My Beauty Best Teacher

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...one has to consider the cases of many African countries where these institutions were severely compromised during one-party rule.

Such countries have had huge political problems with their democratisation since they have no credible institutions to adjudicate even the simplest of squabbles. In Malawi all political actors have respected the courts and sought to redress their grievances through the court system. Malawi had more litigations going on than the entire SADC region. One can point to some of the abusive aspects of these litigations but all in all they are partly evidence of the faith in our court system.

When Bingu came to power he promised to reverse the creeping trend towards the politicisation of these institutions. He specifically promised to strengthen the meritocratic basis of the civil service. What we are witnessing now is the shredding of the legitimacy of these institutions by politicising them and by implying that their daily management of their affairs depend on “orders from above”. The institutions are now being pitted one against another.

The following is the first of a series of excerpts that Al Jazeera will be publishing from The Invisible Arab: The promise and peril of the Arab revolutions by Marwan Bishara.

In much of the world's media, the narrative goes like this: An oppressed people who have suffered passively suddenly decide that enough is enough and, thanks to Western technology and inspiration, spontaneously rise up to reclaim their freedom, inspiring what is called the Arab Spring.

Like most revolutions, however, this one was a long time coming. The historic takeover of Tunis's November 7 Square, Cairo's Tahrir Square, and Manama's Pearl Square, among others, were the culmination of a long social and political struggle - countless sit-ins, strikes, pickets, and demonstrations by people who risked and suffered intimidation, torture, and imprisonment.

What started as a desperate act of self-immolation by Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, soon became a viral event on the internet, one that led angry Tunisians to pour into the streets by the thousands. Demonstrations turned into national upheaval and culminated in a full-fledged revolution that toppled the Tunisian dictatorship and spread east to other countries to kindle the greatest Arab transformation in memory. Never had the region witnessed such collective vigour and yearning for change.

Read more of our Tunisia coverage Within a few weeks, millions of Arabs filled their streets and squares, giving new meaning to Mark Twain's claim that there's power in numbers. The silent majority finally spoke, breaking the psychological barrier of fear erected by regimes through decades of oppression, and discovering in record time that, as the fairy tale foretold, the emperor had no clothes.

Starting on a small scale, training just a few boys on a dust pitch in Accra, the Right to Dream Academy has grown to the point at which it is today; a hugely successful fully residential international school, offering scholarships to talented children drawn from all over Ghana.

Image courtesy of Candace Feit

The focus and guiding principle of the Academy is that every talented child has the right to dream of a better, brighter future and can reach their full potential when nurtured through a carefully structured programme in a safe and healthy environment.

In March 2010, we officially opened the new RtD Academy, a US$1.5million purpose built facility, located 20km south of Akosombo in the Eastern Region of Ghana. The new Academy provides a home for our expanding programme, with specialist facilities and resources located onsite, to ensure our students can reach their true potential in life...[more]

Sokari Ekine meets women’s movements in the Niger Delta and discovers that in this militarised country even small acts take courage
The Niger Delta has been at the centre of Nigeria’s post‑independence military project from the first coup in 1966 through to the present. To the outside world it remained a forgotten outpost, however, until the 1990s and the rise of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Since then, unequivocal evidence has emerged of how the region and its commerce – primarily the oil industry – has been systematically militarised, with violence by the state, multinationals and local militias deployed as an instrument of governance and intimidation to force the people into total submission...[continue reading]

To eke out a living, poor entrepreneurs like Bouazizi -- not just in Tunisia, but across the world -- have little alternative but to join the local extralegal economy with its own rules for making transactions and protecting assets. Bouazizi, for example, paid 3 dinars a day for the regular use of a location on the street -- what the ILD calls an "extralegal property right." According to our research, he had worked his entire life to establish a small place in the local market economy -- and lost it in a matter of minutes.

During our research we found hundreds of small enterprises like Bouazizi's, run by Tunisians with no legal identity, no legal address, and no legal right to their shack or market stall. Without legal documents, their ability to make the most of their assets is limited, and they live in constant fear of being evicted or harassed by local officials. According to our research, around half of the entire Tunisian workforce is employed by extralegal businesses of this kind. Around the region, the number is far larger -- over 100 million Arabs.

If committing suicide over the loss of $225 worth of goods and a regular location on the street for a fruit stand seems inconceivable to most people in the United States and Europe, Bouazizi's counterparts throughout Tunisia and in the extralegal economies in the rest of the Arab world understood immediately his desperation. In their eyes, Bouazizi had not been just the victim of corruption or even public humiliation, as horrible as they are; he had been deprived of the only thing that stood between him and starvation -- the loss of his place in the only economy available to poor Arabs.

Whenever I try to apply logic, critical reasoning and scientific temper to issues during public debates, I am often accused of not thinking like an African. I am always told that I think like a white man or that I have a western mentality. As if critical thinking or the scientific outlook is for westerners alone or that critical thinking can only be exercised by people from a particular race or region. No, this is not the case.Surprisingly, nobody has ever stepped forward to tell me how an ‘African’ thinks. For me it is either this ‘African mode of thought’ is one which nobody knows about or is one that does not exist or qualify to be called a thinking pattern. Nobody has tried to let me know if Africans think at all. Because this misguided view that one is unAfrican or western in outlook is often employed to block or suppress critical reasoning or inquiry particularly when it is used to challenge traditions, positions and opinions informed by blind faith or dogma.

While holding on to beliefs and outlooks informed by superstition and primordial thinking is often glorified as African. Even in this 21st century, reason and science are still perceived as western, and not African values. I have yet to understand how we came about this mistaken idea. Hence, it is often portrayed as if the African does not reason and dare not reason or that the African does not think or cannot think critically. It seems thinking like an African means suspension of thought, logic or common sense. Thinking like an African means not thinking at all- thoughtlessness or thinking in spiritual, occult or magical ways.For instance, whenever I try to challenge or question the irrational and absurd claims of witchcraft, juju and charms, and other ritualistic and religious nonsense that dominate the mental space of Africans, I am often reminded that my mentality is western. And you know what, whenever in the course of a public debate, somebody alleges that a position is western, it means that it is unacceptable though it may be reasonable or may have a superior argument. Is that not unfortunate?

The shops are stacked six feet high with goods, the streets outside are jammed with customers and salespeople are sweating profusely under the onslaught. But this is not a high street during the Christmas-shopping season in the rich world. It is the Onitsha market in southern Nigeria, every day of the year. Many call it the world’s biggest. Up to 3m people go there daily to buy rice and soap, computers and construction equipment. It is a hub for traders from the Gulf of Guinea, a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease but also home to millions of highly motivated entrepreneurs and increasingly prosperous consumers.
Over the past decade six of the world’s ten fastest-growing countries were African. In eight of the past ten years, Africa has grown faster than East Asia, including Japan. Even allowing for the knock-on effect of the northern hemisphere’s slowdown, the IMF expects Africa to grow by 6% this year and nearly 6% in 2012, about the same as Asia...[continue reading]

Razia Said's CD, Zebu Nation was created to raise awareness and benefit the preservation of the rainforest in her native Madagascar, specifically the region to the northeast known as MaMaBay (area comprised of the Masaola and Makira forests, and the Antogil Bay)...Her first recorded songs were in an R&B/Jazz/Pop style, in English. During a family visit to her family in Madagascar, in the MaMaBay region, she met with members of Njava, a locally renowned band, and embarked on the path of using her native rhythms and instruments, and singing in her native language.

Nyatiti is an eight-stringed plucked lyre from Kenya. It is a classical instrument used by the Luo people located in the Nyanza western region in Kenya. It is about three feet long. The player of Nyatiti holds it to his chest, seated on a low stool, with the base firmly to the ground. Usually it is played together with the oporo, a curved horn...[continue reading]

courtesy of Design Indaba

Wide Open Walls is an initiative of Lawrence Williams, one of the owners of the Makasatu conservation project at Mandina in The Gambia. A keen artist, Williams has been working with local artists on a creative project called Bushdwellers.Envisioning the project to work as an art installation, while also promoting the region as a tourist destination, Williams was keen to expand the project by collaborating with other creatives. Recently Wide Open Walls and Write on Africa with Ricky Lee Gordon, joined creative forces to encourage inspiration and urban rejuvenation through special event and art initiatives in public spaces. The aim of the project was to “inspire ourselves to inspires others to inspire change”...[continue reading]

Demonstrators in Tunis, Tunisia, on January 20, 2011 courtesy of Tech Review

...something deeper and more universal has been achieved: voice. New ties are being made both virtually and on the street. Social and mainstream media have connected people to each other and to the world. The youth of an entire region are speaking out with whatever tools they have, from social media to feet on the ground. The buds of the Arab Spring are young and still in need of nurturing, but George Washington's observation may still hold true: "Liberty, when it begins to take root, is a plant of rapid growth."

A democratic consciousness informed by West Africans’ gloomy history is helping to nurture the region’s democracy. The fundamental theme is using democracy to address development challenges in a region with high unemployment, large number of restless ethnic groups, dangerously bulging youth, never-ending poverty, and certain cultural inhibitions that entangle progress...In the past 20 years or so, the intellectual climate of West Africa, encouraged by the international community and diasporan West Africans, is changing and the beginnings of deliberately thought-out reform movements for democracy is emerging. In the face of West Africa’s murky political history, the contending issues are whether West Africa should adopt Western democratic liberalism or democracy brewed from within West Africa’s history and cultural traditions. Western liberal democracy is cooked in Western cultural context with all its attendant limitations. While West Africa may borrow from the West, it has to be blended with the West African culture. In Nigerian political scientist Claude Ake’s Democracy and Development in Africa, he argued, “Even at its best, liberal democracy is inimical to the idea of the people having effective decision-making power. The essence of liberal democracy is precisely the abolition of popular power and replacement of popular sovereignty with the rule of law.”

A few years ago, former Central Bank Governor ‘Comical' Chukwuma Soludo reeled out the results of studies which clearly indicated that the north east geopolitical region of Nigeria was the poorest and least developed. Is there any coincidence with the fact that the same region has now become the haven of extremist groups posing serious security threats to the entire country? Why are we seeing almost daily attacks and loss of lives and property from Bauchi, Gombe to Maiduguri?
That Nigeria as a country is facing unprecedented political, social and economic crises is not in doubt. While each state has specific challenges, the north east region faces the risk of disintegration from the activities of extremist groups that seek to bring about violent change. The role of the region's political elite and fraudulent governors who have systematically narrowed the economic and political space to the exclusion of the majority, who wallow in poverty, unemployment, insecurity, cannot be discounted. Taking advantage of youth unemployment, the Gombe State government supported the ‘kallare' group; Bauchi State gave tacit support to the ‘sara suka', while the Borno government openly related with the ‘ecomog' group which directly or indirectly metamorphosed into the ‘boko haram'.

“Among the non-western economic blocs, East Asia has the highest intraregional trade, comprising largely intermediate goods, underpinning the region’s global trade and competitiveness agenda, and attracting ample FDI. In other words, Factory Asia has worked well. Factory Southern Africa has not. Southern Africa remains the least integrated region in the world despite the presence of a customs union and a free trade area.”Report co-author Sandeep Mahajan says a successful Factory Southern Africa requires dynamic trade based on nimble networks of multi-national firms. Formal and informal trade barriers have to be removed. “South Africa,” he says, “needs to open up, as well as integrate its own rural and advanced regions.” Current policy, he says, “tends towards mercantilism, at the cost of much larger gains from trade based on the principles of comparative advantage."

Ethiopia is a poor country, with most of its population living in what is termed 'extreme poverty' (accepted definition: less than $1 per day). But Ethiopia should not be a poor country; large areas are lush green with plenty of opportunity for cultivation. The key is to direct aid in such a way that it avoids sporadic development and, instead, achieves long-term success through integrating all of the requirements a community needs to thrive. In other words, what's the point of building a school when the kids are too hungry, or sick with malaria, to attend? You need to provide them with food, health care and education at the same time. This is only part of it, but you get the idea.The fancy phrase is 'holistic development' and it's not pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking; I saw it with my own eyes during my visit: large swathes of land being irrigated to produce cash crops which, in turn, could be sold at market (the tradition had been to grow maize, more maize and more still); schools being built, new health centres, savings and lending schemes allowing investment in rudimentary tools which revolutionise production and, crucially, food storage to ensure that if the rains do not arrive one year there's enough food to feed their families. In short, a major success story run entirely by Ethiopians themselves.A group called Self Help Africa runs the project in the Sodo region I visited, along with others in various parts of the country. To see such immense pride on the faces of the farmers planting their new crops, on the children walking to their new schools and, particularly, on the women who run the savings and lending schemes is a memory which simply doesn't fade. Whole communities coming together, hundreds of men, women and children digging ditches, building dams: millions of gallons of rainwater which had previously crashed off the mountainside, dragging topsoil from the land below until eventually pouring uselessly into the river and being lost forever, now being stopped in its tracks. That rainwater now seeps into the ground, raising the water table.