Kenya: Politics, Power, and Death - It's Election Time
On December 27th 2007, Mwai Kibaki of the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC) was reelected in KenyaÂ’s ninth presidential election since gaining independence in 1963. Opposition protests and the subsequent crackdown by government forces have left over 600 people dead. Both local and international observers have noted abnormalities, with some going so far as to say that the vote count itself was rigged.
It goes without saying that I feel that it should not be necessary for 600 persons to have had their lives prematurely terminated for the purposes of insuring free and fair elections - and certainly not by a country that is generally accepted to be a model of African democracies.
Most of the violence has taken place in Kibera, NairobiÂ’s largest slum. The initial protests, numbering in the thousands, have dwindled significantly since the 27th, yet the government continues to use lethal force to quell the opposition.
"We will not allow Kibaki to make this country a dictatorship."
The United States and the international community have blamed both Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, who represents the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), for the violence, because of their inability to get together and discuss the new government’s options for establishing a meaningful consensus. The two have yet to meet. “It is beyond time for them to come together and . . . focus all of their efforts on trying to reach a political accommodation,” Sean McCormack of the US State Department said. The European Parliament has also called for a suspension of EU aid till a compromise can be reached. Again, at least 600 people have died, and he future is looking bleak. Mistrust and government do not mix - just look to the state of our own affairs for proof.
Perhaps the most ironic and confounding aspect of this development is the fact that Mwai KibakiÂ’s first election in 2002 was arguably considered the first actually free, open, and fair election since KenyaÂ’s independence in 1963.
Jomo Kenyatta was KenyaÂ’s first openly elected president in 1963. Without getting into specifics, he rose to power under controversial circumstances and retained his leadership through some pretty shady political maneuvering. But hey, who can blame him, right? YouÂ’re pretty much going to be making shit up as you go along considering your country's long track record of being brutally repressed by outsiders. ThereÂ’s going to be a lot of trial and error.
Anyway, Mr. Kenyatta remained in power till his death in 1978. At this time, Daniel arap Moi, of the same party as Mr. Kenyatta - the Kenya African National Union (KANU) - became the next president by means of constitutional concession (i.e., without an election). In 1982, after a failed coup d'état, Mr. Moi decided that KANU was going to be the only legal Kenyan political party. The election of 1988 brought to light several decisively undemocratic processes (notably mlolongo where individuals had to stand behind the person they supported - so much for anonymity). Still, Mr. Moi managed to stay in power by winning the 1992 and 1997 elections, assisted at least in part by fragmentation of the tribal opposition.
Well, hell, youÂ’re probably wondering how in tarnation they ever got that guy out of office? The answer is by constitutional amendment. The 2002 election was the first since 1982 where Mr. Moi was not allowed to run. So who won? ThatÂ’s right - Mwai Kibaki, who within five years has become so corrupt that he has rigged the elections and unleashed the police on his fellow countrymen, resulting in the death of 600 human beings.
So now you know . . .
“The people are scared. There is no food.”
UPDATE: Mr. Odinga and the opposition have decided that the violence is too much and have opted to institute economic boycotts in replacement of active protests. This announcement came on the bloodiest of the official "three day" protest.
Note: Zarth and a four hour Scrabulous marathon with a friend from Nairobi instigated this... By absolutely no means do I profess to be any type of expert on Kenya, if anyone feels that I have misrepresented this information by all means correct me. The purpose of the piece is to help inform, not to mislead. I hope y'all learned something, and thanks for your time.
Fingergate. Seriously. That Is What It Is Being Called.
Welcome to the world of creepy and awful: ItÂ’s Big Brother in South Africa. Things went horribly wrong during the filming of South AfricaÂ’s second season of Big Brother. A woman got incredibly drunk, passed out, at which point her housemate sexually abused her. And to top it off, producers apparently thought it was totally okay to air.
Ofunneka Molokwu is a 29-year-old medical assistant who decided to spend the day drinking. She black out after an extended period of vomiting. That’s when 24-year-old housemate Richard Bezuidenhout decided to take advantage of the woman. As another housemate begged him to stop, Bezuidenhout “penetrated her vagina with his fingers” while Molokwu lay unconscious. He then sat down in a chair across the room and sniffed his fingers for a while. Seriously. This actually happened on television, while people watched at home.
Viewers flooded newspapers and Internet message boards with emails expressing outrage. Many of the emails contained photo clips from the program, which appeared to show housemate Richard Bezuidenhout, a 24-year-old film student from Tanzania, assaulting Ofunneka Molokwu, a 29-year-old medical assistant from Nigeria.
The pay-TV channel insists that no such attack took place, even though people watched it occur. The channel took the high road.
"There is no indication that [Molokwu] was unconscious at the time," M-Net executive Joseph Hundah said.
Riiiight. I guess that is why producers called paramedics after the attack and cut the live feed, because all was well. Oh, and go fuck yourself.
In South Africa a woman is assaulted every 40 seconds. BezuidenhoutÂ’s actions constitute rape under South African law. Bezuidenhout decided to top the assault by being an even bigger asshole when he opened his Neanderthal mouth to explain his actions to his other housemates.
Well, this is Africa.
Well, then maybe we can get you killed by a lion.
Now, in an even more hideous turn of events, the controversy is being called "Fingergate." Seriously.
The fallout over what is now being dubbed 'Fingergate' continues.
Barf.
Compassionate Conservatism, Their Black Asses
Guess what? Not only do abstinence-based sex ed programs--which include programs that emphasize abstinence but do teach about other methods for preventing STDs and pregnancy as well as those that teach "abstinence only"--not keep kids from having sex or getting pregnant. They also don't keep kids from getting AIDS. Not even as compared to kids getting no sex education at all.
And yet the Bush administration's quite proud of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief--which requires that 1/3rd of all money spent on AIDS prevent encourage abstinence. Though according to Rolling Stone,
In its first year, PEPFAR spent more than half of the $92 million earmarked to prevent sexual transmission on promoting abstinence programs.
Even though
sexual abstinence only programmes for prevention of HIV infection do not decrease or exacerbate sexual risk. . . .
The trial results also suggest that abstinence only programmes do not effectively encourage abstinent behaviour but instead are ineffective for preventing or decreasing sexual activity among most participants.
The most recent study
was designed to identify programme trials measuring any (my emphasis) biological, behavioural, cognitive, attitudinal, or other outcome, not just HIV incidence. . . .
Outcome? You might as well buy everyone a cable subscription and let them stay home, for all the difference these programs made.
Seven trials assessed participants' reports of having been diagnosed as having a sexually transmitted infection by a doctor or nurse. Every trial compared an abstinence only programme with usual care by schools or community centres. No trial found a significant short term or long term benefit, and one trial found significant adverse effects of the adult led programme. . .
If you think that sucks for us Americans, think of how much worse it's gotta be for the international "beneficiaries" of Bush's largesse--given that, again quoting Rolling Stone,
the reality facing young women and girls in Africa and other impoverished regions, who are often infected by wandering husbands or forced to have sex in exchange for food or shelter. Among fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds in sub-Saharan Africa, studies show, more than three times as many young women are infected with HIV as young men.
Of course, hey. If they get AIDS, there's drugs for that now. Right?
Study here; short summary here.
If you want to do something to counteract the damage, you can start here.
Bitch_PhD thanks DeadRat for the link to the study.
Nigeria Joins War Against Gays
Nigeria joined today's top headlines with a proposed law that would ban gay marriage. Note that, remarkably, this movement comes from a country which hasn't ever heard of Pat Robinson, Ray Comfort, Billy Graham, nor the Project for a New American Century.
As reported on the BBC:
If the proposed law is approved, anyone who speaks out or forms a group supporting gay and lesbian rights could be imprisoned.
But this isn't anything new for Nigeria. In 1999, President Yoweri Museveni moved the nation's Criminal Investigations Department "to look for homosexuals, lock them up and charge them." This recently surfaced version of the deemed "Same-Sex Prohibiton Act" not only bans same-sex marriages and relationships, penalizes gay rights activists but also targets and chokes the already neglected HIV/AIDS treatment for Africa's infected homosexuals and their quality of life.
"If South Africa want to do it, that is their business. It is not Nigerian to be gay," [said] Emmanuel Onwubiko, Senior commissioner, Nigeria Human Rights Commission.
Africa Brings Out the Softer Side of Bush
Being a progressive political columnist in the age of George W. Bush can sometimes feel like an exercise in repetition, becoming as tiresome to write as it undoubtedly is to read. "Doesn't Bush suck?" "See what a jerk he is here!" "Watch him stomp civil liberties there!" "Watch him suck up to the evangelical Christian right!" The headlines practically write themselves. That's why it's such a rare and refreshing change when he does something positive, and doubly so when he does it without plastering it all over a press conference in an attempt to improve his image.
The Washington Post reports that during his tenure he has, with little fanfare, tripled US aid to developing countries in Africa to almost $9 billion.
The president has tripled direct humanitarian and development aid to the world's most impoverished continent since taking office and recently vowed to double that increased amount by 2010 -- to nearly $9 billion.
The moves have surprised -- and pleased -- longtime supporters of assistance for Africa, who note that because Bush has received little support from African American voters, he has little obvious political incentive for his interest.
"I think the Bush administration deserves pretty high marks in terms of increasing aid to Africa," said Steve Radelet, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.
Bush has increased direct development and humanitarian aid to Africa to more than $4 billion a year from $1.4 billion in 2001, according to the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. And four African nations -- Sudan, Ethiopia, Egypt and Uganda -- rank among the world's top 10 recipients in aid from the United States.
Beyond increasing aid to Africa, Bush has met with nearly three dozen African heads of state during his six years in office. He visited Africa in his first term, and aides say he hopes to make a return visit next year.
Who knew? Aside from a few references in his 2003 state of the union address the administration has been relatively silent on the subject, with the exception occasionally discussing the situation in Darfur.
Although lumping together every country on the continent into just "Africa" is an extreme oversimplification, as countries like Egypt, South Africa and Nigeria are about as different from each other as the US is from them, it's fair to say that the continent as a whole is facing some serious problems. Even if the infection rate has been previously exaggerated, some African countries have over 20% of their total populations testing positive for HIV. An ongoing food shortage affects millions of people living there, and political strife continues to plague many countries there.
However, some critics are claiming that the increased aid is just a means to increase revenue for corporations looking to expand into new markets.
"I know a lot of activist groups who believe that the president's stated commitment to Africa is, at best, a play on words," said Nii Akuetteh, executive director of Africa Action, a Washington-based advocacy organization. "First of all, much of the aid is emergency food or medical aid, rather than true development assistance. Then there are conditions that are attached where the emphasis is more on countries that open up their markets so American companies can go in and privatize things like water and electrical service or have access to certain resources."
Certainly privatization of essential services like water and electricity has been a mixed blessing of sorts. While private sources of water do tend to offer a higher water quality than what had previously been available, the poorest people are left right where they had been before; drinking often tainted water because they can't afford the better water now available. Much of the blame can be placed at the feet of the IMF, which mandates water and other utility privatizations in some of its loan structures, though a UN study showed that some of the loans from the US follow similar patterns of restrictions, which may be in the best economic interests of recipient countries.
So even charity has a dark side. Unfortunately that's still about as good as it gets with this crew in power, so we should be happy even for that.
Pitt Tops List of “15 People Who Make America Great”
Who would have thought having your girlfriend pop out a kid in Africa could get you kudos from Newsweek? Um, nobody. Yet somehow Brad Pitt pulled it off--the magazine recently named Pitt one of its “15 People Who Make America Great.” Newsweek claimed Pitt focused attention on African issues, contending “[People] might not know about AIDS orphans in South Africa.”
Well, letÂ’s not go so far with the celeb dick-sucking. Pitt dragged along the press and its tourist dollars to the poverty-stricken country of Namibia, but wasnÂ’t their family trip also self-serving? DidnÂ’t Pitt and Jolie invade this country so they could have a bit of privacy during their tender family moment?
"It's the first time I've actually felt like we have some degree of control over it," says Pitt, from his home in Malibu. "I can't describe what an immense relief it is for me."
Pitt learned of the struggle of AfricaÂ’s poor when he and Jolie adopted their daughter, Zahara, an AIDS orphan from Ethiopia. The actor claimed the experience helped him see beyond Malibu, and he hopes to inspire others to so the same.
"I look at [Zahara] and imagine what her life could have been," he says. "You want to grab as many of these kids in your arms as you can. They need our help, and we should be doing more."
The Jolie-Pitts new addition, Shiloh, already earned money for the familyÂ’s causes; her first photos sold for $4 million, all of which the family gave to charity.
“Knowing that someone was going to hound us for that first photo — and was going to profit immensely for doing it — I just couldn’t live with it,” Pitt told the magazine. “We were able to turn that around and collect millions for people who are really going to need it.”
Other notables who achieved the fifteen include CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, whom the magazine claimed showed an “inner rage” during her Katrina coverage, and Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay who invested his fortune in nonprofit business.
