Development Africa

Another one would be to require that a president is not electable unless he or she has a minimum of multi-regional support.  It is not enough that a head of state has a majority of the people of his or her side; that majority must also be distributed nationally.  Perhaps the president should demonstrate a strong support in at least three regions out of Ethiopia’s current nine regions

There is also the novel concept of electoral polygamy which in principle dis-ethnicises politics and creates strong ethnic checks and balances.  It requires that every member of the house of representative have two constituencies – one primary which may be his or her own ethnic group and the other constituency distant from his or her own roots.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is concerned about the Ugandan government’s creation of a team of experts to closely monitor social networks, fearing that it will be used to restrict freedom of expression and silence critics.

RSF is all the more concerned about the possible repercussions of this unit’s creation on the work of the media because the organisation has noted an increase in recent years in harassment of journalists critical of President Yoweri Museveni’s government.

TV reporter Gertrude Uwitware was kidnapped and badly beaten by unidentified assailants in April for posting a comment online in which she defended a well-known university academic accused of insulting the government. Uwitware was made to delete all of her Twitter and Facebook posts for being too critical.

According to this version of history, Rwanda’s unity was destroyed by the Belgian administration and the Catholic Church. Economic and political independence were lost, foreign education and religion undercut Rwandan culture, a divide and rule policy set Hutu and Tutsi against each other, and political ethnicity emerged. After independence, the regimes of the first and second republics continued the segregation legacy of the colonial masters, and the problems were compounded. After a lost century, Rwanda’s history resumed in 1994 when the RPF took power after defeating the genocidal regime. It liberated the country from dictatorial leadership, and built a nation based on law, democracy, peace, security, justice and development. The narrative is promoted in the national and international media, at conferences inside the country and abroad, and in speeches of national and local authorities. All Rwandans know it and can recite it flawlessly.

However, the RPF’s historical narrative involves “a whole set of false propositions and assertions”, according to a leading historian of Rwanda, Jan Vansina. “The linguistic and cultural unity of the country today did not exist in the 17th century and Rwanda is not a “natural” nation. Rwanda really became a nation in the 20th century … Formerly, neither abundance nor order flourished in the country and it is false to think that everyone was happy with their station in life and all lived under the shepherd’s staff of wise kings,” he writes. The RFP’s narrative of “erroneous propositions” aims at “the projection of a nostalgic utopia into the past, a past that contrasts with a painful present”.

Democracy, or more accurately democratic materialism, has become the dominant ideology. It is increasingly obligatory to be a democrat. It has almost become the single political thought. Democratic materialism asserts that there are only bodies marked by languages, and nothing else. There is only one market, one politics, one economy.

Democracy has become a package of 'techniques' — constitutions, electoral mechanisms, management systems — to be exported or imposed, top-down, on Third World countries.

The world becomes divided in a Manichean manner: good democracy versus bad democracy (the recent experience of the Palestinians); good Muslim versus bad Muslim (Mamdani 2004); good states versus rogue states; democrats versus terrorists. And are these the fuelling dynamics of globalisation?

There are two ways of picturing Africa in the context of global capitalism. One is from the point of view of the people living and hoping to improve their lot in sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-eight nation-states with a considerable variety of kinds of “insertion” into the global capitalist economy, and a corresponding range of experiences of development (or the lack of it).6 The other is from the point of view of capital, for which Africa is not so much a system of states, still less a continent of people in need of a better life, as simply a geographic—or geological—terrain, offering this or that opportunity to make money.

Growing pressure of population means a constantly expanding landless labor force, partly working for subsistence wages on other people’s land, partly unemployed or underemployed in the cities, sometimes migrating to neighboring countries (e.g., from Burkina Faso to Cote d’Ivoire), living on marginal incomes and with minimal state services, including education and health.

The “investment climate” has been made easier, thanks, as we will see, to a decade and a half of aid “conditionality,” and the returns can be spectacular; the rates of return on U.S. direct investments in Africa are, for example, the highest of any region in the world (25.3 percent in 1997).9

Some people have not failed to note that a certain number of Cubans, albeit an insignificant minority, have not shared the joys and hopes of the celebrations for the seventh anniversary because they are against the Revolution.

We are not going to use this platform to rail against imperialism. An African saying very common in our country says: “When your house is burning, it’s no use beating the tom-toms.” On a Tricontinental level, this means that we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight. This is what we are doing, and this is what we will go on doing until all foreign domination of our African homelands has been totally eliminated.

The success of the Cuban revolution, taking place only 90 miles from the greatest imperialist and anti-socialist power of all time, seems to us, in its content and its way of evolution, to be a practical and conclusive illustration of the validity of this principle. However we must recognize that we ourselves and the other liberation movements in general (referring here above all to the African experience) have not managed to pay sufficient attention to this important problem of our common struggle.