The international community ought to be very worried by what is going on in Kenya. It should learn from its mistakes in not intervening in nearby Zimbabwe when it could have. The accounts of 30 people being burned alive in a Kenyan church sent shudders down my spine. It reminded me of stories I heard of the Rwandan genocide when I was there in July. Politics in many African countries is still based on tribal affiliation and Kenya, I believe, is no different. Kenya, like Zimbabwe, is a country of immense natural resources, and run properly ought to give its people a very good living. It is to be hoped that the post election troubles quickly die down. If not, we could be looking at yet another failed state in Africa with bloodshed on an unimaginable scale.
UPDATE: A reader has recommended Kenyan Pundit, a Kenyan blog which is following the crisis with some really good analysis.
34 comments:
Yes- what's going on in most parts of Africa is dreadful. Yes, in this day and age there should be stable and prosperous 'black' states/countries. One problem- I can't think of ONE. Why is this? I'm afraid i subscribe to Alan Clark's view of the entire African continent. One thing is for sure- if the West intervines disaster beckons. Africa should sort itself out. If it does not wish to create stable 'democratic' regimes then that's up to them. We should stop hand-wringing over Africa and the Middle East. It just encourages them.
Hi -
My parents live out in Kenya and, by all accounts (including some very good Kenyan blogs - www.kenyanpundit.com being one of them) things are a lot worse than is being reported over here.
The big thing to watch out for is tomorrow's planned rally in Uhuru park (ironically named after the Swahili word for "freedom"). Odinga has called for 1million people to descend on the city centre and considering the police are on a shoot to kill order, I can't see things ending well.
Political unrest in Africa will continue until the international community stops supporting the corruption that is rife there.
I think it is as simple as that - nothing to do with tribal this or tribal that.
One cannot help but think that the concept of 'politics' is the root cause of so many problems in Africa. In these cases, democracy clearly does not work.
There are more foreign aid workers in Africa today than administrators at the height of imperialism.
Imperialism was immoral and the aid workers foster coruption. The current political setup means that without oversight Africa will descend into a bloodbath.
The West should stop calling it "Africa's Problem" - when they created most of it.
The ROOT of the problem is that the West believe that the only difference between Africa and the West IS the culture and that their culture is better - and if they just keep trying at their culture then the old tribal culture will vanish - echos of Communism.
The West can't accept that the people are different - because that would mean they are racist. So they plough on trying to change their culture.
It's because we didn't intervene in Zimbabwe that Kenyan and Ugandan elected leaders are morphing into dictators.
The problems in Kenya today would seem to be a direct consequence of the divisiveness which democracy fosters.
The European mainland has moved away from a crude nationalistic form of democracy towards the EU bureaucratic model. It seems to suit much of Europe quite well (but, obviously, not the UK). Maybe Africa needs something more akin to the EU?
The alternative? Well, the Chinese seem to have a new quasi-Imperial model (given that Britain is no longer in that market)!
FFS Kenya is a failed state as it is. You may like to compile another one of your Lists
Prosperous and democratic African states
I think "The West" needs to stop trying to impose its own standards on other cultures. Kenya should be free to run itself in the way it chooses, not in the way that David Miliband decrees. If the Kenyans want a British-style parliamentary system they will demand it.
We don't have to read history books to see what happens when we intervene in other countries' politics.
I'm interested in your use of the phrase "the international community." Does it really exist, post-Bush?
Paul Lindford - Cannot resist a little dig at Mr Bush, eh? Why didn't you cite the war in Iraq as one of the main causes of tribal disagreements in Africa? Trouble in Africa was something Mr Bush cooked up with Dick Cheyney and Donald Rumsfeld in the cause of enriching H-a-a-a-a-l-l-l-i-b-u-u-u-ton!
There never was anything called "the international community". I don't want half the nations in the world to be my neighbours. No to Sudan. No to Libya. No to Saudi Arabia. No to Rhodesia, Somalia and most other African countries. No to Venezuela. There is no such thing as an "international community".
Re Kenya, they've had 60 years of independence and they are still having self-inflicted human catastrophes. They wanted us out. We're out. I vote we stay out.
Good post (if I was being picky I might point out that it might be stretching it a bit to describe, 2000 km away, Zimbabwe as "nearby" to Kenya)
Ed - just how do you demand a British style parliamentary system or at least the ability to change your leader without bloodshed when you are a Kenyan or Zimbabwean citizen. You would have seen, certainly in the case of a Zimbabwean, anyone you know who is just suspected of being an inch out of line deprived access to food or beaten up and tortured at best and quite possibly killed.
We intervened as best we were able in the countries of Eastern Europe, opposing dictatorships there - the history books tell that after a long long time that was worthwhile.
Zimbabwe's problems were not caused by colonialism but by a leader who step by step moved from someone with a democratic mandate to a corrupt dictatorship. We should do anything we can to stop Kenya going the same way.
I think however we have to look at what no democracy in Africa would actually mean...
1) More wars, especially more civil wars and tribal genocide
2) More suppression of woman, homosexuals, other cultures and reglion.
I'm not sure its something which can be solved by 'the international community'. I'm not sure it can be solved by Africa itself.
Theres three choices
1) Democracy
2) Dictatorships (mostly brutal ones)
3) Chaos
I can't see any other option.
Jabberwock - in the same way that my English ancestors demanded it. Do you think our parliamentary democracy was established by the UN or EU?
That is not to say we shouldn't offer help but to threaten sanctions or military intervention is ridiculous.
Ed - agreed.
I'm sorry, but I really don't care any more. Kenya, and so many other 'developing' [except they never do, do they] countries have had so much of our attention, care, charity, support, time, energy and advice, and have routinely ignored, derided or squandered it. The cash has been wasted in billions on vanity projects, ministerial Mercedes or simply stolen by a succession of brazen and unblushing kleptocrats, and the consequential debt has been forgiven - unlike any debts I may run up. "Foreign aid: taxing poor people in rich countries for the benefit of rich people in poor countries" - a quote which has been attributed to at least 3 'originators', so I won't source it.
If Kenya goes tits-up, what are the consequences? Little more than that European supermarkets won't be able to supply their customers with snow-peas out of season. Kenya may possibly become another province of the expanding Chinese empire. Let the Chinese tip *their* money down the wide and bottomless sewer which is Africa.
Let's simply close our wallets and purses, and let the scoundrels chisel and kill each other. I suddenly discover that I have far more important things to worry about, such as whether to take my dry-cleaning into town today or tomorrow. Decisions, decisions.
Ed:
Here are some excerpts from the presidential candidate Raila Odinga who claimed the election was rigged.
"I am deeply committed to a new Constitution and a parliamentary system of government, as contained in the Bomas Draft. The USA is the only country among the major western powers with a presidential system. All the rest are parliamentary democracies, and this is what we must aim for in Kenya.
We must remove power from the power brokers and give it back to the people of this country, so that the people have a real say in their destiny, and are not just dispensable pawns in a complicated game being played by our leaders to rules that only they know."
Source: http://www.odmk.org
It appears that Kenyans opted to move towards a parliamentary democracy, notwithstanding your ignorance and willingness to display that lack of information.
I also find your words trite considering your nation was very happy to help invade Iraq under dubious circumstances. That kind of narrow and blind self interest is what guided Africa into the mess it is in today - including supporting corrupt African leaders, who by the way, often have bank accounts in your countries - that one, you never seem to complain or care about.
3.39 - exactly the point I was trying to make!
Anonymous @ 3.39.
Yes, that's what Odinga said before the election.
Just look at all the sanctimonious claptrap that Mugabe [to take but the most egregious current example] spewed before independence. Compare it with his behaviour afterwards. Look at the way that ['Saint'] Benazir Bhutto and her husband pillaged the Pakistani treasury and took kickbacks from Dassault on defence contracts.
Nobody *ever* stands for election saying, "I'm going to rob you blind, you gullible suckers." Colour me jaded and cynical, but I refuse to believe that Odinga would be substantially different from Kibaki if he had won.
Albert M Bankment
The signs were always there with Mugabe, but we were so desperate to get shot of Ian Smith that we refused to see them. Afterwards we sat back and congratulated ourselves for having overseen a peaceful handover to majority rule, ignoring the fact that we had delivered Zimbabwe into the hands of a psychopath. The strategy before the Lancaster House agreement should have been to isolate Mugabe from his more moderate Patriotic Front partner, Joshua Nkomo. While not defending the conduct of Smith and the white minority between 1965 and 1980, they always knew that Mugabe would turn out to be a disaster, and they were right.
I am afraid South Africa will be next. You just cannot impose the way we do things on tribal countries. Just leave them alone to sort themselves.In time they may stop killing each other as we did about 300 years ago.
Johnny Norfolk
Africa is tribal as is Europe and Asia. The tribes of Europe are still killing each other in the former Yugoslavia just as the others did through two world wars, both much more recent than 300 years ago.
But Africa is not only tribal but very hierarchical - the guy at the top has the ultimate say and dispenses the patronage to his supporters. Of course one can see that in the UK with the innumerable quangos headed by party apparatchiks but it has at least some veneer of civilisation. In Africa, as in many Asian countries, the scale of financial and electoral corruption is awesome. It will never be different. Kenya today is Rwanda before, Angola before that and Idi Amin's Uganda still further back.
Eventually the new imperial masters, the Chinese, will sort it out brutally and ruthlessly - frankly Black Africa's only hope.
Botswana is dying of Aids and South Africa will die of Jacob Zuma - those were the only brighter spots south of the Sahara.
Victor
I suspect that one of the problems that Africa has is a lack of nation states. Almost every country is an amalgam of several different and distinct ethnic groups which encourages politicians to pander to ethnic prejudices and encourages voters to overlook massive corruption as long as their local politician can divide some of the spoils to his own ethnic group.
Be honest, if the EU ever becomes a country wouldn't you be more inclined to overlook a corrupt British politician if he brought home some of the wealth than you would if a current politician did so?
Botswana is an exception to this rule in that it is basically a nation state (there are small minority groups but they aren't common). Botswana is also prosperous and stable in spite of a sever Aids epidemic and I don't believe that this is a coincidence.
No demos means no democracy.
Anonymous 3:39. Phew! I was on tenterhooks, but somebody finally mentioned Iraq. I just knew it was coming up and was holding my breath ...
I am amused, in a somewhat horrified way, at the blinkered statements disparaging Africa by so called 'civilized' people - it is a cunning sort of racism, based on a sense of self that is superior but only on the surface, a mirrored veneer eaten by worms from within.
The tribes of Europe have gone through countless wars with the death tolls in the tens of millions, twice during the last century alone but umm, we call it a grand name, the "World Wars" as if that is the whole world, and not tribal politics. Your societies have manufactured weapons to wipe out the planet several times over yet you live under the illusion that you are somehow better.
In what way? The scale of destruction, chaos and impoverishment that your tribes cause are better? The US undergoes sophisticated voter disenfranchisement and media misinformation occurring under multiple elections while Britain blindly follows like a poodle, and sends its citizens for trial in the US and indefinite detention whereas it does not even merit equal treatment or equivalent rights?
Raping your own people of civil liberties today, emerging as the cutting edge of repressive totalitarianism, you have the nerve to point to other people and countries like South Africa? Please, I don't want to laugh too loud, because it is not funny in the least bit.
You sanctimoniously pontificate about corruption, when your whole system of life is so unsustainable and so unscalable that you have to engage in essentially grand robbery on a global scale just to keep your standards of living in place? Who are the real kleptomaniacs? The African dictators who amass wealth or entire societies predicated on reaping windfalls based on exploiting other regions of the world for their natural resources?
Africa doesn't need you as much as you need Africa. That much is absolutely clear to me, that without the resources from the developing world, your societies will collapse in short order.
Spare us the sanctimonious male cow droppings and go do your dry cleaning.
@verity
I wonder what you think about global warming, where countries in Africa have water (and hydro power) shortages and poor crops due to climate change. Do you ever stop to think about that and how you could help?
I've read people complaining about the various African countries, and about the Chinese, but I don't hear the biggest polluters and contributors to global warming changing anything of significance.
Who is actually causing the most damage to the world? Who is in a position to actually start taking leadership and steering the human race to a better tomorrow? Who is actually building up the policies, conditions and technology for the demise of our species?
What do you think is the source of the biggest problems we have in the world today? Africa or the West?
[12:17] I wonder what you think about global warming, where countries in Africa have water (and hydro power) shortages and poor crops due to climate change. Do you ever stop to think about that and how you could help?
Nope.
Global warming, if any, comes from activity on the surface of the Sun. That's the universe for you. Completely out of control of the ant hill of bipedals on the Earth.
but I don't hear the biggest polluters and contributors to global warming changing anything of significance.
The biggest (and only) contributor to "global warming", if any, is the Sun.
Who is actually causing the most damage to the world? The Sun?
Who is in a position to actually start taking leadership and steering the human race to a better tomorrow? The Africans? (To say otherwise would be "a cunning sort of racism".)
What do you think is the source of the biggest problems we have in the world today? Africa or the West? Al Gore, Michael Moore, Sting and lefty quangoes? (Not Barak Obama, because he's from Kenya. So he's OK.)
At least the Africans have the excuse that they aren't generally privileged to go through education systems like yours.
With your response, and your education systems, it probably means just a lack of general intelligence if you consider global warming to be equivalent to the Sun.
You're not much smarter than the African dictators. It is after all the same type of mind that produces those results - see what you want to see, never mind reality ...
I see that snow and bitter winds are sweeping the UK. It must be all that global warming we read so much about.
[9:00] "it probably means just a lack of general intelligence if you consider global warming to be equivalent to the Sun."
If your incoherent comment is addressed to me, global warming is caused by activity on the surface of the sun. Global cooling occurs, slowly, over a period of years, when this activity dies down.
It might interest proselytizers of the global warming community to know that Mars is slowly, slowly warming at the same rate, or close, as the Earth. Not much CO2 on Mars, I believe. And not too many flights or emotively renamed "rain forests" aka "jungles" to save, or inefficient light bulbs or dishwashers with a dry cycle.
Regarding the very slight global warming cycle we are currently undergoing, It's The Sun Wot Done It.
I trust the study below to be more filled with verity than the tabloid-style references to the Sun as an ill considered answer to climate change.
"The study by Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, shows the added air pollution caused by each 1 degree Celsius increase in temperature caused by carbon dioxide leads to about 1,000 additional deaths in the U.S. and many more cases of respiratory illness and asthma. Jacobson estimates as many as 20,000 air-pollution related deaths may occur worldwide each year with each 1 degree Celsius increase.
The Stanford Report quotes him saying:
"This is a cause and effect relationship, not just a correlation. The study was the first to specifically isolate carbon dioxide's effect from that of other global-warming agents and to find quantitatively that chemical and meteorological changes due to carbon dioxide itself increase mortality due to increased ozone, particles and carcinogens in the air.""
Source: http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/01/stanford-scient.html
Build idiot proof software and the universe builds a better idiot ... perhaps you are the epitome of Darwinian selection, then?
For a very long time I cared; cared passionately about the Third World; gave to the Third World; responded to the countless appeals; agonised over the famines, the droughts, the floods, the earthquakes, the debt burden, the civil wars. I am sure that it's a dreadful failing and character flaw in myself, BUT I NO LONGER GIVE A FLYING ONE about any of it, about any of them.
I have seen friends disenfranchised by the electoral swapping of one set of grinning, sanctimonious crooks for another set of grinning, sanctimonious crooks. My wife has been barged off the pavement by Mrs Mugabe's bodyguards, as they shadow her on a London shopping binge with stolen money. I have fumed as a succession of jumped-up, self-righteous buffoons lecture me on their requirements and demands, and attempt to make me feel guilty for the admitted transgressions of anonymous opportunists two centuries ago. However much 'we' do, it is never enough. However much we give, they demand more to expiate our imaginary guilt.
Yes, slavery was appalling. Yes, the arbitrary division of Africa was dreadful. Yes, the plundering of natural resources was unfair. No, I didn't do it, and neither did my ancestors. I refuse to feel any transferred guilt, however many heart-rending pictures of swollen-bellied, starving kids that Oxfam shows me. Compassion fatigue? Damn right!
I no longer care. I fervently wish that they would all slaughter each other until there is just one of them standing. Since that will be, by definition, the most bloodthirsty and unprincipled one of the entire despicable lot, we can have our own equally self-righteous show-trial and execute him [or, possibly, her]. I don't care if they're black, yellow or white. I am sick of being lectured by an army of unblushing creeps with their hands out for yet more aid. They can either get their acts together, and make their land as productive as it was under the 'wicked' colonial régimes, and sling out [and preferably string up] the crooks, or they can simply die. I have bigger and better priorities nearer to home.
Rant ends!
I don't think the plundering of natural resources was unfair. They didn't know they had those natural resources before we found them. And that they have uranium was irrelevant until we invented a use for it. The demand for these resources came from our technological inventiveness. They could have made out like bandits had they gone for it.
Yet, now they know they have these resources, they should be capitalising on them instead of whining around with the begging bowl.
In 'Eat The Rich' by my hero PJ, he details how vast, resource-rich Tanzania is way behind the tiny little island of Hong Kong, which has no resources at all, except its people's brains and energy. Hong Kong's commercial instincts have flooded over into Guandong province of China so they'll all driving posh cars and the wealth is spreading.
In Hong Kong, Chinese capitalists are driving around in Rolls-Royces (this tiny, resource-free island is the highest Rolls-Royce per capita place in the world, by the way) and in Tanzania - many of them are still walking to the water hole.
In Africa, the British developed the recovery of resources and systems for their transport to markets. Why did most African states fail to follow through on the marketing infrastructure the British had put down, plus the gift of the English language for international trade?
If it was tribalism and "the strong man" that's their problem,not ours. Vide Idi Amin and all the rest of them. (Idi Amin even evicted the wealth creators, the Indian families of descendants of imported Civil Service people, who found refuge in Britain and have proved so capitalistically adroit.)
Excuse me if I fail to feel guilty for the failures of resource-rich Africa.
I pray Kenya doesn't go the Zimbabwe route. Another good site with news updates about Kenya is bongasasa.runboard.com
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