My Beauty Best Teacher

Toilet capitalism in Zimbabwe

Vice reports:

Boniface Mwangi was joined by a half-dozen artists on a quiet Tuesday night in downtown Nairobi as they worked on painting their inaugural mural. A piece this size would usually take days, even with a large crew. They did it in seven hours. A blank wall in a filthy, abandoned lot near the city market was illuminated by floodlights as various crew members traced a 30-meter tall mural that tells the story of corruption in Kenya.

Photos by Andre Epstein

“We’re using images of a vulture MP stomping on a face, of protests and Parliament, to tell Kenyans that when you sell your vote, you’re mortgaging our future,” he said.

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Al Jazeera reporting:

Protesters in Senegal have clashed with police after a court approved President Abdoulaye Wade to seek a highly disputed third term, but barred music icon Youssou Ndour from running.
Senegal's constitutional court approved late on Friday a list of 14 candidates who had met the requirements to run for president in the February 26 election, and among them was the 85-year-old Wade...[more]

Daniel Ayana writes:

Scholars have suggested the importance of integrating African democratization process with grassroots institutions for long-term consolidation. However, the major problem remained the inadequacy of secularism in disentangling the religious from the non-religious intertwined in indigenous African institutions. This essay reconsiders the Burckhardtian notion of secularism for a recalibrated definition that embraces a trajectory of transposed values. Debunking the Burckhardtian notion opens up an analytic terrain relegated to the religious. Thus indigenous African religions are re-conceptualized as civic religions to shed light on their public aspects. The essay then identifies collective ceremonies and the attendant secular/civic rituals as the grassroots institutions housed in indigenous African religions. The analysis also locates the disjuncture between independent African states and the grassroots institutions at this level of collective ceremonies, perceived as sacral or irrational. The objective is to harness them as African building blocks for democratic consolidation

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In Africa Works:

Image courtesy of Bongoweekend

African presidents continue to display a preference for pomp and ceremony over practical action. Sata (president of Zambia) suggests an alternative approach — and is backing up his rhetoric with action. On a recent trip to the historic Zambian city of Livingstone, near the border with neighboring Zimbabwe, Sata traveled by public bus to a meeting with president Robert Mugabe — and then afterwards, even more improbably, settled his own hotel bill.

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Further reading Zambia’s President Sata: A Populist ‘Clown’ With Interesting Off-the-Wall Ideas

Howard W. French writing in the Atlantic:

The Democratic Republic of Congo's President, Joseph Kabila, has just perpetrated a massive hoax in order to retain power. Bowing in principle to the Western-driven demands the our famous but nebulous "international community," Kabila has held just held elections, which he would like the world to believe he has won.
The overall tally, 49 percent for the "winner," and 32 percent for the first runner up, had a ring to it that at first glance, at least for the uninitiated, sounded both plausible and competitive, which in such matters usually go hand in hand. The results proclaimed the Congo to be the latest African country to have traveled far away from the bad old past of continental elections, which authoritarian rulers once routinely "won" with upwards of 95 percent of the vote.

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Related video:
'Congo elections: Why is our revolution not being televised?'

The brother of the groundbreaking designer Bibi Seck:

Malick Noël Seck, a Senegalese political activist, was arrested on October 10th, 2011, for delivering an open letter to the President of the Constitutional Council stating that the third term candidacy of President Abdoulaye Wade is unconstitutional. He was charged with making death threats against the members of the Constitutional Council and "contempt of the court". The letter contains no death threats. Furthermore, the letter cannot be seen as "contempt of the court," as members of the Constitutional Council are not magistrates of the Senegalese legal or administrative system.

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Al Jazeera on commodity corruption in Sierra Leone:

In Al Jazeera:

Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, is considered one of the most dangerous places on earth. Its two million inhabitants have endured more than two decades of conflict and today a battle rages between the armed al-Shabab group and Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG).Amidst the chaos of this war-torn city, Mahamoud Nur, the mayor of Mogadishu, is trying to make a difference, in part by "altering the mindset of the people"...[continue reading]

In the Guardian:

Photograph: Zed Nelson/Institute

Mabior Garang, son of Dr John Garang, a former SPLA rebel leader and Sudanese politician

'The people are edgy right now. They fought the war, contributed their children, their crops, their livestock. The moment they should be paid back, the ­movement is hijacked by the ­"cut-and-paste ­middle class" – the foreign diaspora returning. They can’t institute ­policies that speak to the people. And when ­people are hungry and perceive those in power are denying them food, they will rise up.'

via Kilele

In Pambazuka Ella Scheepers writes about June 23 Movement and democracy in Senegal:

The formation of M23 – a new movement born out of the 23 June protests against President Wade’s proposed constitutional amendments – is the latest result of African democracy at work. Here different (and sometimes opposing) voices join together to create a singular organization for a common cause to protect and promote the constitution and democratic principles. Instead of adhering to rules about what traditional democracy is and what traditional relationships it permits, M23 went back to the basics in defense of the common good, hence bringing together very diverse sections of society.

courtesy of CS Monitor

Its impact has been both immediate – halting the adoption of the proposed amendments in parliament - and there seems to be potential for the development of a longer lasting impression where civil society has a strong voice in the halls of power. However, this phenomenon will be tested in the upcoming 2012 election when the question of whether the movement was the voice of particular interest groups or truly has the peoples' interests at heart will be answered.

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Ethan Zuckerman writes:

Africa is becoming a hotbed for democracy. Freedom House (whose methods I sometimes disagree with, but who offer a global view of political freedoms over a long period of time) identifies three “free” states in West Africa (Ghana, Benin and Mali), and three in southern Africa (South Africa, Botswana and Namibia) as well as three of the small island states. And more than twenty states meet Freedom House’s “partly free” criteria, including powerhouses like Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal. Zambia is listed as partly free, but this year’s successful election might lead to an upgrade. Nigeria, often dismissed as a basket case, had a pretty good election this year as well.

concluding:

There’s a danger that we miss a major story here: democracy is taking root in Africa and spreading rapidly. Nations like Zambia, which survived autocratic rule and then dominance by one party are now seeing democratic change. It’s important to cover African crises and tragedies, but not at the expense of the hopeful news of democratic success and change.

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Meanwhile Jimmy Kainja discusses how the Zambia result spotlights "a rare moment" in the history of African politics:

No one can say what future holds for Zambia under Michael Sata but Zambians can be assured that they have a man in power that majority of them voted for. Banda has shown that he is a true statesman. His loss is not only a victory for Sata, it is also a triumph and a rare moment for African politics and democracy. Let us hope this is not an isolated incident but a sign of maturing democracy...[continue reading]

In Up Station Mountain Club Peter Wuteh Vakunta reviews George Ayittey's Defeating Dictators:

After publishing Africa Betrayed (1992) and Africa Unchained (2005), intellectual gadfly, Professor George B.N.Ayittey has crafted yet another masterpiece, Defeating Dictators: Fighting Tyranny in Africa and Around the World (2011) in which he adumbrates the deceptive habits of highly defective despotic regimes in Africa and beyond. Ayittey contends that a dictator is a dictator. He further points out that “The only good dictator is a dead one”(218). The crux of the argument in his book is that Africans and other people chaffing under the yoke of despotism should steer clear of confusing ideological with systemic dictatorship—dictatorship that emerges from faulty institutions and systems. Any political system that concentrates power in the hands of one person, he argues, will inevitably degenerate into a dictatorship. The culprit is the system—not ideology or culture...[continue reading]

From Salisu Suleiman:

Are there any connections with the fact that the more feudal a system, the poorer and less educated the majority of people within those systems usually are? Consider this – two of the most feudal institutions in Nigeria – the Sokoto Sultanate and the Borno Emirate have significantly lower western literacy levels than is common. But these examples apart, President Goodluck Jonathan, in his attempt to win the April 2011 elections has inadvertently waddled into a decades old social and political struggle for the soul of the North...[continue reading]

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The NYTimes on Senegal's activist rappers:

Senegalese rappers and other members of Y'En A Marre  Rebecca Blackwell/Associated Pres

In Senegal, the political mainstream appears stagnant and the musicians anything but, which explains why laid-back musicians with stage names like Fou Malade (“Crazy Sick Guy”) and Thiat (“Junior”) are leading a vigorous demonstration movement against the country’s octogenarian president, who does not want to leave office.
The usual regional trappings of power — a $27 million monumental statue overlooking the capital, a new presidential plane, tinkering with the country’s Constitution — have not gone down well in a poor but proud West African country used to something better. They have led to a season of revolt, on the North African model, in this coastal country, a former French colony.

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Global Voices reports:

On Saturday, September 3, 2011 a group of around 200 young people assembled in Luanda, Angola to protest lack of freedom and the 32-year reign of President José Eduardo dos Santos. According to witnesses, the protest ended with police beating a number of protesters.A video call to protest, uploaded on September 1, featured bold, personalized calls to protest by a number of the protest's organizers, many of whom are hiphop artists. The tagline of the video “32 anos é muito” means simply “32 years is a lot.”...[continue reading]

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Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in GhanaWeb:

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.”

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Nick Eubank writing in the Guardian:

Somaliland was part of Somalia until 1991, when it seceded during the country's civil war. When Somaliland first declared independence, its government was built around a single clan and lacked accountable political institutions. Business leaders eventually agreed to provide funds, but not until the government agreed to develop representative and accountable political institutions (a concession that politicians made only out of necessity, as it weakened their own grasp on power).In one notable incident, the government was forced to implement democratic reforms in exchange for tax revenues from Somaliland's main port. These revenues total less than $30m a year – a fraction of the more than $100m the government would have received from aid organisations if Somaliland had been eligible for international assistance. It is difficult to imagine that the owners of the port would have been able to exact the same concessions if the government had other funding options.As a result of these negotiations over tax revenue, Somaliland has become an exceptional democracy. It has held multiple presidential, parliamentary and district-level elections. It has seen multiple peaceful handovers of power, including to a minority clan. It even survived a presidential election that was decided by an 80-vote margin without resorting to violence.

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