Last Tuesday it was the 20th anniversary of Mandela's release from Robben Island. And what was practically the whole of South Africa talking about...? President Zuma's sex life!! As you probably know by now, a newspaper las Sunday published the exclusive that Zuma had fathered his 20th child. The baby born last October however, was the result of an extra-marital affair with Sonono Khoza (39), the daughter of football magnate and member of the World Cup organising committee Irvin Khoza. Ever since the story broke, all of the South African media, the blogosphere, the twittersphere has been of fire, discussing the matter. As an example, Thought Leader, the opinion portal of the newspapater Mail and Guardian, and the top ranked blog in Africa, according to Afrigator, has published numerous posts on the matter, by different columnists. Just listing some of their titles gives an idea of what are the most important problemas and aspects which derive from the whole story: for example, Michael Trapido - Is Zuma's sex drive out of control?; Marius Redelinghuys - Umshini wethu weSex; Janice Winter - Father of the nation? In that case, the personal is public, Dad ; Khaya Dlanga - The president is public property; Alex Matthews - Why Zuma's sex life in endangering millions; Christi van der Westhuizen - The ‘bonus’ of polygamy, but only if you’re ‘indigenous’ (Part 1), etc
South African President Jacob Zuma with his fifth wife Thobeka Mabhija, whom he married in January (Jerome Delay, Reuters)
I once read something along the lines that (can't remember or find the exact quote): "political scandals in Italy are about always money, and in England about sex", pointing out that each country has a distinctive character that dictates what constistutes a scandal and what is an acceptable, or unproblematic behaviour. In this case South African society and the country's recent history dictate a series of fault-lines which usually dictate how politics is conducted and how public opinion tends to get divided. Most of these fault-lines, which include: the racial legacy of apartheid, how to deal with cultural diversity in the "rainbow nation", the HIV-AIDS epidemy, Zuma's character and his contrast to both Mandela and Mbeki... have been touched in this saga, along with more universal concerns such as: the responsibility of politicians, and the public/private division. Thus, as the story broke the ANC refused to comment alleging that the party had "always made a distinction between people’s personal affairs and their public responsibilities. Insofar as we are concerned, the alleged relationship of the president and anyone should be treated as such”. On a similar note, Julius Malema, president of the ANC Youth League, argued that: “We are Africans and sitting here all of us [sic], Zuma is our father so we are not qualified to talk about that”; an explanation even more questionable as it sought to bring a cultural argument to defend Zuma's actions (in this case the respect for elders).
But the indefensible character of the extra-marital affair, together with Zuma's baggage, and the HIV-AIDS epidemy in South Africa, soon began to weight on the judgements passed on the President - who on Wednesday was forced to admith the paternity of the child (and announced that he would take two days off, because he was exhausted). Let us remember that Zuma was accused (and later acquitted) of raping a young HIV-positive woman in 2006, and that during the trial he admitted having (unprotected) sex with her and infamously declared to have had a shower to prevent being infected by HIV/AIDS (something which earned him a shower-head, courtesy of cartoonist Zapiro, only recently removed - more on this story here). This was an unacceptable behaviour from a South African public figure (and even more so from a future president), but Zuma appeared to have mended his way in last year's AIDS Day speech, widely praised by NGOs and pressure groups, and in which he announced that Anti-Retro Virals would be made available to all HIV positive babies, and that, although mistakes had been made, the government would now lead the HIV-AIDS fight in South Africa, and that himself was preparing to take an HIV test.
A Zapiro cartoon showing Zuma and his shower.
Now, the announcement of this extra-marital paternity threatens to un-do all his work on this deparment, and appears to be affecting his support among the public, and perhaps more crucially among members of the Alliance. Thus, the M&G reports today that leaders of the ANC Youth League, COSATU, and the SACP, although not making openly hostile comments, "are known to have opined privately that his behaviour was simply indefensible". I have written more extensively here, about Zuma's need for delicately balancing the forces within and outside his government if he wants to successfully lead the South African government. It also seems clear now, that the popular support that he enjoyed when he was invested in April last year is quickly diminishing on the face of contiuned economic hardship, and that the political support that he needs, is only being harmed by his "bedroom antics".
On Sunday I wrote about Spanish PM Zapatero addressing African leaders at the opening of the 14th ordinary African Union Summit in Addis Abeba, and how he stuck to generalities on his speech. The summit finished yesterday, and, keeping in the line, African leaders made some interesting declarations but did not push through any revolutionary decisions. Nevertheless, I have tought it may be a good idea to put together the most important outcomes of the summit:
The most commented aspect of the meeting, as it is often the case in African politics, was a question of leadership. Thus, the earlier part of the summit was dominated by a bitter controversy: the desire of the AU Chairman, Muammar Al Gaddafi, to exten his one-year term. During his tenure, Gaddafi has been the centre of numerous controversies (some of these have been mentioned before in this blog - for example, here and here), but this time he had to give up and cede the AU Chairmanship to Malawian president Bingu Wa Mutharika. This change to a presidency on the south of the continent was part of an established rotating system, but after Gaddafi's wishes were ignored - something that some consider as an "rare glimpse of courage" from African leaders - Gaddafi accused the "political elite of the continent" of lacking "political awareness and hence the political determination”, and set his sight on a new international role - this time as leader of the League of Arab states.
Newly elected AU Chairman Bingu Wa Mutharika (Photo Reuters)
On the main theme of the conference “Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in Africa: Challenges and Prospects for Development”, not much appears to have been advanced. There was, of course the unavoidable declaration of good intentions at the closing ceremony, with the Chairman Wa Mutharika pointing out the need to "put in place a food security program to alleviate poverty in the next five years; the need to develop transport and telecommunications, and connect countries through ICTs; and the development of energy". But these declarations are not enough and ICT analysts and experts still think there is much work to be done, and that sometimes the AU focuses on the wrong areas.
A number of other topics were however also discussed at the AU summit, such as:
- the dissolution of NEPAD - after nearly ten years in which it failed to deliver a single project - and its substitution by a new agency - the NEPAD Planning and Coordination Agency (NPCA) - formally integrated within the AU's structures.
- on the inauguration of 2010 as the "Year of Peace and Security in Africa", Wa Mutharika also declared "war on unconstitutional change of government on the African soil and resolve to take strong necessary punitive action against all authors of coup d'etats and those that provide them the means to unseat duly elected governments", and pressed for the AU to take a harder stance on coup leaders in countries like Madagascar, Mauritania and Guinea (with measures being announced next week).
- a letter from Eritrea was circulated among the leaders attending the summit, accusing Ethiopia of blocking Eritrea's participation at AU events by failing to extend appropiate guarantees to its officials.
- AU leaders also considered, according to the Chairman of the AU Comission Jean Ping, offering "land and naturalization benefits" to Haitians affected by the earthquake and who may seek to return to the African continent.
- at the the summit, the AU also endorsed South Africa's candidature for a non-permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, on the elections that will take place at the General Assembly in October this year.
- finally, at the summit, the AU also unveiled its new flag, selected from those put forward after the call for new ideas made in 2007.
There is no doubt that during the more than 150 years that it has existed,photography has changed the way we relate to the world around us. In a way, in the words of Susan Sontag, has altered the notion "of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe" (On Photography, 1971, p.3). Regarding the African continent, photography has also played a role. The "construction" of the African continent during the nineteenth and twentieth century by racist and colonial discourses has been based not only on words, spoken or written, but also and perhaps more powerfully, on images. Sontag notes "there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate, by seeing them as they never see themselves... ; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed" (On Photography, 1971, p .14). The profound relationship between the construction of an European imaginary of colonised Africa and photography has been explored numerous times. One of the most interesting examples may be the book " Images and empires: visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa ", edited by Paul S. Landau and Deborah D. Kaspin. In the Spanish context, this kind of colonial imagery is vividly portrayed in the book of Pere Ortín and Vic Pereira "Mbini: Hunters of images in colonial Guinea .
But while the Europeans used the "colonising camera" to create an image of Africa that corresponded to his racist discourse that justified colonial occupation, the camera was used during all this time for Africans to create their own discourses. Already during the nineteenth century African individuals and families posed in studio photography sessions that became a way to portray and create an alternative image to that suggested by Europeans. During the twentieth century, with cheaper and more easily available cameras, this construction of an alternative discourse began to democratise, being accessible to more people. With the advent of independence, many photographers became true chroniclers of the optimism and hope of these countries. Some of these chroniclers would become two of the best known African photographers: Malick Sidibé and Seidou Keita , both from Mali.
Merengue dancer, 1964, © Malick Sidibé. Photo courtesy Fifty One Fine Art Photography
Via LensCulture
Girls on Bike © Seydou Keita (via BBC Photography )
Today, fifty years after the independence of most of African countries, there are many photographers on the continent, each with different interests, languages and styles. Many blogs often comment on the work of these artists and journalists that convey different images of the continent. For example, Twiga recently pointed out a number of South African photographer (including the photographer Nontsikelelo Veleko, whose exhibition "Welcome to Paradise" can be seen in Casa África in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria until 19 February).
Other blogs like Africa is a Country , and A Bombastic Element , periodically make entries on the photography and photographers of the continent such as the Ghanaian Nana Kofi Acqua , or the South African Steve Bloom .
Despite these variety of images and photographers, the representation of the continent continues to be often manipulated by different discourses: in this case the images of primitive peoples used to justify colonial occupation have given way to images of poverty, wars, famines and disasters that support an image of Africa as a place with no present and no future. To counter this, various initiatives have emerged that seek to offer another image of the continent. An example of this is Joan Bardeletti's project "Middle Classes in Africa" (via Africa is a Country ), which seeks to portray the African middle classes, and has started in Kenya and Ivory Coast. The choice of this population group is due both to the fact that it is growing rapidly, as to the fact that it has traditionally been seen as a symbol of Western development absent on the continent.
Kady Camara in his internet cafe and photocopying in Abidjan (Photo Middle Classes in Africa )
Another such project is "Africa Knows" , a Kenyan initiative that seeks to tell another story about Africa, through photojournalism and creative writing and using social networks and new technologies. In addition, photos of AfricaKnows can be bought online in various formats to support the project.
Been Together for Too Long (Photo: Joshua Wanyama)
No one doubts that Ghana is one of the Africa's most stable and democratic countries on the continent, and one with the excellent future prospects in terms of economic growth. All of this can be seen in the fact that, for the past few monts, Ghana has mostly been in the news for good reasons: first, the elections held in January last year, were not only extremely fought and exciting, but also resulted in a peaceful transfer of power from the ruling NPP to the new President John Atta Mills, of the NDC. Later last year, President Obama chose Ghana as his first state visit to Africa. Furthermore, the discovery of off-shore oil in various locations of its coas may signal a new and important source of income.
Slogans and campaign colours line Ghana's streets. (Peter Lewenstein) (Flickr/BBC)
On this last point however, it is necessary to highight the mixed blessing that finding natural resources can sometimes be, for often finding oil in countries whose government is not as transparent as it may be desired turns out to be a source of worries - a "resource curse" as some have chose to label it. Uganda, for example, finds itself in a similar situation. I doubt however that this may be the case in Ghana, given that, as we have pointed out it is a stable and well-governed country, but extra-care when dealing with these sort of topics, is never a bad idea. In fact, some undesirable consequences that may derive from Ghana's oil findings and its emergence as a leading west african economy were pointed out in an interesting article in the Guardian on Tuesday. The article reports on the OECD warning that the Ghanaian government's decision to become an offshore financial centre, with the help from Barclays Bank, may have a negative impact. "The last thing Africa needs is a tax haven in the centre of the African continent", said Jeffrey Owens, head of the OECD's Tax Centre. Similarly, Wilson Prichard also pointed out that: "Aside from the general social costs associated with the operation of tax havens globally, in the absence of a very strong regulatory framework and very strong standards of transparency there's a particularly high risk that a tax haven in west Africa...could facilitate large-scale corruption and tax evasion, and pose a correspondingly large risk to good governance and economic growth in the region."
These are all important arguments against the decision, to which I would add my own hostilty to tax havens (everywhere) given the harmful role they play within the international economy, allowing for tax evasion and capital flights (which mostly affect poorer countries). Furthermore, the current economic thinking, after the financial crash that led to the current economic crisis, favours greater economic regulation and is openly hostile to tax havens. For this reason it seems important not to over-stress the fact that Ghana's mobe would be a negative one because it is in Africa.
It is the very nature of tax havens and their lack of transparency, that allows for corrupt practices to appear - not the fact that this would be an African tax-haven, Let's remember that one of the most important tax-haven is Switzerland, right at the centre of Europe. Clark Gascoigne, in the Financial Task Force blogs, puts this accross succintly: "Just because Switzerland doesn’t physically border an African country doesn’t mean that it’s not facilitating corruption within Africa. Indeed, quite the country is true. Just consider the case of Mobutu from the DR Congo. It’s great that the OECD now wants to make the connection between corruption and financial secrecy. However, they can’t pretend that this is only a problem in Africa." .
This is, for me the key aspect to this debate. Taxes are a crucial element to any country's economic development and progress. And the decision to chose one or another tax regime corresponds only to the government and the population of the country - in this case Ghana. Taxes are also (boring as it may sound), a fascinating topic - of which I know next to nothing but I'd like to know more about. And looking for more information on takes and Africa for this post I have just learn about the Tax Justice Network for Africa (TJN-A), a pan-African initiative launched at the World Social Forum in Nairobi in January 2007, which: "aims to promote socially just, democratic and progressive taxation systems in Africa. We advocate for tax systems which are favourable to the poor and finance public goods. We challenge harmful tax policies and practices which favour the wealthy and which encourage unacceptable inequality." The TJN-A, is part of the Tax Justice Network (their blog is here), and has just launched its first newsletter - which can be accessed online, as a pdf). This, no doubt, is an extremely interesting and necessary initiative which I am looking forward to know more about.
Last Tuesday, Freedom House published its annual report on the state of political and civil liberties around the world, titled "Freedom in the World 2010". In this entry I will briefly highlight some of the aspects related to sub-Saharan Africa, but first, a couple of points on the global situation.
Thus, in the overview essay that accompanies the release of the report, FH points out how:
“For the fourth consecutive year, declines have trumped gains. This represents the longest continuous period of deterioration in nearly 40-years…Declines for freedom were registered in 40 countries, representing 20 percent of the world’s polities.” This essay also points out four different trends which constitute the most serious threats for civil and political liberties world wide. One of these, the re-emergence of coups d’etat, appears as a throwback to the past, while the other three are rather new trends, and include: “authoritarian crackdowns on front-line human rights defenders”; “authoritarian crackdowns on journalists and bloggers” and the “challenges from nonstate actors, including religious extremists and drug lords”.
Regarding sub-Saharan Africa, the region is signalled as the one which has “suffered the largest setbacks, with 15 countries registering declines and only 4 securing gains”. According to FH, “the most disturbing trend” is how “influential” states in the region, such as Nigeria and Kenya, despite an apparent improvement in the past, continue their recent backsliding. Other countries mentioned in the report which had managed democratic achievements, but appear to be turning around, include Botswana and Lesotho, with “Lesotho moving from Free to Partly Free status”. Also three countries in the region experienced coups: Guinea, Madagascar, and Niger. And “in the case of Guinea, the military takeover was followed by a terrifying rampage in which soldiers massacred and raped peaceful protesters.” Meles Zenawi’s government in Ethiopia is also criticised for having “persecuted the political opposition, tilted the political playing field, and suppressed civil society”.
Also extremely disheartening is the continued existence of countries with the worse record possible (a score of 7 for both political and civil liberties). In fact, of the nine countries of the world which receive this rating, five of them are in Africa: Equatorial Guinea, Libya, Sudan, Eritrea and Somalia. Declines were also recorded in other repressive states such as Gabon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
On the positive side, improvements were noted in four countries: Malawi, Burundi, Togo, and Zimbabwe. On Zimbabwe, the report points out that “harsh conditions eased somewhat after opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was brought into a unity Government” but that the regime remains “among the continent’s most repressive.”
