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I want to suggest that South Africa offers us deeper lessons. To begin with, it calls on us to broaden and deepen our notion of justice. In the era that followed independence, we thought of justice as mainly social justice. Today, we have narrowed down the understanding of justice to criminal justice, with lawyers as its primary custodians.

The negotiations that ended apartheid brought us political justice. That political justice was a reform of the political system – an end to juridical and political apartheid.

The twist in Darfur had to do with relations between peasants and nomads. Nomads have a soft notion of borders. They move across borders. So the British decided that nomads who move over large areas of land shall have no tribal homeland. These were the nomads of northern Darfur, the northern Rizeigat.

How is this relevant to Kenya? Think of the violence in the Rift Valley. The deep background is colonial. The details are different. But the questions are the same: who has right to land? This is not a question of right against wrong, but right against right. In contention are two sets of rights, each with a different history; one colonial, the other post-colonial; one tribal/ethnic, the other national. The perpetrators may be different, but the issues are not so different.

In Kenya, you have had two experiences over the past few decades. The first was the national movement for a constitutional reform. You forged a national coalition, a coalition across ethnic and ideological boundaries. My friend Willy Mutunga called it ‘Constitution-making from the Middle. This attempt at political reform was an exemplary effort, one that inspired the region. But you failed to build on it. Instead, you turned to a contradictory initiative – don’t be vague, go to Hague. The Hague initiative undercut the gains made in the earlier period. Whatever national movement you had built around the constitutional reform process was split along ethnic lines, as each side mobilized in pursuit of revenge, rather than reform, and a different breed of lawyers took over.

Soon after the end of apartheid, its lessons were followed in Mozambique, where Renamo had unleashed the most brutal terror against children and women. It was a practice reminiscent of the kind of terror unleashed by LRA in Uganda. That is where the similarity between Uganda and Mozambique ends. The two governments followed entirely different paths: a political reform in Mozambique, and war and punishment in Uganda. You only need to look at the consequences to appreciate the difference: the war is over in Mozambique where the leadership of Renamo sits in Parliament. The war continues in Uganda where the leadership of LRA is still on the run.

I want to argue that the issue for us today, the big issue, is political violence. This violence is testimony that we have failed to come to grips with the legacy of colonialism – and the challenge of decolonization

The first set of concessions is what Joe Slovo, the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, called sunset clauses. They promised that the personnel of the old apartheid state – including its security forces, judiciary and civil service – would survive into the post-apartheid order. The state personnel were granted impunity. Only the political establishment had to subject itself to an inclusive electoral process. Second, there was constitutional protection for white-owned property; this protection was translated into a local government law. Third, there were no court trials of perpetrators; there was no judicial process. Instead, there was an amnesty for all. The much-lauded TRC really functioned as a mock quasi-judicial process: no matter the quality of the truth offered, it had no choice but to grant amnesty. Apartheid did not end in the courts. Its end was negotiated at the conference table. It could not have been otherwise, for at least one reason.

Perhaps the most instructive is the case of Zimbabwe, where SADCC under Thabo Mbeki successfully resisted demands by the West that the region isolate Zimbabwe through sanctions. The result was to give time for an internal dialogue. Contrast this with Kenya where the ‘international community’ – along with an influential internal constituency – distorted the internal political process by threatening to give priority to court trials. It is of secondary significance whether these trials were to be internal or international.

The weakness of the Afro-optimistic perspective is reinforced by recent research showing that foreign investments  to a large extent are directed towards African agricultural land for the production of energy crops and food for export. Such investments often take place in interaction between foreign and domestic African interests, and with the support of international aid. Such projects are highly mechanized and require little labour. Large-scale agriculture focuses mainly on a single crop, thus undermining biodiversity. Irrigation is necessary but often leads to conflicts with local smallholder farmers, of whom the majority are women. In Africa, smallholders have weak water and land rights, despite their paramount importance of their production for food security – they produce 90 per cent of the food in Africa.

This large-scale agriculture uses 75 per cent of the country’s farmland, but contributes only 60 per cent of the gross annual agricultural production. It employs only two people per 100 acres, while small-scale farming provides jobs for 15 people in the same area, accounting for the bulk of food production.

While a couple of pejoratively called “black diamonds” have made it to the top, crafting a small indigenous elite that slowly takes up residence in the old vestiges of white privilege, for the vast majority of South Africans nothing has really changed.

Samir Amin once wrote that “the logic of this globalization trend consists in nothing other than that of organizing apartheid on a global scale.” Apartheid here is not meant as a metaphor; it is what a philosopher might call an ontological category of the neoliberal world order. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, “the explosive growth of slums in the last decades … is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times.”

First of all, the ANC decided to take over existing institutions — political and economic institutions that were based on systematic exclusion and massive inequality — and thereby ended up unwittingly reproducing these same oppressive structures with a new elite formation. Secondly, as Lawrence Hamilton explains in his book The Political Philosophy of Needs, the ANC leadership deliberately embraced a particular ideological vision of how to “transform” the country: a vision he refers to as the “political philosophy of rights”, in other words: liberalism. South Africa’s new constitution was the clearest manifestation of this: everything was put to work to secure the rights of individuals to vote and be represented, to own property, and to not be discriminated against in any way. Little attention, however, was given to questions of political participation, genuine popular sovereignty, and the satisfaction of basic human needs.

Partly because of the reigning neoliberal ideology of the time, and partly out of fear of reproducing the Zimbabwean experience where Mugabe’s violent land expropriations had led to a white exodus and economic collapse, Mandela and the ANC opted for a gradualist approach that actually ended up turning the ANC into an agent of apartheid itself. Legally, the property rights of white landowners took priority over the human needs of local shackdwellers. Workers’ rights were increasingly hollowed out as the right to unionize gave way to the “right” to be “represented” by a corrupt and ANC co-opted union leadership. The state-oriented approach and the political philosophy of rights thus locked poor South Africans into a logic of representation and top-down decision-making whereby human needs, social autonomy and political participation came to be subordinated to the formation of a new political and corporate elite of former ANC revolutionaries.

The so-called Abahlali baseMjondolo, or shackdwellers’ movement, has since spread to Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg.

The action was just one more expression of the dawning realization around the world that, in these times of universal deceit, only an insistence on radical autonomy can take the revolution forward.

Twenty years after apartheid, the old freedom fighters of the ANC have come to reproduce the same structures of oppression against which they once arose.

A local slumdweller, probably somewhere in his thirties, lay dead on the side of the road, his body awkwardly twisted into an impossible position, his eyes still wide open. Some two hundred meters ahead, a car had pulled over on the curb, its driver casually leaning on the vehicle while talking to a policeman. No one had even bothered to cover up the body. This man just lay there like a dead animal — another road kill in endless wave of needlessly extinguished lives.

This time, however, the policemen and politicians responsible for the massacre were mostly black and represented the same party that had once led the struggle against racial oppression: the ruling ANC of President Jacob Zuma and the iconic freedom fighter Nelson Mandela.

Abahlali stresses its autonomy from state institutions, political parties, businesses and NGOs, and rejects both the ANC and its principal rivals in the opposition, drawing instead on self-organization and direct action to secure improvements in living conditions, to defend communities under threat of eviction, to reclaim urban land for social redistribution, and to democratize society from below.

U.S. proxies set off inter-communal bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994, a conflagration that served as pretext for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and the loss of six million lives – all under the protection, funding and guidance of a succession of U.S. administrations in mock atonement for the much smaller “genocide” in Rwanda.

New age Euro-American law holds sway over Africa in the form of the International Criminal Court. The Court’s dockets are reserved for Africans, whose supposed civilizational deficits monopolize the global judiciary’s resources. This, too, is R2P, in robes.

However, what we do know about U.S. domestic “terror” spying is enough to dismiss the whole premise for the NSA’s vast algorithmic enterprises. The actual “terrorist” threat on U.S. soil is clearly relatively slight. Otherwise, why would the FBI have to manufacture homegrown jihadists by staging elaborate stings of homeless Black men in Miami who couldn’t put together bus fare to Chicago, much less bomb the Sears tower?

So, what are they looking for? Patterns. Patterns of thought and behavior that algorithmically reveal the existence of cohorts of people that might, as a group, or a living network, create problems for the State in the future. People who do not necessarily know each other, but whose patterns of life make them potentially problematic to the rulers, possibly in some future crisis, or some future manufactured crisis. A propensity to dissent, for example. The size of these suspect cohorts, these pattern-based groups, can be as large or small as the defining criteria inputted by the programmer. So, what kind of Americans would the programmers be interested in?

As the country‘s health financing crisis escalates, the option of reintroducing and increasing user fees at clinics and hospitals has already been tabled for debate. Such a devastating and retrograde move in Lesotho would further exacerbate inequality and increase rather than reduce access to healthcare for the majority of the population. World Bank President, Jim Yong Kim, recently stated that user fees for healthcare are both unjust and unnecessary.

It is accepted that borrowing capital via the private sector will always be more expensive than governments borrowing on their own account. The theoretical cost saving and value for money potential of PPP financing and delivery therefore lies in effective risk transfer to the private sector and, in turn, the effective management of that risk by the private sector in the form of improved performance and greater cost efficiency in its operations. In the case of Lesotho, this potential benefit has not been realised, and the costs are already escalating to unsustainable levels.

The World Bank promised and advised that to build a Public-Private Partnership hospital in the capital would cost no more than the old public hospital it replaced.

“They are interested in conversations, not conversions. They find abstract distinctions between nature and culture sterile. They would rather try to understand what cities have in common with towns and villages and bushes and forests, or what interconnections there are between concepts such as ‘civilised’ and ‘primitive’, Europe and Africa, the Neolithic and the Bronze Age.

Nyamnjoh contrasted “completeness” with “conviviality”, defining the latter as recognition and provision for the reality of being incomplete.

“It challenges us to be open-minded and open-ended in how we speak and how we identify ourselves. It encourages us to reach out, encounter and explore ways of enhancing or complementing ourselves with the added possibilities of potency brought our way by the incompleteness of others.”

Nyamnjoh argued that ideas of completeness are an extravagant illusion and it therefore makes more sense to speak about incompleteness and to invest in the sort of interdependence that can enhance us to be more efficacious in our actions.

The FN has moved away from the fringes of the political party system to take up a place nearer to the centre. It has subsumed its appeal to racism, Holocaust denial and nativism under a cloak of anti-immigration policies coupled with a broad populist appeal against the demands of the European Union for austerity.

This bodes ill for Europe and its social and political cohesion. It also will have a dramatic impact on Africa if France leaves the Euro zone or if the increasingly dire financial crisis of the French banking system continues.

The monetary policy governing such a diverse aggregation of countries is uncomplicated because it is, in fact, operated by the French Treasury, without reference to the central fiscal authorities of any of the WAEMU or the CEMAC states . Under the terms of the agreement which set up these banks and the CFA the Central Bank of each African country is obliged to keep at least 65% of its foreign exchange reserves in an “operations account” held at the French Treasury, as well as another 20 percent to cover financial liabilities.

The monetary policy governing such a diverse aggregation of countries is uncomplicated because it is, in fact, operated by the French Treasury, without reference to the central fiscal authorities of any of the WAEMU or the CEMAC states . Under the terms of the agreement which set up these banks and the CFA the Central Bank of each African country is obliged to keep at least 65% of its foreign exchange reserves in an “operations account” held at the French Treasury, as well as another 20 percent to cover financial liabilities.

It vast expenditures in pursuing its wars in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic have exhausted most of the its defence budget. The reason it has been able to sustain itself so far is because it has had the cushion of the cash deposited with the French Treasury by the African states since 1960. Much of this is held in both stocks in the name of the French Treasury and in bonds whose values have been offset and used to collateralise a substantial amount of French gilts

It vast expenditures in pursuing its wars in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic have exhausted most of the its defence budget. The reason it has been able to sustain itself so far is because it has had the cushion of the cash deposited with the French Treasury by the African states since 1960. Much of this is held in both stocks in the name of the French Treasury and in bonds whose values have been offset and used to collateralise a substantial amount of French gilts

It vast expenditures in pursuing its wars in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic have exhausted most of the its defence budget. The reason it has been able to sustain itself so far is because it has had the cushion of the cash deposited with the French Treasury by the African states since 1960. Much of this is held in both stocks in the name of the French Treasury and in bonds whose values have been offset and used to collateralise a substantial amount of French gilts

It vast expenditures in pursuing its wars in Libya, Mali and the Central African Republic have exhausted most of the its defence budget. The reason it has been able to sustain itself so far is because it has had the cushion of the cash deposited with the French Treasury by the African states since 1960. Much of this is held in both stocks in the name of the French Treasury and in bonds whose values have been offset and used to collateralise a substantial amount of French gilts

French Treasury officials reckon that if France changes it relationship to the Euro it will have the effect of releasing around 40 percent of the French debt exposure and will extend a lifeline to the French Treasury. It has not calculated what will happen to the CFA francs.

French Treasury officials reckon that if France changes it relationship to the Euro it will have the effect of releasing around 40 percent of the French debt exposure and will extend a lifeline to the French Treasury. It has not calculated what will happen to the CFA francs.

It is up to the francophone Africans to demand from their leaders that they act to preserve whatever is left of the currency reserves in France and start making plans for the collapse of the Euro.