month in income.

Kenya did not have a housing bubble. Its growth slipped at the worst part of the world recession, but it never went into a recession. Today, growth in Kenya is zooming up higher than ever.

This is not unlike most of the emerging nations of the world.

How come?

I won’t pretend to be an economist, and I’ll let you reference that body of work (in the same way you try to find a quote in Shakespeare), but here’s my basic understanding.

1) The emerging economies are much more plastic (possibly, dynamic) than the larger economies. They can change quickly. The tea industry might be the biggest supplier to the GDP one year, and then cell phone manufacturing the next. It takes less time to create infrastructure for any given industry, and the work force supplies new industries faster and better.

2) Governments like Kenya are more socialist. They worry more about growth and citizen well being than national debt. Total Kenyan national debt is around three-quarters or higher of the GDP. Public debt is routinely at 50% or higher and the additional external debt is another quarter or more of GDP. [In the U.S. we make no distinction between locally held “public debt” and foreign-held “external debt” as done in the developing world. This is because developing world currencies are not convertible into developed world currencies like the dollar or Yen or Euro.]

The current American debt is a little bit more than half our GDP.

3) America goes into its highest debt during a recession, to stave things from getting worse. Emerging nations like Kenya reach their highest debt usually during boom times, when the government is trying to send the rocket economy even higher.

This story is not news to the Americans who need to know.

Today’s major newspaper in Nairobi, the Daily Nation, published this story about Kenyans buying into the American real estate market this morning (Kenyan time, 6 hours ahead of New York).

By 8 a.m. (EDT), the second comment left after the online story was from “a licensed real estate broker/investor in Charlotte NC” inviting readers to contact him by email.

I’m not suggesting that the American economy, which is 225 times bigger than Kenya, should pursue the same economic policies. But ….

Kenyans might.

Shedding Light

Shedding Light

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

The Ethiopian dam, Gilgel Gibe III, will be 2000′ wide, 734′ high, hold a reservoir 81 sq. miles large, become Africa’s largest hydroelectric plant and some say the planet’s greatest ecological catastrophe. Save the wild, or turn on the lights?

For the mid-term at least (25 years), it will provide enough electricity for all of Ethiopia’s grand development plans with lots over to help neighbors Kenya and Uganda.

It will dam the Omo River above Kenya’s Lake Turkana. This is one of the most remote places in Africa. I floated the Omo as early as 1981, and the peoples who live along it have not changed much since. I often tell tourists that the “village” they want to see near their Mara camp is either hocus-pocos or a living museum, and that only in remote areas of Ethiopia and The Sudan can truly primitive people still be found.

The Omo disgorges into the giant desert Lake Turkana. About the size and shape of Lake Michigan, Turkana is a remnant of a prehistoric Nile river system, and no rivers flow out of it, now. It’s surrounded by harsh desert.

The Turkana people who live around it fish and farm seasonally, in a tight belt right around the lake itself, as rainfall is scarce. But the seasonal floods of the Omo are enough for some agriculture, and the lake is rich with fish: the world’s largest crocodiles live here. Peter Beard’s book Eyelids of the Morning shows a croc from here that is 28′ long.

Of course all of this is in jeopardy, now.

Leading the fight against the dam is the California-based International Rivers. They successfully spearheaded a drive that resulted last month in UNESCO and other UN agencies warning Ethiopia it could lose all sorts of funding if it continues with the project.

International Rivers claims that a half million traditional peoples along the Omo and into Lake Turkana will be catastrophically effected. It calls the Omo River the “umbilical chord” for Lake Turkana.

Seasonal farming based on the seasonal floods of the river (very much like the Nile), fishes, wildlife and plants are all doomed if the dam is built, IR claims. In addition to less fresh water in a desert desperately in need of it, the salinity of Lake Turkana will increase to toxic levels.

The dam itself is estimated to cost $1.55 billion. Another quarter billion will be needed for transmission lines.

Initially this was financed by the African Development Bank and the World Bank. But starting several years ago, the environmental impacts seemed so grave western agencies began bailing out of the project. The financing has been taken over by China.

The dam is about half completed, now, mostly with Ethiopian money spent and Chinese funds promised, and it cannot proceed without further cash, so it’s up to China, now. IR and several international organizations are now pressing China to end its participation.

Last month, an Ethiopian journalist who did little more than report all the above, was thrown in jail.

This is a high wire game.

If IR claims are even partially correct, it is Kenya that stands to be most impacted. Turkana’s life-giving water is one of the few reasons the area in Kenya’s far north has not succumbed to the current famine.

But Kenya just signed an agreement with Ethiopia to buy the electricity from the dam.

Africa needs electricity. And presuming for an instant that the Kenyan authorities understand the ramifications, and that there is a real possibility that their northern villagers will be critically compromised, they have still decided to support the project.

Africa needs electricity. Nairobi’s reservoirs have almost refilled with unusual rains. But power outages still occur. The city is growing like a morel. Industry is exploding. Africa needs electricity.

Do we stop the dam, save Turkana and condemn Kenya and Ethiopia to reduced development? Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, not your nicest character, nevertheless put it succinctly:

“The views of western critics are ironic as Ethiopian facilities are infinitely more environmentally and socially responsible than the projects in their countries, past and present,” he said.

Meles claims the western world is in a conspiracy “to condemn African peoples to extreme poverty.”

Africa needs electricity. Should we stop this, and then fund their nuclear power plants? Or massive solar or wind or other projects that can’t even get traction at home?

“They are concerned about butterflies’ lives, but not human diseases,” Meles says of us.

Numerous organizations have rallied around IR to defeat the dam. Even the palaeontologist Richard Leakey has pointed out that some of the world’s most treasured archaeological sites will be compromised.

Which to save? The past, or the future?

Danse Macabre

Danse Macabre

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Africa waits on pins and needles as America plays with the world. It’s not true that a default will in any way help Africa, not even gold-producing South Africa.

It’s hard to imagine what a default will be, and I don’t mean that in any apocalyptic way. America is the standard for world economy. It could be that default will be ignored, because if default of the standard is not ignored, the whole box of cards resting on it is jeopardized.

Gold is soaring, and the world’s principal gold source is South Africa, the continent’s most important economic power.

South Africa moved from the 32nd to the 28th largest economy just in a year, last year, because of the soaring price of gold. That’s an extremely respectable position relative to the rest of the world, and for certain, the leader in the continent. (Egypt is number 2 on the continent, 40th in the world.)

You would think South Africans would be ho-humming the imminent American default.

“Despite the benefits for mining, the timing could not be worse for the SA economy, “ writes Claire Bisseker last week in Johannesburg’s most important financial newspaper, the Financial Mail.

Bisseker’s brilliant synopsis of our situation and what it means for Africa is required reading for anyone interested in the economies there. What I found particularly interesting is that she extends her view well beyond the current crisis and in the long-term actually sees a benefit for African and other emerging economies.

“Whatever happens, one thing is clear… [There will be a] shift to fast-growing emerging markets as the main source of global dynamism.”

In other words, a benefit – a silver lining if you will – to emerging economies. If she’s right, it’s a terribly ironic silver lining to a world based once based gold and now thought to be based on … us, America.

But in the short-term, everyone in Africa warns the jolt will be significant.

In today’s lead editorial, the Mail’s editor, Barney Mthombothi asks, “As the world watches the danse macabre in Washington DC with utter amazement and dread, one has to ask: who runs the place? Have America’s leaders taken leave of their senses? And are we witnessing the decline of a once great power?”

Mthombothi dares to suggest one reason for the impasse is American racism.

“So why an impasse now? Some believe it has a lot to do with Obama, his colour to be exact.” Although he then suggests an equally important component is America’s “ideological divide.”

Like all African business leaders, Mthombothi must harbor a long bitterness that stretches all the way back to the days of slavery. And when giant places like Texas try to reword if not rewrite the history of slavery, it only stings them more.

In the end, like many dispatches I’ve been reading from Africa, Mthombothi concludes that the fundamental problem is not racism or ideological divide, but our constitution.

“The American constitution was an arrangement for a bygone era. It’s led to a stalemate that threatens us all.”

I tend to agree, although it may not be so much the constitution as the belief that we can neither reinterpret or change it to fit our modern times. The intransigence of the American right is the too old ebony stick that’s either going to break in the wind or come down on us all.

China Builds & West Saves Africa

China Builds & West Saves Africa

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NPR’s fabulous story this morning about Kenya and China begs repeating what I’ve been saying for so long: watch China carefully and learn without embarrassment. The world may do better, then.

Frank Langfitt’s reporting on Morning Edition was superb. (And so much better than NPR’s former African correspondent, Ofeibea Quist-Arcton, who has been reduced to the new “West African Correspondent” where she continues to do a bad job, there.)

Langfitt did a yeoman’s job telling a decade’s story in less than 15 minutes. But there were a few things of importance that were neglected.

In May last year I wrote about the “Flame Tree Road“, which was then 8 lanes growing to 11 and is now, as Langfitt reports, 16 at some spots. Last September I wrote about China’s port plans in Kenya, and just a few months ago, Conor Codfrey reported the somewhat jaded views of western businesses about all of this. Two years ago I reported China was suddenly in Kenya looking for oil. Langfitt recapped it all, very well.

China is entirely and pitifully practical. And that is the crux of the difference between her and the west.

The west pontificates at best, fools at worst, and has been doing so for centuries.

The three C’s that governed Livingstone’s life and fund-raising, “Civilization, Commerce and Christianity” more or less governed until just this decade virtually everything the west ever did in Africa. China is also a “C” but like any efficient businessman, they’ve reduced the three C’s to a more productive two: “China & Commerce.”

China’s premise appears in stark relief for those of us who know Africa. Damn Kenya’s dwindling forests, we need the wood to build things. Forget about Kenya’s wetlands, they have no oil. And as for its wildlife, the only good rhino is one without a horn.

Poaching of both elephants and rhinos has increased substantially with the Chinese presence in East Africa, and there have been regular reports of Chinese apprehended in East Africa with poached ivory or rhino horn.

More worldly: Damn the millions under the Yangtze dam, discard the two centuries of Tibetan Buddhism, consider an enemy the enemies of your neighbors and do anything for a quart of oil.

Did I say we can learn from this?

Yes, absolutely. Because this policy reeks of the desperation of perfected capitalism, and that is the world’s economic system. Knowing it doesn’t mean you love it.

Ever since Livingstone’s three C’s, the west has spent enormous resources in trying to justify and work through the inherent contradiction between capitalism and goodness, trying in effect to claim there wasn’t an inherent contradiction. Realpolitik was the west’s first foray into diplomatic reality and succeeded to some extent because its American minister had a thick foreign accent. But Realpolitik has faded recently as Christianity and other ideologies like “hard work” and “marriage” have ascended.

The Chinese just love Glen Beck.

Africans are getting worried now that this pure intention of China is without a soul. Langfitt’s reporting this morning encapsulates in a few minutes volumes of recent articles and endless conversations on Kenyan radio talk shows.

After all, the west gave Kenya its religions. China is giving it its roads. There’s a very interesting future out there.

Religious Horror

Religious Horror

by Arusha ♥ 1 Comment

To a young apolitical Iranian woman, America is an army of helicopters ruling purgatory, patrolling the vast, lawless space between the disorganized and deceitful now and the desperately sought paradise. This wondrous insight comes to us thanks to the Zanzibar Film Festival which opens this weekend.

(For a broader summary of the festival, please read my Tuesday blog.)

“Invitation” is a film by Payam Zeinalabedini, an Iranian with a very limited budget. It’s not going to win any technical awards, and as you are carried along by the lilting, beautiful girl’s voice over the film’s haunting music, it becomes hard to “translate” the very poor English subtitles. But please stick with it, and forget the subtitles if you must. It is absolutely a film that every American should watch.

Watch it now, by clicking here, or come back to it, later. It is 30 minutes long and gives us Americans a widely held view of ourselves from the outside.

In a larger sense I think this is why so many Americans love Africa. There is something that we immediately identify with every moment of new experience, whether it be vast Midwest-like plains or thousands of animals. (American’s empathy for animals is legendary.)

And I’d like to think a few clever Iranians understand this, too. Payam’s film has shown in a few other festivals, but its technical merits are wanting. If shown, for example, in Milwaukee or Austin, it would probably fall flat as poorly made propaganda. But the characterization it makes of America will not offend an audience in Africa. And obviously it’s not intended as propaganda, there.

Africa has manipulated America well, for both America and itself, for several generations. Africa knows the good we have, and the bad we seem unable to shake. And because the film really does lack the technical merits of so many of the other entrants in the festival, I have to believe, too, that the Africans running the festival are doing exactly what the Iranians are:

Trying to send us an important message. A post card, if you will, of an essentially apolitical Iranian girl of her journey into Iraq. In a way that won’t evoke our defensiveness before we absorb it. ‘Someone,’ I can imagine them saying to themselves, ‘has to let America know what’s happening.’

Filmed in 2008 it is a story of this young lady making the trek to the holy Shiite shrine in Karbala, Iraq. We never know her name, or the name of her grandmother who she invokes constantly as her mentor and inspiration and the assumed recipient of her remarks.

In fact, throughout the film’s crowded voyage through humanity, no one offers names. At the Iraqi/Iran border where American soldiers finger print and eye scan all pilgrims, names are clearly forged or just made up. Except for imams and holy historical figures, names aren’t used, not even when trying to check into an inn for the night.

The film becomes a documentary of crowds of nameless pilgrims wandering towards the shrine, in a sort of hapless pursuit that things holy must be better.

The Iranian woman narrator has paid an Iraqi tour company for the trip, as have hundreds if not thousands of other Iranians in lines of buses coming out of Tehran. But when the convoy reaches the Iraqi border, the comfortable vacation turns into a horrible expedition.

It’s raining and cold. Compared to Iran’s paved roads, Iraqi’s dirt tracks are terrible. And dangerous. The girl explains that Iraqi security personnel must join the bus groups to guard the continuing journey, because it’s considered so dangerous.

Waning daylight infuses the “second-hand Iraqi” buses bereft of working windows or adequate heaters as the convoy pushes deeper into Iraq. They pass Tikrit, and the narrator turns her camera at Saddam’s palace, but it passes quickly out of view as something no longer meaningful.

It’s dark, cold and still raining, and the colored often neon lights that poke out from villages along the way seem like circuses or game parlors. The narrator remembers the tracer lights of Iraqi aircraft over Tehran during the great wars. She was very little, and she remembers her grandmother telling her to run to the shelter.

Then the tour bus gets stuck in the mud, in the dark, cold and rain. The Iraqi security officer orders them to stay in the bus “And don’t sleep! It’s dangerous!” By the broken English subtitle, she says mournfully, “Grandma, I now know what anxiety for the future means.”

The next day she sees lines and lines of Iraqis walking on the muddy sides of the road to the shrine and feels embarrassed with her fortune. “I am not vengeful,” she begins, invoking the long wars between the two countries, “and I wonder if I should get out and walk with my brothers.”

Americans – which are never shown – are omnipresent, but as if in another dimension, outside real peoples’ realities. At one point, the security officer accompanying her in her bus warns her not to take pictures or use her cell phone, because Americans “have X-rays and we’ll all then get arrested.”

As they approach Karbala in the darkness and drizzle, the sounds of excited pilgrims increase. There is self-flagellation and ominous and aggressive dancing common to this sect of Shiites, unhappy crowds, mixed and uncoordinated singing and shouting. They walk pass dilapidated or bombed out structures as the throngs of people move towards the only lighted structure in the area, a yet distant giant Christmas-lighted mosque and shrine.

They decide to check-in to their inn before going to the mosque. The electricity is erratic and there is no light in the cold, rainy street. Yellow light peeps out from shuttered windows. When they finally locate their presumed overnight lodging, they discover there’s no room for them at the inn. And there’s no representative around from the travel agency that took their money to complain to.

“This is Karbala,” the innmaker intones, “go to Paris, go to the Emirates if you want a room!” The girl remarks they can’t even find an internet café, because there’s no electricity and no computers. She remarks with the first bit of political overtones that this is the country that was supposed to have a nuclear bomb, and they don’t even have working computers!

What she had hoped would be a joyous excursion has become a nightmare. She finds an Iraqi who has the authority to allow her to film inside the shrine, but his laptop doesn’t work so he can’t give her the necessary permit. She finds a laptop from a fellow Iranian traveler, and the official creates a permit using Word.

Suicide bombers have attacked nearby mosques. There are sirens and flashing lights, and suddenly American soldiers who are never shown, though. No one seems to care. “This country is conquered by Americans,” she says as if only realizing it herself, now.

Finally she gets inside the mosque. The light is bright, almost blinding. Most faces turn away from her camera. Those that don’t reveal fear, anger, perhaps terror.

She gets in a line of congested movement towards the shrine, the object of the trek. The orderly movement forward is interrupted by security officials frisking entrants. Inside, she says, “Grandma, perhaps it was your prayers that got me here, but now I’m entrapped among the security Army of Blasphermers.”

“I feel I am supposed to see and hear” inspiration or something religious, and then her voice is drowned out by the sounds of helicopters going around and around, closer and closer, louder and louder.

This is the view of Iraq by a young Iranian. I don’t consider this propaganda, although I think it quite fair to presume the film maker had an agenda in mind. But strip away the commentary and subtitles, and just take the scenes shown for what they are:

A country in endless mourning, restless and lawless, pitifully unfulfilled.

Ready to either implode completely or explode entirely.

An American watching this film must wonder what the hell we’re doing there. We’re not bringing peace, and we’re certainly not bringing prosperity or any measure of happiness. If our national security goal is to impede harm against us, we’re certainly not doing it by making friends. You could not live in Karbala without hating America.

Nevertheless, if this has “kept a lid on terrorism” one wonders if the oppression this thrusts on the peoples of Karbala is fair strategy. In a tit-for-tat body bag game, we’re winning. But one wonders if the game weren’t played at all, if the numbers of dead, injured and unhappy would be infinitely less.

We have turned a once joyful religious trek undertaken for centuries into a modern horror film.

Africans First Walmart Second

Africans First Walmart Second

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Does Africa need lower prices? You bet! In just a few years there will be Walmarts in virtually every major African city. I think Africa can handle it. So I say, “Bring‘um On!”

Africa’s third largest retailer, Massmart, will be consumed by a $4.6 billion offer from Walmart following initial South African government approval Tuesday. Massmart currently operates in 13 of Africa’s 53 countries, and growing.

Predictably, business interests hailed the merger. Worker interests decried it. The South African government commission which approved the merger is imposing a few restrictions, including maintaining the existing labor/union mechanisms which many had feared wouldn’t survive the merger.

Everyone knows what this means. There is no dispute that Walmart will lower prices, probably boost quality in an African market known for shoddy alternates and outright fakes, as well as lowering wages and reducing other existing worker benefits.

“Can you imagine what [will] happen in Africa, with its extremely vulnerable workforce and inadequate and unenforced labor laws?” Mfonobong Nsehe writes on a Forbes blog consortium.

Everybody knows.

But two-thirds of South Africans support the merger. The reason is simple, and it’s Walmart’s signature: Lower Prices.

And the counter argument is that lower prices mean lower wages mean either depressed economies and/or an increasing gulf between rich and poor. Click here for a great interview of Patrick Craven, a South African union spokesman.

America exports Walmarts, because America is the world’s largest and most fundamental capitalist system, and Walmart is the epitome of what capitalism means. Walmart, in turn, exports human rights abuses when it sources vendors from foreign sweat shops. America champions human rights. Therein the paradox.

If we’re going to live with capitalism then we want its players to be as aggressive as possible so that the system remains dynamic. Healthy capitalism is a bloody thing. And I can’t see impeding Walmart if we’re encouraging Goldman Sachs, or for that matter, Exon/Mobile.

Walmart is not the problem. Walmart has to live under the laws of each country in which it operates, and what that means from the getgo is that advanced industrial societies must take charge of their capitalist development. REGULATION.

Minimum wages and minimum worker benefits must be increased. Affirmative action, particularly with regards to gender, must be dusted off the shelves and reembraced whole-heartedly. Legions of public agencies, from tiny villages to sovereign governments, must not extend tax benefits without ensuring that tax loss doesn’t depress its citizens’ standards of living or increase the gulf between the haves and have-nots.

The consumer and worker must always get the better shake. Business should be seen as serving, not feeding on, consumers and workers.

This is not Walmart’s responsibility. Walmart’s responsibility is to be as mean as possible. That’s how capitalism succeeds.

It’s now up to the African governments. They’re newer and not as beholding to giant capitalist entities as the American government has become, and there is a real possibility they will be able to regulate this behemoth with the same idealism they profess as overall goals of governance.

People First. Walmart Second.

Africa has a chance to get it right. But they dare not model America. We haven’t done so well.

Getting Ready for the Next One!

Getting Ready for the Next One!

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Near the Hilton Hotel, Nairobi.

“Getting ready for the next one!” a Kenyan friend of mine told me this weekend. He sells billboard space.

The weekend’s successful end threw into stark contrast the saner religious leaders in Africa and their woealmostbegone American counterparts. Most modern religious Africans – and there are many, Muslim and Christian and may other denominations – despise hocus pocus. Americans thrive on it.

It’s such a switch from the stereotype of not too long ago where yes the American tourist was anxious to see lions but really wanted pictures of a “village” because all the primitiveness and … well, hocus pocus, of Africa was so thrilling.

Maybe one day it was, but ain’t no more.

Now in all fairness, if you really head into the boondocks, somewhere akin to Backwater, Appalachia, you might certainly find some old woman who knows exactly what part of her dead frog will relieve you of an undesired suitor.

But modern, mostly young African churchgoers have no time for American hocus pocus, (even though with pleasure they take their money).

Harold Camping, the now famous Prophet of Doom, founded and headed Family Radio, an impressive network of 68 radio stations with hundreds of thousands of duped American followers. But what is less known is the many radio stations and other services he funded in Africa.

According to London’s Guardian newspaper Camping spent more than $100 million worldwide of his followers’ money on radio stations, billboards and posters, financed by the sale and swap of radio stations in the U.S.

I snapped a photo of a billboard in Nairobi and an even bigger one in Dar, placed at the most expensive place in all of Dar, the matutu and bus terminal.

Kenyan religious leaders and radio station owners, funded by Camping, distanced themselves from the doomsday prediction long ago. They placed displays ads in newspapers around Kenya starting a year ago when the billboards first appeared. The most common one read:

“We wish to inform our viewers, listeners, partners and well wishers that we are not in any way or form affiliated to the US evangelical Christian broadcaster Harold Camping or family radio.com.”

(Of course that isn’t true. They got their money from Camping. But then obtuseness is a religious art.)

Kenyan religious leaders then went on to say certainly there would be a Judgment Day, but don’t alter your schedule for the first week of June.

There is, of course, a serious side to this so far jocular story. While most Africans like most Americans recognized the ruse for what it was, some didn’t. And those like Camping who were to be the saved ended up the lost. But to be lost in Kenya or other parts of the impoverished world desperate for hope is a much worse situation than Harold Camping likely finds himself in this morning.

And that leads to another less jocular aspect of this story. WHY do Americans surrounded by the best tools in the world to discover truth believe in such incredible nonsense? Why is an American so incredibly gullible?

It’s Monday. A week before vacation stretches before us. We’ll leave that to another day.

Three Men Out

Three Men Out

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Say what you believe and believe what you say. Without that credo society breaks down. The cants include Schwarzenegger, Strauss-Kahn, and Wanjiru. These three headliners are respectfully American, French and Kenyan.

They are stars: political and commercial, and sports heroes. Wanjiru at the prime age of 24 was the world’s greatest marathon runner, and he killed himself yesterday when his wife found out about his affair.

Nairobi’s Capital FM radio station put it poetically: “[His] existence was intertwined by the sad pointer [of a] tortured genius, choosing to express himself through an excellent natural gift and reckless abandon in equal measure. Enigmas who no one, even himself knew.”

Gimme a break.

Nothing quite as poetic with the Terminator or Emperor Pretender. In fact once you leave dynamic African society, scandals don’t seem to be scandals, anymore.

My greatest personal disappointment was with John Edwards.

I’m a numbers guy. It’s very hard to get a handle on how many committed couples have affairs. It’s just too all-over-the-place. So-called “respected journals” like The Journal of Couple and Relational Therapy say 50%.

But that’s a European group, and I think their main interest is selling their books and therapy.

Although it’s been a decade since any American university studies, that’s what I’d believe: Judith Treas, a sociologist at the University of California-Irvine, concluded 11 % and pronounced, “There isn’t any evidence of an infidelity epidemic.” The numbers were more or less the same as a University of Chicago study in 1994. Michael Kinsey concurred.

And so that leaves me and my cohorts in grey society all quite ordinary, in a grand majority of all the less influential and colorful bodies on earth. Oh, but wait! Zuma! Jacob Zuma!

The President of South Africa makes no bones about his affairs. He doesn’t have to. He just marries them, and right now, they number 12. It poses great difficulties when he travels on State visits. The Maitre D’ doesn’t know who to put on the place card.

I’m not the only person who’s made fun of the President’s polygamy. In South Africa it’s a serious issue. And the fact he doesn’t have to cheat, he just marries again, doesn’t mean the man “Says what he believes and believes what he says.” Zuma’s in a ton of trouble in that regards.

So is sexual infidelity, which breaks the credo, public infidelity? If you lie to your partner, do you lie to your constituency? to your clients? to your business partners? to your children? to your supporters?

Is this just a goofy topic… or a real issue?

National Enquirer readers want to know.

Pathetic Fear of the Wounded

Pathetic Fear of the Wounded

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East Africa: beware! You are reacting to the fall of bin Laden like a Republican U.S. politician, and you should know by now that’s absurd.

Until now I’ve felt that East Africa had handled terrorism threats – particularly from Al-Qaeda and its franchises – better than the U.S. But that may be changing now that bin Laden is dead and East Africa is emerging as a powerful young society.

East Africa has probably suffered as much if not more from the machinations of Al-Qaeda than the U.S. Don’t forget: it was the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that were blown up in 1998 by Al-Qaeda that presaged 9/11.

Fringe Muslims had been blowing up things in Kenya since the early 1960s when the then Block Norfolk Hotel was bombed because it was owned by Jews. Somali shares a 500k border with Kenya, and Al-Shabab (Al-Qaeda in Somalia) controls much of it. During the World Cup last year almost 100 people were killed when two sports bars in Kampala were blown to smithereens because Ugandan troops aid a UN peacekeeping effort in Somalia.

And there’s much, much more. I won’t be foolish enough to count up the bodies, East Africa vs. the U.S. from Al-Qaeda, but the comparison is serious.

And until Obama, American politicians used terrorism incidents to beef up the military industrial complex and prop up their own careers. Sounds harsh? Yes, it is terribly harsh, but it is not spurious, it’s true.

The incredible difference in the way the Obama administration has handled the end of Osama, compared to previous (mostly Republican) administrations that used torture, disseminated grizzly pictures and turned our national security into a contest for new MnM colors, tells me that we’re finally getting it right.

Ideas, Joe, not guns and their human debris. Plans, not fear.

But now I’m worried that East Africa is following the same wrong course that America followed in the past.

“As the world celebrated the killing of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday by US Special Forces, East Africa stared at a possible new political nightmare,” warned popular East African columnist Charles Onyango-Obbo in an OpEd this weekend.

Onyango went on to terrify his readers with the same balderdash dumb politicians have used for centuries: fear of the wounded devil. Wounded but not killed, his vengeance becomes greater than ever.

“Most analysts agree that the Al Qaeda threat has not been buried with him,” Onyango writes of the obvious, even though it isn’t. Many analysts believe this and many other successes against terrorism recently herald the beginning of the end of Al-Qaeda.

Terrorism expert Peter Bergen claimed on CNN the bin Ladens’ death marked “the end of the war on terror” and a number of experts as critical as Foreign Policy’s Daveed Gartenstein-Ross cautiously agree.

I don’t think it’s necessarily that definitive, but my point is that there is not universal certainty among those who should know, that bin Laden’s death increases the threat level of terrorism anywhere .. including in East Africa.

The most repressive government in East Africa, was the most enthusiastic about the “new threats.” Details hadn’t even been released about Osama’s demise when on May 2 the Ugandan government “stressed the need to beef up security following the killing of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Matia Kasaija, the internal affairs state ministersaid Uganda should not be caught unaware.”

It’s an old tactic, for morally bereft governments and uncreative journalists: scare the hell out of the audience to get their loyalty and attention.

It’s what we did in America for nearly a generation, and we now realize what a terrible mistake that was.

East Africa, beware. Don’t jeopardize reality just to score some extra points.