My Beauty Best Teacher

Luca Bussotti writing over at Pambazuka:

CC Afronie

Firing up the local production of knowledge is crucial to escaping the ‘industry of development’

He goes on to say:

...it appears rather obvious that few people have an interest in promoting local knowledge and knowledge in general as a key to exiting structural dependence. Rather, as Mozambican sociologist Elísio Macamo wrote, the ‘industry of development’ continues to work, and it doesn't seem to be in the interest of the leading classes to get rid of it.

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Hope Shand writing in Pambazuka:

Under the guise of developing ‘climate-ready’ crops, the world’s largest seed and agrochemical corporations are pressuring governments to allow what could become the broadest and most dangerous patent claims in intellectual property history. A new report by ETC Group[1] reveals a dramatic upsurge in the number of patent claims on ‘climate-ready’ genes, plants and technologies that will supposedly allow biotech crops to tolerate drought and other environmental stresses (i.e. abiotic stresses) associated with climate change. The patent grab threatens to put a monopoly choke-hold on the world’s biomass and our future food supply, warns ETC Group.

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Kersty McCourt writing in Pambazuka:

Corruption and excessive pretrial detention are mutually reinforcing: A criminal justice system that overuses pretrial detention is susceptible to corruption, and an environment marked by corruption will likely lead to over-reliance on pretrial detention. Both corruption and excessive pretrial detention flourish under the same circumstances. The two form a vicious cycle: A dysfunctional justice system leads to corruption, and that corruption further twists the justice system.

Continuing:

All over the world, poor people are arrested because they cannot pay a bribe to the corrupt police officer, then denied access to counsel or family because they cannot bribe the corrupt guard or prosecutor, then held indefinitely – or found guilty – because they cannot bribe the corrupt judge. The ability to put cash in the right hands often makes the difference between freedom and detention. Pretrial detention centres are populated almost entirely by poor people.

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In Pambazuka Ronald Elly Wanda makes a case for re-instituting the indigenous institution of traditional jurisprudence:

Ronald Elly Wanda

Since flag independence in the 1960s, African governments have been in a rush to normalise authoritarian rule and human rights abuses under the auspices of maendeleo (development) and economic growth. A short stroll in any African village today confirms that the globalised Western culture of justice delivery or innovation that most African leaders seem to trust has not improved the well-being of our local communities or delivered justice for them. On the contrary, it has often blocked viable indigenous innovation of cultures and suffocated African justice. Here in East Africa, cultures of innovation have largely accrued from the jua kali (informal), and not the formal sector. Indigenous cultural innovations have also been at the centre of development in most highly indebted poor countries (HIPC), such as in Uganda or its slightly richer sister Kenya, notably because of wanainchi (citizens) exceptionally limited access to capital.
As such, when it comes to delivering justice in Africa, we ought to revise our priorities by doing away with existing preconceived ideas that might have worked within the European cultural setting. They have clearly not worked in the face of the socio-cultural heritages of African societies, and neither has the opposite, the Africanisation of Western concepts of justice delivery.

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Hama Tuma in Pambazuka

A national flag, a black oppressor in a Mercedes Benz and a Rolls Royce, palaces and corrupt and hedonistic existence for the few and Africans were expected to hail this as freedom and salvation. Those who said the emperor was actually naked and that colonialism has continued in a new garb (with the old stink in place) were quickly silenced. Belgian and CIA agents collaborated to have Patrice Lumumba murdered. Freedom fighters Um Nyobe, Felix Moumie and later on Mondlane, Machel and Cabral were gotten rid off in one way or another. Pan-Africanists with a strong anti imperialist stance were made victims of foreign-engineered coups, as in Ghana and Nkrumah. Colonialism never left but wore a new mask; Africa was doomed as the traitors had a field day, selling the whole continent without any scruples or qualms.

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Photo courtesy of Ghennet Girma

Alemayehu G. Mariam writes in Pambazuka:

The current state of affairs in Ethiopia calls for the reinvention of politics in the democratic opposition, by disconnecting from the self-destructive politics of the past and overwrought politics of the present, and connecting to a new politics of the future which transcends partisanship, ethnicity, ideology, language, region and so on. This reinvention requires several things: A paradigm shift in political thought and behaviour, a radical change in perspective, a new approach and lexicon for political communication and a redefinition of the issues within a broader national agenda. It calls for politics that is ‘compassion-centred’ and pragmatically oriented to creatively solving the entrenched problems of governance.

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• Alemayehu G. Mariam: Ethiopia: The Future of the Future Country, Part II (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Failings of the Nation-State (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

Jason Hickel writes in Pambazuka:

The correlation between environment and development is indeterminate; there are many regions in the world with hostile geological and climactic characteristics that have nonetheless managed to keep from descending into inveterate poverty. Second, the theory focuses on what Africa lacks rather than what Africa has, being – among other things – vast natural resource wealth in the form of unprecedented petroleum reserves and mineral deposits. The question should not be what to do in the absence of resources, but how existing resources get used, how they are distributed, and who pockets the profits.

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• Africa Rising (loomnie.com)
• Dictatorship more dangerous than climate change (my-beauty-best-teacher.blogspot.com)

In Pambazuka Amira Kheir writes:

Perhaps it is time we re-examine the dilemma of African statehood through a different prism – as a crisis of inheritance rather than a crisis of capability. And by inheritance I am not predictably alluding to colonial legacy, rather to a very specific transition that occurred in the decolonisation era. While one is not independent of the other, pursuing a deterministic approach to the current status quo – one governed by cause and consequence, and not by simplistic notions of ‘nature’ – is perhaps where our answer lies.
More precisely, what I am attempting to present is an alternative paradigm – that the reason the state of affairs is as it is could be a direct result of the subtle inheritance of a system that did not match African needs and potential. This is an inheritance that is often overlooked as a norm and that is taken for granted as the natural and certain structure of governance: The nation-state.

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In Pambazuka:

What constitutes an intellectual in the South African context?’ asks Leslie Dikeni in this week’s Pambazuka News, ‘Who is an intellectual and who isn’t?’ In an extract from a new book of essays, ‘The Poverty of Ideas’, Dikeni separates the ‘real intellectuals’ from a new breed of ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ that have emerged in recent years: The ‘celebrity intellectual’, the ‘commercial intellectual’, the ‘policy analyst’ and the ‘new gender activist’...[continue reading]

Alemayehu G. Mariam writes in Pambazuka:

The inconvenient truth about Africa today is that dictatorship presents a far more perilous threat to the survival of Africans than climate change. The devastation African dictators have wreaked upon the social fabric and ecosystem of African societies is incalculable.

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The cautionary tales of commodity dependence continue.In Pambazuka Khadija Sharife writes about Zambia's copper straitjacket:

Once perceived as an icon of progress in Africa thanks to wealth from its copper mines, today over 75 per cent of Zambia's population lives below the poverty line...Khadija Sharife recounts the country’s ‘riches to rags’ story – a story that is being repeated in former resource colonies across the continent, which although ‘politically liberated’ have ‘remained economically chained’.

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Even Russia's Medvedev rails against commodity dependence.

Tutu Alicante and Lisa Misol write in FP:

Imagine a tiny country flush with oil money, where the wealth per person is on par with that of Spain or Italy. Now picture a place quite the opposite, where nearly two-thirds of the population lives in extreme poverty and infant and child mortality rates are on par with those of the war-ravaged Democratic Republic of the Congo...impossible as it sounds, these two sentences describe the same place: Equatorial Guinea, a West African country home to roughly a half-million people. Earlier this month, the country's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, marked the 30th anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.

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via Pambazuka

Fatima Sadiqi writes in Common Ground News Service:

Women in North Africa have made tremendous progress in promoting and upholding their rights. Women in this region—commonly known as the Maghreb—are at the forefront of the Arab world in terms of individual rights and gender equality, and constitute models for other Arab women to follow. A number of lessons may be drawn from the inspiring experience of women in North Africa, especially in Morocco and Tunisia.

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Etyopian Simbiro writes in Pambazuka

Yesterday’s oppressed have now become today’s worst oppressors, invalidating the meaning of fighting for freedom and exacerbating the culture of vengeance, ethnic prejudice, and discrimination. They are also destroying the possibility of a dissenting and freethinking in Ethiopia step by step. They have already let the country down, a country that listened to the wind of change carefully and hoped that a better future would come, free from state-sponsored terror, torture, rape, and murder. The last 18 years have brought more misery to Ethiopia than what people expected and hoped to see; the minor changes here and there don’t really count. Just like in the past, one group still dominates the rest of the population, a one party system deceptively dressed as a multi-party system.

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