East African drought, the 'worst in 60 years'

A drought developing across the Horn of Africa is now the worst in 60 years - affecting 10 million people, according to the United Nations.

I don't know if the governments of the people in the affected countries are as interested in this serious issue, as are the foreign aid agencies. There is the suggestion in some quarters, that the drought is a direct consequence of the world's changing climate, a situation for which the Africans who now are suffering the most, bear the least responsibility.

See here for more

Africa's imaginary gay crisis..

Ebenezer Obadare

A spectre is haunting Africa – the spectre of homosexuality. Over the past decade, a curious and totally unlikely coalition of religious leaders, the ruling class and sections of the mainstream media has launched a vigorous campaign against homosexuality and perceived homosexuals. Trading in the most spiteful rhetoric and symbols imaginable, members of this alliance have sung from the same hymnal, affirming, implausibly, that homosexuality is a recent import into Africa and that homosexuals are responsible for the continent’s postcolonial throes. Not unpredictably, the alliance’s investment in hate has yielded bountiful dividends of violence and murder. In January, the Ugandan teacher and gay rights activist David Kato was murdered by yet unidentified assailants after a national news magazine in the country “outed” (Kato never attempted to hide sexual orientation) him as gay and openly urged his execution. Ugandan police were suspiciously quick to blame his death on a botched robbery operation.

African countries, to be sure, are not unique in this assault on perceived sexual deviance. Western countries may have instituted a raft of legal measures to protect sexual minorities, but such legal protection often has to contend with deeply rooted cultural antipathy. The truth is that even in the West, the struggle for sexual parity is unfinished, a fact the ongoing battle over same-sex marriage in the United States amply illustrates.

Even so, the situation in the West hardly compares with the atmosphere of competitive denigration found across most of Africa today. I advance two preliminary explanations. The first is economic. It is hardly a coincidence that the two countries where anti-gay rhetoric has been most strident in Africa – Zimbabwe and Nigeria – are also two of the most economically destitute. In both countries, the percentage of the population “living” on less than a dollar a day has risen steadily over the past two decades. Average life expectancy, according to the 2011 Failed States Index (where both are ranked 6th and 14th respectively) is 33.5 for Zimbabwe and 48.3 for Nigeria. In both countries, a frustrated quest for a rational explanation for economic crisis has produced an implausible demonology in which gays, lesbians and sexual “deviants” of all sorts apparently team up with sundry “demonic forces” to ambush not just those countries’, but Africa’s economic progress (incidentally, South Africa, with the most liberal sexual laws in Africa, is also the continent’s most economically advanced country).

The situation in both Zimbabwe and Nigeria seems to validate the link between material privation and political suggestibility. Where people are poor and poorly educated (or not at all), they are more susceptible to political manipulation by demagogues who parrot easy explanations for complex and fundamentally rational economic problems. In most of Africa today, the insidious fiction that the “gay next door” bars the way to economic progress has been the cue for a massive pink-hunt. The parliament in Uganda is currently mulling over legislation to impose the death penalty on homosexuals. In Nigeria, the Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2006 expressly criminalises homosexuality and same sex marriage. In Zimbabwe, Dr Martin Ssempa, surely Africa’s most virulently homophobic preacher, bludgeons the poor with graphic images of the “sickening” things that gays get up to, ironically enough, in the privacy of their bedrooms.

None of this politico-economic explanation can be meaningful without a connection to the expanding influence of religion in Africa. This is my second explanation. Over the past three decades, much of the continent has fallen under the scourge of Pentecostal Christianity. As a social phenomenon, one with key transnational connections, Pentecostal Christianity in Africa has carried a moralist and doggedly anti-intellectual banner. On the one hand, Pentecostalism manifests as a moralising force that narrates Africa’s economic and political crises as an inevitable outcome of public immorality (and what can be more immoral than two men or two women going at it in their bedroom?), a situation, it would seem, that can only be rectified by a collective return to the straight and narrow. As an anti-intellectual force, Pentecostalism in Africa is profoundly ahistorical in that it eschews human, especially political, agency in favour of pseudo-spiritual “explanations”.

This is the overall anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist climate in which gays have become, quite literally, African societies’ whipping boys. I emphasise this climate in order to drive home an important point: given the atmosphere of pervasive irrationality, gays are only one among many other “enemies”. In Nigeria for instance, an ever growing list of “demonic forces” has recently expanded to include so-called child “witches” who are blamed for even economic problems that pre-date their conception. In the most tragic examples, brainwashed parents have colluded in the killing of their own children.

With many evangelical upstarts naively promising salvation in exchange for gays’ renunciation of “sodomy”, the continent is once again chasing shadows at the expense of real solutions to its serious problems. Such problems may vary in manifestation and degree, but they are unified by their being traceable to a common set of factors, foremost among which are elite myopia and failure to invest in human capital and physical infrastructure. These problems require urgent and, suffice to add, rational attention, and as it is, African governments’ capacity to deal with them is hobbled by their failure to keep their highly-skilled young men and women at home. These are the things we should be obsessing about, not what the dude next door is up to when the lights are out.

Blog Author's Note: I came across this marvellous write up here and thought to reproduce it in full on this blog..

Confusion Break Bones

I Am Slave

I'm miffed that I missed this drama when TV's Channel 4 aired it in August last year, as part of their series on modern-day slavery and human trafficking. But I got another chance to see it on the Community Channel this evening and slapped myself when I discovered that it had been available on Channel 4 OD all along. Programmes on Channel 4 OD are geo-blocked, so you probably won't be able to see it on that site unless you're within the UK. This film is well worth searching for though, if you can find it elsewhere..

And although I'm somewhat late, I've been tripping on this totally amazing, albeit quietly disturbing drama that is based on a true story, starring the extremely talented British-Nigerian actor Wunmi Mosaku who plays Malia, a Sudanese princess from the Nuba Mountains. As a child she is abducted from her family and kept as a slave for six years in northern Africa, before she is sent to London where her misery continues.

And all this while, over a period of many years her devoted father (played by Ivorian actor Isaach de Bankole) from whose hands she was snatched by her abductors, searches tirelessly for her. The saga finally ends when after all her tribulations Malia manages to escape from her oppressors. Father and daughter eventually make contact, even if only tenuous contact by telephone. Some of the others in the cast are Nonso Anozie and Lubna Azabal.

This look at modern-day slavery is directed by Gabriel Range. It is strikingly photographed and very well acted. I do however think that the story told is sketchy, and that since the subject is of such a serious nature, it might have worked better had there been more detail to it. A clip can be seen on the BBC website here and Mosaku and the film's writer Jeremy Brock are interviewed.

The Telegraph offers a great review here. You can also see The Guardian newspaper here in an in-depth commentary on how domestic workers become slaves in the UK. It is believed that there are up to 5,000 people in the UK who are being kept as slaves.

Burundi, children behind bars

Channel 4's programme Unreported World exposes the plight of hundreds of children in Burundi locked up for years without trial in adult prisons, among some of the most dangerous criminals in the country. (Click here to see it on the Channel 4 website). And they meet one man who has dedicated his life to freeing them; Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa is the only hope many of these children have.

(Note: The film is still available on the Channel 4oD website even now in 2013, but you will need to register if you're not already registered on the site and then navigate to the 2011 series. Use this link, it's worth the trouble).

Burundi has no juvenile justice system and children above the age of 15 are tried as adults. By law any child under that age should not be imprisoned, but in a country recovering from civil war and where record keeping is scant, many under-age children are slipping through the net and are being locked up.

There is no legal aid, and there are only 106 lawyers for a population of over eight million people. This is one of the reasons why three quarters of children are being held for long periods without trial.

While wrongly imprisoned for two years, 62-year-old Pierre found the body of a child prisoner who had been murdered. The incident affected him deeply and he decided to spend the rest of his life defending victims of injustice.

Reporter Ramita Navai and director Wael Dabbous travel with Pierre to a prison in Ruyigi province, one of the poorest parts of the country. They find more than 20 children in the jail, several of whom look younger than 15.

Many of them say they have been locked up having been accused of minor offences, such as stealing a bag of rice. Nestor tells Navai he is 12 and has been there for two months. 'My family never liked me. That's why they sent me here. They've left me here to die,' he says.

Navai and Dabbous travel with Pierre to Mpimba prison, the country's most notorious jail, which houses some of the most dangerous criminals. It was built for 800 prisoners but there are now more than 3300. The team finds nearly 100 boys sleeping in one cell, nearly all of whom are being held without trial. There's no room to lie down or sit, so the boys are all forced to stand.

One of them, Claude, says he is 13 years old. He has been accused of rape but appears to be the victim of a dispute between families. Like other children, he may have been falsely accused of a crime in order to settle a score. He's been held for five months without trial and says older prisoners abuse the children. Pierre decides to investigate his case.

Claude Tangishaka, who stated that he was 13

The team travels with Pierre to Claude's home province of Bubanza, where he meets the magistrate in charge of the case. He reveals that hospital records showed Claude's alleged victims had in fact not been raped and that there was a feud between Claude's family and another family.

Claude doesn't have a birth certificate as he was born during the civil war, and Pierre needs to prove he is under 15 to get him out of jail. He travels to his home village, where Claude's mother tells him she thinks he is 14 and that he had actually been accused of inappropriately touching his neighbours' children.

Back in Mpimba prison, the team meets some of the 100 female prisoners locked in with the 3000 men. There are also 24 babies and toddlers living in the jail, nearly all of whom were born inside. One prisoner tells Navai that that some women are forced to have sex for money in order to survive, and become pregnant.

Burundi's Director of Prisons tells Unreported World that a lack of resources makes it impossible to hold women and children separately. He also admits that under-15s are being illegally imprisoned and blames corrupt magistrates and policemen and a lack of proper records.

Pierre is still negotiating with Claude's neighbours who are demanding compensation to allow Claude to return to the village. The magistrate says that Claude cannot be released if his mother does not pay the compensation, as his life will be in danger and the villagers may kill him. His mother has nothing to give. While there is no way of knowing how long Claude will be behind bars, Pierre is still fighting to get him released.

Related reading:

Burundi: Children Behind Bars Suffer Abuse Human Rights Watch

Burundi: Children Behind Bars Suffer Abuse Stolen Childhood

Children behind bars suffer abuse in Burundi Save the Children

Burundi: Child soldiers living on the edges Stolen Childhood

Prisons in Africa: An evaluation from a human rights perspective www.surjournal.org

The Channel 4 reporter Ramita Navai writes:

'You're with Pierre, you'll be OK,' one of the prison directors told us, as we stepped into the sea of bodies swarming the courtyard in Mpimba prison. Pierre-Claver Mbonimpa is a human rights activist who works in Burundi's prisons, and Mpimba is the most notorious jail in the country. It was built for 800 inmates - there are now over 3300. There's barely room to sit.

Rapists and murderers are held alongside political dissidents and petty thieves - and they all stand aside to make way for Pierre. No other visitor is treated with the same reverence, for Pierre used to be one of them.

An ex-policeman, he was jailed for two years, wrongly accused of possessing an illegal firearm. It was in a tiny, black cell in solitary confinement when he decided that if he was ever released, he would dedicate the rest of his life to fighting injustice. But Pierre was not here to see these men, for among the heaving mass of prisoners are tiny, frightened figures in ragged clothes. Children in Burundi are kept in adult prisons and Pierre is fighting to get them out.

'Prison is not place for a child - just look around, these children live in fear,' said Pierre. At night, not even the armed guards dare enter the dark cells, bootleg alcohol fuelling the aggressive atmosphere. Outbreaks of violence are common. The criminal age of responsibility is 15, but many underage children end up in prison. Years of civil war means that birth certificates and public records are scarce, and that the justice system has been left shattered.

Almost hidden between the inmates, Pierre discovers Claude, who looks even younger than the 13 years he claims to be. Like many other boys here, he's been accused of rape. Pierre explains that most of the boys worked as household servants and were accused of rape by their employers. Pierre suspects it is a way to evade payment.

Sexual abuse is rife and there is not enough food. Nearly all of the children are being held without trial -some have been here for years.

But Pierre says he will never give up. He even gets death threats for his work, but undeterred, he continues to file his complaints and expose any corruption along the way. "Let them give me death threats, I'll never stop," he says in his gentle, calm voice. "I'm all these children have."

Why I am voting YES

There is a referendum today in the UK on whether to change the voting system by which Members of Parliament are elected, from the first-past-the-post system currently in use, to the Alternative Vote (AV) system.

My understanding of the situation is this:

With the current system, theoretically a candidate with even only 30% of the vote in a constituency would be declared winner if none of the other candidates have individually been able to amass up to 30% of the constituency's vote. What this in effect means is that although 70% of voters have not voted for him, the candidate with 30% of the vote is declared the winner and the voices of 70% of his constituency although spread out among the various other candidates, are unheard.

With the AV system however, voters are given the opportunity to vote for all of the candidates in the election by order of preference. At the first count the candidate with the most first preference votes, if they carried up to 50% of the vote, is declared winner. If they don't carry up to 50% the candidate with the least number of first preference votes is eliminated and his votes distributed among the other candidates by order of preference. The elimination of the candidate with the least number of preference votes continues until the object of achieving 50% of the vote by the leading candidate is arrived at, such that there is a guarantee that every Member of Parliament under AV would have the support and be the favoured candidate of at least 50% of the voters in their constituency.

This seems to me like a much fairer system than the current first-past-the-post system. Also, scare tactics aside, the arguments that have been advanced by the 'NO' campaign have been weak and unconvincing, especially since I know that in all of the elections at which I have voted under the current system, my vote has never counted.

Moreover, under AV, politicians will be made to work harder for votes, rather than relying mostly on their core supporters' votes as they currently do. They would need voters who would not ordinarily vote for them to consider voting them as second preference etc. And it can only be a good thing if canvassers from all parties had to come knocking on my door, one after the other, to canvass for my vote and and try to persuade me by giving me the reasons why I should vote for their candidate. AV empowers the electorate in a way that first-past-the-post could never do.

So YES it is for me.