Chip-and-PIN is broken

By Cory Doctorow at 11:43 PM February 11, 2010

checksecurity researcher Ross Anderson and colleagues have published a paper showing how “Chip-and-PIN” (the European system for verifying credit- and debit-card transactions) has been thoroughly broken and cannot be considered secure any longer. I remember hearing rumbles that this attack was possible even as Chip-and-PIN was being rolled out across Europe, but that didn’t stop the banks from pushing ahead with it, spending a fortune in the process.

The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it’s doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it’s chip-and-PIN. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a PIN of 0000 (or anything you want). We did so, on camera, using various journalists’ cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say “Verified by PIN”.
It’s no surprise to us or bankers that this attack works offline (when the merchant cannot contact the bank) — in fact Steven blogged about it here last August.

But the real shocker is that it works online too: even when the bank authorisation system has all the transaction data sent back to it for verification. The reason why it works can be quite subtle and convoluted: bank authorisation systems are complex beasts, including cryptographic checks, account checks, database checks, and interfaces with fraud detection systems which might apply a points-scoring system to the output of all the above. In theory all the data you need to spot the wedge attack will be present, but in practice? And most of all, how can you spot it if you’re not even looking? The banks didn’t even realise they needed to

Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize since 1980:

Winners of the Nobel Peace Prize since 1980:

• 2009: U.S. President Barack Obama

• 2008: Martti Ahtisaari

• 2007: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Al Gore

• 2006: Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank

• 2005: International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei

• 2004: Wangari Maathai

• 2003: Shirin Ebadi

• 2002: Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter

• 2001: United Nations, Kofi Annan

• 2000: Kim Dae-jung

• 1999: Medecins Sans Frontieres

• 1998: John Hume, David Trimble

• 1997: International Campaign to Ban Landmines, Jody Williams

• 1996: Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo, Jose Ramos-Horta

• 1995: Joseph Rotblat, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs

• 1994: Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin

• 1993: Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk

• 1992: Rigoberta Menchu Tum

• 1991: Aung San Suu Kyi

• 1990: Mikhail Gorbachev

• 1989: The 14th Dalai Lama

• 1988: U.N. Peacekeeping Forces

• 1987: Oscar Arias Sanchez

• 1986: Elie Wiesel

• 1985: International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War

• 1984: Desmond Tutu

• 1983: Lech Walesa

• 1982: Alva Myrdal, Alfonso Garcia Robles

• 1981: Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees

• 1980: Adolfo Perez Esquivel

Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO — President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee said, citing his outreach to the Muslim world and attempts to curb nuclear proliferation.

The stunning choice made Obama the third sitting U.S. president to win the Nobel Peace Prize and shocked Nobel observers because Obama took office less than two weeks before the Feb. 1 nomination deadline. Obama’s name had been mentioned in speculation before the award but many Nobel watchers believed it was too early to award the president.

Speculation had focused on Zimbabwe’s Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, a Colombian senator and a Chinese dissident, along with an Afghan woman’s rights activist.

The Nobel committee praised Obama’s creation of “a new climate in international politics” and said he had returned multilateral diplomacy and institutions like the U.N. to the center of the world stage. The plaudit appeared to be a slap at President George W. Bush from a committee that harshly criticized Obama’s predecessor for resorting to largely unilateral military action in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

Rather than recognizing concrete achievement, the 2009 prize appeared intended to support initiatives that have yet to bear fruit: reducing the world stock of nuclear arms, easing American conflicts with Muslim nations and strengthening the U.S. role in combating climate change.

“Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future,” Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Committee said. “In the past year Obama has been a key person for important initiatives in the U.N. for nuclear disarmament and to set a completely new agenda for the Muslim world and East-West relations.”

He added that the committee endorsed “Obama’s appeal that ‘Now is the time for all of us to take our share of responsibility for a global response to global challenges.’”

President Theodore Roosevelt won the award in 1906 and President Woodrow Wilson won in 1919.

The committee chairman said after awarding the 2002 prize to former Democratic President Jimmy Carter, for his mediation in international conflicts, that it should be seen as a “kick in the leg” to the Bush administration’s hard line in the buildup to the Iraq war.

Five years later, the committee honored Bush’s adversary in the 2000 presidential election, Al Gore, for his campaign to raise awareness about global warming.

The Nobel committee received a record 205 nominations for this year’s prize though it was not immediately apparent who nominated Obama.

“The exciting and important thing about this prize is that it’s given too someone … who has the power to contribute to peace,” Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said.

Nominators include former laureates; current and former members of the committee and their staff; members of national governments and legislatures; university professors of law, theology, social sciences, history and philosophy; leaders of peace research and foreign affairs institutes; and members of international courts of law.

The Nelson Mandela Foundation welcomed the award on behalf of its founder Nelson Mandela, who shared the 1993 Peace Prize with then-South African President F.W. DeKlerk for their efforts at ending years of apartheid and laying the groundwork for a democratic country.

“We trust that this award will strengthen his commitment, as the leader of the most powerful nation in the world, to continue promoting peace and the eradication of poverty,” the foundation said.

In his 1895 will, Alfred Nobel stipulated that the peace prize should go “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies and the formation and spreading of peace congresses.”

Unlike the other Nobel Prizes, which are awarded by Swedish institutions, he said the peace prize should be given out by a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian Parliament. Sweden and Norway were united under the same crown at the time of Nobel’s death.

The committee has taken a wide interpretation of Nobel’s guidelines, expanding the prize beyond peace mediation to include efforts to combat poverty, disease and climate change.

___

Associated Press Writer Ian MacDougall contributed to this report

East Africa’s drought a looming catastrophe.

From The Economist print edition. THIS year’s drought is the worst in east Africa since 2000, and possibly since 1991. Famine stalks the land. The failure of rains in parts of Ethiopia may increase the number needing food handouts by 5m, in addition to the 8m already getting them, in a population of 80m. The production of Kenyan maize, the country’s staple, is likely to drop by one-third, hitting poor farmers’ families hardest. The International Committee of the Red Cross says famine in Somalia is going to be worse than ever. Handouts are urgently needed by roughly 3.6m Somalis, nearly half the resident population (several million having already emigrated during years of strife). In fractious northern Uganda cereal output is likely to fall by half. Parts of South Sudan, Eritrea, the Central African Republic and Tanzania are suffering too. Rich countries are being less generous than usual. The UN’s World Food Programme says it has only $24m of the $300m it needs just to feed hungry Kenyans for the next six months.

In Mwingi district, in Kenya’s Kamba region, the crops have totally failed. Villagers are surviving on monthly government handouts of maize-meal, rice and a little cooking oil. Worse than the hunger, say local leaders, is the thirst. People are digging wells by hand, but they hit rock. They plead for the means to go deeper but they cannot afford the dynamite or machinery.

In the pastoral areas of northern Kenya, southern Ethiopia and south Somalia the death of livestock on a massive scale has sharpened conflict. Oromo rebels in south and east Ethiopia and Somali secessionists in the east of the country are likely to fight more fiercely. The drought may strengthen the hand of the Islamist Shabab movement, linked to al-Qaeda, in south Somalia; it uses food aid to control the people. Recent cattle raids in northern Kenya have left scores dead, with unprecedented numbers of women and children among the victims. Fighting may intensify until the land becomes greener again.

When will that be? Meteorologists reckon the rains due in October and November will be heavier than usual. That would be good, if the east African authorities were prepared. But they are not. Mud slides and floods are likely, with streams and rivers carrying off the topsoil. Malaria and cholera may increase. Surviving cattle, weakened by drought, will drown or die of cold.

Even the cities—and their economies—will be sorely afflicted, since 95% of Ethiopia’s power and 70% of Kenya’s is hydroelectric. With rivers down to a trickle or drying up completely, dams are running out of water; some are empty. Turbines have shut down. Electricity throughout east Africa is patchier than usual, just when governments are trying to pep their economies up.

The delayed opening of a big Ethiopian dam capable of producing 300MW has resulted in daily blackouts in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa. That, says the government, has reduced economic growth by two percentage points to 7%; others guess that growth has fallen to less than 5%. A British firm, Aggreko, has won a contract to set up electrical generators to supply 30MW to Ethiopia’s grid.

The same firm has also signed a deal with Kenya to double the power it temporarily supplies the country, to 290MW. Kenya has been rationing electricity. Most of its townspeople are without power for three days a week. Aggreko will keep more lights on but far more expensively. Small firms and poorer customers may be pushed into the dark.

The high price of food and water is making governments more disliked. The price of maize-meal has more than doubled since 2007. Jerry cans of water, which is often filthy, cost four times more than a year ago. With luck, governments may be forced to improve their management of water. Villagers may be persuaded to build terraces to stop topsoil running off. Dams need better maintenance and desilting. Officials should be shamed into stopping their friends from stealing or wasting water. As the cost of diesel power soars, schemes for renewable power and plans to link the region’s power grids may be speeded up. High prices have encouraged some industries to find their own solutions. An Indian cement firm, Sanghi, says it plans to run a new Kenyan cement factory on its own hydroelectric power.

Amid the gloom, a few companies and countries have benefited. Shares in the Kenya Power and Lighting Company have risen this year in expectation of more demand. The main Kenyan power supplier, KenGen, has sold bonds to finance a scheme to expand its output by 500MW. Malawi, which periodically suffered famine until a recent fertiliser-subsidy scheme came good, is to export maize to Kenya.

The drought cycle in east Africa has been contracting sharply. Rains used to fail every nine or ten years. Then the cycle seemed to go down to five years. Now, it seems, the region faces drought every two or three years. The time for recovery—for rebuilding stocks of food and cattle—is ever shorter. And if the rains fail before the end of this year, an unimaginably dreadful catastrophe could ensue.

Internet freedom

The Internet has proven a powerful force for policy makers, both good and bad. Barack Obama leveraged America’s Internet freedom to persuade U.S. voters to elect him last year. China’s leadership, on the other hand, keeps the Internet tightly censored to suppress dissent in their one-party state.

So the launch of Freedom House’s first study of online freedom last week is welcome. The survey, conducted between Jan. 1, 2007 and Dec. 31 2008, measures “access to relevant technology” and “the free flow of information through it without fear of repercussions.” Freedom House selected 15 countries and ranked them on a scale from 0 to 100, with higher numbers representing less freedom. (See the nearby chart.)

The initial findings set a good benchmark for future studies. And in many countries, the relative freedom of the Internet has already had a positive impact on political change: Take Malaysia, where online news portals and blogs have breathed life into the opposition. Or Kenya, where bloggers chronicled the violence after the December 2007 election — a period when live reporting on TV or radio was entirely banned.

Freedom House warns that these gains aren’t assured. In many countries with a “partly free” Internet, online censorship is likely to increase as governments implement more sophisticated systems of control. The study singles out Egypt, Kenya, Georgia, Malaysia and Russia as particularly vulnerable.

And the world’s most restrictive countries aren’t likely to change tack soon. The three most restrictive regimes surveyed — Cuba, Tunisia and China — also happen to be authoritarian states whose survival depends on information control. China, home to the world’s largest Internet-using population, also has the most sophisticated methods of content control: online monitors filter Web pages, block online posts and interfere with online chats. Chinese Web sites are also required to monitor their own content — part of a trend of increasing privatization of censorship.

Yet even in this environment, the Internet can still be used as a force for positive political change. The price of these actions is sometimes very high: China had 49 bloggers and online journalists in jail as of mid-2008, according to Reporters Without Borders. But the longer the Internet is in China and other repressive countries, the more sophisticated users become, too.

As governments catch up with technology and introduce more sophisticated censorship programs, protecting online speech will only become more important. The Internet can be a powerful avenue for free speech — or for propaganda. The Freedom House study is a good first step in understanding what makes the difference.

Kenya joins Earth Hour’s initiative

by Daniel Ooko and Ben Ochieng

    NAIROBI, March 28 (Xinhua) — Kenyans and some environmental activists on Saturday night joined the rest of the world in calling for a global action against climate change.

    The country’s most iconic building, Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC), located in the heart of Nairobi’s Central Business District (CBD) and within a walking distance of several five star hotels, was plunged in darkness for an hour as their lights were switched off to raise awareness about the need for action on climate change.

    Joining the world in turning off non-essential lights as part of the Earth Hour 2009 campaign, the Nairobi city was among the 65national capitals and nine of the 10 most populated metropolises on the planet to mark Earth Hour.

    People gathered in parks, streets, town squares and homes around Kenya to witness the lights going out on iconic landmarks, UNEP headquarters in Nairobi, homes and some social places.

    In line with the support and importance KICC attaches to the green movement and by extension green conferencing, the iconic tower of the KICC couldn’t have been a better choice for the 2009 Earth hour event.

    At exactly 20:30 (1730GMT), lights went off to the soothing tune of “Sente” by one of Kenya’s leading female vocalists and Goodwill Ambassador of the WWF, Achieng Abura.

    ”The words of my song ‘what we do today determine tomorrow’ were drawn from inspiration by former (Indian) Prime Minister, the late Indira Gandhi, who advised inhabitants of the world to put their ear to the ground and listen to what the earth is saying.”

    ”It’s time our government hear what environmentalists are saying. We have not seen elaborate measures by the government on the global warming,” said Abura.

    ”The effects of global warming are everywhere and the whole world is affected. We as Africans, we must chart our own destiny … we have to place for the future of our children. There must be responses to global warming,” Abura said.

    Representatives of the country’s leading corporate bodies told of how they advised their employees to mark the hour from their homes by switching off lights in their abodes.

    UNEP official Famina Kodre-Alexandre said that the United Nation environmental agency’s Nairobi office, like UN offices worldwide switched off non-essential lights in their facilities to mark the day.

    The Nairobi highlight was also marked at a candle-lit gala dinner for the National Museums of Kenya, marking the institution’s centennial year.

    The event is meant to pressure political leaders around the world to sign a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol on climate change that runs out soon.

    The United Nations is among a range of organizations and business that are backing the event which is being coordinated by the wildlife group, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).

    WWF Representative John Salehe said the environmentalists have shown that they are determined to tackle the global warming and what was needed is political leadership.

    ”We have shown our determination and the will to take the global warming but what we need is political leadership,” Salehe said.

    ”This is a wonderful concept. We switched off lights in our offices and our staff have been advised to do so in their houses as part of our responsibility to protect the planet.”

    Billed as the biggest public demonstration in support of a new climate deal in 2009, landmarks and householders across close to 90 countries were expected to take part.

    For the two billion people in the world without access to electricity, many of whom live on the African Continent, Earth Hour may seem more of a developed rather than a developing country initiative.

    ”Earth Hour 2009 is in reality of special significance to Africa … this is the continent with the least responsibility for climate change, yet it is perhaps the most vulnerable to the climatic events unfolding as a result of the build-up of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels,” said Nick Nuttall, Spokesperson for the Nairobi-based UNEP.

    He said the Earth Hour was happening against a backdrop of a deepening drought in Kenya that has contributed to an estimated 10million people suffering hunger and water shortages and fires at several economically-important wildlife sites that are key revenue-generating tourist destinations including Mount Longonot and Lake Nakuru.

    Nuttall said it is thus up to the minority of people living in Africa with the luxury of electricity to be fully involved, sending a clear message from this Continent to the rest of the world that action is needed to seal the deal at the UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December.

    ”Sealing the deal is likely to unleash the carbon markets and is perhaps the best bet for fast-tracking clean and renewable energy into countries in Africa, including the rural areas, while assisting Africa and other developing Continents climate-proof their economies against the climate change already underway,” Nuttall told Xinhua.

    Nuttall is among more than 3,400 UN staff in Nairobi being urged to play their part during Earth Hour. Like the UN headquarters in New York, non-essential lights and equipment will be switched off at the UN Office in Nairobi in a show of support for Africa’s first Earth Hour experience.

    The activists said the 2009 will be a crucial year in the fight against climate change, leading up to a major UN conference in Copenhagen.

    It will be there that world leaders will come together to agree on a new global climate deal that will replace the Kyoto protocol, and define how the world deal with climate change in the future.

    ”Climate change, unresolved and unchecked is likely to intensive these kinds of extreme weather events in Africa,” said Nuttal.

    ”By 2025 close to 500 million people could be living in water stressed or water scarce areas; up to a third of Africa’s coastal infrastructure will be threatened as a result of sea level rise and between 25 percent and 40 percent of species’ habitats could be lost by 2085,” he added.

    The Earth Hour event is supposed to show the world that it is possible to take action on global warming and is meant to pressurize political leaders around the world to sign a new deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol that runs out soon.

    From the small island nations of the South Pacific to the densely populated cities of the Americas, millions of people from all walks of life and corners of the world participated in Earth Hour.

    Global warming has seen the increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s near-surface air and the oceans since the mid-twentieth century by about 0.74°C and projections indicate that the global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4°C during the present century.

    Greenhouse gases are been responsible for most of the observed temperature increase.

    Studies by Britain’s Hadley Centre recently established that global warming is affecting Africa more than the industrialized world, despite being the least to blame for emitting the pollutants responsible.

    In Kenya the phenomenon is attributed to the disappearance of the second highest mountain in Africa — Mount Kenya’s largest glacier, the Lewis Glacier, in the last 100 years.

    Other occurrences that have been blamed on the trend are the deadly malaria outbreak of 1997 which killed hundreds of people in the Kenyan highlands where the population had previously been unexposed and the 2001 drought, Kenya’s worst in 60 years, which affected over four million people.

    ”The event is significant in terms of sensitization on the need to protect the environment. Any action taken at the family level, like switching off lights on Saturday for one hour, touches the entire world,” says John Kioli, the Executive Officer at Green Africa Foundation, an environmental conservation concern.

    ”For the very first time, Nairobi has taken the lead to host Earth Hour in Africa. We call on Nairobi residents, and Kenya as a whole to support this global event,” noted Earth Hour Kenya’s Kimunya Mugo.

A country created by grand theft, ruled by a clique

By Martin Kimani (Originally printed in the East African on January 14, 2008)

Robbery has thrived in Kenya for many decades now. The very creation of Kenya a century ago was an act of grand theft. Our country won its independence but has never broken free from the idea that political power is a license to rob by means fair or foul.

For decades as colonial subjects we were not allowed to vote freely. When we finally won the right to vote, most of the subsequent elections were stolen from us. The 2007 poll thus found a people rooted in a history whose course, twisted by the machinations of brutal thefts and shady backroom deals, had meted out injustice and indignity to more people than it enriched or empowered.

Yet Kenyans, despite this chequered history, had in the years since the early 1990s become bigger than their circumstances. They had begun believing that they could indeed change their country for the better. The ballot had become, despite the best attempts of their erstwhile leaders, a way to impose their will on a political elite whose most prominent members had been part of the old boy’s club that ruled with an iron fist for decades.

The election results, when they were announced by Samuel Kivuitu, the formerly much-respected chairman of the Election Commission of Kenya, rather than appearing to express the will of a large section of the electorate, seemed to many to be one more act of robbery. Others who had rallied around President Mwai Kibaki, who was now quickly sworn in to a second term, felt that justice had been done. Yet Kenya in 2007 is not the Kenya of 1987.

Young men who felt that their vote had been rigged turned on their neighbours who they believed had been supporters of the president’s Party of National Unity. They thought that they had been witness to an act of robbery that released all their latent resentment over other perceived past injustices.

They burnt down houses, they beat many and killed some, they looted and destroyed shops — most belonging to Gikuyus who as a bloc had been solidly behind the president.

Machetes swung, rapes happened, a church containing dozens of people seeking safety within its premises was torched, cars were burnt, and roadblocks manned by angry, bribe-demanding young men peppered roads across the Rift Valley province.

Now you hear it said boldly, no longer whispered as it was before the election, that ethnic cleansing or even genocide is underway. Senior members of the government have publicly stated that they have evidence that the attacks were planned by people associated with the opposition.

The truth of these claims or their counter-claims will become apparent with time. But the allegation alone, coming as it does in an atmosphere of rumour, innuendo and conspiracy theory is a danger to the country.

If there is a repetitive pattern to mass violence through history, it is that victimisers usually begin as the victimised or at least perceive themselves as such. We should beware our fears because they can turn us into monsters. This is especially true among those with a great deal of power, since their fear can lead to a worse conflagration than any we have witnessed so far.

Returning to the young men who have burnt and killed in the Rift Valley and elsewhere in the belief that they were acting to right the wrongs of stolen lands, ethnic chauvinism, government neglect and a rigged election, their acts of violence, rather than bringing them closer to gaining justice, have only driven them to join the great Kenyan tradition of robbing and dispossessing the perceived enemy. They have raised a mighty fear in the moneyed classes, especially in Nairobi.

What do you own in the elite neighbourhoods of Kileleshwa and Lavington when violence erupts in Kibera’s slums? The large screen television remains in its usual spot, except that this time it is reporting fire and death in Nairobi and not the Gaza Strip. Cars stay in their driveways.

The bank vaults holding the billions of shillings that the government had proudly proclaimed were the creation of its policies stay unopened for the days while Kenya burns. The expensive paintings in Nairobi’s luxurious malls are seen by no one and the imported designer clothes remain undisturbed on their hangers.

The only things that spread are fear and rage. They fill all spaces. The violence is dispossession by remote control. The political and economic elite that had celebrated the steady rise of the Nairobi Stock Exchange Index, which marched alongside their fortunes, cower and wonder whether their security guards will protect them or join the rage coming through the radio and television.

Paranoia rules. Streams of refugees leave the Rift Valley and Kisumu and Mathare and Kibera. Violence is a form of language, one that speaks the world into two camps: the merchants of violence and their victims. The results of the election were being invoked as a reason by the rioters but their point went deeper.

They were screaming to the world that they too could rob and take as so much has been taken from them; they were rendering the objects of power and privilege impotent. They succeeded for some days before a lull set in. But the anger and frustration remain present.

Those young men are watching for the backroom deal. They have their eyes focused on men and women in suits meeting in secret places and whispering secret things and agreeing on how to keep that Nairobi Stock Exchange Index continuing its happy rise to the heavens.

They see a lot more than the politicians believe they do and now that they have had a taste of the paralysing power of violence, they will man their powder kegs waiting for the betrayal that has always issued out of the backrooms where power has been cobbled together and distributed among a very small group of people.

Yet because the rich and powerful, especially those who are in possession of the reins of state, have been scared by the violence, they may become even less partial to sharing power.

It would do well to heed the fire, for it has only been damped down for the moment.

It will not go out at the orders of government spokesmen. Rather, real peace will only come from acknowledging our history of betrayal and robbery and heeding citizens’ demands that a fundamental change be made in the way the country is governed.

Kenyans must stop asking the wrong questions

By MARTIN KIMANI (The East African) A recent article in the ‘Times’ of London described how scientists are using powerful lasers to replicate the fiery core of the sun so that they can produce nuclear fusion. The process “squeezes atoms together under enormous pressures and temperatures until they fuse, releasing huge quantities of energy.”

This is exactly what is happening to Kenya. It is why so many of us feel so exhausted and pessimistic; we are being squeezed under an enormous load that gets worse by the day.

But our bleakness must not be confused with hopelessness or our despair with defeatism.

The pressure may force us to see that the political scandals and the violence, as horrific as they are, are only emanations from an ideological structure that produces them as its inevitable sewage.

It is the cracks in the smooth facade that disguised a system of obscene greed and brutal self-regard that are beginning to show.

To fight our melancholy, which will only get worse as the real face of our society is revealed, we need not merely to find the right answers, we must ask the right questions.

The large obstacle to this intellectual goal is our tendency to focus on the symptoms — a corrupt MP, a “bad” policeman — without attending to Kenya’s structural evils.

Paul Ricouer writes of states originating from a “founding crime,” echoing Machiavelli who argued that the “real problem of political violence is not that of useless, arbitrary, and frenetic violence but that of violence calculated and limited to promote the establishment of a durable state.”

Such was the start of Kenya and indeed of almost every state on earth.

Though this illicit brutality is later legitimated, its origin is like an itch “marked by the successive use of violence.”

Our “emergency mindset” — negotiations, reconciliation, find new leaders, defeat corruption — treats the persistent violence in Kenya as arbitrary and frenetic. But its source is structural, it is the itch of the founding crime now scratched by different fingers.

The way it is hidden in the mundane violence of everyday life is not natural: it reflects a ruling ideology.

A counter-intuitive response would be to dare, if only for a moment, to look away from the machete stroke and the bullet to what happens before and after they pierce flesh.

To try and see Kenya as you would a favourite film watched so often that you begin to pay attention to the background and to the minor characters. We need to ask: What symbolic structures — as reflected in our social and political and economic life — produce that machete swing?

The disease must be distinguished from its symptoms. Our frequent emergencies, which matter greatly on the moral level, are only a painful manifestation of our country’s order. Death by starvation is an emergency, but the real emergency is intellectual because this ordering we refer to is primarily ideological.

It was Thomas Pynchon who wrote, “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.” We must do away with wrong questions. Such an undertaking though takes courage, especially for the affluent and privileged who run the risk of being uncovered as culprits in a great crime rather than as charitable givers.

This fear — and for some a genuine desire to be of service — are what lead to the ceaseless elite urgings for practicality in “solving” our dire problems.

They argue that we live in a post-ideological world and that all we need are good governance and clinics. But they know very well that no nation has ever been built on running water:

Nations are made of the kind of dream that drove Abraham Lincoln to think a million fatalities worth preserving the United States, the thinking whose echo Barack Obama rode all the way to the White House.

Kenya’s rulers though only possess nightmarish fantasies of power to service their vast, unending appetites.

Just as Mzee Moi at the height of his destruction of Kenya’s intellectual class in the 1980s felt the need to write an atrocious book on Nyayo and its inarticulate philosophy, so today’s chieftains and their practical hangers-on gift us with Vision 2030.

Or the dozen other well meaning Power-Point-to-Singapore plans and frameworks that wend their way around Nairobi’s workshop circuit.

What these visions and plans have in common is a belief that Change will come from good people doing good, incremental things.

This fiction of niceness and social responsibility never dares to truly address the profound marginalisation and brutalisation of millions as a result of the normal functioning of Kenya.

Humanitarian outpouring quickly follows atrocity. Yet these do-gooder efforts are a mask.

Their proponents are willing to undertake any reform … provided it does not compromise the smallest part of their property or power.

This means that for all their charitable efforts, they cannot keep up with the fires the system is producing.

Unfortunately, this is not enough to effect radical change: as a society, we remain in the grip of the ideological scheme of the Kibaki-Ruto-Odinga world.

As long as its foundations remain mostly hidden, it will be almost impossible to fashion an ideological counter-thrust that can allow us to build movements that fight for vibrant democracy, social equity and first-class citizenship.

The revolution that is so frequently prophesied in bars countrywide nowadays is not coming. Instead, as 2012 approaches, the same crude power-by-tribal-numbers ideology will appropriate the very real frustrations of millions and blame them on a scapegoat.

Blood will flow in the name of land or lower rents, or against “one tribe’s arrogance…” Only a profound rupture in the symbolic order that holds sway over us — probably through an exponential intensification of the usual crises — will allow for this course to be shifted significantly and positively in the near term.

Meanwhile, the system we call Kenya will continue releasing its vile discharge for the Practicals to clean up.

It will remain a creature of extraordinary violence and obscene greed. It will eat even when there is nothing more to eat because its impetus, its structure, is greater than its self-awareness or the moral qualities of its office-holders.

What then is to be done? The intellectuals drawn not only from academia but from different walks of life will have a critical role to play in coming years.

We need them to dispense with the wrong political questions in classrooms, journals, books and newspapers.

To do this, they will need to be intellectual detectives uncovering the structural crimes of the powerful and piercing the ideological screens they employ to hide their deeds.

And all along, they will press hard for evidence to gain a successful conviction in the court of public opinion.

The time has come to plunge deeper into the bleak heart of Kenya, to see the dark mood upon the country not as an aberration but as a healthy reaction to a state of deadly illness.

We need thinking and ideas and ideology at the barriers because the monster is working mightily from his hidden perch.

Why Foreign Aid Is Hurting Africa

By DAMBISA MOYO

A month ago I visited Kibera, the largest slum in Africa. This suburb of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, is home to more than one million people, who eke out a living in an area of about one square mile — roughly 75% the size of New York’s Central Park. It is a sea of aluminum and cardboard shacks that forgotten families call home. The idea of a slum conjures up an image of children playing amidst piles of garbage, with no running water and the rank, rife stench of sewage. Kibera does not disappoint.

What is incredibly disappointing is the fact that just a few yards from Kibera stands the headquarters of the United Nations’ agency for human settlements which, with an annual budget of millions of dollars, is mandated to “promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all.” Kibera festers in Kenya, a country that has one of the highest ratios of development workers per capita. This is also the country where in 2004, British envoy Sir Edward Clay apologized for underestimating the scale of government corruption and failing to speak out earlier.

Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower. The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It’s increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa’s population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster.

Few will deny that there is a clear moral imperative for humanitarian and charity-based aid to step in when necessary, such as during the 2004 tsunami in Asia. Nevertheless, it’s worth reminding ourselves what emergency and charity-based aid can and cannot do. Aid-supported scholarships have certainly helped send African girls to school (never mind that they won’t be able to find a job in their own countries once they have graduated). This kind of aid can provide band-aid solutions to alleviate immediate suffering, but by its very nature cannot be the platform for long-term sustainable growth.

Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, such charity-based aid is relatively small beer when compared to the sea of money that floods Africa each year in government-to-government aid or aid from large development institutions such as the World Bank.

Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population — over 350 million people — live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.

Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. In order to keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of African education and health care. Well-meaning calls to cancel debt mean little when the cancellation is met with the fresh infusion of aid, and the vicious cycle starts up once again.

The most obvious criticism of aid is its links to rampant corruption. Aid flows destined to help the average African end up supporting bloated bureaucracies in the form of the poor-country governments and donor-funded non-governmental organizations. In a hearing before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2004, Jeffrey Winters, a professor at Northwestern University, argued that the World Bank had participated in the corruption of roughly $100 billion of its loan funds intended for development.

As recently as 2002, the African Union, an organization of African nations, estimated that corruption was costing the continent $150 billion a year, as international donors were apparently turning a blind eye to the simple fact that aid money was inadvertently fueling graft. With few or no strings attached, it has been all too easy for the funds to be used for anything, save the developmental purpose for which they were intended.

In Zaire — known today as the Democratic Republic of Congo — Irwin Blumenthal (whom the IMF had appointed to a post in the country’s central bank) warned in 1978 that the system was so corrupt that there was “no (repeat, no) prospect for Zaire’s creditors to get their money back.” Still, the IMF soon gave the country the largest loan it had ever given an African nation. According to corruption watchdog agency Transparency International, Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaire’s president from 1965 to 1997, is reputed to have stolen at least $5 billion from the country.

It’s scarcely better today. A month ago, Malawi’s former President Bakili Muluzi was charged with embezzling aid money worth $12 million. Zambia’s former President Frederick Chiluba (a development darling during his 1991 to 2001 tenure) remains embroiled in a court case that has revealed millions of dollars frittered away from health, education and infrastructure toward his personal cash dispenser. Yet the aid keeps on coming.

A nascent economy needs a transparent and accountable government and an efficient civil service to help meet social needs. Its people need jobs and a belief in their country’s future. A surfeit of aid has been shown to be unable to help achieve these goals.

Stuck in an aid world of no incentives, there is no reason for governments to seek other, better, more transparent ways of raising development finance (such as accessing the bond market, despite how hard that might be). The aid system encourages poor-country governments to pick up the phone and ask the donor agencies for next capital infusion. It is no wonder that across Africa, over 70% of the public purse comes from foreign aid.

In Ethiopia, where aid constitutes more than 90% of the government budget, a mere 2% of the country’s population has access to mobile phones. (The African country average is around 30%.) Might it not be preferable for the government to earn money by selling its mobile phone license, thereby generating much-needed development income and also providing its citizens with telephone service that could, in turn, spur economic activity?

Look what has happened in Ghana, a country where after decades of military rule brought about by a coup, a pro-market government has yielded encouraging developments. Farmers and fishermen now use mobile phones to communicate with their agents and customers across the country to find out where prices are most competitive. This translates into numerous opportunities for self-sustainability and income generation — which, with encouragement, could be easily replicated across the continent.

To advance a country’s economic prospects, governments need efficient civil service. But civil service is naturally prone to bureaucracy, and there is always the incipient danger of self-serving cronyism and the desire to bind citizens in endless, time-consuming red tape. What aid does is to make that danger a grim reality. This helps to explain why doing business across much of Africa is a nightmare. In Cameroon, it takes a potential investor around 426 days to perform 15 procedures to gain a business license. What entrepreneur wants to spend 119 days filling out forms to start a business in Angola? He’s much more likely to consider the U.S. (40 days and 19 procedures) or South Korea (17 days and 10 procedures).

Even what may appear as a benign intervention on the surface can have damning consequences. Say there is a mosquito-net maker in small-town Africa. Say he employs 10 people who together manufacture 500 nets a week. Typically, these 10 employees support upward of 15 relatives each. A Western government-inspired program generously supplies the affected region with 100,000 free mosquito nets. This promptly puts the mosquito net manufacturer out of business, and now his 10 employees can no longer support their 150 dependents. In a couple of years, most of the donated nets will be torn and useless, but now there is no mosquito net maker to go to. They’ll have to get more aid. And African governments once again get to abdicate their responsibilities.

In a similar vein has been the approach to food aid, which historically has done little to support African farmers. Under the auspices of the U.S. Food for Peace program, each year millions of dollars are used to buy American-grown food that has to then be shipped across oceans. One wonders how a system of flooding foreign markets with American food, which puts local farmers out of business, actually helps better Africa. A better strategy would be to use aid money to buy food from farmers within the country, and then distribute that food to the local citizens in need.

Then there is the issue of “Dutch disease,” a term that describes how large inflows of money can kill off a country’s export sector, by driving up home prices and thus making their goods too expensive for export. Aid has the same effect. Large dollar-denominated aid windfalls that envelop fragile developing economies cause the domestic currency to strengthen against foreign currencies. This is catastrophic for jobs in the poor country where people’s livelihoods depend on being relatively competitive in the global market.

To fight aid-induced inflation, countries have to issue bonds to soak up the subsequent glut of money swamping the economy. In 2005, for example, Uganda was forced to issue such bonds to mop up excess liquidity to the tune of $700 million. The interest payments alone on this were a staggering $110 million, to be paid annually.

The stigma associated with countries relying on aid should also not be underestimated or ignored. It is the rare investor that wants to risk money in a country that is unable to stand on its own feet and manage its own affairs in a sustainable way.

Africa remains the most unstable continent in the world, beset by civil strife and war. Since 1996, 11 countries have been embroiled in civil wars. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, in the 1990s, Africa had more wars than the rest of the world combined. Although my country, Zambia, has not had the unfortunate experience of an outright civil war, growing up I experienced first-hand the discomfort of living under curfew (where everyone had to be in their homes between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., which meant racing from work and school) and faced the fear of the uncertain outcomes of an attempted coup in 1991 — sadly, experiences not uncommon to many Africans.

Civil clashes are often motivated by the knowledge that by seizing the seat of power, the victor gains virtually unfettered access to the package of aid that comes with it. In the last few months alone, there have been at least three political upheavals across the continent, in Mauritania, Guinea and Guinea Bissau (each of which remains reliant on foreign aid). Madagascar’s government was just overthrown in a coup this past week. The ongoing political volatility across the continent serves as a reminder that aid-financed efforts to force-feed democracy to economies facing ever-growing poverty and difficult economic prospects remain, at best, precariously vulnerable. Long-term political success can only be achieved once a solid economic trajectory has been established.

“The 1970s were an exciting time to be African. Many of our nations had just achieved independence, and with that came a deep sense of dignity, self-respect and hope for the future.”

Proponents of aid are quick to argue that the $13 billion ($100 billion in today’s terms) aid of the post-World War II Marshall Plan helped pull back a broken Europe from the brink of an economic abyss, and that aid could work, and would work, if Africa had a good policy environment.

The aid advocates skirt over the point that the Marshall Plan interventions were short, sharp and finite, unlike the open-ended commitments which imbue governments with a sense of entitlement rather than encouraging innovation. And aid supporters spend little time addressing the mystery of why a country in good working order would seek aid rather than other, better forms of financing. No country has ever achieved economic success by depending on aid to the degree that many African countries do.

The good news is we know what works; what delivers growth and reduces poverty. We know that economies that rely on open-ended commitments of aid almost universally fail, and those that do not depend on aid succeed. The latter is true for economically successful countries such as China and India, and even closer to home, in South Africa and Botswana. Their strategy of development finance emphasizes the important role of entrepreneurship and markets over a staid aid-system of development that preaches hand-outs.

Governments need to attract more foreign direct investment by creating attractive tax structures and reducing the red tape and complex regulations for businesses. African nations should also focus on increasing trade; China is one promising partner. And Western countries can help by cutting off the cycle of giving something for nothing. It’s time for a change.

Dambisa Moyo, a former economist at Goldman Sachs, is the author of “Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa.”

Kenya wildlife perishes in nets bought with US aid

DIANI, Kenya (AP) — Plastic fishing nets — some bought for poor fishermen with American aid money — are tangling up whales and turtles off one of Africa’s most popular beaches.

One recent victim was a huge dappled whaleshark that bled to death after its tail was cut off by fishermen unwilling to slash their nets to save it. In another case, divers risked their lives to free a pregnant, thrashing humpback whale entangled in a net last summer.

Both incidents occurred off Diani beach, which is popular with American and European tourists.

The fishermen have traditionally used hooks and hand lines to haul in their catch, which they then sold to hotels full of tourists. But the use of plastic nets has become increasingly common as growing populations have competed to catch shrinking supplies of fish, marine biologist David Obura said.

In 2003, USAID began a four-year project worth $575,000 to improve the lives of coastal communities. It worked on a project with a Kenyan government agency that included providing freezers for the fishermen to store their catch, along with boats and nets.

But the plastic nets are destroying the very ecosystems that the fishermen depend on and the tourists come to see, said Daniel Floren, who runs a local diving school.

Officials, experts and even the fishermen themselves acknowledge the nets are killing wildlife and coral.

“Without the reefs, there will be no diving. If we have nothing to show, I’ll have to shut up shop,” Floren said.

The aim of the U.S. project was to help lift local people out of poverty, said Robert Buzzard, a USAID official involved in the initiative. But there were no studies to show how the kind of equipment supplied might affect the marine life.

“There weren’t environmental assessments year on year,” Buzzard acknowledged, saying USAID was “partly” responsible but also was dependent on local organizations to provide information.

The project did not provide the type of nets or long fishing lines — which catch fish without entangling other marine life — that fishermen requested, said Isaak Mwachala, head of one of the local fishermen’s associations.

“When they were going to the shop where these nets are sold, they didn’t bring us with them … but when (the nets) are already here we can’t refuse them,” he said.

Buzzard said he did not have records of Mwachala’s request, but said it was possible it had been made.

When Mwachala and his friends head out to sea, they often throw miles (kilometers) of plastic net onto the reef. The money they earn pays school fees for one man’s child, hospital bills for another’s. But along with the haul of colorful fish, the nets threaten turtles, whales, whalesharks and dugongs — large marine mammals related to manatees.

The fishermen, who say their old hook-and-line method never caught turtles or whales, practice conservation where they can.

After Floren offered small payments last year, they brought him more than 70 turtles snarled in fishing nets over a two-month period. It was not possible to say how many of them were trapped in nets funded by USAID. He managed to cut free and release all but a dozen. But the pregnant, entangled humpback whale last September was much harder.

It took Floren and two other divers three tense hours to cut her free, all the while risking panicking the whale and becoming entangled in the mesh themselves if she suddenly fled to the deep sea. A rare dugong and another humpback mother whale were freed a month later in the northern town of Malindi.

The huge dappled whalesharks that migrate down the coast are also at risk. Volker Bassen, founder of the East African Whaleshark Trust, said about half a dozen have become entangled in the type of nets funded by USAID since he founded the trust four years ago.

He said most marine animals are trapped by nets left on the reefs overnight to catch lobsters for the tourists.

“The nets that USAID bought are made of nylon, which doesn’t rot. Even if it washes away, it remains in the sea and continues to kill marine life for decades,” he explained. “It turns into a ghost net.”

The nets are still destructive even if just used during the day and hauled in at night. The stones they use to weigh down the nets scrape over the delicate corals in time with the current, snagging the nets along the bottom and leaving scraps of blue nylon entangled in their wake. Onboard the boat bought with USAID funds, the men casually tossed chunks of the coral they’d pulled up over the side of the boat.

The fishermen interviewed by The Associated Press agreed that their livelihoods depended on preserving the seas and were interested in trying long lines if they were provided.

But Buzzard said USAID’s involvement with the fishermen’s group had been finished for a year and a half, and there were no plans to replace the nets. Buzzard said a colleague had been sent to speak to local conservationists who had complained about the nets.

“Those concerns are valid,” he said. But “this project is finished … Every project we do, we learn from.”

Still, providing only one group of fishermen with new equipment would not be enough to save the marine life, said Obura, who specializes in studying coral reefs.

In addition to the growing groups of poor fishermen crowding onto the reefs, huge European and Asian trawlers much further offshore are overfishing the deeper coastal waters, he said.

“The fishermen have the strong sense that there are other, richer fishermen out there raping and pillaging the seas and so why shouldn’t they?” he said.

Fisherman Mohammed Khamis said the nets provided with USAID funds have increased the fishermen’s average daily earnings from $4.50 to $7 — still less than a tourist pays for a fish fillet at an expensive hotel.

Khamis knew the nets could be destructive, but had three sets of school fees to pay totaling $460 a year and no other options for work in a country riddled with corruption and poverty. He says he could not afford to sacrifice his children’s future for a turtle’s.

“If someone has a family, they have to look for school fees, sickness, everything,” he said. “We don’t eat these turtles and we don’t want to catch them but the extra fish is paying my children’s school for their future.”

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