Africans ought not worry as much as they do about yesterday’s annual publication by Transparency Intentional listing the world’s countries by their level of corruption.
I’m sorry I had to wait for our unexpected political nightmare to come to this realization: but TI’s report is as corrupt as any of the countries it evaluates. The report is an annual self-congratulations among white Europeans.
Yesterday the Tanzania government rejected an appeal by the German Parliament to consider alternatives to the giant Stiegler’s Dam project.
In a very unusual Bundestag debate of so narrow an issue a wide coalition of German parties emphasized the growing evidence that the dam will destroy The Selous, one of Africa’s most pristine wildernesses.
In the British Parliament a prominent Lord urges the government to recolonize Zimbabwe. Russia’s methodical promotion of oligarchy finds purchase in the Central African Republic, where it’s close to controlling the government. In the U.S. religious groups blossom in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
Like any revolutionary period, politics becomes so upset that old ideas resurface and new ones fashioned of opposite extremes develop as well. That’s happening today in Africa as in the U.S.
Last week’s Nairobi bombing may not have been against Kenya, but America.
Today global media reran a report by Somali Radio Dalsan shortly after the attack last week. The report claimed that bombing was in direct response to two American actions: (1) the decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem and (2) revenge for the American drone killing of a top al-Shabaab leader.
So… what?
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Last year I wrote, “Today is one of the most important holidays, Martin Luther King Day. It’s impossible to overstate its importance this year.”
The litany of racist acts accelerated including murder. Worse, everyone is becoming numb. We chuckle quietly hopeful of some relief. We go about our business as if nothing has happened, as if there is nothing special about today. Most offices, even cultural institutions, are acting today as if Martin Luther King never existed.
Africans are outraged at the New York Times publication of photos of the dusitD2 hotel massacre in Nairobi Wednesday.
The backlash was severe enough globally that the Times announced a working group that might alter their policy on publishing blood and gore, even as their Director of Photography continues to justify this one.
In the last year 21 were killed and at least 28 injured by shooters in Kenya in a single incident that happened yesterday. In the last year 106 people were killed and 121 injured in 18 separate incidents in the United States. In Parkland, 17 were killed.
It you were a foreigner heading to Orlando last February, or Nashville last April, or Sante Fe last May or Pittsburgh in October or any of the other 14 major U.S. shootings last year, you’d probably feel right now just like an American heading to Nairobi.
To those of you have been insisting Zimbabwe is just fine for tourism, please explain your position to the tourists currently hunkered down in the hotels in Zimbabwe unable to go or come.
Airlines canceled flights, taxis and other transport wouldn’t move tourists from hotels anywhere, and visitors could do nothing but hunker down. No tourists appeared in danger, but this certainly wasn’t the vacation they’d been sold.
More than two decades into China’s super-investments in Africa, a less than practical policy is becoming clear. As with Sri Lanka, China apparently expects a number of African governments to default on their loan agreements, followed by Chinese assumption of major parastatals like the electricity grid, ports and airports.
Truth is like the massive granite boulders of the Serengeti that have laid on earth for two billion years. They don’t move. Lies have no purchase on earth. They blow away.
“Whilst we are led to believe that ‘aid’ …to the [African] continent is a mark of generosity, research shows that this is a deception… Aid to Africa amounts to less than $30 billion per year [but] the continent is losing $192 billion annually in other resource flows, mainly to the same countries providing that aid.”
The initial outcome of the Congo (DRC) election is no surprise. The possibility of civil war has increased. But there was a tragic surprise and it’s with CNN and the Washington Post grossly misreporting what happened.
Take note, progressives. Two major news media that you love reported out a positive story of an actually miserably negative one. They missed easy and essential elements that have been fully reported by British and European news outlets, and pretty well by the New York Times and NPR. Here’s what’s happened and what was so badly reported:
With so much lying, offensiveness and stinging vulgarity… plus so many unbelievable social distractions and political bombshells, it’s hard to recognize a point of danger or a point of hope. Africa’s current affairs are little different than most of the rest of the world, so 2018 blurs into this miasma the moment you focus out of any single event.
But we’ve got to try to make sense of it all, clear the fog and figure out where we’re at. Africans especially can help westerners manage this confusion, and the first thing to understand is that nothing less than an exercised spirit is going to get us home.
2018 was a sobering year in Africa: Human rights and democratic freedoms declined. It was hard to find much hope.
There were a few places, though, and South Africa especially may be showing us and the rest of the world the way out of this darkness. It’s very African: patience pays.
Many Africans view 2018 positively, a time when autocratic leaders solidified power and stability increased. For many African conservatives it was a good year.
It was not a good year for African liberals, human rights activists, members of the LGBT community, women or those who champion democracy. Rightists celebrated; leftists wept.
Have you ever watched a colony of anemones? Touch the biggest one and it immediately begins to shrink into itself. Then even without touching others, all the anemones follow suit withdrawing into themselves.
It’s like the mopane tree in Africa. One giraffe starts to nimble a mopane leaf and the whole forest starts to fold leaves and emit toxins.
Africa’s top 2018 stories resemble the top stories in lots of other parts of the world. But believe it or not, Africa actually started earlier and may be ending sooner than much of the rest of the world, as evidenced by the February resignation of Jacob Zuma as president of South Africa.