The Truth About African Migrants in Europe,DREAMS

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè

Medicine never stops evolving, and the never-ending efforts of millions of researchers around the world have provided humanity with some amazing technologies in the last few years. From artificial intelligence (AI)-based doctors that can outperform their human counterparts to the development of “smart” cancer vaccines, the race for medical innovation never stops.

However, these technologies come at a steep price, and very few countries – namely, the most industrialised ones – can afford to use them and make them accessible to the general population. Treatment disparity between the richer Western countries and the poorest African regions becomes wider every day. Countless Africans keep falling into the so-called “poverty trap”, generating a vicious circle of deterioration where ill health, epidemics, and poverty interact and mutually reinforce each other.

In an ideal world, everyone should have access to medical treatment regardless of his or her ability to pay. The reality, however, is much grimmer. When sickness occurs in a low-income household, not having the capacity to pay for medical expenses can have devastating consequences for the patient and the entire family. If access to healthcare and treatments is lacking (such as if there are no hospitals in a rural area), the individual right to health is violated, and his or her ability to work is denied. When access is granted, but the medical expenses are too steep, the consequences are no less catastrophic.

Treatment may come at the cost of financial and social well-being: the family may have to pull children out of school and push them into labour; food spending may be cut with obvious detrimental effects; and adults could be forced to work under strenuous conditions, increasing the risk of additional health issues. People who are more vulnerable to poverty are the same ones exposed to a higher risk of falling sick, such as the elderly, children, and women. Poverty increases the likelihood of becoming sick, and ill people are at a greater risk of becoming poor, generating a vicious circle that widens the disparities between the poor and the rich. When people are forced to sell what assets they have, such as livestock and land, to pay off medical debts, a financial disaster ensues, and a household may face poverty that can be dragged across the next generations. The outcome – known as the “medical poverty trap” – is a self-reinforcing mechanism that causes poverty to persist.

The medical poverty trap is particularly persistent in sub-Saharan countries such as Uganda, where low-productive agriculture, high transport costs, and small markets make the high number of rural households even more vulnerable. High economic growth rates are not sufficient to defuse the issue, however, as the cycle of health and poverty is influenced by many factors other than just economic ones. Less educated population groups are often those who have the lowest incomes, and cultural barriers can prevent them from seeking proper medical treatment when access is scarcely available. Superstition, religious beliefs, and social customs may convince them into preferring a shaman or quack over a real doctor. Ritual and herbal remedies may somewhat be part of the so-called “traditional medicine”, but they are practised with no regard to scientific procedures and are often ineffective when not directly harmful. And if the main earner of the family dies because he or she is not properly treated, the consequences for the household could be even more dramatic.

Africa and healthcare – An overview of the numbers

Just a handful of few lucky individuals around the globe have access to life-saving medications and adequate healthcare. Sixteen per cent of the entire world’s population consumes a whopping 78 per cent of the total medicines produced. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), however, usage of essential medicines is similar across all countries regardless of the income category, at about between 25 and 35 per cent. This means that in low-income countries, essential medicines are used at similar rates as in higher income countries, no matter how high their price is or how burdensome it is to buy these drugs for a household. For example, to purchase the basic 7-days course of treatment with ciprofloxacin required to treat an adult respiratory infection, in Kenya a worker must pay the equivalent of over a month’s salary. In Italy, the cost of this same treatment is roughly €6, less than the hourly pay of the average unskilled labourer.

In the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 8-E, the global community, in cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, committed to ensuring that access to essential affordable drugs would be achieved in most low- and middle-income countries by 2015. An increase in public expenditure or a widening of health insurance coverage were deemed necessary to reach this goal. Only a government may, in fact, possess the economic power to provide an entire population with sufficient coverage to afford (at least) essential drugs and treatments. Today, in 2018, the current situation is not particularly encouraging, and most African governments are quite distant from achieving this goal. In highly industrialised countries, the average health expenditure per capita is estimated at $3100 – more than one hundred times more than in sub- Saharan Africa, where the average per capita expenditure is just a meagre $37. A single regional health centre serving 100,000 patients in a developed country administers a budget which is roughly equivalent to the budget of a country with a population of 10 million. In South Africa, to intensively treat only 60 per cent of all diabetes patients, the volume of metformin and sulfonylureas distributed by the public sector should be increased, respectively, by 366 per cent and 495 per cent. When essential drugs are not available in the public sector, patients must necessarily purchase them in the private sector at a much higher price, or forgo treatment altogether.

When only wealthier people can afford to pay for treatment, richer patients quickly become those who use the most healthcare. At the same time, newer medical technologies increase the number of treatable diseases and improve productivity by reducing illness, therefore widening socio-economic disparities. Does that mean that in low-income countries medical technologies and advancements are an enemy of equality instead of ameliorating the quality of life of the general population? The answer is no, but let’s dive in a little deeper.

The perfect recipe for disaster

Fifty per cent of children under the age of five who die of pneumonia, tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoea, measles, and HIV across the world are in Africa. All these diseases are defined as “preventable” since they could have been easily treated if the patient had access to adequate health care services and affordable drugs or vaccines. But the average African patient must face several barriers to have access to what the international community defines as “adequate care”.

According to the World Bank, about 80 per cent of low- and middle-income Africans need to rely on public health facilities, whose situation is dire at best. Most primary care facilities suffer from a constant shortage of fundamental medications, such as in Zimbabwe, where painkillers are administered to patients suffering from all kind of diseases as a “treat-all-drug” since they are the only ones available. Patients are frequently referred to the big hospitals, but these larger facilities are limited in number, and very few families can afford to pay for their services. Many of them are inaccessible to those living in remote rural areas since they require many hours of walking in those regions where transport infrastructure is severely lacking.

Some facilities, on the other hand, simply do not exist. Except for South Africa, in all of sub-Saharan Africa, a region where over 650 million people live, there are hardly any facilities specialising in neurology. A population that is equivalent to Europe’s and Russia’s together has little access to facilities that can be found in almost every medium-sized German, British or Spanish city.

Skilled personnel will never be available if proper training is unavailable. Even the few fortunate (and wealthy) ones who can afford the higher education required to become a specialist choose to emigrate and live in richer countries where they can hope for better wages, a superior quality of life and more chances of career growth. Still, shortage of resources and the lack of skilled personnel are just the tip of the iceberg. For years, many African governments relied on charity projects financed by the international community to help them improve their healthcare systems. However, these plans have been mired by a constant lack of coordination, and frequently became an occasion for corrupt governments to siphon funds. The amount of resources wasted is simply depressing. For instance, over 75 per cent of all medical devices sent by Western countries remain unused because they cannot properly function outside of their natural context. The more advanced a medical technology is, the lower is the chance of it to be used properly in hospitals where no personnel have the technical expertise needed to understand its function. What’s the use of advanced digital technologies in facilities where there’s no Wi-fi or even just Internet connectivity available? The vast majority of medical devices and drugs sent cannot be transported into inaccessible areas such as deserts or inland regions, or just expire and become unusable because of the improper storage conditions. In the last decades, the “Western helping hand” did nothing but fill large warehouses with expired drugs, deteriorated vaccines and unused medical devices.

Most of the solutions offered by the many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that operate in Africa seem nothing but failed attempts to patch over the shortcomings of a system that is not looking to solve its problems in the long term. For example, every time a humanitarian health crisis or a natural disaster occurs, the International Red Cross quickly implements a large mobile field hospital and dispatches many medical units to address it effectively. That’s nice, but these solutions can only momentarily solve an epidemic outburst, but cannot improve the country’s medical infrastructure or address any of its underlying issues. All those foreign specialists who voluntarily offer their services as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and technicians may seem like angels and heroes, but their presence is too volatile to fix any of the complexities of the existing situation. As soon as the Western angels are gone, public health facilities face their usual shortages of critical drugs and devices once, and countless patients die of easily curable diseases.

Getting to the heart of the issue

Almost 20 years after the Abuja Declaration of 2001, very few African Union countries have been able to reach their target of allocating 15 per cent of their GDP to improve the health sector. Some of these countries have even reduced it. And when the funds are so low that just salary and personnel expenditures eat up to 70 per cent of hospital resources, it’s no surprise if there’s nothing left for other expenditures, such as purchasing essential drugs and medical devices, especially when the price of these medications and medical technologies is much higher in Africa than in every other well-developed country.

Understanding why this happens is the only way to cut this Gordian knot. Today, Africa produces less than 2 per cent of the drugs it consumes. Imported medications cost more than locally produced ones, and if the money invested in healthcare by the governments stays the same, this means that hospitals can buy fewer drugs, and that more sick people will die because they will not have access to the treatments they need. Africa has almost no capacity for pharmaceutical research and design (R&D) and local drug production. The only exception is South Africa, where some active pharmaceutical ingredients are produced. In every other country, even the ingredients must be imported. And the devil is in the details, because importing these ingredients would be already costly in Europe and North America, but it is ten times more in Africa, where procurement practices are plagued by a terrible transport system and general lack of adequate storage facilities.

Today, Africa imports 70 per cent of its pharmaceutical products, and many governments must spend a disproportionate amount of their already meagre resources on inefficient procurement procedures. But why can’t Africa can’t produce its own drugs like every other country (even developing ones, such as India)? Once again, there’s nearly not enough specialised personnel available. (High-scale drug production requires a high level of technical specialisation that must be supported by strong financial and educational investments – investments that repay themselves in due time, as happened in Cameroon where the $24 million-worth local generic drug manufacturer Cinpharm-Cameroon started producing antibiotics that are now much more affordable even for low- wage earners.)

Today, Africa imports 70 per cent of its pharmaceutical products, and many governments must spend a disproportionate amount of their already meagre resources on inefficient procurement procedures.

As a side note, the international community doesn’t seem to be so happy about Africa gaining its own economic independence. The biggest global pharmaceutical companies that are often so vociferous when they spend a minimal amount of their enormous fortunes to appease Africa with charity rear their ugly heads when their interests are threatened. Back in 2001, 40 pharmaceutical companies (yes, forty), among the world’s largest and most influential, dragged the South African government to court to stop it from producing generic HIV/AIDS drugs that would have significantly reduced their exorbitant prices. Eventually, most of these companies dropped the case, but thinking that they would have left millions of Africans to face certain death only to keep their profits intact is nothing less than a monstrosity.

A few words to the wise

Africa deals with 25 per cent of the world’s disease burden by spending less than 1 per cent of global health expenditure. There’s no need to assess how insufficient this amount is, especially knowing how much of it is wasted by inefficiency. Sickness means poverty; health brings growth and socio-economic well-being. It’s just as simple as that. If Africa wants to grow, it must invest in healthcare. And it must do it today, no matter how many challenges it may (and will) face.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Claudio Butticè

The number of immigrants that move to Europe in search of a better future keeps growing year after year, and those who come from sub-Saharan Africa are no exception. Even if the economic conditions of many countries in this region have somewhat improved, the reasons why people keep emigrating have changed, as have the social groups that decide to move to the Western world.

Europe is facing a seemingly endless wave of refugees coming from the Middle East as well, and many countries apparently aren’t able to deal with the ever-increasing number of people who reach their borders and coasts. New rules are needed to distribute these people more fairly across Europe and prevent criminal organisations from exploiting refugees and forcing them into slavery and human trafficking.

As a consequence, many populist and subtly neo-fascist parties have taken power and used immigration as an abhorrent scare tactic to gain popular support. Immigrants and refugees slowly became scapegoats unjustly blamed for all the problems of European countries. Information was manipulated through the use of fake news and social media, and people were misled into believing a significantly distorted version of the reality.

But what is the truth? What are the true numbers of African immigration to Europe? What are the African people who go to Europe going to face once they get there? Is the life of an African immigrant in Europe so much better than the life he lived in his country of origin?

The numbers The number of international migrant populations coming from countries in sub-Saharan Africa has grown significantly since 2010, especially toward Europe. Among the ten countries with the fastest international migration growth rate, eight are in sub-Saharan Africa. With the exception of Syria, where one of the biggest global humanitarian crisis had displaced millions of refugees, the number of people who emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa grew by 50% – three times more than the 17% worldwide average. This rate has also been much higher between 2010 and 2017 (31%) than in the past, especially in the 1990s, when the growth was just 1%.

With the exception of Syria, where one of the biggest global humanitarian crisis had displaced millions of refugees, the number of people who emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa grew by 50% – three times more than the 17% worldwide average.

Probably one of the most interesting findings on the evolution of the migration phenomenon is that back in the 1990s, 75% of the emigrants moved to another sub-Saharan country, a proportion that dropped to just 68% in 2017. Today, many more sub-Saharan migrants move to Europe, and the number of those who live in European Union countries, Switzerland and Norway reached 17% in 2017 (4.15 million) from 11% in 1990, alongside another 5.2 million North African immigrants.

Most of the sub-Saharan migrants and asylum applicants who come to Europe are from Nigeria, South Africa, Somalia, Senegal, Ghana, Angola, and Kenya. The reasons why migrating is considered a desirable alternative by many sub-Saharan people tend to vary, but are mostly related to finding a job and escaping economic hardship. Although most sub-Saharan African economies are growing, unemployment rates are still high, and wages are quite low, especially for those who possess higher- level qualifications.

And emigrating is not just appealing, it is now easier than in the past. As reported in the New York Times, “incomes per capita in the countries with the largest diaspora populations range roughly from $7,000 to $20,000. Some big African countries — like Nigeria — have entered that range.” Better economic conditions mean that more people are rich enough to afford the journey across the Mediterranean.

Other reasons include political instability and wars, global warming that pushes many people away from their homes, and the wish to reunite with family and friends who already live abroad. But what actually happens once these migrants reach Europe?

The Mediterranean migration and the Dublin Regulation

Once a migrant reaches the European coast, he may seek asylum according to the rules set by the Dublin Regulation. The Dublin Regulation is a European law established in 1997 between the European countries, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway. Also called the Dublin III Regulation after it was modified twice in 2003 and 2013, this law regulates which member state is responsible for examining applications of asylum seekers seeking international protection.

The Dublin Regulation does not go in details on how the asylum seekers should be treated, how their application is managed, nor the process through which an application is accepted or rejected; it just defines the responsible country, mostly to prevent an applicant from submitting his or her claim in multiple states. Once the responsible state rejects the asylum seeker’s application, that person is expelled from the European Union and may not restart the process in another member state. Usually, the state responsible for examining the application is either the one where the family and relatives of the asylum seeker reside legally or the one where the seeker first entered the European Union. In Europe’s highly bureaucratised system, with so many different countries, each one with its own unique laws, the Dublin Regulation is extremely dysfunctional. The first, most obvious consequence of this regulation is that most of the burden of dealing with the constant migratory flows lies on the shoulders of just a few countries. Spain, Greece, and Italy are the countries where the vast majority of African migrants arrive, even if most of the refugees wish to travel to a different destination, such as Germany, which alone saw more than 476,000 new asylum applications in 2015.

In Europe’s highly bureaucratised system, with so many different countries, each one with its own unique laws, the Dublin Regulation is extremely dysfunctional. The first, most obvious consequence of this regulation is that most of the burden of dealing with the constant migratory flows lies on the shoulders of just a few countries.

The second issue is that the entire process is excruciatingly slow. A large number of migrants who barely survived their trip across the Mediterranean in flimsy rubber dinghies or small wooden boats must be first visited, identified and searched immediately after they disembark. They spend their first few days detained in tents and metal holding pens in the ports where they wait in long queues to have their bags searched, their bodies examined by medical personnel, and their belongings thoroughly scrutinised to identify potential smuggling operations. Those fortunate enough to pass this first check must then spend months or even years in reception centres where they often live in inhumane conditions as they wait for their claims to be heard. In 2015, more than one million migrants applied for asylum, but only 292,540 (who probably applied years ago) successfully achieved refugee status.

Most of them choose to refuse identification or flee so they can travel directly to the desired destination, usually the one where they expect better living conditions. Sanctions for this type of irregular travel are minimum at best, and even those who get deported to their original countries can just organise another trip.

The effects on European public opinion

The Dublin system put those countries that represent the external borders of the European Union under significant pressure. Greece, Spain, Italy, and Hungary must deal every year with the brunt of the migratory flows even when they can barely offer asylum seekers the support and protection they rightfully deserve. It is not a coincidence that those countries recently have been invested by a new wave of xenophobia that gave birth and power to many populist parties. Despite the fact that restrictive immigration policies have always failed to contain migration flows from Africa, many Europeans perceive the African immigrants as a threat to their personal and economic security.

Perceptions of the impact of migration have been voluntarily distorted by the media for political reasons. The neurosis of social struggle has been inflamed by manipulating public opinion through scaremongering. Many neo-fascist and populist parties wanted to steer people into making emotional rather than reasoned choices, and the results they achieved with these tactics are, indeed, frightening. Harmful stereotypes, discrimination, and xenophobia, have been used as weapons to control the opinions of European citizens, who now believe that the number of immigrants living in their countries is up to three times higher than the reality. Widespread fear of an alleged “Islamisation” of their culture fueled the rage of the least educated, low-income populations, who now vastly overestimate the number of immigrants who are Muslim and depend on welfare like “social parasites”,

It is easy to understand how making immigrants the scapegoats for the difficulties brought about by the global economic crisis helped the “strongman” political leaders gain vast consensus. Hate towards immigrants has been used to convince the Britons into leaving the European Union with Brexit, to allow Matteo Salvini, a pseudo-fascist Italian political leader who deliberately cites Mussolini, to gain immense traction, and to give the populist Viktor Orban’s government a fourth term in Hungary.

The consequences of African immigration on the real economy

By 2050, more than one-third of European citizens will be aged 60 or older, a reality that will cause the labour demand to go unanswered, with over 20 million qualified jobs exceeding supply. With half of the world’s population growth expected to occur in Africa, sub-Saharan African regions are going to provide almost 800 million new workforce participants that the local economy will likely be unable to absorb. It is easy to understand how African migration may represent an excellent resource to provide a fresh workforce to the aging European economy, rather than the opposite.

But the benefits are even more immediate. Between 2004 and 2014, migrants already accounted for 70% of the increase in the workforce in Europe. A study found that in Europe, low immigration rates between 1995 and 2005 were associated with a constant GDP decrease of 0.23% per year instead of rising by 1.79% per year. Only the excessive rigidity of the European labour market and its restrictive employment protection laws exacerbated the negative impact of immigration on native employment. The European Union is in desperate need of an army of unskilled labourers, to the point that in countries such as Italy, Spain, and Greece, the employment rate of immigrants is now higher than that of native workers. These same countries use populist slogans to target migrants who are accused of being “lazy parasites who live off social security”.

Since employment is the single biggest determinant of a population’s net fiscal contribution, migrants have a positive impact on the public purse. They can, in fact, actively contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Immigrant workers do not depress the wages of native workers either. According to multiple studies, immigration has no negative effects on wages in industrialised countries. Rather, in the long term, immigration increases innovation, productivity, skills variability, and even wage distribution.

Africa will mutually benefit from the migratory flows as well. Money remittance is a powerful economic equaliser; the poorer the region from which the African migrant came from, the higher are the remittances sent back to his or her relatives. To put things in perspective, cash remittances to sub-Saharan Africa totaled a whopping $37.8 billion in 2017, and the World Bank has estimated that they will grow to at least $39.6 billion in 2019.

Conclusion

Mediterranean migration is seen only through a strictly Eurocentric perspective, and it’s centered only on the perceived negative effects on the security of the destination countries. European policies frequently promote the human rights abuses perpetrated in North African countries against refugees with the excuse of “dealing with the illegal immigration emergency”. On the other hand, the effects of Western neocolonialism on the socio-economic development of the African continent are often disregarded, although the widespread exploitation of many African lands is one of the principal reasons behind the poverty of these regions.

The highly industrialised countries are in constant need of food and biofuels at the lowest prices possible. Thousands of Africans have been uprooted from their farms to make way for foreign investors to grow food on an industrial scale. In Uganda, 1 million hectares of forest have been lost over the last ten years after the English New Forest Company drove almost 22,000 people from their lands. Anything can be bought and sold if a foreign corporation wants it, even entire villages. The same countries that complain about the never-ending flow of desperate migrants and refugees reaching their coasts are those whose companies paid the gun-toting soldiers who evicted these same migrants and refugees from their homes.

In most European countries, local citizens have seen a significant drop in their real salaries in the last ten years. Most populist parties put their propaganda machines to work to blame the rapid increase in unskilled immigrant labourers for the sharp falls in pay, even if evidence shows that there’s no practical connection.

In truth, the injection of a fresh African workforce in Europe could improve the economy of both continents. Nonetheless, by blocking immigration, the Old Continent guarantees the consolidation of African underdevelopment. But what’s even more depressing is that by letting the hate towards immigrants run rampant, Europe is just sabotaging itself by allowing a handful of dangerous and unscrupulous individuals to gain undeserved political power.

Research by BASSAM HABIB

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Claudio Butticè

The first African Diaspora Young Leaders summit was coming to a close in Washington DC. The State Department had sent me an invitation to the closing dinner. RSVP for one, I wrote back. State Department dinners are often a microcosm of the global political structure, and schmoozing around with the diplomatic corps is like listening to the whispers of countries bottled up in one room.

Sometimes you catch the ambitious Washington-based African ambassador gunning for the presidency in his or her country, but I’m yet to catch one with a big idea for a United States of Africa. Most of the African envoys do not want to stay in America once their tour of duty is done. They are not economic refugees and their dreams are made. I want to find out from the room filled with ambitious African youth if they want to stay on and catch the American dream. They are also looking to lead the continent in conquering an uncertain 21st century and the US might just be a launching pad.

I asked as many as I could, and without hesitation they all quipped a version of, “I’m going back home of course!” I qualified my question further and asked, “If you got an offer for a job or graduate studies here, would you stay?” One tall Malian fellow hesitated and shook his head in a circular manner. That was the extent of his commitment to pursuing the American dream. He did not care for pecan pie either. These are not singular-story instances meant to create a bias. America has lost its lustre even among young Africans.

In a short while, this realisation would be ascertained by none other than the Under Secretary of State for African Affairs. He stood up to speak and asked the young Africans to speak well of America when they got back to their countries; that America is not as bad as they show it on television. I almost keeled right off my playing-diplomat-for-a-night seat. When did the script change so drastically? It’s no longer Africa asking America to stop spreading the unsavoury story about a dark continent. Now an American top-ranking diplomat is trying to right the image of a superpower that’s suffering an ugly meltdown and the whole world has a front row seat.

In spite of America’s fading lustre, there is still a growing African diaspora in the United States, and they will in a few decades be part of the “people-of-color” majority in the United States. For the American-Africans or Continental Africans who have become citizens, this is their home, one that enables them to play out their transnational citizenship as successfully as other diasporas before them have. An understanding of Continental Africans’ positioning along the timeline of American empire-making is important. It should help get Africans becoming more proactive in establishing an influential presence in American politics and policy-making, and also in pushing Africans to conquer their own continent for themselves.

A savage inspiration

Empire rises through stages: Conquest of territory; elimination or assimilation of indigenous peoples; and the building of new and more efficient trade routes. Those who lead conquests embody the animus dominandi, a necessary force of evil in the usurpation of power, wealth and security.

The end goal in a humane conquest, if the oxymoron can be believed, is the establishment of peaceful coexistence with those conquered, or the removal of oppressive leadership from the land invaded. In modern history, only one humane conquest comes to mind: Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979 to dislodge the brutal regime of Idi Amin. It lasted all of five months. America’s preemptive invasion of Iraq post-9/11 was sold to the people as a remedy that mirrored Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s Uganda invasion: to free the people of Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s oppressive rule. But it soon became clear it was a greed-driven opportunity for war profiteering and expansion of the American corporate empire that had become a monstrosity.

There are many wars that America has fueled to maintain its interests and footprint in foreign soil. It wasn’t always like that. America grew out of European immigrants who were running away from persecution, famine, and war in their own lands. They came to America seeking fortune and new beginnings, and they formed a country that rejected monarchy and its extreme powers. America was the biggest and boldest experiment in democracy and freedoms that attracted people from all over the globe. This roaring inspiration was also ruthless as European immigrants who became white Americans held millions of Africans in bondage and massacred millions within indigenous nations, with the survivors confined to reservations. Vicious greed easily becomes a reality in empire- building.

Eventually, a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans brought an end to slavery. This is a price they had to pay for the dream of a truly free nation whose citizens were all considered as created equal and endowed with the same inalienable rights. It took bold and selfless political leadership to apply this principle of freedom to enslaved persons. President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation in 1863 was met with disdain and dismissal from his friends and enemies alike. It ranked poorly as a political move. Lincoln was driven by his own conscience and the American Constitution, a document that captures the ideals of a people, written with the ink of human kindness. It is also a document that has made America the “home of the free and land of the brave”. The irony of it all is that America was also built through the savage inspiration of those who stopped at nothing to succeed; immigrants who never gave up, never made excuses, and never let hunger, disease or the ravages of unpredictable Mother Nature stop them.

Dust bowls came and threatened famine, and the new Americans started afresh. The Ireland famine they escaped from was far worse as it had killed over a million. Floods came and carried the homes of new Americans carving a home from scrub in the wild West, and they rebuilt. They had far worse memories of homes shelled with bombs and bullets in war-torn Europe. Religious persecution in Europe brought the Anabaptist Amish to America where they found freedom and thrived in exclusive communities of their own defining. Persecuted Mormons trekked west through harsh territory and built their city on the hill out of a mirage of hope. Diseases came and killed families that moved to nowhere-places in the expanding America, and they picked up their shredded hearts and kept on striving. The Chinese suffered calculated segregation through the Exclusion Act but they found a way to remain an important part of building America throughout the 1800s.

Enter the Africans

How could anyone not feel inspired by a country made up of people who came from every corner of the world and found more ways than one to dream and achieve? Is it any wonder that the American Dream phenomenon took root and became the country’s biggest thought export that kept drawing in the rest of the world? The land where every dream is possible also became the allure for African immigrants from the mid-twentieth century, their numbers spiking from the early 1980s.

New legislation broke the Europeans-only influx into America and allowed more Africans to become part of America’s citizenry. A place of great contradictions: on one extreme, African descendants were enslaved for two-and-a-half centuries, and on the other extreme, free and educated Continental Africans were provided a way in through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

Empire and smart nation-building knows that human capital is key in its expansion and stability. From the Roman Empire that had earlier been the cradle of modern democracy to the United States of America, citizenship held the highest value for the inhabitants. It gave them the power to vote, to gain access to economic opportunities, to hold office, and to move freely.

Stages to citizenship become goals that an immigrant works very hard to achieve. In a land where the biggest pull factor is the American Dream, achieving that dream becomes a calculated get for African immigrants so that tales of their personal conquest will vindicate their desertion of home. When Europeans set out for the United States on boats and scraps of boot, many died out of pride, refusing to return to homes that still had their arms open wide for them in case things did not work out. The shame of not achieving that dream would be too much to bear. They would die in the gold rush melee, in the coal mines, in the cowboy ventures, in the farmers’ fight against nature, and in the run-in with Native Americans fighting to hold on to their lands. Africans who come to the United States are no different from those first immigrants. Much as most come with a mind to acquire their education, a slice of the American Dream, and promptly go back to beloved Africa, they discover that the road to achieving what they came for is entangled in legislation and privilege. They are outsiders standing in a long line of immigrants waiting to get in to the gates of a new belonging.

Becoming American for an African is very rarely a personal goal but a necessity acquired to assist with personal conquest. Africans do not carry the pride of nation as Americans do. My neighbours, like many Americans, fly the US flag every public holiday and any other odd day. I have recently purchased a Kenyan and a US flag that I will fly on my front porch to test out the feel of nationalism. In Kenya, I would not be allowed to fly my Kenyan flag. However, in a changing America, pro-Trump neighbours will also look at my Kenyan flag askance as it will indicate an unwelcome immigrant presence.

As the latecomers in the game of American belonging, there isn’t much out there on African immigration statistics. Shaw-Taylor and Tuch (2007) surmise that about a million Africans immigrated to the United States between 1965 and 2007. These records are usually far below the real numbers as many who come and stay do not participate in the census. Second generation Continental Africans have also increased significantly. The Nigerian diaspora has become one of the fastest growing, both in numbers and in economic success. A Bloomberg research bursts the myth that Asians are the only ones at the top of the intellectual wealth pyramid.

The Kenyan diaspora, meanwhile, continues to astonish as its remittances to Kenya grow to a whopping Sh197 billion (nearly US$2 billion) this year, up from Sh174 billion (about US$ 1.8 billion) last year. The tragedy of the Kenyan diaspora, at least those in the US, remains their insistence on staying cocooned in cliques and tribal mindsets while abroad, an attitude that makes them ineffective pawns in America. A long straw extends from the mouths of family and community in Kenya and dips into diaspora pockets, and each year, the gulp gets bigger, thanks to the powerless generosity of a splintered diaspora. With all their smarts, Kenyans in the US have refused to invest in the strategy of building a united front as a power bloc, and so their remittances remain untapped influence. Eight years after the constitutional enshrining of their right to vote, the Kenyan diaspora in the US still cannot vote back home.

No immigrant community has ever achieved influence without the strategic politics of mobilisation and organisation in their adopted country. Kenyans are adept at splitting their power by dismissing each other’s efforts. They duplicate, triplicate and quadruplicate initiatives instead of supporting what is on the ground. The new entrants to a cause will dismiss others as failures and with great humility argue that they are the ones who will make it happen. The community politics of the Kenyan diaspora is not only a microcosm of Kenyan society in Kenya but a far darker version of it.

Lessons from how other immigrant communities in the United States conquered in spite of their political or ethnic diversity are yet to sink in for the Kenyans. Collective intelligence is a switch that an initiative-taker turns on, but the bulb will not light up until the people with their hands around it stop the sabotage. (I have played significant roles in the Kenyan community in America long enough to observe its ways, which gives me a measure of authority on the subject.) Perhaps the growing second-generation Kenyan-Americans will shape its power.

Conquest, China and African superpowerdom

If the American republic has risen to superpowerdom through conquering occupied lands, eliminating indigenous peoples, and building infrastructure through the wilderness, all while using stolen labour and the legitimisation of a cruel injustice, why hasn’t the African continent achieved as much in its own continent where its nations are free? Dreams of a Pan-African state have flared up with the staunchest Africanists and died like a kerosene flame, leaving only a smoky trace of it that still lingers.

To build empire, Africa would not need to engage in the cruelty of displacing or enslaving anyone. The Morgenthaunian animus dominandi or necessary evil-nature approach to raising empire has to be redefined if Africa is to use it to achieve superpowerdom. By superpowerdom I do not mean a hunger for domination over others, but a reaching towards the highest levels of self-realisation as Africans. Such realisation comes with technological advancement, an end to poverty, the inalienable right to freely acquire knowledge for its own sake, and definitely the restructuring of political systems and inculcation of integrity in the continent’s democratic processes.

But is Africa interested? The current trend has African countries firmly serving nationalistic self- interest at best, and more of individual strongman interests. A continental trading bloc covering at least fifty African countries has been in the works, but its success is yet to unfold. The assumption that an African economic bloc could set the giant continent off to the 21st century superpowerdom is unlikely; at least not without independent institutions powerful enough to ensure economic accountability and social justice.

The success of America’s rise, savage inspiration that it was, also came from the independent institutions that checked its rogue politics, demanded a righting of wrongs, and allowed for people power. If African is not ready to hold its rogue leaders to account as South Korea recently did by throwing its corrupt president in jail, an economic bloc will only create a deeper chasm between those who can manipulate trade and those too far from the decision-making table.

Africa is a willing victim in the unfolding conquest by the rising Chinese global power, which is carrying out open surgery on the continent. As they open up the innards of Africa and plant Confucius centres in colleges, popularise Mandarin classes, establish television stations to transmit Chinese propaganda, and build breathtaking infrastructure, Africa seems content with the drip of modernisation-on-loan feeding its arteries. There is nothing the Chinese are doing that global powers of the past – Malian, Roman, British, American and others – did not do.

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that seeks to etch the most ambitious trade routes across several continents is reminiscent of the Trans-Sahara trade routes that gave superpower status to the kingdom of Mali for a span of seven hundred years – until the Europeans made more efficient trade routes through the Atlantic. It wasn’t until America built the Transcontinental railway that connected it from sea to shining sea that the country actually started its rise to superpower status. Throughout history, control of new and more efficient trade routes have led to the rise of new empires. How is it that free African nations and their rich diasporas cannot build an engineering marvel from Cape to Cairo all by themselves?

The unfolding conquest of Africa is a willing victim eyes-wide-open surgery on the continent by the Chinese rising global power. As they open up the innards of Africa and plant Confucius centres in colleges, popularise Mandarin classes, establish television stations to transmit Chinese propaganda, and build breathtaking infrastructure, Africa seems content with the Chinese drip of modernisation-on-loan feeding its arteries.

White nationalism and the Age of Trump

Trump’s America is a surrender of empire in exchange for white nationalism. Stoking trade wars and supporting white extremism is a calculated recipe for white nationalism. The president has been on an anti-globalisation rampage. He has attacked regional and inter-governmental trade treaties, environmental agreements and military alliances that have kept America at the helm of the current global political structure. The president is in the throes of a ferocious tariff war against China, Canada and European countries, all trading allies of the United States. It has become common to wake up to news about American industries now making significant losses and some shutting down because the targeted countries are no longer buying American products. Farmers and fishermen whose products are exported to China now need a government bailout to survive.

Anti-immigrant policies have restricted temporary work visas that usually bring in seasonal workers from Mexico to work on farms and in the crab industry. As a result, massive fields of unpicked crop have gone to waste and the crab industry has suffered. The same policies have created the parent- child separation debacle in Texas, a racket that turns out to be, no surprise at all, a profiteering racket. While the world reels in shock at how low America has sunk, the detention business continues to thrive as it nets in new clients in immigrants seeking asylum. The GEO Group that runs private prisons also happens to be the biggest contractor for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The company is also accused of sponsoring politicians in Texas, the same state where unconscionable detention of children is happening.

In all this, good old American activism stays fired up and keeps agitating its way to justice. A company as powerful as the GEO Group now feels threatened by the Dream Defenders Action who have exposed them. A strategic and sustained fist pumped in the air has proven a formidable weapon against massive corruption in a country as powerful as America.

As the Mexican border immigration wars rage, some African immigrants who never thought themselves unsafe now find themselves targets of the government’s ransacking of those who supposedly cheated in their citizenship interviews. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is on record explaining the task to de-naturalise “errant” Americans who took up citizenship since 1990. That is the decade the numbers of Africans in America started rising significantly.

It is well-known that Trump has an issue with Nigerians, an identifier he uses to mean Africans. And he’s not alone in calling all Africans Nigerians. Perhaps it is the rising power of Nigerians in America that feels too threatening. The whitening of America in the Trump era is real. The immigration witch-hunts conjure up histories that led to some of the worst human atrocities in places like Nazi Germany where unwanted groups of people who had started thriving were exterminated.

While this remains an interesting time in America, perhaps the incredulous nature of it drives one to the conclusion that it is all in futility. The numbers will sort it all out. Unless white people increase their population at an astronomical rate in the next few decades, America is destined to become a country of majority “people of colour”, for lack of a better term. It is a scary thought that stoked the flames of white nationalism in Britain, leading to Brexit, and now in the United States. Human civility is superficial. Once threatened with the possibility of extinction, conquest or minority status, the human becomes the brute in a jungle where all civility disappears. While this remains an interesting time in America, perhaps the incredulous nature of it drives one to the conclusion that it is all in futility. The numbers will sort it all out. Unless white people increase their population at an astronomical rate in the next few decades, America is destined to become a country of majority “people of colour”, for lack of a better term.

Only communities that have lived in close connection to the earth will tend to have a greater sense of civility and welcome for the stranger, conquering only to ensure their own survival, but not to fuel uncontrollable greed. America is a corporate empire built upon unexpiated savagery, and like all empires, it will come to its end.

An ode to indigenous peoples

Sitting Bull. Crazy Horse. Little Wolf. Spotted Tail. Red Cloud…the list is long. These Native American warriors who defended the usurpation of their land with fierce skill and legendary valour will inspire for ages. Their defeat will also depress the human spirit that cheers on the emancipation of the conquered. Victories of Native American nations against American expansion are filled with breathtaking courage. The Lakota, the Nez Perce, Cherokee, Navajo, Sioux, and many of the almost 600 indigenous nations held their ground against an army with numbers, resources and technology they could not match. As with most peoples who get conquered, the lack of a united front plays into their defeat.

A story is told in the annals of history that Sitting Bull once had a dream that his Lakota people of Standing Rock would vanquish the approaching American army led by the feared General Custer who had never lost a battle. On this day, Sitting Bull and his vastly outnumbered Lakota warriors prepared to fight yet again. His dream came true, and to America’s shock, the inconquerable Custer was killed and his army decimated at the famed battle of Little Bighorn.

But it wasn’t the dreams of one who prayed to the Great Spirit that won the battle; it was the ferocious zeal to survive when faced with extinction. It was the same zeal that led Shaka Zulu to victory against a British army with superior weaponry at the battle of Isandlwana; the same Ethiopian dare that trounced the invading Italians at the battle of Adoa; the same fire that led to the Mau Mau uprising against Empire in Kenya.

It is the same fire of indigenous African peoples that need instruction to rise and conquer a continent they already occupy, lands that already belong to them, resources that are theirs to exploit. The unfolding development in Africa is the footprint of another encroaching superpower. Africa should not surrender to a second colonisation so soon.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Claudio Butticè Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer By Claudio Butticè

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè

Over the past two decades African higher education has undergone profound changes. In the 1960s and 1970s, universities on the continent were few in number, small in scale, and elitist institutions with the limited mandate of producing cadres for the Africanization or indigenization of the newly independent state apparatuses. In the 1980s and 1990s, during the heyday of structural adjustment programs, they were regarded as costly irrelevances at best, or bastions of political unrest at worst. Now, they are seen as essential for the creation of knowledge economies and societies, indispensable for human capital development, and turning Africa’s unprecedented youth bulge into a demographic dividend rather than a Malthusian nightmare.

Yet, the continent’s higher education sector is plagued by huge capacity deficits and challenges that threaten its survival, sustainability and contribution to the continent’s historic and humanistic project for democratic and development transformation. Since the late 1990s I’ve been immersed in research on African universities and knowledge production on Africa. I’ve published several books and numerous articles and given dozens of conference presentations on these subjects. The books include two edited volumes on African Universities in the Twenty-First Century (2004) and another two volumes on The Study of Africa (2008). Among the presentations, the most significant might be the Framing Paper I was commissioned to write for the 1st African Higher Education Summit held in Dakar, Senegal in March 2015.

The continent’s higher education sector is plagued by huge capacity deficits and challenges that threaten its survival, sustainability and contribution to the continent’s historic and humanistic project for democratic and development transformation

My reflections have also been immensely enriched by my work in university administration since 1994, and most recently as Vice-Chancellor of an African university, and member of several higher education governing boards including the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities and as Chair of the Advisory Council of the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program that provides fellowships for African born academics in Canada and the United States to work with universities in six African countries.

From these scholarly, administrative, and governance vantage points, I’ve distilled six key capacity challenges facing African higher education: institutional supply, resources, faculty, research, outputs, and leadership. Overcoming these challenges, and creating quality education, is essential for the sector’s contribution to the creation of globally competitive, inclusive, integrated, innovative, successful and sustainable democratic developmental states and societies envisioned in the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, and numerous National Visions.

Institutional Supply: In 1944, the entire African continent had 31 universities (out of 3,703 degree granting higher education institutions worldwide). The number rose to 170 in 1969, 446 in 1989 and 1,639 in 2015 (out of 18,808 worldwide). Even more spectacular has been the growth in enrollments, which rose from 0.74 million in 1969 to 12.2 million in 2015. Despite the massive expansion, Africa’s enrollment ratio remained low at 12.08% in 2013 compared to a world average of 32.9%, and 68% for Europe, 61.5% for North America, and 51.8% for South America and 28.9% for Asia.

Thus, Africa needs more universities. But expanding the supply of educational institutions must be matched by investments in physical and technological infrastructures without which the slide to declining quality will continue. It must also be accompanied by improving access, equity, and affordability, especially for marginalized communities and women. Worldwide gender parity in tertiary education was achieved by 2000 and stood at 1.10 in 2013. Africa remains the only region where gender parity has yet to be attained. Its gender parity index was 0.85 in 2013.

Resource Deficits: As in much of the world, higher education in Africa is increasingly privatized as evident in terms of the explosion of private universities, the growing privatization of public institutions, and emergence of the for-profit institutions. Worldwide the proportion of private universities grew from 40.6% in 1969 to 57.5% in 2015. In Africa, the number of private universities grew from 35 in 1969 to 972 in 2015. Clearly, the majority of African universities are now private.

The growth of private higher education institutions is in part a result of escalating student demand and incapacity of public institutions to meet it. It also signifies declining state support. Increasingly, higher education has come to be viewed as a private rather than as a public good. As in many parts of the world, African universities have increasingly become neo-liberal institutions characterized by what I call the 5Cs: corporatisation of management, consumerisation of students, casualisation of faculty, commercialisation of learning, and commodification of knowledge.

As in much of the world, higher education in Africa is increasingly privatized as evident in terms of the explosion of private universities, the growing privatization of public institutions, and emergence of the for-profit institutions.

Governments and governing boards pressure universities to cultivate new revenue streams including ‘cost sharing,’ marketing institutional services, and fundraising. Yet, few African universities have developed adequate fundraising capacity—typically they employ a couple of people or so when similar institutions elsewhere employ scores and even hundreds. Also, we live in cultures where philanthropy is often confined to supporting relatives or religious organizations not for institution building. The endowment fund of the University of Cape Town, Africa’s top ranked university, is valued at R3 billion (about $224 million). This is less than the $347 million endowment of Spelman College, the renowned African American women’s college that enrolls about 2,000 students.

As in many parts of the world, African universities have increasingly become neo-liberal institutions

In Search of Faculty: The rapid growth in the number of universities has outstripped the supply of faculty. While in several parts of the Global North such as the United States, there are more people with terminal degrees than there are academic jobs, across Africa there is a severe shortage of qualified faculty. In Kenya, for example, according to data from the Commission for University Education, in 2018 there were 18,005 faculty in the country’s 74 universities and colleges, but only 34% had doctoral degrees. This is equivalent to the number of faculty at any three of the large universities in the US.

The severe shortages of faculty result in universities relying on adjuncts, that is faculty with permanent appointments in one institution who teach in multiple institutions. (In the USA four-fifths of faculty re now adjunct because of academic labor oversupply and financially beleaguered universities’ efforts to cut costs by reducing the ranks of permanent faculty). The predictable result is limited engagement between faculty and students, which leads to declining quality of teaching and learning. In many countries the casualisation of academic labor reflects the erosion of middle class incomes for academic professionals. Compounding the declining status of academics is the progressive shift towards more top-down institutional governance, in which the edicts of managerialism are increasingly undermining academic autonomy and freedom.

Research Underperformance: Africa’s positioning in global research leaves a lot to be desired. In 2013, the continent only accounted for 1.3% of global Research & Development (R&D). Africa’s R&D expenditure as a share of GDP was 0.5% compared to a world average of 1.7%, and 2.7% for North America. Africa’s share of world researchers was 2.3%, compared to 42.8% for Asia. As for researchers per a million inhabitants, Africa had 169, compared to 786 in Asia and 4,034 for North America. In 2014, Africa claimed 2.1% of world scholarly publications, compared to 33.1% for Asia, and 32.9% for Europe.

Africa’s positioning in global research leaves a lot to be desired. In 2013, the continent only accounted for 1.3% of global Research & Development But Africa enjoys one dubious distinction. In 2014, 64.6% of publications by African authors were with international authors, compared to 26.1% for Asia. In nearly 30 African countries authors published more than 90% of their articles in collaboration with other countries, especially the United States, France and the United Kingdom. Clearly, African academic knowledge systems, like our economies, suffer from limited regional integration and high levels of external dependency.

Within the continent itself, South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt dominate and many countries are negligible in the production of knowledge. The vast majority of the continent’s universities cannot be considered research universities and contribute very little to knowledge production which is one of the key functions of the university. Research productivity is essential for higher education to contribute to sustainable development and in the global competition for talented students, top faculty, scarce resources, and reputational capital. Not surprisingly, most African universities do not feature in international rankings, whatever one may think of the validity of such rankings.

Quality of Outputs: The growing massification of higher education across Africa, while desirable, has not been accompanied by rising quality of outputs because of the capacity deficits noted above. Besides research knowledge, a critical output of universities is of course its graduates. As the costs and competitiveness among higher education institutions increase, demands have grown for accountability from all the affected constituencies, for universities to prove their value in the quality of their graduates. An important measure is the employability of graduates. The media is full of stories of graduate underemployment and unemployment. The growing mismatch between the quality of graduates and needs of employers and Africa’s ‘rising’ economies has become a source of apprehension.

Concerns and pressures over the quality of outputs from universities have led to the development of national quality assurance and regulatory regimes. Gone are the days when universities were largely left alone as arbiters of their own standards. In some countries quality assurance was initially targeted at private institutions on the faulty assumption that all was well with the public institutions. In addition to regional quality assurance agencies, such as the African Quality Assurance Network, the number of national quality assurance agencies across the continent grew from 9 in 1990 to 21 in 2012 to 32 in 2015.

Nevertheless, questions remain on the extent to which the proliferation of quality assurance systems has led to improvements in the quality of higher education. In many African countries, regulatory agencies adopt authoritarian and accusatory practices instead of interactive, collaborative and iterative processes. They tend to be too interventionist, prescriptive, and pursue outdated notions of quality education. For example, in some systems there is inordinate emphasis on the nature of examinations rather than on continuous assessments and acquisition of competency based and lifelong learning skills. Some even decree faculty promotion standards and qualifications of members of governance bodies.

Governance and Leadership: I noted in the Dakar Summit Framing Paper that “the challenges facing African higher education institutions require sophisticated management and effective governance systems… Clearly, there is need to recruit and train higher education administrators who are smart leaders, skilled managers, successful fund raisers, and savvy public figures.”

The Dakar Summit Declaration and Plan of Action itself identified the “Promotion of institutional autonomy and academic freedom” as a core principle. Unfortunately, the infectious and insidious authoritarian culture of the postcolonial one-party state persists in many institutions and higher education systems in which regulatory agencies, governing boards, and management seek to rule by decree and directives. Yet, shared governance is central to the success of higher education institutions. It entails institutional leadership at all levels that puts a premium on what I call the 3Cs of effective academic leadership: (collaboration, communication, and creativity), in pursuit of the 3Es (excellence, engagement, and efficiency), and based on the 3Ts (transparency, trust, and trends in higher education).

Revitalizing African Higher Education: The challenges and opportunities facing African higher education institutions are evident from the analysis above. Clearly, there is need to expand enrollments without sacrificing academic quality; increase and improve funding and financial management; raise the volume and value of research productivity; strengthen the educational quality and employability of university graduates; develop effective and collaborative regulatory cultures of quality assessment and improvement; and enhance the quality of institutional leadership and governance.

A grand compact on African higher education must be forged by all the key constituencies, principally, governments, the private sector, civil society, and the universities themselves. This requires commitment to what I call the 4As, 4Cs, 4Is, and 4Rs of higher education revitalisation. The 4As refer to availability (of institutions), access (to institutions), affordability (in institutions), and accountability (by institutions). The 4Cs include comprehensiveness (provision of education that develops the whole person), curiosity (cultivation of lifelong learning), community (fostering civic values), and capabilities (developing subject and technical competencies, liberal arts literacies, and soft skills).

The 4Is entail inclusion (valuing institutional diversity); innovation (cultivating creative and entrepreneurial mindsets); integration (building cohesive teaching, learning and research communities); impact (fostering inclusive cultures of institutional assessment). The 4Rs refer to relevance (of knowledges produced, disseminated, and consumed to economy, society, and the times); retention (ensuring student, faculty and staff development and success); research (unwavering commitment to knowledge production and evidence based decision making); and rigor (in all activities to ensure academic excellence, operational excellence and service excellence).

Governments have a special fiscal responsibility in the revitalisation of African higher education as an engine of growth, development, and transformation. Massive investments in the sector are required. The universities cannot generate these resources all by themselves. The continent’s elites, many of who are products of Africa’s universities during the golden years, have a special role to play. The ranks of high net worth individuals across the continent are skyrocketing; they increased by 19% between 2006 and 2016 reaching 145,000 with combined wealth of $800 billion, and are expected to rise by 36% and reach 198,000 by 2026.

How many of them invest in the African higher education sector as do their counterparts in the Global North? The great private Ivy League and flagship public universities of the USA with their massive endowments were built by philanthropic and public support. Harvard’s $37.1 billion is more than half of Kenya’s GDP and higher than the GDP of 39 African countries. Lest we forget, the oldest US universities were built in colonial and postcolonial times when it would have been easier for American elites to invest in sending their children to the more established and prestigious, at the time, British and other European universities. Many of our elites take enormous pride in sending their children to overseas universities, even mediocre ones, shunning local universities for their apparent low quality, notwithstanding the fact that many of them are products of these very institutions.

It is also critical to promote, in the words of the Dakar Summit’s Declaration, “diversification, differentiation, and harmonization of higher education systems at the national, institutional and continental/regional levels and assure the quality of educational provision against locally, regionally, and internationally agreed benchmarks of excellence.” The Dakar Summit urged African governments and regional economic communities “to develop deliberate policies that designate some universities as research universities that drive the higher education sector to meet national development objectives…. These research universities will produce the relevant knowledge and skilled labour capacity the continent’s key institutions – governance, trade, defense, agriculture, health, finance and energy – need to succeed.”

The good news is that higher education around the world, not just in Africa, is in a state of crisis, transition, or disruption—choose your term—which opens opportunities for African educators to reinvent higher education systems that befit their needs, contexts, and the unforgiving and unpredictable demands of the 21st century.

The articulation and harmonization of higher education systems goes beyond national borders. It is imperative for Africa to promote international academic mobility for students, academic staff, academic credits, and qualifications within the continent. This entails strengthening and implementing existing regional conventions. Also in need of strengthening and operationalization are protocols for the mutual recognition of academic and professional qualifications. A critical element of this process is the need to develop an African credit transfer system.

I believe the six capacity challenges identified in this essay can be overcome. The good news is that higher education around the world, not just in Africa, is in a state of crisis, transition, or disruption—choose your term—which opens opportunities for African educators to reinvent higher education systems that befit their needs, contexts, and the unforgiving and unpredictable demands of the 21st century. Let us summon our creative energies and renew our commitments as part of the collective effort to finally realize Kwame Nkrumah’s vision, expressed prematurely at the height of decolonization that the 20th century would be Africa’s, and make this century one that is truly ours.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè

2nd July 2010. Soccer City, Johannesburg. The score is 1-1 at the 2010 FIFA World Cup quarter-final between Ghana and Uruguay. In the 120th minute, Ghana have a promising free kick at the edge of the box. Some panicked Uruguayan defending, a proper goalmouth melee. Hang on, what’s this? It’s a penalty. Luis Suarez just saved a certain Ghanaian goal. The only problem is he’s not a goalkeeper, but a forward. He is shown a red card for his troubles.

Asamoah Gyan steps up. Could this be the moment an African nation goes to the semi-final, in Africa’s World Cup? Gyan is Ghana’s top scorer at this World Cup, with three goals – two of which were penalties against Serbia and Australia in the group stages. If there was someone you could bet on to have the sangfroid and the cojones to do it, Gyan was that guy.

The weight of a continent’s expectation is on his shoulders. He fires a shot, which cannons off the crossbar. Instead of winning it, he condemns Ghana to a needless penalty shootout which they late go on to lose – John Mensah and Dominic Adiyiah miss for Ghana and Sebastian Abreu hits a cheeky Panenka to send Ghana out of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.

This memory is so vivid because I watched every heart-rending minute of that match, cursing at Suarez- the ready-made pantomime villain who dashed a continent’s hopes; but more so at Asamoah Gyan? How could he miss? Why was he such a choker?

This is the story of Africa and the World Cup as we have always known it. A tale of the valiant underdogs who, like Icarus, flew too near to the sun and paid the price with their naivete. It is also a tale of self-sabotage, incompetence, gulfs in class and institutional racism.

***

The story of African football is about politics. In 1934, Egypt became the first African country to participate in the World Cup, which was hosted by Italy. They qualified for the sixteen-team tournament by beating Palestine (then under a British mandate) and Turkey (who withdrew from the qualification round). In the World Cup, Egypt lost 4–2 in the first round against Hungary. This was to be the last time an African team participated in the World Cup, until Morocco did so in 1970.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many African nations became independent and naturally, as independent nations, they joined global bodies, like the United Nations, and of course, the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which at the time was dominated by northern European and South American nations. This posed an existential threat– the FIFA Congress operated on the basis of one nation, one vote, irrespective of footballing ability. The Kenyas and Zambias, in the eyes of FIFA, had an equal say in world football, the same as two-time world champions Brazil, Uruguay and Italy.

Paul Darby, in Africa and the ‘World’ Cup: FIFA Politics, Eurocentrism and Resistance published in the International Journal of the History of Sport (Vol. 22, No. 5, September 2005, 883 – 905) observed that the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA)“made several attempts during the late 1950s and early 1960s to introduce a pluralist voting system that would more adequately reflect their self-perceived standing in world football”. When these efforts failed, they chose to assert their dominance in the FIFA World Cup. FIFA’s Executive Committee decreed that to qualify for the 1962 World Cup, Morocco, the winners of the African preliminary round would have to play a further qualifying match against Spain – a match they duly lost. In 1964, they made it worse by marginalising the Asians and Africans by pitting them against each other: the winners of the African zone would play the winners of the Asia/Oceania zone to qualify for future World Cup Finals.

Kwame Nkrumah, the-then Ghanaian president and pan-Africanist, persuaded CAF (Confédération Africaine de Football) to have its members boycott the 1966 World Cup. CAF’s Secretary General, Mourad Fahmy, argued that “the allocation of one World Cup slot to three continents (with more than 65 members)was absurd and did not adequately reflect the prevailing situation in world football.”

In 1974, João Havelange, a Brazilian, ran for the FIFA presidency on a pledge to improve the situation of Asian and African football – by increasing the World Cup final places from sixteen to twenty-four, and by increasing funding to improve infrastructure in African and Asian countries. He won handily, beating the incumbent, Sir Stanley Rous, who was widely resented by African nations for, among other things, supporting the inclusion of South Africa in the FIFA family despite their apartheid policy.

Under Havelange, Africa got two World Cup spots, which later became five under the expanded 32 team format that began in 1998. But it was under his protégé, Joseph ‘Sepp’ Blatter, that the African continent came to the fore. For all his faults, Blatter ensured that the dream of an African country hosting the World Cup became a reality. He backed South Africa over Germany in 2006. He backed it again in 2010. It later emerged that the win was not entirely legitimate; the 2015 indictments of FIFA officials by the United States’ Department of Justice showed that Jack Warner, a FIFA Vice President had accepted $10m from South Africa in 2008. Danny Jordaan, the chairman of the 2010 Local Organising Committee clarified it was not a bribe but a contribution towards the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football- of which Warner was President at the time) “development fund.”

***

The story of African football is about incompetence. Zaire’s team, the Leopards, were Africa’s representatives at the 1974 World Cup in West Germany. The reigning African champions had been funded lavishly by the kleptocratic dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu wa Zabanga; he had given each member of the team a house and a green Volkswagen. Things had looked promising when they lost 2-0 to a Scottish team with the talents of Kenny Dalglish, Billy Bremner and Dennis Law. But it was the next match against Yugoslavia that will live on in infamy.

Before the match, Mobutu, or one of his minions, had assumed that the team’s coach, Blagoje Vidinić, a Yugoslav, of planning to deliberately throw away the game so as to favour his home team, so he was “secluded” from the team for that match. It later transpired that the players had not been paid their allowances – a story that will become all-too familiar – and they were in fact planning to strike before the match. The team lost 9-0 in the second-worst World Cup performance of all time (el Salvador holds the dubious record, losing 10-1 to Hungary in the 1982 World Cup, held in Spain).

Mobutu, predictably, was not amused. He gave the team an ultimatum: don’t bother coming home if you lose by more than four goals to Brazil. That was the Brazil – the defending champions who had thrilled the world with their canary yellow shirts and an exuberant display of swashbuckling football. Zaire creditably lost 3-0, not without its mishaps and led to arguably the most bizarre moment in World Cup history – Mwepu Ilunga rushed out of the wall and hammered the ball away before Rivellino could take the free kick. BBC match commentator, John Motson, termed it, “a bizarre moment of African ignorance.” But that was not the truth; Ilunga later claimed he was wasting time because Mobutu’s threat was all too real. In fact, on the team’s return to Kinshasa, they were briefly detained at the presidential palace for four days while Mobutu decided what to do with them, before he eventually released them. Minus their allowances, of course.

The singularly African spectre of disorganisation always seems to strike at the World Cup. In 2014, the Ghanaian team refused to train and were actually contemplating going on strike before their match against Portugal unless they received their bonuses. It took the personal intervention of President John Mahama Dramani, who ensured that the players received their money – in cash. The players did not trust their officials to bank it for them, so the cash (all $3 million of it) was put on a chartered flight to Brazil and delivered to the players in a police convoy. Later, Ghana’s star midfielders, Kevin-Prince Boateng and Sulley Muntari, who had shone so brightly in 2010, were kicked out of the squad for “vulgar verbal insults.” Cameroon also threatened to go on strike at the same World Cup and duly delivered another bizarre World Cup moment – Alex Song’s bizarre elbow on Croatia’s Mario Mandžukić. Nigeria went on strike and boycotted training too, and despite their woes, they made it to the last 16.

Which begs the question: why always Africa?

Endemic corruption is a way of life in Africa, and this extends to football. The sums of money in football make it a particularly lucrative feeding trough: during the 2011-2014 financial cycle, FIFA gave each member association an extraordinary Financial Assistance Programme (FAP) payment of US $ 1,050,000. Such sums in the hands of local football officials find more convenient uses. A week before the start of the 2018 World Cup, Ghana’s FA President, Kwesi Nyantakyi, was implicated in a corruption expose by Ghanaian journalist Anas. He has since resigned. Aden Range Marwa, a Kenyan assistant referee who was due to officiate at the 2018 World Cup, was also netted in the sting for allegedly taking a bribe of $600.

Poor youth development also plays a key role in Africa’s underperformance at World Cup. This is a direct result of poor investment in coaching and infrastructure. African teams are usually powerhouses at under-17 and under-20 level – Nigeria and Ghana have won FIFA tournaments several times. Football at the Olympic games are considered an under-23 event. Nigeria won the gold in the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Cameroon followed suit in Sydney 2000. However, there doesn’t seem to be a clear transition for most of the youngsters into the main national team. Take the 2005 U-20 final between Nigeria and Argentina: only John Obi Mikel can be said to have had a successful career. The Argentine side, on the other hand, had Lionel Messi, Sergio Aguero, Pablo Zabaleta, Ezequiel Garay and Lucas Biglia, who are bona fide global superstars today. Here’s another interesting statistic, Nigeria won the U-17 World Cup, beating Spain in the final. None of the Nigerian players have been capped to date. That Spain side had David de Gea in goal. Only Ghana’s U-20 side of 2009 seems to buck the trend – some of the youngsters formed part of the successful 2010 squad.

Another reason could be the perception that sport should not be taken seriously in Africa; it is usually a means to pass time or a political tool. This is why you can have a whole Sports Principal Secretary claiming that Kenya was ready to host the African Nations Championship (CHAN) because “we had the best hotels and roads, the only thing we lacked were the stadiums.” This attitude is hard to eradicate and shows up at the most inopportune moments. Sven-Goran Eriksson, a former England manager, was appointed as Cote d’Ivoire manager for the 2010 World Cup. Eriksson was appalled by the general disorganisation surrounding the preparations. An hour before a warm-up game in Switzerland, the players had no kit. One of the players couldn’t play because the kitman forgot his boots at the hotel. His captain, Didier Drogba, fresh from winning the Double with Chelsea that season, was not surprised. “Sven, it’s Africa. It’s like this.”

Which brings us to another question: why do African teams always prefer foreign coaches? Most African teams that make it seem to have foreign coaches. Of the African teams participating in the 2018 World Cup – only Tunisia (Nabil Maâloul) and Senegal (Aliou Cisse – captain of the 2002 Senegal side) are local. The perception by our football administrators, is that African coaches do not seem to know what they are doing. Yet, there are instances which prove that, with the right support, local coaches can hold their own. Egypt’s Pharaohs were led to three consecutive African Cup of Nations (AFCON) titles in 2006, 2008 and 2010. Stephen Keshi, the legendary Nigerian defender, won the 2013 AFCON and reached the last 16 of the 2014 World Cup with the Super Eagles. Kenya qualified for the 2004 AFCON under a local coach, Jacob “Ghost” Mulee. Kenya achieved its highest ever FIFA ranking, 68th, under a local coach, Francis Kimanzi. This is another interesting fact for you – to date, no foreign coach has ever won a World Cup.

***

The story of African football is about triumph in the face of adversity.

Some of the most memorable moments in World Cup history have been by African teams. Can you forget Ghana in 2010, who carried Africa’s torch brightly in 2010 in Africa’s World Cup? But before Ghana, there was a Cameroon at Italia ’90 with the iconic Roger Milla celebratory jigs at the corner flag during Italia ’90. Those were the lasting moments of Italia ’90 – neither Paul Gascoigne’s tears nor Toto Schillaci’s prolific form for the home side came anywhere close. François Omam-Biyik’s header at the San Siro against the world champions, Argentina, led by the captain, leader, legend and once-in-a-lifetime genius of Diego Maradona, was the biggest upset in World Cup history. This was bigger than the United States beating England 1-0 in 1950. Much bigger than West Germany beating the Magical Magyars of Hungary in the miracle of Berne. This was an African team, from you know, Africa. Beating Maradona’s Argentina with nine men – two deserved red cards for playing typical “African” football). Roger Milla, all 38 years of him, was summoned by Paul Biya (he’s still President to date) and in true African dictator fashion, ordered to play at that World Cup. Their preparations were shambolic- Cameroon’s training camp was rocked with the usual complaints of allowances not being paid. Their goalkeeper, Joseph-Antoine Bell, was an egomaniacal divisive force. And yet, they hung on, match by match and were merely a Gary Lineker penalty in extra time from doing the impossible – reaching the semi-final. The Indomitable Lions inspired a whole new generation of footballers, both in Africa and elsewhere – Bell was dropped for the relatively low- maintenance, Thomas N’kono, who had a superb tournament and inspired the legendary Gianluigi Buffon to become a goalkeeper. In fact, Buffon named his son, Thomas, after N’kono.

Do you remember Senegal following an eerily similar script in 2002? The Lions of Teranga, making their first appearance in the World Cup, humbled France – defending World and European champions in Seoul with Pape Bouba Diop scored the scrappiest of goals to cause yet another upset. A Henri Camara golden goal in extra time against Sweden took Senegal to the quarter-final against Turkey, where the Lions too, succumbed to a golden goal. Fate, it seems, had a touch of cruel irony.

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The story of African football is about hope.

Despite all the challenges that football in Africa faces, never have I been more optimistic about its future. A lot of good things are happening: Nigeria’s 2018 World Cup kit, manufactured by Nike, was sold out within three days of its launch; which goes to show that there is money to be made in the African game if things are done properly. Mohammed Salah, Liverpool’s Egyptian King running down the wing, is one of those you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it talents. He could potentially be the first African Ballon d’Or winner since George Weah, now President of Liberia.

Gianni Infantino has pledged to expand the World Cup further. The 2026 World Cup, to be held in the United States, Mexico and Canada, will have 48 teams, with Africa having 9 teams and Asia 6 – not a bad start to his presidency. He has also promised to end the culture of corruption at FIFA, but this is to be taken with a pinch of salt – after all, Blatter is still attending the 2018 World Cup as President Vladimir Putin’s guest.

For youth development and a solid technical foundation, we can look to Germany and Belgium for assistance. These two nations rebooted their whole approach to youth development, investing in coaching and better facilities. Germany’s squad which won the 2014 World Cup, demolishing home favourites Brazil 7-1 along the way, was the fruit of careful planning. England have caught the bug a bit too late, but they are catching up. All African countries should follow suit. Maybe we should do one of those benchmarking trips, with actual results.

Finally, we should get more organised and drop the “this is Africa” mentality. Oh, and stop the looting.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

By Claudio Butticè

Two decades ago, a storm was brewing in Kenya’s teacup. Kenya’s smallholder tea farmers were ready to throw in the towel. Inefficiency, bureaucracy and corruption was impoverishing them. Grossly dissatisfied with their fortunes, many were contemplating to uproot their bushes, threatening to send Kenya’s leading export into the sort of crisis that had befallen coffee, which tea had displaced as Kenya’s leading foreign exchange earner. Kenya’s coffee production has plummeted from 130,000 to 40,000 tonnes a year.

But for a bold response by the Kenya Tea Development Agency Ltd (KTDA), the agricultural collective that manages the tea value chain for Kenya’s 550,000 smallholder tea farmers, the same fate would have befallen them. The KDTA embarked on, and successfully implemented a bold technology-driven transformation, from leaf collection, processing, logistics, input supply, payments and credit facilities for the farmers overhaul transformed the value chain that included end-to-end automation.

I recently gave the keynote address at the Self Help Africa’s annual ‘Africa’s Change Makers Ball’ in Boston, USA, 11th May 2018. During this I highlighted how small-scale agriculture should be considered globally competitive farming in its own right, and why we should recognize its potential to become a pathway to sustainable development. The KTDA is the first case study I used to show this, and here’s why: significant improvements followed the transformation. Real-time data saw perishable green leaves being rerouted to the factory with excess capacity rather than being discarded as waste; ‘ghost-growers’ were eliminated, farmer registration period was dramatically reduced from six months to three days, procurement for factory equipment was reduced from eight to an average of three months; fertiliser was delivered on time, energy consumption was optimised and electricity bills reduced by over 30%.

The impact on small-scale farmers was immense. Monthly incomes increased by over 40%. With the Tea Agency consistently paying on the 26th of the month, every month, tea farmers could educate their children, pay for healthcare services, create employment and most importantly, they could feed themselves.

The results of this digital transformation propelled KTDA to unprecedented heights for the continent, becoming the first African organisation recognised by the global ‘CIO100’ Awards in 2009. This is a global accolade that recognises digital transformation initiatives which lead to both profitability and have a significant social impact.

The transformation enabled Kenya to consolidate its position as the worlds’ leading exporter of black teas with a 23% market share, with the KTDA affiliated smallholders account for 80 percent of the share. At the core of this competitiveness, is the fact that Kenya’s smallholders produce better quality tea than plantations— indeed in Kenya, smallholder teas commands a 25 percent price premium over plantation teas, and as high as 60 percent for the top quality smallholder teas. Unsurprisingly, the small-scale tea-growing areas in Kenya have the lowest incidents of poverty in the country.

My second case study was Frigoken, a global leader for premium hand-arranged and processed fresh produce – French beans in particular. Frigoken’s premium products are sourced from 70,000 small- scale outgrowers, mainly women who grow export vegetables on plots averaging an eight of an acre. Frigoken provides them with extension services that enable them to meet the exacting quality and international food safety standards, quality inputs at fair prices, and guaranteed market for their products. The technical support provided also helps the farmers to raise their overall productivity thus contributing to food security as well. Like our smallholder tea farmers, Frigoken’s contract farmers compete on quality that can only be achieved through meticulous, labour intensive husbandry that cannot be achieved at scale.

Abandoning one’s own journey to take on that of another’s is rarely a brilliant idea. For decades, African governments have neglected smallholder agriculture in an elusive quest for rapid industrialization. In the sixties and seventies, they pursued import substitution which sought to replicate European industrialization. It was disastrous. Since the early 90s, we have been trying to copy the Asian Tigers export-led industrialization. It is not working.

Africa is still predominantly agrarian society. There has been much talk of a crisis of rural-urban migration over the years, but 85 percent of Sub-Sahara African people are still living in the rural areas. Agriculture is the largest economic sector in every country accounting for between 20 and 40 percent of GDP. Smallholder farmers account for 75 percent of agricultural production. Africa will transform and prosper its own way, the African Lions way, not the European or Asian Tiger way.

Africa holds 40 percent of the world’s unused and underutilized arable land. As many parts of the world face ecological limits of industrial agriculture, Africa is well placed to respond to the global imperative for ecologically sustainable agriculture. Our continent’s small-scale agricultural sector is a priceless pearl—good for the people, and good for the planet. Organisations such as Self Help Africa can assist with replicating and up-scaling the models used by the KTDA and Frigoken. Doing this will ensure high quality standards and consistent supplies that can meet the needs of the global markets while maximising returns for the small-scale farmers.

Africa will transform and prosper its own way, the African Lions way, not the European or Asian Tiger way. For now, I do not see masses of African smallholder farmers giving up their shambas for sweatshops. I believe that transforming smallholder agriculture is more than a solution for poverty, it is our ticket to prosperity.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè The peering into that deep void never quite stops. I’m talking about that troublesome, discomforting place that separates the global black family, the rift between Continental Africans and Blacks who are descended from slaves. It’s a rift created by forces and events too painful and shameful for many to want to talk about, yet one that often feels over-hyped, a conversation that stays at the tip of the tongue and never concludes. Is there anything more to explore beyond what you will find in abundance on YouTube and the blogosphere?

There is no shortage of sensational clatter that plugs a hunger for instant gratification when it comes to discussing that eternal antagonism between Africans and Blacks. It is the proverbial tale of sibling rivalry – Essau and Jacob, Sendeyo and Lenana, Thor and Loki, Wuriri and Mabemba… I lost you on the last one. There’s an arresting tale from the Taita people about a rivalry between two sisters that takes one of them through death and mystical destruction, and the redemptive re- membering of body and bond until their relationship is newly restored.

It often seems pointless to rehash an emotive break-up for the sake of resolving it, especially one that has grown larger than life and seems to demand the very institutionalisation of the rivalry that defines it. After all, such a rivalry gave birth to the story that recently took the world by storm – the Black Panther movie – and got people talking all over again about this very rift between the global Black family.

However, beyond the trivial endless beefing – the derogatory name-calling and the beliefs and stereotypes we hold against each other, there is still a sincere hunger for peeling off layers of masks from each other’s faces in the hope that we shall find the long-lost sibling and reach full acceptance at the final unmasking.

There is no urgency on the personal level for a momentous kumbaya between Blacks and Africans; otherwise we would be seeing a lot more inter-marriages between the two by now. The urgency is at the global level. Yet the dissection of this rift towards a global unity of the Black family cannot be done without exploring the trivial nuances that contribute the most to the daily rancor. This also comes with the danger of generalisations, a process that takes one right back to the place of rancor when an argument does not apply to the singular. Having lived, schooled and worked in the United States as an African, now married to an African-American, I will claim the privilege of making informed generalisations on this issue. A reminder that I will use “Blacks” to refer to African- Americans and “Africans” to refer to Continental Africans.

Generalization 1:

Blacks and Africans do not like revisiting the past. This is a trait that has kept both groups numb to their own pain. They fail to appreciate each other’s past from the point of separation. Blacks have not had a powerful movement dedicated to the demand for reparations, neither have Africans dedicated any significant effort towards reparations for colonisation.

Blacks and Africans do not like revisiting the past. This is a trait that has kept both groups numb to their own pain.

In Kenya, a lawsuit against the British was a low-key process spearheaded by human rights lawyers without the forceful wind of national activism. Reparation is an integral part of healing the past, in this case, repaying a people who went through Maafa – the entire gamut of the African Holocaust. Black people are still going through this targeted catastrophe, only now redesigned as mass incarceration, violent racism and economic subjugation.

Other people have received reparations – the Japanese for the suffering that America put them through when they corralled them into concentration camps; the Jewish people for the Holocaust; groups of Native Americans for massacres that occured across the Americas; Aboriginal people for the great suffering as a Stolen Generation.

For the descendants of slaves, no amount of literature, song or grioting can ever truly capture the impact of their holocaust. It is tragic that a history of two-and-a-half centuries of official slavery has not pricked the conscience of any American administration enough to legislate reparations. It is a necessary step towards removing the poison of racism that still courses through America’s veins and reconciling historical injustices. Equally tragic is the fact that there has not been a collective effort by African nations to confront their colonial masters. This neglect of the past has exacerbated the rift between Blacks and Africans whose knowledge of each other is generally superficial and lacks comradeship.

Generalization 2:

The post-Civil Rights generation of Black people do not want anything to do with Africa, and Africans remind them of an identity they are embarrassed about. This statement is bound to raise consternation among Blacks who have taken pilgrimages to the Door of No Return, those who have actually settled in Africa, and those who have married Africans.

But I’d argue that the Blacks who have embraced the African identity have little to no clout to shift the whole Black awareness centre towards a Pan-African awakening. They are too few. Many young Black people will say Africa is as strange to them as Mongolia, their African ancestry notwithstanding. Very few who take holidays ever consider Africa as a destination. Why should they, when all they see through American mainstream media’s keyhole is a continent in continuous throes of devastation? Oprah Winfrey said it, as did Dr Henry Loui Gates, that growing up, to be called “African” was an insult deeper than the N-word.

Africans who come to the United States soon learn that they are a notch below the African-American on the social strata. Naturally, it is the person right above your head that gets to step on you the most. The rift between Blacks and Africans is widened by the fact that a lot of the put-downs Africans suffer while abroad come directly from Black people.

It is easy to forget that the weight of oppression that comes from the top is suffered by both Blacks and Africans. By no means does this excuse Black people who find Africans easy targets to deposit long-seated anger and frustration. Indeed, one of the most emotional debates following the debut of Black Panther was on a thread where Africans confronted Blacks for suddenly feeling proud of African costumes and accents. Black Panther made it cool to have an African accent, yet many times Blacks have told Africans to stop speaking “African” when they speak English with heavy African accents. All the direct racist taunts I’ve received in America have come from Black people, mainly for my accent and my style of dressing. Black people’s fear and shame of their African identity is not difficult to understand, and not at all difficult to forgive.

Sadly, the same fear and shame is being reciprocated by Africans against Blacks. This wasn’t the case with Africans who came into the US before the turn of the century, I being one of them. At least in Kenya we were never exposed to derogatory media about Black people in America. This was a new phenomenon, one that followed the rise of hip-hop in African countries. Older generation Africans who now have kids born in the US do not want anything to do with African-Americans. They have also been poisoned by negative keyhole perspectives of Black people.

While finding their place in America, Africans are unwilling to understand the struggles of Black people and choose to either keep to themselves or marry white. A Kenyan-American teenager said to me that he dislikes it when his parents tell him that if he wants to make it, he should not mix with losers, meaning Black people. This young man identifies himself more as African-American than as Kenyan-American. This myopic view of Black people causes Continental Africans in the diaspora to miss out on the gains they could make if they joined hands with their Black brethren in the countries where they now reside. They become insular in their immigration woes, choosing to hide rather than fight.

The Kenyan diaspora community, for instance, has lost its unity and has become an each-one-for- themselves society, at best uniting around ethnic identities. This kind of unity is weak and ineffective when it comes to moving legislation in the diaspora’s favour. Only recently, the self-styled “General” Miguna Miguna, who has aligned himself with the National Resistance Movement in Kenya, toured the US and became a major magnet for diaspora Kenyans; only it was mainly one ethnic group that showed up for these rallies.

These ethnic-driven passions do nothing to solve the needs of the diaspora. Continental Africans in the diaspora have completely ignored the power and resourcefulness that could come with aligning themselves with Blacks. Fortunately, the young second-generation Africans align themselves more with Blacks than with Africans, and that might spell the realisation of a much needed Pan- Africanism.

Cultural appropriation:

Cultural appropriation is a concept that should not be given room to flourish. Black movements have always come with some form of African pride expressed through fashion or re-invented nuggets of African traditions. Black people who have arrived at a point of reconciliation with their African identity also pick and choose what, when, where and how much of this identity they can add on to give authenticity to who they are. A dashiki here, an African name there – one with just the right phonaesthetics.

Whether the declared African meaning is real or imagined is inconsequential, and that’s just fine. A black model named Roshumba once said on national television that her name meant “beautiful” in Swahili. At the time, I was flabbergasted, and that’s because I was still newly arrived from the motherland and had not learnt the intricacies of lost identities that are the burden of brothers and sisters shipped here hundreds of years ago.

As a descendant of a people violently separated from their culture and identities centuries ago, a people who have lost track of where on the continent they came from, Roshumba has every right to arbitrarily attach semantic value to a name that she or her parents decided is Swahili. Forget that no such word exists in the Swahili language. It does not become a corruption of the language; it becomes a creative addition to a language, not by a colonial force but by a fellow African long separated from her unknown language by tragic circumstance.

My journey as an African in the diaspora who has had a close and personal connection to African- Americans has stamped in me a fierce responsibility to defend the right of Black people to find their own African identity, as long as that process does not diminish African people. While Africans can and should provide a correction to a cultural misnomer, they also do not have a monopoly to decide what is African. For example, naming a child “Mwizi” and declaring that it means “king” in Swahili when it actually means “thief” is something a Swahili speaker can correct. At the same time, such corrections should not come with an expectation that “Mwizi” should always mean “thief”.

A lesson I learnt in my linguistics class many years ago is that the relationship between a morpheme and its semantic value is arbitrary. In other words, a word can mean anything its speaker wants it to mean, and that is how language evolves. If the person who named their child “Mwizi” was misinformed, and the child has grown to believe it means “king” and no one questioned it because no one else knows the original meaning, then the semantic value of “king” becomes valid among those found within that region.

I take pains to unpack this identity repurposing because it’s a conversation we Africans have had often concerning strange “Swahili” names that Black people acquire and their equally odd meanings. Granted, the current generation of Blacks has adopted a trend of creating names based purely on stylish phonetics devoid of semantic value, such as De’Quisha. That too is valid cultural dynamism that is both unique and self-affirming. My own ethnic community has names whose meanings have been completely lost to time and traversing.

Continental Africans should also remember that those who were captured into slavery as late as the eighteenth century preserved African traditions that retain an ancient authenticity. The Gulla- Geechee people of North Carolina and Georgia maintain the highest concentration of African customs brought in from Sierra Leone where their ancestors were captured in the 1700s. Some have migrated up north and carried with them these authentic African traditions. They are much like the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia who have maintained some of the oldest Jewish traditions as a result of thousands of years of separation from other Jews. The sudden spike in African pride, thanks to Black Panther, could be a flash in the pan. It could also potentially enhance the rift between Blacks and Continental Africans in the diaspora by the latter claiming to be the authentic custodians of everything African, especially the good stuff. Let us not forget that one of the greatest gifts, in my opinion, that Black people have given to the world is the Kwanzaa festival, a non-religious ceremony that uses African language, symbols and consciousness. The value in Kwanzaa transcends race, religion and nationality and could easily become as universal as Christmas.

Black people should embrace active custody and practice of all good things African, be they real, reimagined or repurposed for the greater good. This points to a socio-cultural diplomacy where African conscience becomes a lifestyle and an aspiration on a global scale. It would be an equivalent to the spread of the American Dream, which played a major role in boosting America’s economy and stature in the world. It is mind vibranium, a soft power for launching a 21st century Pan-Africanism that young people can buy into.

The Old Pan-Africanism

A young generation now lives out its life largely through social media. Africa has the world’s largest young population, which the United Nations estimates at 200 million aged between 15 and 24. They have time and again shifted centres through social media activism, using platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Kenyans On Twitter, for example, got CNN to retract and apologise to Kenyans for calling the country a “hot-bed of terror”.

Siyanda Mohutsiwa, a famed writer and speaker from Botswana, makes the case for a Social Pan- Africanism led by the digital revolution. She is young, she has roused up globally trending hashtags such as #IfAfricaWasABar, and she understands the bee-hive effect of social media platforms that can be used to usher in a new Pan-Africanism. She calls it Social Pan-Africanism, an idea that would allow Africans to communicate and solve the issues of their times unencumbered by borders or nationality, untouched by oppressive governments or censorship. It also easily bridges this great void made worse by African peoples’ unwillingness to think beyond nationalistic, ethnic or diasporic enclaves.

Siyanda Mohutsiwa, a famed writer and speaker from Botswana, makes the case for a Social Pan-Africanism led by the digital revolution.

But I see a crater that could swallow all the efforts towards a youth-led social Pan-Africanism if they don’t sustain it through a merger with the foundations of political Pan-Africanism that established freedoms for African peoples across the globe. Political Pan-Africanism is rooted in the painful place that young Continental Africans and Blacks do not want to revisit. They do not need to dwell in the past, but they need to tether themselves to the anchors of the past in order to create a mind-blowing future.

This is a lesson Black Panther communicates well for those familiar with Africa’s history. Wakandan Afrofuturism was a reality somewhere in the past, albeit without the sci-fi gizmos. For a stretch of 700 years, economic Afrocentricism ruled the world when African kingdoms controlled global trade. The last powerful monarch, Mansa Musa of the Kingdom of Mali, saw the construction of a global university and an empire so advanced that Europeans, then in the dark ages, might have looked upon it as we did when Wakanda technology flashed before us.

Let us remember that before slavery and colonisation there were African kingdoms across the continent in various stages of political and economic power, well before the United States rose to be a superpower. If there was one thing that led to the fall of Africa’s “Wakanda” past, it was the Europeans’ discovery of trade routes through the Atlantic that erased the powerful Trans-Sahara trade routes. The cheaper and more efficient sea routes controlled by Europeans opened the doors to shipping more merchandise from Africa, including humans, which became easier after African kingdoms began to weaken in the 16th century.

The last powerful monarch, Mansa Musa of the Kingdom of Mali, saw the construction of a global university and an empire so advanced that Europeans, then in the dark ages, might have looked upon it as we did when Wakanda technology flashed before us.

Reconstructing an African people united by common past and common destiny started during slavery with the abolitionists who also advocated a return-to-Africa movement, and continued through the Civil Rights movement and into the African independence struggles. The fact is that the Black diaspora that descended from slaves has always been an active participant in seeking the liberation of colonised Africans. Marcus Garvey, W.E.B DuBois, the Congressional Black Caucus, the TransAfrica Forum, the Nation of Islam and the Rastafari Movement all held a Pan-Africanist soul at their core, a belief in the common struggle and destiny of the Black race that drove them to reach across oceans to save fellow Africans suffering under colonisation and apartheid. They did this through activism, legislation, art and scholarship. There should be a monument of African-American Pan-Africanists in African countries. It is fitting that Ghana recognized W.E.B Du Bois’s role and built a Centre for Pan-African Culture in his name.

While celebrating Venezuela’s Independence Day at their embassy in Washington DC, I ran into a now elderly Harry Belafonte, and he told me about the time he, together with Miriam Makeba, sang at Kenya’s independence celebrations. He spoke of Jomo Kenyatta and the Mau Mau movement with pride. Belafonte has blended art, diplomacy and activism for the Black cause with power and dignity. As his tall frame faded off towards his car, it struck me that there is a fading generation of Black diaspora Pan-Africanist giants that have been bridging this Black divide for a long time. Organised Pan-Africanism started soon after the First World War when the 1st Pan-African Congress met in 1919 expressly to demand that Africans be granted home rule by their colonial masters, a demand Du Bois revised to self-rule at the second Pan-African Congress.

Black Noah

Kwame Nkrumah drank from the fountain of Garveyism. Marcus Garvey was a Pan-African purist who believed in the segregation of the races and preached an Africa-for-Africans philosophy. His faith was made true by his works, evidenced not only by his founding of the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) early in the twentieth century, but more significantly by the Black Star Line he started for the purpose of shipping Black people back to Africa. He was the black Noah that built a boat to save the African race from the deluge of Maafa and its drowning effects. He believed it was the responsibility of the diaspora African descended from slaves to save the African in Africa from the oppression of colonisation. Only his plan for salvation did not quite work out the way he envisioned, and the floods of imperialism in Africa and Jim Crow in the United States remained regional catastrophes the Black race overcame without the global unity he had purposed.

Politically, African countries were moving farther away from any form of Pan-Africanism as the formation of successful independent nations became a greater priority. The formation of the Organisation of African Unity did not foster much of a shared responsibility towards Africa’s common destiny. Many founding leaders of newly independent African nations turned to their colonial masters instead of building an Africa that could depend on itself. African nations became pawns on the neo-imperial chessboard of their former colonial masters. For a continent as endowed in natural wealth as Africa, it is tragic that the plausible dream of Pan-Africanists like Garvey failed to take root. But it is not all together dead. Garvey left a dream of the rise of Africa that one can glean from restless young and awakened Black activists. Erik Killmonger picks up where Garvey left off. Where the Black Star Lines failed, the Killmonger attitude will step in to usurp power from insular African leaders who have failed to use their resources for the good of the African people.

I have met Erik Killmonger, and he is a Republican. I have met him in the minds of Black Republican friends in Washington DC longing for the rise and liberation of the Black race from the high rates of poverty, neglected neighbourhoods, incarceration and political powerlessness. In conversations whispered in shared car rides, a Republican friend narrates to me the vicious circle of need in inner city black neighborhoods, and how Democrats are to blame because they’ve been in leadership in these cities far too long. My friend says she has spoken to many Black single mothers who do not want welfare hand-outs. They want opportunities, and Republicans want to instill in that get-it-at-all- cost attitude. It’s the Killmonger drive – grab fearlessly what is due to you, fight for it and do not expect entitlements.

I’m a Democrat. And a Kenyan. I’m not too religious about party politics. I agree with what she is telling me, and on any good day, she might have converted me. Except that when I zoom out and take in the Republican view of global politics, I cannot buy into it. I find it to be one that seeks domination as opposed to cooperation. Doctrines such as with-us-or-against-us, as espoused by former President George Bush, have justified preemptive attacks and wars that have killed too many in foreign countries. African countries have become battlefields in a global war against terror that they never started, one that benefits a corporate world that runs the world’s economy. That is also the Killmonger hunger for domination.

For a continent as endowed in natural wealth as Africa, it is tragic that the plausible dream of Pan-Africanists like Garvey failed to take root.

It is tempting to buy into the rise of Africa as a dominant power, knowing we have been there before, but this time around, Africa would have the advantage of new technology. But that would mean nothing short of an arms race and wars. Nations have thrived better through cooperation than through exclusivism and domination. If there was a Killmonger in real life, perhaps Muammar Gadaffi could have fit the bill. He was a Pan-Africanist who believed in an African currency that could easily dominate the world economy. After all, Africa’s natural resources, such as coltan, are still the “vibranium” that drives new technology.

Bridge To Kibera

“I was in Kenya last year,” my Republican friend continues.

“Oh?” I want to hear this. It’s always a pleasant surprise to know an African-American has travelled to an African country. I hold my breath, hoping she will say something good about Kenya. During my last trip to Kenya, I had been robbed at gun-point. I was not ready for a guest’s sh*thole testimony about my country.

“And I stayed in Kibera during my entire stay!” My heart sunk. Couldn’t she have stayed in a hotel? For heaven’s sake, Kibera? What was she thinking? She has money, a lot of it, and she is someone who has held advisory positions with several Republican White House administrations. So why does she sound excited about having stayed in Kibera for… what? Did she just say three months?! “My Kenyan friend welcomed me to her home in Kibera!” She truly was excited about it. The way she said it, as if there was nothing to it but someone’s hospitality in its purest form. I will never doubt a Black Republican’s down-to-earth passion for the well-being of Black people anywhere in the world. No matter one’s political leaning, true Pan-Africanism has to have the heart to extend from the White House to Kibera.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè To a greater power and a better nature you, free, are subject, and these create the mind in you that the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the world around you goes astray, in you is the cause and in you let it be sought.

~ Marco the Lombard’s counsel, from Dante’s Divine Comedy

Novelist Pankaj Mishra, referring to “the history of modernisation”, observes how despite pretentions to rationality and order described by the American originators of the term in the 1950s and 1960s, modernisation’s history “is largely one of carnage and bedlam” that disproportionately afflicts a targeted, “othered”, dehumanised, inferiorised population invariably classified as poor, who by implication are also made responsible for the pathetic state in which they find themselves.

A polarisation of conscience means that little solidarity can be extended to those who suffer the greatest burden of the consequences of the worst of human impulses and choices. Do we imagine that the gaze infected by the paradigm in which it thrives can refocus its witnessing lens from a place of profound empathy for and with humanity, and see itself in the suffering of the other?

There is nothing objective in the human gaze. We know this. Yet we collude with this post- Enlightenment, neoliberal hubristic production system that even proposes its own transcendence and omniscience— and does so while denying or erasing the reality of the shared experience of suffering so that it can lay claim to transcendent objectivity. How can a corrupted witness purport to offer a truthful testament to human experience? How unbiased is the evidence (images, stories) that such a witness brings forth?

Humanity now thrashes about in a chasm of the absence of a real vocabulary of beingness today, while at the same time, makes excuses for a parasitic ideological structure that requires the stories of others’ vulnerabilities in order to shore up itself and its peculiar myths. An obsessive and pornographic preoccupation with the wounds of others serves two key purposes: one, it enables the observers to feel, what is that imbecilic word…superior, and two, it helps the observers to avoid engaging with their own internal contradictions and pathologies, it buries their fears.

Against such a backdrop, what does our own articulation of post-coloniality, social development, vulnerability and poverty actually mean here and now? What does “representation” become when forged through an epistemological structure that fragments the world so that it can elevate itself as the “universal” and the standard by which the human race measures its progress. In referring to this dilemma, the thinker Santiago Castro-Gomes calls it the problem of the “hubris of point zero”.

This is the epistemology that, despite its, yes, many virtues, treasures, and achievements on behalf of its select, could also declare those on the right of the screen as virtuous and righteous in their actions against those on the left, who are consistently classified as soulless, valueless, ungovernable and unmournable savages, barbarians, terrorists and heathens— not entirely human and, therefore, exploitable and dispensable. The mostly Euro-American collective societal imagination, in particular, was co-opted into this belief. The paradigm deliberately enlisted science and academia to develop a literature and theory to absolve itself from this, its public evil. The desecrated bodies on the left of the screen are rendered undignified and nameless even in their ancestral homes—and there are no plaques to commemorate their histories, achievements, their existence – while museums are built to enshrine the so-called exploits of those on the right.

An obsessive and pornographic preoccupation with the wounds of others serves two key purposes: one, it enables the observers to feel, what is that imbecilic word…superior, and two, it helps the observers to avoid engaging with their own internal contradictions and pathologies, it buries their fears.

What we see and hear now has a history and a template. Given this, what then should a person do with an array of stories and images embedded in a diminished, diminishing and disordered framing of life, that from its origins, and despite the evidence of its horrid impulses, has never been forensically interrogated?

In a 1999 New York Times article, Nigerian author Wole Soyinka reminded us how “the great philosophical minds of Europe, like Hume, Hegel and Kant, bent their prodigious talents to separating the species into those with rights and those with none, founded on the convenient theory that some people were human and others less so. The Encyclopedists of France, products of the so- called Age of Reason, remain the most prolific codifiers of the human (and other) species on an ambitiously comprehensive scale, and their scholarly industry conferred a scientific benediction on a purely commercial project that saw millions of souls dragged across the ocean to serve as beasts of burden. Religion and commerce … were reinforced by the authority of new scientific theories to divide humanity into higher and lower manifestations of the species. The dichotomy of the world was complete.”

I am compelled to ask how truthfully a person of this epoch can speak to precarity, poverty or marginalisation without making incisions into the profound moral and existential vacuum that are their sources and causes, which the human collective treats with amnesia. We are enduring a season of an unprecedented crisis of being and vision – and the devastation of lives we see and label as “precarious” are symptomatic of this.

Reality, they say, is relational, not representational. I retreat once more to Marco the Lombard’s counsel from Dante’s Divine Comedy for guidance:

To a greater power and a better nature you, free, are subject, and these create the mind in you that the heavens have not in their charge. Therefore, if the world around you goes astray, in you is the cause and in you let it be sought.

Do we really have the adequate tools of analysis that will lead us into an immersive experience of the realities to which we refer? We live a lie-laden un-reality where communities of the most resource- rich territories of the world are interpenetrated by the most devastating forms of poverty while those of the resource-consuming lands are lauded as the most advanced, the wealthiest, the best, when the questions that should be asked are: How does the world’s wealth get to be transferred, from where, by whom, for whom and at what price? Who sets the rates? To what obscene extent are precarity, marginalisation and poverty in themselves a profitable by-product of a way of being in the world? How are these accepted by-products of an accepted global industrial ideology? Will we explore poverty in its multiple designs and constructions in Bretton Wood cults, in the numerous multinational boardrooms, and in all those resource-hunting, territory-scouring Trojan horses that first appear as non-governmentals and then collude with emasculated, lobotomised post-colonial governors masquerading as leaders of so many nations?

We find ourselves entangled in and by a culture that, for example, knowing there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, still allowed its privileged liars, those contemporary high priests of baal, a gateway to create and launch a grotesque unending war fifteen years ago that has since devoured an ancient civilisation and pushed our earth into the cusp of a human-caused apocalypse. This alleged “war on terror”, an abominable act, co-opted forty other nations, all of which fly the banner of democracy and human rights, and who have wilfully and continuously committed atrocities before slithering away to reconstruct a narrative of righteousness by evolving new euphemisms that deny the horror that their choices have visited upon millions and millions of innocents.

The abomination is today visited on Yemen for no real reason other than Saudi Arabia, this paradigm’s favourite pimp, wishes to test its war chops and spread its particular version of self- rightousness. Saudi Arabia is spending trillions of dollars on weapons sold to it by nations, that offer themselves as ‘paragons of human values’ weapons that are sometimes procured through second or third parties. Money gratefully received without question. Later, when the images of devastating Yemeni starvation hits your Christmas screens, some scrawny Englishman will compose a “Do they know it’s Christmas?” dirge so that we can all send our one pound to help the poor, the starving and the helpless. Meanwhile, it is Christmas every day in our weapon-manufacturing communities; the war in Yemen is a ceaseless bounty.

I ask you, are there any stories today, any images of the full Yemeni reality? Of course not. We will neither reveal the images of the generals overseeing the devastation of an already weak land, nor will we show what bullets and grenades do to human bodies. Why should the truth of what sustains our economies and guarantees our lifestyles interfere with the pleasure of our morning cappuccino? But God help the ones who emerge from the inferno of our making. They become our revenants. Their bodies and haunted lives are fingers pointing at us, which without a single word, mock our presumed innocence.

Here is our world now, this massive entangled bruise of traumatised, alienated, marginalised, terrorised, impoverished hundreds of millions, a world offering itself to the possibility of self- annihilation as entertainment.

This epistemological framing by which we live has won for its adherents entire territories that are relabelled as, for example, the United States of America, Australia, Canada, and then elevated as “universal” beacons of high human values that also confirm the hegemonic paradigm’s transcendent delusions, those mythologies that are adorned with titles such as “civilisation”, “democracy”, “scientific”, “advancement”, “philanthropy” and “human rights”, so many gilded fig leaves positioned to conceal the wound and its questions, which may include:

What is the origin of this nation?

How did the current governance structure evolve? Who and how many had to die to invent this “country”? How did they die?

Who atones? Who does not atone?

This dominant system, including its knowledge systems, generates and reinforces a malignant Military Industrial Complex upon which entire economies depend. And it seduces us with amnesia. Forget! it suggests. In exchange we may frolic carefreely amidst the flowers of Orwellian doublespeak – collateral damage, for example, a euphemism for lies, transference, prevarications, perception management, propaganda, erasure and rewriting and rebranding of horrors. Meanwhile, in a world of abundance, how is it even possible that eight men from the same cultural paradigm have gained control of 80 per cent of the earth’s wealth? Is this the culmination of the so-called Age of Reason? Today we accuse Kim-Jong-Un of impoverishing North Koreans, but do we also reflect on the meaning (today) of the American war in Korea (1950-3)? The wilful carpet bombing of a country by one set of humans until everything is rubble, as the generals casually cited that 20 per cent (a conservative estimate) population death rate? Why do we act shocked when grieving, starving, devastated, traumatised people turn their backs on a world that turned its backs on them? And we suddenly have something to say about…what?

Please don’t get me wrong; I am not excusing insanity. What I ask is if the prevailing global paradigm and its tributaries—-modernism, post-modernism, post-post-modernism…with their penchant for laundering their darkness – are what can gainfully articulate the dimensions, meaning and language of profound human suffering. In the end, after we have described, or gazed upon, the poverty- stricken, the marginalised, the oppressed, the dehumanised, in whatever forms these take, what actually changes for the common good as a consequence?

A different point.

We neither see nor imagine the same thing when we say “poverty” or “precarity”, do we? Despite our preferred assumptions, there is no uber-state of poverty or precarity that is the universal template. Yet so very rarely do we allow an exploration of the varieties of consciousness that imbue human seeing, recognising, describing and attending; or the reality of philosophical and cultural divergences.

This alleged “war on terror”, an abominable act, co-opted forty other nations, all of which fly the banner of democracy and human rights, and who have wilfully and continuously committed atrocities before slithering away to reconstruct a narrative of righteousness by evolving new euphemisms that deny the horror that their choices visited upon millions of innocents.

To some, poverty is an asset in a world where shareholder profit is the Holy Grail, where consumption is the measure of nirvana. So valuable it is that should the economies of certain nations decline, wars must be manufactured. As long as weapons can be sold and jobs created, a necessary magic happens—these economies are rich and stable again and can hold themselves up as beacons of world development and order, right? But the blood-price that designated scapegoats have paid remain obscured and untold.

Precarity does, however, explain how humanity has turned vampire to humanity, feeding on its own lifeblood, its harrowing collective gaze always turned outward and elsewhere. Precarity (or what some might refer to as precariousness, which is a less enduring/permanent condition) – a word that was apparently coined by the Catholic monk and anarcho-communist Léonce Crenier (1888-1963) – has been defined as “the politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks…becoming exposed to injury, violence and death”. Precarity is a condition that is often associated with neoliberal capitalism and its perverted logic of blaming the victim for his or her suffering, rather than examining the skewed power and economic relations that might have contributed to that suffering – a logic that relies on scapegoating to absolve the inflicter of suffering from any blame.

What the scapegoater’s target (the poor, the starving, the helpless, the victims) may have to give up is the power to name themselves. If they survive the struggle, they will be doomed to be spoken for, depicted, analysed and approached with the delicious frisson of Freud’s unheimlich — the uncanny. But sometimes, sometimes, it is true, that the monstered being growls back using the tools and technology of the paradigm against itself.

We, the inhabitants of this earth, are caught up in the matrix of a dark drama that services our fears, our violence, our silences, our looking away, and in some cases, our approval. This grotesque dance is justified with epic headers: Age of Discovery, War on Terror, Humanitarian Interventions. Weapons of Mass Destruction. Mother of All Bombs. Later, imagine our surprise when survivors from such expeditions flee their homes seeking refuge and peace in our midst. Having even been robbed of their names, we are now able to label them poor, marginalised, migrants, refugees, precarious, as if what befell them happened through their own fault. We negotiate encounters so that their suffering is kept as far away from our lives as possible.

Their courageous odyssey, their spirit and strength in the face of overwhelming intimate losses are rarely voiced, lest they expose our cowardice. Their desperation is often criminalised, as if it is infectious. We may safely look at their drowned bodies on television, but having seen enough of these, no longer notice them. We engineer them into concentration camps in Turkey, Lebanon, Kenya, Uganda, Jordan, Greece and Libya. Meanwhile, we neglect to act on the reality that we know that their powerless bodies are minute by minute being brutalised, experimented with and traded. Their organs are being auctioned, their children are being raped, their women are being violated, their men are emasculated, humanity is being brutalised by humanity using its most insidious weapons: human absence and human silence.

In April last year, the American military dropped what they christened the “Mother of All Bombs” over the Achin district in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, a public display of the same casual evil that created the Nagasaki and Hiroshima slaughter, a prelude of what is to come, perhaps? There is still to this day a terrible silence over the actual number of Afghani casualties, which have already been pre-stigmatised as ISIS, not to speak of the devastation of the landscape and environment. There are no independent verifications, no counter-checks, no accountability, no display of bodies other than those of living American soldiers standing in caves that are still intact and whose locations cannot be verified.

So, when a surge of humans in deep distress whose environment has been poisoned and shattered will flee Afghanistan trying to find new homes, will they be returned to the source? Will we try and find the reason for their fleeing and hold to account the responsible nation? Of course not. That would require what seems to have been leached out of the human collective: a will to truth and courage. Indifference has been made cool. “Post-truth” has been invented. When the desperate immigrant carrying his remaining child peers through a fence, won’t we line our words and images to articulate a preferred trope that reinforces our framing of poverty, powerlessness, and precarity regarding him and his country?

Shall I go on?

Weeks before the bombing and Donald Trump’s foray into Syria, American soldiers and their Saudi friends were implicated in the mass slaughter of a boat filled with innocent people escaping Yemen. After the announcement of the mistake, nothing. There was also the horrible and mistaken slaughter of innocents in Mosul involving the so-called coalition forces. After the initial alarm, nothing. You who study representation, have you heard anything more of these crimes against the earth, decency, morality and humanity that sink without a trace, without a second bleep? The silence, though, does make it simpler to rationalise the sacrifice of humans to tomahawk missiles while the enabler eats chocolate cake—or was it vanilla?

It is to specific and targeted realms of anguish that we send our image capturers and story makers. The consistency of the ideology calls for the permitted symbols of doomed desires: the sacrificeable, the pitied and – despite the pathos – the unmournable body (preferably in a particular melanin shade and from a particular culture). This paradigm allows the media to use and expose them as the poor, the less fortunate, the marginalised, the victims. So the advantaged—and that is the adjective always used – might make meaning by pressing a forefinger on the donate button and dispatch two euros fifty to support one of a hundred thousand non-governmentals who promise the miracle of turning coins into medicine and water for the ones, who, fortunately, are not us. These days it is accompanied with a hashtag. But no questions.

So what do we have to show, we humans speaking about poverty and precarious lives lived in ineffable margins? What do we have to show that amplifies our abysmal and wilful unknowing of the actual and inner lives of those whose histories we choose to condense into a single, transient thumbprint, captured, edited, and distributed by a thinned-out imagination? In the academy’s retelling of precarity, poverty and their representation, what room exists for a multidimensionality and multiperspectivity that breathes fresh knowledge and insight that might actually transfigure our humanity?

Let us change track and look at some art, okay?

The cover image of Job’s Friends by Lenny Caccio is inspired by the biblical Book of Job. It features three friends – Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite and Zophar the Naamathite – who show up to supposedly console a terribly afflicted Job. Encountering the extreme suffering and wounded spirit and body of their friend, they first choose to sit in shock. After a suitable interlude, now accustomed to the spectacle of suffering, they proceed to diagnose the disease from a safe space that does not require them to touch Job. They also evolve a branding plan in which they excuse everything but Job, who is somehow made responsible for his fate. They offer a scholarly treatise on meaning, suffering and Job’s responsibility. They wonder why Job is not more like them, they who are favoured by God. If he were, such suffering would not be his fate. Nay indeed, since they know the mind of God, actually, in a way, this makes them, like God…if not God Himself.

Meanwhile, we neglect to act on the reality that we know that their powerless bodies are minute by minute being brutalised, experimented with and traded. Their organs are being auctioned, their children are being raped, their women are being violated, their men are emasculated, humanity is being brutalised by humanity using its most insidious weapons: human absence and human silence.

Suddenly, certain of their transcendence, they authoritatively proceed to make decisions for Job. They go on and on until Job became a scientific and social development project. They discuss the alleviation of Job’s poverty, precarity and disease. Dear Job is sucked into the eye of the cyclone of stupidity and is compelled to reclaim a semblance of humanity by trying to explain the inexplicability of his existential harrowing.

In the eyes of the three idiots, Job, the scapegoat, must not be perceived as innocent, for through this judgment he is designated as the carrier of the pathologies and terrors that afflict the human journey; upon him rests the entire mystery of human suffering. Now Job is the heathen. The savage. The pagan. The terrorist. The infidel. The Third World hordes…or was it swarms (David Cameron). The extreme other from whom our lives are detached, whose suffering is alien to our righteous ease. Behold this, the detached collective observing human suffering, not as witnesses, but as judges and gossips. They fail to see that Job is a mirror and witness to the reality of life. These idiots (yes, I am judging them) look and look and turn blind.

It does end rather well, with a schadenfreude twist. The mysterious Source of Existence in whose name much was suggested by the trio shows up from out of the whirlwind, the storm, the chaos, and is in a very bad mood. He stormily affirms and underlines the truth of human unknowing before the immensity of life. Some paraphrased bullet points from within the storm: You are not the authors of nature or life. You are all subject to the mystery of suffering, pain, death, and the unknowing. In other words, as a millennial friend once put it to me, you know shit about life.

The three self-appointed dunderheads get their knuckles thoroughly rapped by a God who makes them dependent on Job for a dramatic gesture of forgiveness and sacrifice that will release them from the hell their presumptuous babblings have driven them into, thus demonstrating another useful point: You need one another other in order to get yourselves out of your self-created hell.

Back to earth.

On January 24, 2017, a 22-year-old human being, a man named Pateh Sabally, either jumped into or slipped into Venice’s Grand Canal. Witnessing this were about two hundred men and women. They were cited as cursing, mocking and abusing him as he flailed and cried.

What did Pateh see? What did he experience as he started to die? To know that the last human gaze Pateh experienced was the gaze of hatred is such a weight on a sensitive human conscience. What looks out of the gaze of this mob in Venice, finding satisfaction in the slow death of an ebony-bodied stranger in a canal?

A dying man entered the doorway of death with the sound of over two hundred apparently “sane” human beings mocking his life, urging him to annihilation, amused by his suffering. What did Pateh see? What did he experience as he started to die? To know that the last human gaze Pateh experienced was the gaze of hatred is such a weight on a sensitive human conscience. What looks out of the gaze of this mob in Venice, finding satisfaction in the slow death of an ebony-bodied stranger in a canal? And death and dying are such a private, intimate happening, even among creatures. So, what has become of a people and their interior values who seek and find intense porno-visual satisfaction in the death of a stranger? What turns these people into a howling beast, a mob that has lost access to the grammar of life? What is in the gaze of the human in the canal looking at his audience?

We have been here before, haven’t we?

I was surprised, and then not surprised, that the horror did not generate greater contemplation in the media or in societal reflections and that the only images published were those of the drowning Pateh, with the mob offered as a faceless mass without a shape that melts into the day when invited to account for their manner of witnessing. I am struck by the length of time that the mob spent observing, archiving, recording and commenting on Pateh’s dying, and the eerie idea of profound satisfaction in the experience. The mob is so preoccupied with their perception of Pateh’s otherness, his immigrant-being, that nothing of his humanity penetrates their gaze. What is this epistemology of life that makes of human beings a thing that finds pleasure in the dying and death of a man? Why has it not been hacked to pieces yet? Unless, of course, its diminished conceptualisation of who a human being is has its worshippers. In this event, who in our epistemological structuring would be the subject of our reflections on poverty, precarity and pity? Pateh or his mob?

Second case: On September 8, 2015, a woman who had veiled her face, protecting herself from the contagion of encounter, filmed the flow of human sufferers crossing into her country, Hungary. She would at some point drop her camera to focus on extending her foot to kick two children and their father, a former Syrian football coach, Osama Abdul Mohsen, who carrying one son, stumbled to the ground. It is not possible to list the many ways that this man, travelling without his wife, was humiliated. A man has lost his home through no fault of his own, has lost his country, is compelled to impoverishment, and struggles with life in ways that not many in the world can. He traverses unknown worlds, deserts, storms, wars, water, death, displaying the noblest human spirit and its will to live and hope.

This human seeks refuge among other humans, strangers. Reduced to scrambling across a man- caused frontier, he runs in the direction of a camerawoman, who is masked to preserve herself from the diseases he purportedly carries. Let us think carefully about the gesture as she pauses her filming and puts out a leg to trip a man carrying his son, who flails and falls. That fall, friends, is a wounded gong in the deepest soul. A warning. This episode is enshrined as the Petra László incident. It travelled as a cold slithering shiver across the world. In our house in Nairobi, when we saw it, no one could speak. But it was recognised for what it was.

I am struck by the blank in the place where people have absented themselves from, or even worse, have become so paralysed by human uncertainty that they do not know how to be hospitable to and receive, perhaps through an embrace, the wounded among and within them.

My own gaze stays on the camerawoman Petra László. I want to meet her. I have questions to ask. What drives a human being to this place of cruelty? I have traced her narrative of defence. Her first explanation: “I just snapped.” The second: “The man lied.” The third: “I am in danger.” The fourth: “I shall sue Facebook, I shall sue the witnesses.” It goes on.

The discomfort for us is this, the reason for our unspeaking witnessing: Here is the public revelation of the disintegration of humanity, the evidence of the wound. And no, this is not about privilege. Petra is a mirror, you see. Here also is my emptiness. Here is my terror of the mysteriousness of another. Here is a symbol of my impoverished humanity. Here is the sign of the unspoken wound that tears through my own soul, that if unattended for much longer will turn septic and evil—for here precisely is what I do not wish to be.

So who are these people? And why does society and popular media collude in an act of amnesia and erasure, not of the dead or suffering, but of the agents who amplify the suffering of others? It is not labelled as anything, is it? There is no name offered for this precarious condition. Why? There is the gaze. But what is heard? What is told and repeated? What gets muted so that an image can be explained differently?

In August 2016, police in Rome received a phone call from a stranger asking them to investigate a situation. An 84-year old woman and her 94-year old husband were in their apartment. They had been wailing so loudly for a good part of the day and their cries were now disturbing their neighbours. When the police entered the house, they found an elderly couple who were so overwhelmed by an existential loneliness, who having watched the news were horrified by the state of the world, that all they could do was wail, and wail, and wail. The media story slides quickly to the part where the police cook pasta for them. But I am interested in the spaces of silence and absences of neighbours, of family, of community. I am interested in the gaps occupied by this profound human keening, the sensitivity of a man and woman who feel the wounds of the world so profoundly.

But I am mostly struck by the communal unhearing and unseeing and unfeeling and unregarding. The story is not only about the police and pasta, but also about the meaning of that human cry, and the reactions of those who heard it. I am struck by the blank in the place where people have absented themselves from, or even worse, have become so paralysed by human uncertainty that they do not know how to be hospitable to and receive, perhaps through an embrace, the wounded among and within them. Yet here are the kind of people who would press the contribute button on the computer to send one euro to pay for a borehole in Timbuktu.

The worst of these are the leaders of nations whose people are compelled to flee to find life elsewhere, despite the wealth and treasures of home. Each of these leaders, through their incompetence, cowardice and collusion, are culpable and accountable for the extremes of suffering experienced by their people.

What has happened? Do you know? I don’t. But does our lexicon for poverty and precarity encompass this, the marginalisation of persons from themselves? The meaning of lives no longer at ease with embracing, holding, comforting, or mourning each other?

For the Bretton Woods and United Nations indices on global well-being, this scene scores high on the wealth index. It shows evidence of the consumption of pasta. Poverty or precarity, under the dominant paradigm does not figure, does it?

There is an adjunct to this that often skips our global headlines: The state of the elderly in European and American societies, evidenced in excessive winter mortalities, is a reality that is carefully left out of developmental indices and global conversations about precarity. Yet the paradigm to which our world has pledged its visioning will implode before it admits that its mythology is erasing the top end of its generations. It would be cynical to imagine, I guess, that the wild reaping of a generation judged as no longer productive is a desired outcome for a worldview obsessed with human usefulness, wouldn’t it?

What I am trying to say, perhaps not too eloquently, is that perhaps, primarily, for me, this conversation we are having about ‘precarity’ is about humanity and its choices, this is an examination of a communal consciences in an attempt to see a way to engage that is transformative to our humanity and its dignity.

Allow me to make brief references to two key aspects in the global value chain of the misery economy that have a role in informing our constructions and perceptions of poverty and precarity:

First, the matter of forced philanthropy, one of the studios and markets for the representational images of poverty and devastation that social development paradigms offer. The business of imposed philanthropy is a fascinating study of human delusion to omniscience, the exercise of power through the mask of pity and the subversion of genuine human compassion for the purposes of profit and personal glory. It too has a history that reaches deep in the roots of the alleged Age of Discovery that I do not need to go into now. Its patterns are the same. The designated beneficiaries are always rendered choiceless, voiceless and nameless and subject to the character profile the philanthropist imposes upon them. Their most intimate lives are exposed to an irresistible gaze. The philanthropists have the power to speak for and represent an entire people and their experience. It is like the ventriloquist who seeks dummies into which he can throw his voice and reiterate his agenda. Deus ex machina. I will not names.

Caught up in a devastating existential struggle, the targets rarely fight this denudation of their humanity—because, admittedly, some coins to alleviate immediate suffering are made available. Those who object to this business model are often labelled as out of touch, people who are denying or manufacturing reality. For the patron society must always reaffirm its intrinsic goodness. Its people are good. Its intentions are good. And the vulnerable are a blank canvas upon which stories can be repackaged. And if the images are from the imagined African milieu, I promise you a fly on the face shot, even if it has to be photo-shopped in. But this imposed philanthropy serves its most potent purpose: it offers the paradigm a messiah, or many messiahs.

An overview of this ecology of suffering would be dishonest if it did not refer, at least once, to the role played by the useful idiots, those too-numerous colonial (they pretend to be “post-independent”) governments – those impotent venal agents of collaborative coloniality, betrayers of hopes, repellant homeguards. The worst of these are the leaders of nations whose people are compelled to flee to find life elsewhere, despite the wealth and treasures of home. Each of these leaders, through their incompetence, cowardice and collusion, are culpable and accountable for the extremes of suffering experienced by their people. Entangled in a grammar of violence and oppression, they have woven their individual lives into a life-destroying global economic paradigm at the expense of a vision for the world and their own people; they create new demons and excel in the creation and sustenance of a hell that destroys even the future of their land and generations of people. They engineer displacement, and do so in the name of social development. Yet their governments spend twenty times the resources allotted to national development to buy weapons abroad for incompetent armies trained to turn their weapons inward. These caretakers of disaster have nothing to say about a reality that has turned their people’s bodies into the most tradeable and the most disposable, mere containers for other people’s organs. (Many of their people now lie on the bed of the Mediterranean as undersea ghosts.) What a wreckage. What an abysmal poverty of spirit and imagination.

Is there a repository of more profound ideas, values, and words that can engender transformative human relationships so that we do not have to bear the burden of human anguish and injustice alone?

We lament the body of Aylan but immediately censor our awareness about the link between his sea- washed body and that of the CEO of the weapon-making factory that supplied the manufactured rebels with the guns and bombs that destroyed the Kurdi family life in Kobani, Syria. In the representation of poverty, precarity and alienation, where are the images and stories of the weapon factories and the military or prison industrial complexes? We side-eye bodies that have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea but block our ears to the reality of a multi-billion-dollar human trafficking/slavery network owned by an amoral global elite for whom business has never been better, certainly in the supply of human organs that had been a problem before but is no longer an issue in most of the world now.

How can one enter the soul of this theme without a life-giving mythology of presence so that when we speak of human poverty and precarity we do so justly, and in a way that shelters all that is shamed, broken, unjust, flawed, deaf, blind, lost, wounded or sad? What framework do we have that can call out the normalisation of unmitigated evil and our human dalliance with a violence that excuses itself and erases the voices of the most vulnerable?

Is there a way to interrogate the entrenchment of a seemingly omnipotent economic complex that mocks humanity by calling itself not only humanitarian but also just? What do we do with processes and ideologies with which we cohabit that glorify hatred, injustice, fear and violence that turn others into bogeymen? What ideologies of being exist that are capable or brave enough to hold perpetrator predatory systems and cultures accountable for their wilful desecration of life and meaning? Is there a repository of more profound ideas, values, and words that can engender transformative human relationships so that we do not have to bear the burden of human anguish and injustice alone?

Paraphrasing Mignolo, it must be possible for our humanity to imagine “institutions at the service of life rather than life at the service of institutions.” There has to be a way of being and seeing that deepens the witness’s gaze, a daring to first love—yes, I said it, love – and, therefore, make representation a true gift, a grace of human encounter, of human discovery, dignity, enchantment and knowing.

This essay is adapted from a speech by the author at the Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien / Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies (GAPS) Annual Conference on the theme, ‘Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World’, held from May 25 – 27, 2017 – at the University of Bonn, Germany.

Author’s preamble:

The ideas this essay puts forward are mined from many disciplinary spaces and are especially energised by proposals from thinkers like Enrique Dussel, W.D. Mignolo, Santiago Castro-Gomes, Arturo Escobar, among others, who dare to interrogate the reality of the extended and always- morphing life-cycle of coloniality existing in a dominant historical framework that informs the state of the world today. My intention is to exhume a few sacred graves, particularly those masked in silences. This is a basic exploration of, to borrow from Dussel, “negated alterities”.

I want to now confess to you that writing this was a struggle for so many reasons, some not too clear. For one, what really is an adequate analytical framework through which to enter a thorough exploration of the contemporary iconography of profound human suffering? In considering this question, I was forced to recoil before the dominant post-Enlightenment, modernistic ideology and paradigm that fakes its break with its myriad pasts, while embedding and consolidating its humanity-displacing values and intentions To pretend that the paradigm—modernism, post- modernism, post-colonial, neo-liberal, whatever – is not also a violence-based, suffering-denying, scarcity-inducing, wound-causing, human-dividing, difference-criminalising, consumption-adoring, crisis-creating, self-aggrandising, disordered belief system, with its prosperity gospel, slaughtering priests, elaborate infrastructure, instruments, and institutions that favour a pre-selected few would be ingenuous of me.

In which case, how then does one truly speak about representation, for example, within the framework of this overarching epistemological ecology? How does one address its systemic propensity for blood-letting, dependency on the commodification of life, a habit that is soothed by an instinct to euphemise atrocities that include presiding over a protocol that governs which images and narratives are allowed, sought, desired, derived, edited, distributed, sold and pre-explained? This essay is my attempt to deconstruct the representations and present a life- and human-affirming mirror to those doing the gazing.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.

AFRICA’S MEDICAL POVERTY TRAP: Why the continent is getting sicker and poorer

By Claudio Butticè

So stated Samia Nkrumah, Egyptian-Ghanaian daughter of Kwame Nkrumah, in the opening lecture of this year’s Tana Forum in Bahir Dahr, Ethiopia last week. She was speaking to the legacy of Gamal Abdel Nasser, second Egyptian President. Known for his pan-Arab sentiments, most illustrated by his nationalisation of the Suez Canal. But also known for his pan-African sentiments, illustrated by his orchestration of the marriage of Samia’s parents. Not to mention his whisking them to safety in Egypt after the overthrow of Nkrumah’s government. Where they shared political exile with the family of the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba, following his assassination.

With regard to this assassination, Samia noted that Nasser’s aim was not so much the protection of individuals, but more the protection of their visions as the first wave of African liberation governments. Both Lumumba and Nkrumah shared with Nasser not only the view that the only way forward for Africa was unity, but also that political liberation was only the first step. The next step being the re-construction of African economies to end the exploitative chain of periphery/metropole relationships. The appropriation of labour and value from women to men within the family. From the African hinterland to the coastal regions (serving export markets not domestic ones). And from Africa to the rest of the world (maintaining our dependent status within the global political- economy).

‘Africa is one, indivisible’ – Samia Nkrumah

Former South African President Khalema Motlanth – most recently deployed to ensure the success of the recent Sierra Leonean elections – responded to Samia’s lecture. He noted the purpose of revisiting Nasser’s history was to remind us of context. To understand the choices made by that first generation of liberation governments. To see more clearly the challenges that arose from those choices. To also make us think more deeply about our investments in African electoral, succession and transition moments. For governments come and go. But states remain. And we need to constantly be thinking not only about governments but about African states, our positioning – and what that positioning both implies for and demands of our choices today.

It was an inspired and inspiring opening to this year’s Tana Forum, the annual gathering of current and former African heads of state, continental policymakers, academics and civil society. Focused on Africa’s peace and security, the Tana Forum’s aim is to enable more informal exchanges and reflections on where we are and where we need to go.

Former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo, launching this year’s report on African peace and security, noted we’re in a world that’s ‘becoming less liberal, less international and less orderly.’ Despite the (valid) critique of the ‘new liberal international order,’ that is not a good thing. The four trends in African peace and security include, first, more prolonged conflicts that simply aren’t moving towards resolution (as in Cameroon, Mali and Mozambique).

Both Lumumba and Nkrumah shared with Nasser not only the view that the only way forward for Africa was unity, but also the view that political liberation was only the first step

Second, more widespread popular protests against incumbents. Related, third, heightened and more widespread tensions in the context of electoral and (potential) political succession and transitions. Here the good news is succession within ruling political parties in Ethiopia, South Africa and Zimbabwe, as well as by succession by opposition political parties in Liberia and Sierra Leone. But the moral of the story is the need not just for ‘free and fair’ elections – but credible elections. That is, elections that maintain the integrity of the people’s vote even in the face of ‘Version 2.0 electoral fraud’ – the manipulation of electoral technology (ironically) intended to protect the people’s vote, as in Kenya. Fourth and finally, new peace and security threats arising from long-standing grievances – as in the Lake Chad basin and in the Sahel.

Where do we need to go one asks? We can (and should) be proud of the African peace and security architecture. But we need to admit that it works better in some situations than in others. On the most intractable situations, the alignment required between domestic, sub-regional, regional and external pressures is simply not optimal – preventing the decisive action that so many Africans want to see and don’t.

Think here of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo or South Sudan. The principle of subsidiarity is not working as it should, with the responsible regional economic communities and the African Union not being on the same page, enabling belligerents and protagonists to play a ‘Tom and Jerry, cat and mouse’ game with the interveners. Or think here of the Sahel. With its plethora of external interventions. Including by bilaterals outside of the United Nations framework. Collaboration between the AU and the UN is now understood as being expedient, necessary and inevitable. But there is still tension within the UN – especially amongst its permanent Security Council members, who still feel they can act unilaterally in their (colonial) former spheres of influence if they disagree with the multilateral approach. And there is also tension between the AU and the UN as concerns the appropriate allocation and distribution of resources.

Moussa Faki Mahamat, Chair of the AU Commission: Yes, Africans must have the courage to recognise and address our own problems but the UN must also address calls to reform (including of the UN Security Council) …

How much of that is our own responsibility? Moussa Faki Mahamat, current Chair of the AU Commission noted that, yes, Africans must have the courage to recognise and address our own problems – and end our reticence as concerns decisive AU action when required. But he also called for the UN to address the calls to reform (including of the UN Security Council) and address the demand for some of the UN’s assessed contributions to find their way back to the AU. Ownership of our problems is, yes, about our own analysis and intellectual work. But it’s also about African actors being ahead, leading – with the UN (or individual externals) accompanying, not substituting.

‘Africa is one, indivisible.’ If we really believe that today, so very much more is required of us at the national level. So very much more is required of us at the continental level too.

Published by the good folks at The Elephant.

The Elephant is a platform for engaging citizens to reflect, re-member and re-envision their society by interrogating the past, the present, to fashion a future.