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.”

Joshua Kulei, an aide to former President Daniel arap Moi banned from U.S.

Helen Nyambura-Mwaura

NAIROBI (Reuters) – A Kenyan banned from entering the United States over corruption accusations lashed out on Friday at Washington’s envoy to Nairobi for abusing his diplomatic status in a “callous and wild” attack.

U.S. Ambassador Michael Ranneberger last week said a prominent Kenyan had been made permanently ineligible to enter the United States. In an interview, he later named the man as Joshua Kulei, an aide to former President Daniel arap Moi.

Corruption flourished in east Africa’s largest economy during Moi’s 24-year rule, and has continued under his successor President Mwai Kibaki’s administration, prompting action from Western donors including bans on entering their countries.

In a statement, a lawyer for Kulei said he was neither involved in corruption nor post-election violence last year.

“The ambassador’s announcements … are made for the sake of cheap publicity and the ego of a diplomat at the end of his career arrogating and assigning himself the role of a prefect and supervisor of Kenyan citizens and Kenyan institutions.

“The announcements he has now made are callous and wild … an appalling misuse of diplomatic immunity to orchestrate and propagate falsehoods … Mr. Ranneberger’s conduct is in bad taste, theatrical and cowardly.”

The ambassador was not immediately available to respond, but had last week said the travel ban was intended to help curb a widespread culture of impunity in Kenya.

Investors cite corruption as a major deterrent to doing business in Kenya, which otherwise has been one of sub-Saharan Africa’s most attractive spots for foreign money.

London and Washington have banned a handful of Kenyan politicians or former officials, but seldom name them.

Kulei, who was a personal aide to Moi and is a wealthy businessman, said through his lawyer he had no interest anyway in traveling to the United States.

“The USA is clearly the most powerful country in the world but in good conscience should not be a bully through its diplomats,” said a full-page statement in Kenya’s main dailies.

Surveys show a majority of Kenyans are disillusioned with Kibaki’s coalition government — created last year with former rival Raila Odinga as prime minister — for failing to curb rampant grant or improve their lives.

Government officials, including ministers, acknowledge corruption is still a problem, but say they are doing their best to clamp down and would welcome evidence to facilitate prosecutions. They accuse critics of exaggerating the issue.

$110 million fibre optic deal

Kenya said it was on track to deliver high-speed broadband through a new fibre optic cable by the end of June, as the project’s corporate shareholders signed a financing agreement worth $110 million on Tuesday.

Bitange Ndemo, a top official at the information and communications ministry, said the route for The East African Marine Cable (TEAMS) cable had been shifted an extra 200 km (124 miles) from the coastline for fear of piracy off Somalia.

Eleven communications companies had agreed to be part of the project. They will contribute $110 million while the government will give another $20 million, he said, dismissing as “nonsense” a local media report that there had been a blowout in the budget and delays.

“The signing of the shareholder subscription and loan agreement is a culmination of a process initiated by the Kenyan government in 2006,” Ndemo said.

The major shareholders are the government, Safaricom and Telkom Kenya, each with 20 percent. Kenya Data Networks and Econet Wireless each hold a 10 percent stake, TEAMS acting chief executive Victor Kyalo told Reuters.

Other investors include Wananchi Online (5 percent) and Jamii Telkom (3.75 percent). Another five companies plan on buying a 1.25 percent stake each while the remaining 5 percent awaits a buyer.

The firms now have 90 days to pay for their stakes in the project which will will give Kenya access to high-speed internet services through a sub-sea fibre optic cable that will stretch from Mombasa to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates.

Rival undersea project SEACOM has reportedly already landed its cable at the port city of Mombasa, which is to become a regional telecommunications hub.

Ndemo said technology was moving fast with video-based communications using up ever greater amounts of bandwidth and the extra capacity offered by the new fibre optic cable would help Kenya to be at the cutting edge of online service delivery.

Harambee Stars off to Tehran

Harambee Stars left Nairobi for Tehran on Wednesday ahead of Saturday’s friendly match against Iran.

The squad of 21 consists purely of local players after Francis Ouma who was having trials with Italian Serie B side Parma was left behind as his travel documents could not process.

It will be the first match for new coach Antoine Hey and he expects a tough outing. “Iran are one of the best teams in Asia and have very talented players which gives us a huge responsibility to go there and play well,” Hey told journalists before the team’s departure.

The German coach expressed his displeasure with the hastily arranged fixture after stating a fortnight ago that he would not subject the players to a friendly ahead of the crucial World Cup qualifier against Tunisia.

“What can I do? This was an agreement between two governments which as Harambee Stars we have no option but to honour,” he said. Hey added that he would have preferred to play against an African team.

American based player Taiwo Atieno also missed out on the trip as he is yet to obtain a Kenyan passport. Atieno who hopes to pull on the Stars jersey one day was full of praise of the German coach and his methodology.

“Training has been great Antoine has brought organization into the team which the players have responded well to,” said Atieno.

The British born striker thinks that Tunisia match will be a formidable challenge for Stars. “Tunisia have been in almost every World Cup I’ve watched which makes it a big ask for us,” said Atieno.

IMF says in talks with Kenya on $100 million loan

Kenya has requested a loan of up to $100 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to cushion its currency from global economic downturn and help counter a severe food crisis, the body’s resident representative said on Tuesday.

Official forex reserves in Kenya’s central bank declined to $2.6 billion, equivalent to 3.13 months of imports, from $3.3 billion or 4.75 months of imports in the year ago period, according to the bank’s statistics.

Like other nations across the world, Kenya has been feeling the heat from the global financial crisis, but it has been hit harder than most because the crisis slowed its recovery from deadly post-election violence early last year.

The east African nation is also facing a drought that has left about 10 million people in need of food aid.

“What we are exploring right now is … to make available to Kenya as much as $100 million,” Scott Rogers told Reuters in a telephone interview.

He said they are hoping to forward Kenya’s proposal to the IMF board by early April.

“Once the board approves the government’s request, disbursement occurs in a matter of days. That will be late April, early May,” said Rogers.

MONEY FOR IMPORTS

Rogers said the money will augment the central bank’s hard currency reserves.

“This will allow the country to support a high level of importation without putting as much pressure on the exchange rate as would otherwise occur without funding,” he said.

He said the crisis that began in major developed economies was hurting the whole sub Saharan region.

“We are already seeing the impact of the (global) crisis on Kenya’s stock market and exchange rate,” he said. “We are expecting growth in most sub Sahara African countries to be about half what we saw in 2007. All countries will be affected,” the resident representative said.

Kenya’s shilling was hit hard last year by the global financial crisis, a higher import bill due to rising commodity prices and the importation of maize after harvests were destroyed and planting disrupted in the post-election crisis.

It has remained under pressure so far, slipping to a four-year low last week on news of a 27 percent drop in the amount of hard currencies sent home by Kenyans abroad in January.

Rogers said the currency is likely to hold its own against the dollar in future, barring any unforeseen risks.

“The prospects of the stability of the Kenya shilling are good. There may be additional pressures out there. Right now we are not seeing them. They could emerge on factors not under Kenya’s control,” he said.

Rogers said the terms of the concessional loan would be a 5-year grace period and a 10-year repayment time.

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The story of a Kenyan whistleblower

REVIEW OF: It’s Our Turn To Eat – The story of a Kenyan whistleblower “It’s our turn to eat” is about corruption in Kenya. The title quotes the appeal his ethnic peers made to John Githongo-–the man they had appointed as presidential adviser on corruption—not to betray their collective interests by doing that job properly.

The election of a reforming government in late 2002 had raised high expectations of change in that most distinctive characteristic of Kenya’s political culture, corruption. It was expected that past scandals would be investigated and resolved and the first steps taken in preventing future corruption.

At last, evidence emerged which seemed strong enough to sustain action. Inquiries in these years began to inform us all on the Goldenberg scandal–-the definitive scandal of the Moi era-–and the Anglo-Leasing scams which came to light under the new President, Mwai Kibaki. But the government prevented action.

There is inevitably a lot of detail and Michela Wrong handles it beautifully, with the style that made her two previous books so engrossing.There is a grand theme too in “It’s our turn to eat”: betrayal. The story is Shakespearean in its sweep.

John Githongo was brought from a post as a well-known campaigner against corruption to one of the most exposed jobs in government. He came from the right background to work from within the new establishment. Enormous hopes reposed in him. Yet, as he turned over the stones, it was borne in on him that he was being impeded not just by inertia and the culture of ingrained acceptance of wrongdoing. He was being obstructed, deliberately, by the very people at the heart and at the top of the government which had appointed him.

At first, they cautioned him with Talleyrand’s advice to his diplomats: “Surtout, messieurs, point de zele” (Above all, gentlemen, no zeal). Then they turned on him with accusations of betrayal–-of his President, of his government and, above all, of their ethnic and economic interests. Ironically, the betrayal was theirs. Its ugliness led to Githongo’s flight in fear of his life in early 2005.Michela Wrong does this grand theme proud. She brings the protagonists to vivid life. The heroes are all the better for being portrayed without sentimentality and with warts.

The question by the last page is: was it all worth it? Does the story end in disillusionment? For some who believed in Githongo’s campaign, and admired his steadfastness, quite possibly.

The price was high for its central figure. But Githongo is not disillusioned. For him, the struggle is to stop politicians robbing their own people. Githongo admits his error in believing that elaborate institutions could effect reform. The state’s institutions, including the law, can be and have been deformed by corruption.

He now says he puts his hopes in ordinary people and their growing anger about their rulers’ abuse of the trust laid on them.Now the cat is out of the bag. It is for Kenyans to hold to account those who make them poor by diverting public money from the public good to private ends.

There are lessons for Kenya’s overseas friends, too. We development partners must re-examine our official national and multilateral aid programmes, and the implicit and explicit understandings on which they are predicated.And we should raise our own game. Britain is shamed by the OECD’s fierce criticisms of its failure to carry out our international obligations against corruption.

With the banking system in pieces, perhaps now is the time to cleanse its dark corners–-and the dark corners of other professions traditionally held in high regard—of their readiness to handle money stolen from struggling people in poor countries. That money has been appropriated by the indecently rich in poor countries who regard government not as a trust or contract with the governed, but as their private possession.

We should have nothing to do with the money nor the thieves beyond returning the first and exposing and isolating the second.

We should stop sheltering bad governments from the consequences of their people’s dissatisfaction. The so-called donors should align their taxpayers’ interests with Kenyans’. Kenyans are hard-headed people. They do not understand the perverse and indulgent waste of donor money on their corrupt leaders. They see our ministers and similar signing cheques and glad-handing those they know to be on the take. They are confused about the message their donor friends wish to send.

If John Githongo is right, then the ordinary people must be encouraged to exercise more rigorously and effectively their democratic right to hold corrupt governments to account. The aid-givers should get out of the way. They should no longer come between the lion and his wrath.

Sir Edward Clay was Britain’s High Commissioner to Kenya from 2001-2005 when he was outspoken on governance questions including corruption.

Michela Wrong is a reporter who has worked throughout Africa for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. “In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz”, her first book, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction.

It’s Our Turn To Eat – The story of a Kenyan whistleblower, by Michela Wrong, was published on 19 February 2009

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