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A p r i l - M a y 2 0 1 4 A f r i c A T o m o r r o w

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Issue No. 0003 April - May 2014 ISSN 1821 - 9136

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SOUTH AFRICA: THINGS TO WORRY ABOUT AFTER MANDELA

BOOKS: AMERICA’S DEADLIEST EXPORT

AfricaTomorrow

How terror gangs reapfrom African elephants

PLUS: Letting the

Chinese sleep on our beds

Tanzania 8000 TZS; Kenya 450 KSH; Uganda 13,000UGS; South Africa 50 ZAR; Botswana 42.64 BWP; Rwanda 3,200 RWF; Burundi 7650 BIF; Sudan 22 SDG; Ethiopia 94 ETB; Zambia 25,000 ZMK; Malawi 1635 MWK; EuroZone 3.70

The top five opportunities to invest in Ethiopia

Al Qaedabusiness

COUNTRY REPORT

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SOUTH SUDAN: WAR ZIPS UP ALL WARS

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Issue No. 0002 November - December 2013

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SSN 1821 - 9136

PAGE 40

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PAGE 36

WHO IS WHO: WOMEN

TO WATCH IN AFRICA

PROFILE: POLITICIAN WHO IS

VIEYING FOR SAINTHOOD

MALAWI: SHINING JOYCE

BANDA LANDS IN TROUBLE

Tanzania 8000 TZS; Kenya 450 KSH; Uganda 13,000UGS; South Africa 50 ZAR; Botswana 42.64 BWP; Rwanda 3,200

RWF; Burundi 7650 BIF; S

udan 22 SDG; Ethiopia 94 ETB; Zambia 25,000 ZMK; Malawi 1635 MWK; EuroZone 3.70

The AU’s

Project

of Shame

Westgate:

The Jewish

Connection

How Kenya

prepares terrorist

attacks for

political reasons

AfricaTomo

rrow

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Iss

ue No. 0003 April - May 2014

ISSN 1821 - 9136

PAGE 36

SOUTH AFRICA: THINGS TO

WORRY AFTER MANDELA IS GONE

BOOKS: AMERICA’S

DEADLIES EXPORT

AfricaTomo

rrow

How terror gangs reap

from African elephants

PLUS:

Letting the

Chinese

sleep on

our beds

Tanzania 8000 TZS; Kenya 450 KSH; Uganda 13,000UGS; South Africa 50 ZAR; Botswana 42.64 BWP; Rwanda 3,200

RWF; Burundi 7650 BIF; S

udan 22 SDG; Ethiopia 94 ETB; Zambia 25,000 ZMK; Malawi 1635 MWK; EuroZone 3.70Top 5

opportunities

to invest in

Ethiopia

Al Qaeda

business

COUNTRY REPORT

PAGE 14

SOUTH SUDAN: WAR

ZIPS UP ALL WARS

PAGE 40

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CONTENTS

36

2245

Special Report Man of the Century

Who is who Ten most powerful

men in Af-rica

Integration Dissecting

Kikwete, Kagame

differences

Stability South Sudan: War to end all wars?

MANAGING EDITORChris Kidanka

COPY EDITORFili Karashani

SUB EDITORRogart Kissanga

EDITORIAL ASSISTANTJane Shussa

COUNTRY REPRESENTATIVES:

UGANDA Paul Busharizi

ZIMBABWE Munya Mugowo

ETHIOPIA Anaclet Rwegayura

MALAWI Lucky Mkandawire

USA Francis Semwanza

DESIGNCreatiive Print

ART-EDITORSecelela Balisidya

DESIGN ASSISTANTChris Kidanka

CHARTSLyatura Njabha

ILLUSTRATIONSKing Kinya

RESEARCHPeter Tumaini-Mungu

MARKETING MANAGERSilas Bwire

CIRCULATIONSilas Bwire

AFRICA TOMORROW all right reserved Neither this publication nor any part of it may be repro-duced, stored in a retieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means.

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34

20

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The first time I came across the saying ‘a hand that stirs the pot can also run the country’ is when I happened to be inside the offices of a feminist pressure group in Dar es Salaam.

I deduced that they were trying to counter the macho attitude that for women, theirs is the kitchen and they should let the men sit under the ‘trees of the wise’ to decide on the fate of everybody.

But we also know that this is not typically African – a continent which has had its fair share of great female traditional leaders who even conquered male-lead territories. The cur-rent stability of the once nearly failed state of Liberia, under the leadership of Madam Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, speaks louder than words.

The war-torn Central African Republic, after several failures of its past leaders, has a new interim leader in Catherine Samba-Panza and she has immediately called for restoration of order and reconciliation in the country, as they prepare for formal elections.

We hope Samba-Panza’s rise to power marks a “new beginning” and an end to the senseless violence in that country which went beyond reli-gious conflicts.

With no ties to the fighting groups, Samba-Panza’s neutrality is refreshing as she strives to lead her people like a loving mother who embraces all her children.

What makes us so optimistic is not only her professional background as a lawyer, activist and business woman, but also the positive way she has been accepted by the rival groups.

A spokesman for a major group of anti-Bala-ka fighters, Sebastien Wenezoui, said of Samba-Panza: “She is a woman who can bring peace”.

Attacks by Seleka fighters prompted revenge attacks by the Christian militia known as ‘anti-Balaka’, fuelling violence and slaughter between Christian and Muslim communities that had lived side-by-side and in peace for many years.

Samba-Panza’s installation as interim leader should attract more world attention to a country which had been almost completely neglected by the international community.

The CAR has been a scene of perpetual domestic instability, with five military coups and several rebellions since gaining indepen-

dence from France in 1960. In 1966, Jean-Bedel Bokassa — self-proclaimed emperor and president-for-life — deposed David Dacko, the country’s first president, and instituted a rule that was emblematic of the hyper-patrimonial African dictators of the 1960s and ’70s.

The decades that followed brought more military misrule, shallow democratization and a hollowing out of the state, which put the CAR on a downward development spiral. As a result, despite its mineral riches, the country stagnates near the bottom of the UN Human Develop-ment Index, which measures the level of devel-opment around the world using economic and social data. The CAR ranks 180th out of 186 countries on the index.

The new leader must play her cards intel-ligently to win international support and yet resist external pressure.

This is because years of institutional decay have left most Central Africans virtually mar-ginalised, creating fertile ground for recurrent rebellions and violent coups.

The current CAR crisis is not simply the result of domestic failures. External actors have repeatedly destabilized the country by exploit-ing its institutional weaknesses and political fault lines.

African countries should render support to Samba-Panza, who is seemingly striving to reconcile who she called ‘my Seleka and anti-Balaka children’

EDITOR’S PALAVERWar-torn CAR needs motherly leadership

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SHAPING THE FUTURE OF THE CONTINENTSHAPING THE FUTURE OF THE CONTINENT

Issue No. 0003 April - May 2014 ISSN 1821 - 9136

PAGE 36

SOUTH AFRICA: THINGS TO WORRY AFTER MANDELA IS GONE

BOOKS: AMERICA’S DEADLIES EXPORT

AfricaTomorrow

How terror gangs reapfrom African elephants

PLUS: Letting the

Chinese sleep on our beds


Top 5 opportunities to invest in Ethiopia

Al Qaedabusiness

COUNTRY REPORT

PAGE 14

SOUTH SUDAN: WAR ZIPS UP ALL WARS

PAGE 40 Our Cover:A graphic work depicting Al Qaeda millitant brandishing an AK-47 rifle behind African elephants


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COVER STORY

Next time you hear about massive poaching of Afri-can wildlife, know that the perpetrators are on a mission to finance the

killing of innocent people, who might include your brother or sister.

A very close link has been estab-lished between Somali poachers and Al Qaeda-connected militant groups, in a bid to raise funds to facilitate terrorist activities.

According to reports, besides Al-Qaeda, other affiliates accused of being involved in poaching include Al-Shabaab, Jama’atul Mujahideen, and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami of Bangla-desh, who are said to be raising funds through poaching for ivory, tiger pelts, and rhino horns in the Kaziranga jun-gle in northeastern India and Africa.

A two-year investigation that ended last year, carried out by the non-profit conservation organization Elephant Action League (EAL), found “very concrete connections . . . [between] al-Shabaab and poaching”, EAL executive

director Andrea Crosta said in a report. Between one and three tons of ivory,

worth USD200,000 to USD 600,000, enter Somalia each month through Al-Shabaab, according to the EAL. It then disappears into the dark hulls of ships and airplanes bound for destinations worldwide.

Further reports affirm that the markets for such products are in Far Eastern nations, notably China, Viet-nam and Thailand. The demand for ivory in China appears to be fueled by unprecedented growth of its middle class, said to have risen to more than 300 million people over the last 15 to 20 years – or 50 per cent of that country’s urban population. China’s middle class is expected to grow further to between 700-800 million.

Poaching of African wildlife not only threatens the very existence of the various animal species, but also poses security risks to western powers to the extent that the British House of Lords and the American Senate have held serious discussions on the matter, urg-

ing their governments to take action.

British concern Last February, The British govern-

ment hosted the two-day conference, three African leaders from Tanzania, Chad, Ethiopia, Gabon and Botswana to join English celebrities from Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince Harry to David Beckham to help drive home its anti-poaching message

Representatives of world govern-ments meeting in London vowed to put stockpiles of ivory “beyond use” and extend a ban on its trade in a bid to save African elephants from extinction.

British Foreign Secretary William likened wildlife poaching to global crim-inal industry that ranks with drugs, the arms trade and people trafficking.

“We are at the 11th hour to prevent the wildlife trade destroying some of the most extraordinary species in the world, but today I believe we have begun to turn the tide, if we follow up everything that has been agreed,” Hague said.

POACHING

The terrorists’ mega projectTo fight poaching is about more than just conservation. It is a do-or-die security matter impos-sible for a single country to tackle - and involving big powers. CHRis KidANKA

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He said tens of thousands of ele-phants were killed last year along with more than 1,000 rhinos, taken by an illegal trade that also threatens tigers and many other species.

The conference, attended by del-egates from more than 40 countries, linked poaching to international crime, political corruption and even terror-ism. In a communique, participants said poaching “fuels a cycle of instabil-ity, affecting poverty levels as well as regional and international security.”

The international ivory trade was banned in 1989, but one-off sales of stockpiles have been permitted by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species. Conservation-ists say that has helped fuel demand for the illegal elephant tusks.

The link between international criminal networks and illegal wildlife trade has been repeatedly brought to international attention, but relatively very little was done before.

The issue first came to light a decade ago when Wolverhampton Uni-versity in the UK released their “Inter-national Wildlife Trade and Organised Crime” study of 2002, which revealed that Colombian drug cartels, the Rus-sian Mafia and Japanese Yakuza gangs were deeply involved in poaching to finance their operations.

Officials manning wildlife bodies as well as non-governmental organisa-tion conservationists have been woo-ing United States support believing that after that country froze Al Qaeda sources of funds, the terror organisation turned to African wildlife as an alterna-tive means of survival.

For instance, when a number of conservationists from Africa and global financial experts were invited to give testimonies on poaching by the US Sen-ate Committee on Foreign Relations in May 2012, under the banner of “Ivory and Insecurity: The Global Implications of Poaching in Africa”, they drew strong connections between poaching and regional and global security.

A former director of the Kenya Wild-life Service (KWS), Julius Kipng’etich, told the committee that Al-Shabaab, the Somali-based Al-Qaeda affiliate, has been benefiting from poaching.

Kipng’etich’s sentiments were sup-ported by Tom Cardamone, managing director of the Global Financial Integ-

rity (GFI). However, Cardamone was more candid in connecting poaching with terrorism.

He told the Committee that poach-ing and illegal wildlife trade are ways deployed by terrorists to raise money for their activities.

GFI is a US-based research organ-isation that probes how secrecies inher-ent in the global financial system can facilitate tax evasion, money laundering and corruption, as well as the implica-tions on global security. The oversight body estimates that the global value of illicit trade in wildlife stands at between USD 7.8 billion and USD 10 billion.

In response to repeated calls, the US recently announced plans to destroy its 25-year-old stockpile of seized ivory to send a message to the world about the crisis of the ivory trade.

In its own gesture to express com-mitment to fighting poaching, China has also recently destroyed its stockpile of ivory. But on the black market, Afri-can ivory are still widely sold.

Poverty linkPoverty is also blamed for fueling

poaching since poachers would bribe game warders and villagers in order to let them kill the animals for their tusks.

The key to fighting poaching, there-fore, is to reduce the poverty levels that motivate Africans to do the dirty work of buyers, say conservation groups.

It is these same groups that post shocking photographs of elephants and rhinos that have had their faces ripped-off for their tusks and horns.

“Thousands of people are willing to risk their lives to kill an elephant,” Crosta said. By March 2013, 150 of them had been killed in South Africa alone. “It’s such easy money for them,” he said.

James Deutsch, executive director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Afri-ca Program, said that “fighting poverty

has to be a key part of the long-term solution to this problem.” He noted that the WCS is promoting agricultural development programmes in Zambia and ecotourism in Congo and Gabon starring the elephants.

The US White House has vowed to stage a world challenge through the US Agency for International Development, in which competing teams will use technology to analyze animal DNA and track the mobile phones of criminals.

To alleviate poverty, the United States and its partners want to funnel more money into African wildlife tour-ism to create jobs, farming assistance to provide families with food and money, and other measures that will lessen the appeal of the wages that middlemen pay to kill animals.

A record 668 rhinos were slaugh-tered for their horns in South Africa alone last year, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Two-thirds of elephants in Gabon’s Minkebe National Park — about 11,000 — have been slaughtered since 2004, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

According to Richard Vigne, CEO of Ol Pejeta Conservancy: “Crime syndi-cates are involved and demand (primar-ily from China) has now reached such a high level that the price payable to the poacher for raw ivory is reported to be as high as KShs 20,000 (USD 235) per kilogram - or KShs 400,000 (USD 4650) for a 20kg tusk. The KWS and other law enforcement agencies are try-ing their best to contain the situation, but are being overwhelmed”.

The situation is even more alarm-ing in Tanzania where rhinos and elephants are on the brink of extinction. Recently, the country’s new minister for natural resources and tourism, Lazaro Nyalandu, pleaded for help from the international community in the fight against poachers, saying the local work-force is not sufficient.

To Page 8

Cover Story

A quick calculation puts Al Shabaab’s monthly income from ivory at between USD200,000 and USD600,000. Maintaining an army of roughly 5,000 men, each earning USD300, demands at least USD1,500,000 a month, of which the ivory trade can supply a big chunk.


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Cover Story

He said millions of dollars should be injected through the Tanzania Wildlife Protection Fund to combat the vice by employing more wardens whose num-ber is decreasing due to being gunned down by poachers and their own retire-ment.

Britain, Germany, France, the Euro-pean Union, the United Nations and the African Development Bank have pledged support.

US involvementThe United States is one of the larg-

est markets for illegal ivory, and the Justice Department prosecutes traffick-ers and buyers using a police network known as Operation Crash.

Officials estimate that only 10 per cent of horn and ivory is seized from the illegal global market, worth tens of billions of dollars. Police action in the United States helps blunt criticism in parts of the world where US demands for stronger policing are considered hypocrisy. Fish and Wildlife officials have called on other nations to destroy stockpiles of ivory that some want to sell legally to raise cash. The agency hoped to set an example by destroy-ing its entire stockpile of seized ivory in Colorado for the first time, but the move was postponed.

“To stop demand, the first step is to end all sales of ivory within the United States”, Deutsch said. “The US is an important consumer of illegal ivory, and we need to put our own house in order if we are going to ask Asian and African countries to do the same.”

The role of Al Shabaab The EAL said their investigation

followed the Al Shabaab ivory trail into Somalia, requiring assistance from cou-rageous local Somalis who wanted to rid their country of the oppression and killing that is Shabaab’s trademark.

The assistance was possible because for most Somalis, Al Shabaab’s rise to power may have been popular, but it now offers a grim future for those Somalis who prefer to live and practice Islam in a peaceful and traditional way.

Al Shabaab’s success can be attrib-

uted to its ability to pay its soldiers adequately. A young Al Shabaab fighter can earn USD300 a month from his regional commander as a loyalty fee while his food, water, khat (a local drug also known as mirrar) and weaponry is additionally supplied by Shabaab lead-ership.

“In comparison, a soldier fighting for the Transitional Federal Government (TFG), fresh out of Kenyan and Ugan-dan training camps, will have a hard time earning as much, forcing him quite literally to bite the radical bullet and change sides,” says EAL in its report.

In effect, ivory serves as one of the

lifelines of Al Shabaab, enabling it to maintain its grip over young soldiers, most of who are not radically moti-vated. According to a source within the militant group, between one to three tons of ivory, fetching a price of roughly USD200 per kilo, pass through the ports in southern Somalia every month.

A quick calculation puts Al Sha-baab’s monthly income from ivory at between USD200,000 and USD600,000. Maintaining an army of roughly 5,000 men, each earning USD300, demands at least USD1,500,000 a month, of which the ivory trade can supply a big chunk.

What becomes clear from the testi-monies of poachers, brokers and Al Sha-baab members, is the degree of interest and importance which the ivory trade has within the organization.

Al Shabaab’s involvement in the trade could be purely opportunistic, a result of recruiting members who previ-ously made their living out of poaching

and who are now putting their ‘talents’ to use in their new occupation.

The more plausible reason, however, given al-Shabaab’s organizational skill and relative military success, is that the trafficking is the result of clear calcula-tion and strategic financial planning as well as strong contacts with interna-tional criminal syndicates and brokers.

The role of al-Shabaab in ivory trafficking is of immense concern. The harsh environment in which they oper-ate, deprived of natural resources or infrastructure to raid (such as in east-ern DRC or the Niger delta), makes the ivory and rhino horn trade that much

more important. Al Shabaab’s role is not limited to poaching and broker-age, but is a major link in the chain, enabling them to reap huge profits from the mark-up in the trade. Al Shabaab’s strength and conviction to continue its fight will increase its need for fighters, arms, ammunition and other equip-ment, and increase its need for funds.

As the West continues to fight radi-cal terrorist organizations through seiz-ing assets in offshore bank accounts, straw companies and “charities”, these organizations, including Al Shabaab, will rely increasingly on trafficking in contraband as a source of finance.

Unfortunately, shutting down Al Shabaab’s illegal activities in south-ern and central Somalia is simply not possible in the current circumstances. The TFG is barely able to hold on to a 4-square kilometer stretch of land around the capital Mogadishu or to pay its soldiers, let alone orchestrate a coor-dinated crackdown.

How terrorist groups make moneyFrom Page 7

Elephant kiiled for its tusks

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A p r i l - M a y 2 0 1 4 A f r i c A T o m o r r o wCover Story

YOUR

Write to the EditorThe Editor invites letters on any subject. The letters should be short and straight to the point. They should include the author’s name and address. If you preffer anonimyty tell us so. Email to. [email protected] expressed in the letters are those of individual authors and they do not necessarily reflect the views of Africa Tomorrow or its publisher

letters

EditorAs the continent gets set to adopt a

modern economy, banking on its rich deposits of oil, gas, minerals and other natural resources, and a political will to back it all up, the western markets salivate.

Today, both Europe and North America are fully explored and their markets are close to saturation. What Europe did in the late 19th century, coming to Africa for land and manpower, be it in the form of slavery or cheap labour, is being repeated today, albeit in a different fashion, as more of a survival measure.

Programmes are being designed in the West purporting to help empower Africans, such as venture capital initiatives, but many of them end up benefiting the middlemen who would lure capital-hungry and technologically-backward businesses from Africa.

The wake of the Third Millennium is seeing many African countries announcing discoveries of gas, oil and rare minerals and calling for outside investors to ‘help’ harvest the riches.

Unfortunately, most of the negotiations do not forge the concept of South-South and are dependent on the North for capital and technology.

While our countries need economic growth to help cope with the modern times, it should be noted also that citizen empowerment is a must, so that Africans can be players in their own economies. European and North American businesses would no longer need to bring their finished products to Africa, but rather set their plants in Abuja or Dar es Salaam; to venture with the Dangotes and Bakhresas who already have existing businesses in their respective countries. It is of course up to the governments to ensure that the Bakhresas and Dangotes get a fair share under their stewardship.

It is worth noting that a fair number of governments have various initiatives to empower their citizens and give them an upper hand. Programmes such as South Africa’s policy of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) which, apart from being a moral initiative to redress the wrongs of the apartheid era, is also a pragmatic growth strategy that aims to realise that country’s full economic potential while helping to bring the black majority into the economic mainstream.

Samuel MwaibulaDar es Salaam

Tanzania

Empower locals to lead their national economies

The game Sudanese leaders play

Editor,The move by Sudanese President, Omar Al Bashir

to try to mediate South Sudan is very interesting. Al-Bashir. It looks like he doesn’t think that Machar will win the battle. He most probably offers help under condition that Salva Kiir will care for the security at the oil fields. He probably considering to ask Kiir to accept North-Sudanese military at the oil fields.

But he must forget about it because that would be like passing an elephant through an eye of a needle for South Sudanese to see North Sudan soldiers faces in South Sudan again. Al Bashir is already sup-porting Machar and he had been supplying Machar so-called “white army” with arms together with Qatar and those weapons are shipped into South Sudan Jonglei state by the UN peacekeepers planes.

For an average Joe and Jane consumptions, it is made to look like it is between Dinka versus Nuer. Though that guise is not far away from the truth, the game is between a corporate America and Europe-anointed Machar to get rid of Chinese oilmen and Salva Kiir, who wants the status quo, but made a mistake and sacked Machar who was his vice presi-dent and Machar had another idea, challenged his former boss by staging an attempted coup without proper coordination with his comrades from other tribes, whose some them are being supported by the US, but are now rounded up except Rebecca Nyandeng, the wife of the South Sudan founder, John Garang.

To cut the story short, the plot blew up in the face of Machar and his supporters in the US, Europe, Al Bashir and Qatar. Machar tribe is the only one now fighting the government of 63 tribes. And so Machar supporters have used their West corporate media to paint it as a tribal war between the Dinka of Salva Kiir and Nuer of Machar because the Dinka and Nuer rivalry is as accient as bible!

And this was done by Machar’s supporters to cover their tracks from the embarrassments that ensued. Bankers folks bankers, there will be little peace in the resources rich countries like South Sudan that are very weak and new little about the intrigues they used when they about to bust; create a war in a third world country.

Simon Mwamba,Ndola, Zambia

Editor,Most African countries consider Tanzania as a role model when it comes to mat-ters partaining to patriotism, pan Africanism and, most importantly, tranquility. Under the good leadership of Julius Nyerere, Tanzanians were recognised easily out of fellow Africans, for their unity, simplicity and honesty.Now the nation is in constitution-making process, Tanzanians should consider upholding their traditional values.They should not allow the process to separate them.

Dr. Mark Njuguna,Nairobi, Kenya

Best of luck Tanzanians in constitution-making


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COUNTRY REPORT

Top 5 Opportunities for Investment in Ethiopia A lot of good things can be said of Ethiopia. The country has one of the richest histories in the world and a sound economy. Investing there is not a bad idea. Here are five top opportunities to invest in the country. KURT DAVIS JR.

Capital investment is needed to take these business up to the next level and satisfy exponential growth of demand.

Times are chang-ing in the Horn of Africa and the larger East Africa region.

Ethiopia – once the byword for famine in the region – is now garnering attention from foreign investors. Sit-ting in the Sheraton Hotel in Addis Adaba, it is hard not to notice the number of private investors from Lon-don to Nairobi to Johannes-burg passing through and talking about the changing environment and potential

for investment in Ethiopia.Government officials

claim an average GDP growth of 10 to 11 percent over the past 7 years. Sup-porters and critics alike question these figures. International experts, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), sug-gest that actual growth numbers average 5 to 7 per-cent. Regardless of which figures are right – both are respectable – the buzz in the street is justified.

All the excitement can

overwhelm and confuse the first time visitor. “You hear all the talk and see all the news,” says one pri-vate equity investor from the US, “but when walking around you cannot exactly see where the opportunity [for investment in Ethiopia] is because there is still so much poverty on view.”

This article is the first of two parts and is for that investor and every other investor wondering about the best opportunities for investment in Ethiopia.

Here are my recommenda-tions from number 5 to number 1 in order of poten-tial return.

(5) Financial ServicesThe African financial

services sector has greatly benefited from international banks playing a role in pri-vate equity and expansion deals. But such activity has been absent in Ethiopia – home to Africa’s 9th largest economy and 2nd biggest population.

Private investors lurk

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around banks in Ethiopia, eager to jump into a sector not yet available to them. For now, all they can do is dream about the potential of “almost 90 million people, one of Africa’s biggest economies, and high GDP growth means opportunity for financial services,” says one insider at Standard Bank, “plus don’t forget the huge unbanked population.”

In Africa, the most banked populations are in Mauritius and South Africa at around 82 and 58 per-cent respectively as of 2012. Experts estimate that Ethi-opia’s unbanked population could be as high as 85 to 90 percent. As the Ethio-pian economy transitions to the international stage, financial infrastructure will have to facilitate access to the various under-served communities. The recent introduction of mobile bank-ing and related services is surely a step in the right direction.

(4) Telecom ServicesTelecommunications is

another restricted sector in Ethiopia. Experts estimate that mobile phone penetra-tion in Ethiopia hovers between 10 and 15 percent. Internet penetration is below 1 percent largely due to poor infrastructure and very high prices.

The Ethiopian popula-tion will surely surpass 90 million by end of 2013. What mobile phones and internet could do for a pop-ulation of that size is evi-dent in the stories coming out of Kenya and Nigeria.

“That’s gold,” says one telecom expert. “The upper limit of customers is unknown with a rapidly growing population and increasing incomes.”

The potential of the

telecom market is further evidenced by the Ethiopian government recently intro-duced mobile services for utility payments.

“Right now, the Ethio-pian government is trying to make back the money it paid for access to the fiber optic cable,” says a former Seacom employee, “but this should change over time.”

Telecom services would surely be number one on our list of investment opportunities if the sector were open to foreign invest-ment. As one insider says,

“[Telecommunications] is just starting to move in the country. Just wait and see.”

(3) Heavy ConstructionEthiopia’s infrastructure

spending, as a percentage of GDP, is the highest in Afri-ca. The Ethiopian govern-ment rightfully makes the delivery of infrastructural services, such as transport and energy, a focus of its development plan. Absent the government’s current and continued focus on infrastructure, the devel-opment story of Ethiopia

would hit a wall.Heavy construction sec-

tors, including cement and steel, are the ancillary ben-eficiaries of this infrastruc-ture build. The national building lottery is undergo-ing expansion in Piassa. As you drive out of Addis, you pass newly built affordable government housing or pri-vate housing developments; both promptly filling up after the final touches are added. Pass through Bole and expect to encounter changing roadways, as one road finishes construction and another undergoes it. “I don’t know which road is open today,” says my taxi driver.

It is not just the gov-ernment. All the buildings under construction in Addis are also a clear indication that those with money are investing in property.

Says Tsege, a local resident: “Walking around Addis is like walking through a major construc-tion site.”

The prices of cement and steel remain high in Ethiopia and also in Kenya and Tanzania, both of whom are potential export partners. Transportation and logistics still frustrate some companies, but such frustrations are eased by the government’s focus on transport, especially the rail corridor between Addis Ababa and the Port of Dji-bouti. Importing certain materials has confounded the industry, but the Ethio-pian government expedites access to foreign currency for those exporting in these industries.

Energy costs are also among the lowest on the continent. With the new hydro dams coming online

To Page 12

Country report

The Ethiopian potential highlighted of invest

As the Ethiopian economy transitions to the international stage, financial infrastructure will have to facilitate access to the various under-served communities.


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over the next few years, the Ethiopian government will ensure cheap energy for its people and make Ethiopia a potential energy exporter for the region.

The times are chang-ing in the Horn of Africa and the larger East Africa region. Ethiopia – once the byword for famine in the region – is garnering atten-tion from foreign investors.

(2) Education Ethiopia has no short-

age of universities – there are more than 30 across the country. The govern-ment has successfully put schools into most villages. As a result, primary school-ing continues to grow. Yet the literacy rate sits around 42 percent. This figure will improve over time. And

as both primary education attendance and literacy improves, the secondary level of education, specifi-cally universities and voca-tional schools, will become most attractive for private investment.

Furthermore, investing at this level presents multi-ple opportunities for scaling and developing infrastruc-ture. Institutions can scale across the country with Ethiopia’s much dispersed population – the country is not nearly as urbanised as its neighbors. Institutions can also potentially scale across borders as Africans demand better secondary schooling options because companies and investors require higher training. One Ethiopian univer-sity has already expanded operations to neighboring Somaliland.

One challenge investors will face in this sector is a consumer base that remains relatively poor. Income per capita was estimated at $450 in 2012, less than one-third of the sub-Saharan average of about $1,535.

“But with the return of the diaspora, a growing middle class, and Ethiopi-

ans’ strong desire to learn, the education sector will continue to grow,” says one local education consultant. “It is just a matter of price and what is offered by the institution.” Skills desired in the market (inside and outside Ethiopia) include nursing, engineering, and technology. “If the students are not hired here,” says the educator, “they will be hired in other countries as long as the best quality of education is being pro-vided.”

The changing dynamic of mobile phones and inter-net access can reduce the cost of soft infrastructure for institutions. Online and virtual training enables a group of institutions to share and fully utilise teachers across borders. Partnerships between insti-tutions in Ethiopia and

From Page 11

Country report

Institutions can also potentially scale across borders as Africans demand better secondary schooling options because companies and investors require higher training

Beer, a waterfall and Britain’s biggest investment in Ethiopia

Top 5 Opportunities for Investment in Ethiopia

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those in developed countries, such as the United States and United Kingdom, could also enrich students’ experience.

Multiple locations should improve teacher retention beyond the typical 3 years with institutions having the abil-ity to move teachers around to multiple locations and keep the job rather new and challenging. International teacher recruit-ment fairs in the U.S. and the U.K. offer a plethora of rather young individuals interested in an international teaching career.

(1) Fast Moving Consumer Goods and Agribusiness

Agriculture and livestock account for more than 50 percent of GDP and employ more than 80 percent of the workforce. The young foreign consultants run-ning around Addis in bunches and pronouncing allegiance to the Agricultural Transformation Agency (ATA) are a humorous indicator of the focus the gov-ernment puts on agriculture. Ethiopia is also home to Africa’s largest livestock population, with huge exports to the Middle East.

The ATA, managed by Kha-lid Bomba, a former Wall Street banker and staffer at the Gates Foundation, works with local farmers on bettering planting skills, improving irrigation and organizing co-operatives among other things.

“Agriculture improvements here have been great,” says one ATA worker based in Addis, “but there are so many challenges for the country in agriculture that will take a long time to fix.”

Moving the value chain online in both agriculture and livestock could boost the econ-omy more than the production gains achieved to date. Ethiopia’s diverse landscape and climate offer the world amazing coffee beans and delicious tea. At the moment, these products are generally processed and pack-aged outside the country to the disadvantage of Ethiopia. Once processed and packaged onshore,

local Ethiopians could expect to see more than triple the price per kilogram they currently get for their generally raw, unpack-aged and unbranded exports.

Livestock, fish, and poultry present the greatest space for growth. In a country where dairy consumption is at 17 liters per person per year, dairy produc-tion could be greatly improved and coupled with a campaign to improve dairy consumption. Fishery is a virtually untouched industry that is also in need of investors.

Chicken consumption is at 0.6kg per person per year, well below the 6kg sub-Saharan Africa average and the 36kg South African average. It is pro-duction that hampers this indus-try which faces high consumer demand despite high prices. With Easter quickly approach-ing, experts predict that the price of chicken at the market could rise to $3,75 per pound, well above the U.S. price per pound of about $1,02.

“Doro wat is national dish in Ethiopia that requires chicken,” says Abebe, an expat, “yet the

cost of chicken means that most times when I have it at a local house, it mainly includes bones, not meat.”

Adding broilers and cold stor-age to this value chain invest-ment is the biggest challenge with the biggest reward.

Scaling concerns, boiler implementation, and veterinar-ian and disease concerns among other things will pester any potential investor. But with a growing market in Ethiopia, Tanzania and other neighbors, investors will keep trying until someone gets it right.

For years, one of Africa’s big-gest economies has run under the radar. But no longer is it going to sit on the sidelines. The buzz is real. The opportunity is real. “Many of us [diaspora] did not see all this coming,” says a visiting Ethiopian from Wash-ington D.C., “maybe it is time to spread the word and get more diaspora on the flight back to the motherland.”

-www.africa.com

Country report

“...may be it is time to spread the word and get more diaspora on the flight back to the motherland”

A state-of-the-art cement plant estimated to cost US$130-million (over R1-billion) is under construction in Ethiopia driven by an overseas investment partnership


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Perhaps this old white lady’s lamentation, sobbing as she passed by Man-

dela’s body, summarizes the real fear for South Africa without Nelson Mandela: “What will become of us now that the man who helped us is gone?”

The messianic power of Nelson Mandela at home and abroad lies more in how he helped white South Africans survive the wrath of their black compatriots, than in the fact that he lib-erated the black population from the claws of racism.

A few days after his death, a small group of his closest allies gathered at the Nelson Mandela Cen-tre of Memory, near his

home. Among them was his long time friend and ally, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, remembering the days of their struggle.

“It is unbelievable,” Tutu said. “Don’t you believe that God actually loves us South Africans? Everyone was saying that we would have gone up in flames [without Mandela]. He was like a magician with a magic wand, turning us into a glorious multira-cial rainbow people. We are not there yet”.

Reconciliation vs. RacismThe peace that pre-

vailed in South Africa after ANC clinched power was not God-given. The rivalry from KwaZulu Natal was contained by the wisdom

of Mandela, who did not punish Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi but rewarded him instead.

Mandela’s belief in rec-onciliation is what saved South Africa and this is evident in the composition of the new national anthem, which has a verse in Afri-kaans. The Afrikaner com-munity was surprised by his involvement in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and “the lunch and tea engagements with the widows of apart-heid presidents who once treated him as if he were a brute.”

Rugby was closely asso-ciated with Afrikaners and Mandela’s decision to wear the national team shirt in 1995 won him great respect in that community.

But his actions were not that of the average South African. Traces of racism are still evident in the South Africa of today and they are perpetrated by both whites and blacks.

Yes, there is a grow-ing black racism in South Africa and political leaders whose speeches include the word ‘Boer’ are likely to garner the loudest cheers at public rallies.

As Jacob Zuma, the fourth president of the 19-year democracy, noted last year, there are still instances where the master reserves the front seat for his dog, while the worker is relegated to the back of his van or truck.

After over 100 years of official racial segregation in

S. Africa after Mandela: Things to worry about

REST IN PEACE: The conffin of Nelson Mandela is carried to its eternal resting place

The man who held South Africa together and saved it from civil strife, sometimes by the sheer power of his personality, is gone. What future does the rainbow nation now face? Our South African correspondent SINDILE KHUMALO analyses

SPECIAL REPORT

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South Africa, discrimination in terms of one’s skin colour has become almost natural.

It takes supernatural powers like that of the late Madiba to overcome it, and there is hardly anyone left to wear his boots now.

The Malema factorMeanwhile, the youth-

ful leftist politician Julius Malema, a big fan of Robert Mugabe, is gaining a mea-sure of political currency which apparently alarms the white minority.

Banking on the failures of the Zuma administration, the commander-in-chief of the new Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party is all out to cause consternation in South African political circles. His party name choice alone speaks volumes about the most outstanding issue in the country today: economic freedom.

The political audacity of Malema is rare to find in modern apologetic politics, and he attracts followers in droves.

He has chosen to iden-tify his party with the downtrodden of his country, and the party launch was held at Marikana where, on 16 August 2012, 34 miners striking for higher wages were gunned down by police. Touting red berets as its trade mark, the EFF party mainly attracts rela-tively young people in their 30s.

Malema, former presi-dent of the African National Congress Youth League, was expelled from the rul-ing ANC this year after months of acrimony with senior members of that party, including President Zuma.

He was openly defiant at a disciplinary hearing instituted against him. The

big boys got fed up with him and gave him the boot. Then followed criminal charges for alleged fraud and money laundering, with the police poring through his affairs. Soon the tax authorities were also gun-ning for him over unpaid taxes dating many years back, when he was still the darling of the ANC and pre-sumed untouchable.

Weaknesses in the ruling party

Basically, all is not well within the ruling ANC. The party is now exhausted and bitterly divided, with some of its key leaders accused of grand corruption and abuse of power.

Having given it the vote coupled with high expecta-tions, many people are now frustrated at how little it has achieved in recent times. Its leaders look like they are thinking of their individual interests ahead of the next elections, rather than thinking of the nation at large.

Millions of black South Africans continue to lan-guish in abject poverty, despite the country being one of the best performing

economies. The AIDS cri-sis continues, the rich are getting richer – and they include President Zuma, who faces accusations of corruption, both personally and in his party.

Judging by the boos aimed at him during the Mandela funeral, there are signs that the presi-dent could be ousted by a coup within his own party, although ANC will still almost certainly win the general election next year.

Many of those jeering loudest at the memorial

were followers of Malema, who is seen as having the potential to spark racial conflict, particularly after being convicted of hate speech for singing a song with the words “shoot the Boer”.

Rude remindersThe booing of President

Zuma along with thunder-ous applause for Zimbabwe president Robert Mugabe, instead of the other way round, were rude reminders that at heart South Africa remains an African country, having to struggle with the natural political orienta-tions coming from its psy-chic make up.

It leaves plenty of room for change in a direction inimical with the late Man-dela, in the near future. It is a situation that world leaders watch, a bit anx-iously.

There have been other pointers of the real leanings of South African society in past years, but it was hard to be unanimous as to what they represented. For instance the rise in popular-ity of Malema, a radical in

SpeCial report

TRIBUTE EVERYWHERE: Sand sculpture of Mandela on a beach in Puri

SOMBER MOOD: South African president Jacob Zuma with two Mandela widows, Winnie (left) and Graca, (right)

To Page 16


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the very image of not just the old South African Com-munist Party, with his role model as fallen guerrilla fighter Chris Hani, but also Mugabe. It squares up.

Pundits could come up with plenty of pluralistic explanations for the booing of Zuma, from polygamy to cash scandals, but the contrast with the raptur-ous welcome of President Mugabe puts the real issues involved beyond reasonable doubt.

A booing is in a nutshell an expression of freedom as different from organization, in which case the South African crowd was react-ing to what is deep in their hearts while not indicating, simply by that gesture, that Malema is rising to become

South Africa’s undisputed leader, as the crowds more or less echo his thinking.

The notion of empow-erment appears to be the vogue in many parts of Africa, including Tanza-nia, where it has been a hallmark of presidential approach since 2006. How far it is working is a differ-ent matter, as proto-Male-ma tendencies are replete within opposition parties rooting for indigenization.

Apart from the boos and jeers for Zuma in par-ticular, another astonishing incident that occurred dur-ing Mandela’s very public funeral, was the outright sidelining of the Afrikaner community.

As Archbishop Tutu not-ed, Mandela himself would have been appalled that Afrikaners were excluded

from memorial services marking his death. Tutu highlighted the absence of the Dutch Reformed Church and the limited use of the Afrikaans language at the services.

Family squabbles Meanwhile, as Madiba

was battling his illness on his deathbed, some bad omens were already unfold-ing within his family.

George Bizos was Man-dela’s lawyer for half a cen-tury, and probably saved his client’s life at the 1964 Rivonia trial by persuading Mandela to amend the dec-laration that he would will-ingly die for a free South Africa. Adding three words – “if needs be” – gave the judge the freedom to issue a sentence of life in prison, rather than death.

But earlier this year Bizos, despite his intimacy with Mandela, found him-self facing two of Mandela’s daughters in court, as they tried to remove him from the boards of family trusts.

The Mandela family went to war amongst them-selves while the man him-self was still on life support. Winnie and Maki jostled to be seen as the voice of the Mandelas, while Man-dla - the grandson - tried to force the rest of the family to bury his grandfather in his own village, for his own potential gain.

So, as the old white lady noted, what will become of Mandela’s family and Man-dela’s people, now that the man is gone?

Additional analysis by Anil Kija, Dar es Salam

Things to worry about after MandelaFrom Page 15

HE BELONG TO THE AGES: US President, Barrack Obama speaking during the Mandela farewell service

SpeCial report

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For over sixty-five years, the United States war machine has been on automatic pilot. Since World War II we have been condi-tioned to believe that Amer-ica’s motives in ‘exporting’ democracy are honorable, even noble.

In this startling and provocative book, William Blum, a leading dissident chronicler of US foreign policy and the author of con-troversial bestseller Rogue State, argues that nothing could be further from the truth. Moreover, unless this fallacy is unlearned, and until people understand fully the worldwide suffering American policy has caused, we will never be able to stop the monster.

Reviews‘A fireball of terse infor-

mation - one of our best muckrakers.’ - Oliver Stone

‘America’s Deadliest Export is a brilliant expose of critically important infor-mation about the role of the U.S. in the world - yet that is arguably the least of its vir-tues. Blum’s book is also pas-sionate when it ought to be

passionate, and sober when it ought to be

sober. It takes the raw data of international rela-

tions and presents it so mov-ingly, so compellingly, and so insightfully, that when it reaches out for us to act - it has put us very much in the mood to do so. Succinct and comprehensive, reasoned and also impassioned, this is a book all should read.’ - Michael Albert

‘As in the past, in this remarkable collection Bill Blum concentrates on mat-ters of great current signifi-cance, and does not pull his punches. They land, backed with evidence and acute analysis. It is a perspective on the world that Western-ers should ponder, and take as a guideline for action.’ - Noam Chomsky

‘With good cheer and humor Blum guides us toward understanding that our government does not mean well. Once we’ve grasped that, we’re far more capable of effectively doing good ourselves.’ - David Swanson, author of War is a Lie

‘Coruscating, eye-opening and essential. This is a must-read for anyone rightfully concerned at the destructive influence of the

world’s only superpower.’ - Cynthia McKinney, Presi-dential Candidate for the Green Party of the United States

‘William Blum’s Amer-ica’s Deadliest Export is another in his blockbuster series that has applied the reality and morality principles to work on U.S. foreign policy. This book has vignettes and longish essays on matters running from Conspiracies, Ideology and the media to Cuba, Iran and Wikileaks.

It is brimming with wit and with both laughable and frightening quotations. It is admittedly written for ‘the choir,’ but even the choir needs encouragement as well as facts and analyses that will keep its members from succumbing to a potent propaganda system. And we may hope that choir will grow with books like this that both amuse and enlight-en.’ - Edward S. Herman, co-author of The Politics of Genocide

‘This book deals with unpleasant subjects yet it is a pleasure to read. Blum continues to provide us with convincing critiques of U.S. global policy in a freshly informed and engaging way.’ - Michael Parenti, author of

The Face of Imperialism‘If you only read one

book about global politics this year make it this one.’ - Counterfire

Table of ContentsIntroduction1. US foreign policy vs the

world2. Terrorism3. Iraq4. Afghanistan 5. Iran6. George W. Bush7. Condoleezza Rice8. Human rights, civil liberties, and torture9. WikiLeaks10. Conspiracies11. Yugoslavia 12. Libya13. Latin America 14. Cuba15. The Cold War and anti- communism16. The 1960s 17. Ideology and society18. Our precious environ-

ment19. The problem with capi

talism20. Media21. Barack Obama22. Patriotism23. Dissent and resistance

in America 24. Religion25. Laughing despite the

empire26. But what can we do?

BOOk REVIEW Americas’s Deadliest Export Democracy - The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else

Title: America’s Deadliest Export: Democracy - The Truth About US Foreign Policy and Every thing ElseAuthor: William Blumsize: 368 pages 216mm x 138mm Publishers: Zed PublishersCopyright: Zed BooksReview: Courtesy: Zed Publishers - UK


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Graca Simbine Machel is the only woman who has been married to two

presidents in two different countries, and largely influ-enced the politics of both countries.

The First Lady of both Mozambique and South Africa has worked as depu-ty director of the FRELIMO Secondary School in Tan-zania, a member of FRE-LIMO’s central commit-tee, education minister in Mozambique, chairperson of the National Organisation of Children of Mozambique, Expert to Chair the Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, and president of the Foundation for Community Develop-ment in Mozambique.

Graca was born in Gaza, Mozambique on October 17, 1945, the last-born in a family of six children. Her father, a Methodist minister who died three weeks before she was born, left explicit instructions that her older siblings were to see her through high school. Later, a church-based scholarship made it possible for her to attend Lisbon University (Portugal) in 1968, majoring in languages.

But under surveillance from the Portuguese secret police, she was forced to abandon her university education and flee to Swit-zerland to escape the prison sentence that was almost certainly waiting for her due to her political activi-ties as a student.

In 1973, while still in Europe, she joined the Marxist-based Mozam-bican Liberation Front (FRELIMO), an organized resistance movement that was steadily gaining ground

in the struggle against colonialism from the Portu-guese.

When Graca arrived in Tanzania from Europe, she underwent military train-ing and learnt how to take an assault rifle apart and put it back together. Subse-quently, she spent a short period in Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado Province, where she met Samora Machel, the FRELIMO com-mander.

Marriage with SamoraIn September 1975, she

married Machel, the first president of newly inde-pendent Mozambique. She also became a willing step-mother to her husband’s five children by his first companion, Sorita, and his first wife, Josina, who had died of leukemia in 1971 after scarcely two years of marriage. Samora and Graca have two children of

their own.During the war for inde-

pendence from Portuguese rule, FRELIMO set up schools in liberated territo-ries and within their train-ing camps in neighboring Tanzania. In 1974 Graca was appointed deputy direc-tor of the FRELIMO Sec-ondary School in Bagamoyo, Tanzania.

When Mozambique became independent and FRELIMO formed the country’s first government in 1975, Graca became a member of FRELIMO’s central committee and the

Minister of Education and Culture. In this ministerial role Graça worked to imple-ment FRELIMO’s goal of universal education for all Mozambicans. From 1975 to 1985, the number of stu-dents enrolled in primary and secondary schools rose from about 40 per cent of all school-aged children to over 90 per cent for males and 75 per cent for females.

Graca is recognised for her dedication to educating the people of Mozambique, and for her leadership in organisations devoted to the children of her war-torn country. She has been a major force in increasing literacy and schooling in Mozambique and has spo-ken of the needs and rights of children, families and communities, from plat-forms all over the world.

Following President Machel’s death in a plane crash on 19 October 1986, she resigned her post as education minister, leaving behind a sterling record of 1.5 million children in school, as against 400,000 when she first took up the post. As minister, she was able to reduce the illiteracy rate by 72%.

Graca Machel has striven for peace and rec-onciliation in her country, and has attempted to fur-ther Mozambique’s recon-struction and development efforts. As president of the Foundation of Community Development, she has facili-tated greater community access to knowledge and technology and the foster-

SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF AFRICA

Graca Machel: The First lady of Africa

In 1974 Graca was appointed deputy director of the FRELIMO Secondary School in Bagamoyo, Tanzania

A f r i C A t o m o r r o w N o v e m b e r - D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3

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ing of sustainable human development.

In recognition of the particularly devastating effects of war on children, she became chairperson of the National Organisation of Children of Mozambique, an organisation that places orphans in village homes while reinforcing the role of the family and commu-nity in the healing process. Graca worked closely with families in her efforts to rehabilitate children, and to empower Mozambican women.

She has also participat-ed in international forums, as a delegate to the 1988

UNICEF conference in Harare, Zimbabwe, and as president of the National Commission of UNESCO in Mozambique. She also served on the international steering committee of the World Conference on Edu-cation for All, held in 1990.

As chair of Mozam-bique’s National Organ-isation of Children and president of the country’s UNESCO commission, she was asked to lead a study to assist young victims of Mozambique’s civil war. This study was published by the United Nations in November 1996. Machel’s recommendations for reha-

bilitation called on UNI-CEF to begin resettling all displaced children, and to start funds specifically for their re-education. Machel’s report also focused on landmines, and endorsed the idea that humanitar-ian mine clearance should become a routine part of all peace agreements. It proposed that countries which have profited from the manufacture and sale of these lethal weapons should bear the huge cost of their removal.

Machel is also presi-dent of the Foundation for Community Development (FDC), a non-profit organ-

isation that she founded in 1994. FDC offers grants to civil society organizations to strengthen communi-ties, facilitate social and economic justice and assist in the reconstruction and development of post-war Mozambique.

Marriage with MadibaIn the 1990s, the friend-

ship between Graca and South African president Nelson Mandela, whom Machel had known since her husband’s death, deep-ened. The couple married on 18 July, 1998.

Over the years, Machel has won various awards including the Laureate of Africa Prize for Leadership for the Sustainable End of Hunger from the Hunger Project in 1992 , and the Nansen Medal in recogni-tion of her contribution to the welfare of refugee chil-dren. She has received the Inter Press Service’s (IPS) International Achievement Award for her work on behalf of children inter-nationally, the Africare Distinguished Humanitar-ian Service Award, and the North-South Prize of the Council of Europe, among others.

In 2008, the University of Barcelona (Spain) award-ed a Doctor Honoris Causa to Machel. She has served on the boards of numerous international organisa-tions like the UN Founda-tion, the Forum of African Women Educationalists, the African Leadership Forum, and the International Crisis Group. She is also chair of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisa-tion Fund, chancellor of the University of Cape Town in South Africa, and a panel member of the African Peer Review Mechanism.

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N o v e m b e r - D e c e m b e r 2 0 1 3 A f r i C A t o m o r r o w


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By Anil Kija

IT is hard for the rest of Africa, and not least in the eastern part of the continent where South Sudan

had already intimated about becoming the sixth member of the East African Com-munity, to comprehend the conflict that is raging there, and an equally intractable peace process.

Its immediate source however is a move by South Sudan president Salva Kiir to dismiss his vice president Riek Machar, along with most cabinet ministers and several deputy ministers. That at least showed one thing, that President Kiir may have a support base in the population and in the armed forces, but vice presi-dent Machar was the one

holding the support of most of the government and most of elected governors.

Power struggleOnce the step was taken,

itself related to the presi-dent’s disputable use of pow-ers in dismissing an elected governor in Unity state, one of the core oil producing regions, observers noted that an outbreak of fighting was a matter of time.

“[Kiir] has taken the power struggle to a whole other level,” was the obser-vation by Sara Pantuliano, head of the humanitarian policy group at the Overseas Development Institute in London, in an interview with Al Jazeera. “We are going to see big confrontation in the next few days,” she convinc-ingly predicted.

Kiir issued a presidential

decree which also removed all deputy ministers of the government, sometime in July 2013, apparently seek-ing to make a major cabinet reshuffle. Significantly, he failed to make new appoint-ments. In that case there was diminished legitimacy on the part of the president, but as commander-in-chief it was not going to be easy to dislodge him. But Dr Machar counted on the wide

ranging support he was assured from all those quar-ters whose influential politi-cal leaders had been axed. Confusion was generated in the country as the govern-ment was now being run by under-secretaries until fur-ther notice. President Kiir also reduced the number of ministries in his government from 29 to 18, though it was not clear which ministries had been cut, and with no reasons provided for the changes, according to ana-lysts on the spot.

Violence outbreakIt took some time for

violence to actually break out mid-December, close to five months after the cabinet was virtually disbanded. Reports say the rebels include a former army divi-sion made up of thousands of men who switched sides, and perhaps it is this organ-ised and armoured support that gave Dr Machar suf-ficient confidence to launch an all-out war against Presi-dent Kiir. Among foreign countries, the most involved is evidently Sudan itself, which gave a platform to Dr Machar lately where the rebel chief asked Ugandan president Yoweri Musev-eni to stay off South Sudan affairs, as the Ugandan lead-er has been canvassing for an AU-UN operation to quell the rebellion in its northern neighbor.

In a way the current war is a capping stone to many other wars going on in the oil-rich state, itself exacerbated by an especially tangled web of mismanage-ment and misdirect use of its oil resources, the point of departure of the conflict in the more recent context, while the historical legacy is one of fighting with Suda-

NEWS

South Sudan conflict: A war to end all wars?

DISPLACED: Civilians fleeing their residences in war-torn South Sudan

Kiir may have support base in the population but Machar was holding the support of most of the government and elected governors

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nese invaders and within South Sudan ethnic groups, for cattle and grazing land.

The situation is such that any moment in both Sudan and South Sudan there are several layers of war; an interstate war which would be active or diminished, then a war of major ethnic groups living in different provinces, or invaders from the other side of the border to help a minority within South Sudan, for instance in Abyei province. Khartoum has for all intents and purposes annexed the divided, volatile province.

The most recurrent source of violence is the third sphere, that of groups fighting for cattle and graz-ing land, as that goes in attack and revenge phases, making it interminable and constantly displacing people from one area to another. But it is state and semi-state wars which have a greater humanitarian toll on account of use of heavy bombing equipment, shelling and destruction of the little infra-structure that the country disposes.

A key feature of what is taking place, and why it is intractable is the fact that both Sudan and the South are reliant on oil revenue, which accounts for 98 per cent of South Sudan’s bud-get, indicating that little other economic activity is going on. The two states have fiercely disagreed over how to divide the oil wealth of the former united state, thus after South Sudan seceded via a referendum, production was shutdown for more than a year. About 75 per cent of the oil lies in South Sudan but all the pipelines run north, a situ-ation President Kiir wants to change, and which Sudan could help Dr Machar with a view to reverse it.

Lack of interest for peace on the part of Sudan is a major problem, but the lack of aptitude for peace among South Sudan’s populations and elites heightens con-flicts.

Scanning the problemThat is the sort of con-

trast that one routinely finds when scanning for views and leads on what is happening in South Sudan, to make head and tail of the violence in a fledgling, newly inde-pendent state. One expert said in a blog that ‘time and again Western diplomats and politicians mistak-enly assume that everyone

around the negotiating table wants peace. Sudan’s record speaks for itself: for decades the ruling Islamist regime in Khartoum has been ‘cleans-ing’ the nation of citizens who do not share its ideo-logical vision. A scramble for resources, coupled with a neo-colonialist ‘Arabist’ agenda, has fuelled rebellion in the lands it marginalises.’

Another analyst remarks that as South Sudan marks its first year as an inde-pendent country, there is a mood of despair among commentators. The fledg-ling nation is already being

subsumed by war, extreme poverty, ethnic conflict and corruption, wail its detrac-tors. What did they expect? Consider the dire circum-stances its new government inherited. All the aid in the world cannot turn a desper-ately poor, land-locked coun-try where the vast majority of people are illiterate into Finland within a year or a generation or a century.’ Reference to Finland is its peacefulness, not oil.

‘The Southern Sudanese have endured decades of eth-nic cleansing by their north-ern rulers in Khartoum. The southern third of the country was marginalized, while its

oil-funded infrastructure projects in the capital. As a result there are 100 miles (160 km) of paved road in a nation the size of France or Texas. And there are 120 doctors to serve a population of eight million people. A girl is statistically more likely to die in childbirth than fin-ish elementary or primary school. Equally worrying, those who are disappointed by South Sudan’s first year don’t seem to realize that the Southerners’ former oppres-sors in Sudan are committed to making South Sudan fail.

They don’t have to over-

work themselves, given the contentions that have spread animosity and virtually con-stant wars among the vari-ous tribes.

Insistence on the cul-pability of the Khartoum regime on what is happen-ing in South Sudan is hard to obviate, while on the face of it, and in relation to moral precepts, the issue isn’t that Sudan wants to see the South consumed in internecine warfare but that too many groups in the South are eager to play along. ‘Using local proxies, the regime starved or killed two million people in the south, and at least 300,000 in Darfur, earning it sev-eral International Criminal Court indictments.

Under international pres-sure, Khartoum eventually signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2005. But throughout years of agonising, protracted talks, the regime skillfully played mind games, revisiting and disputing clauses previously agreed. They were present because it bought them time, and they had overstretched themselves, not because they yearned for peace and pros-perity. They finally agreed to allow the Southerners to hold an independence ref-erendum in 2011 because they never thought it would happen.

Almost 99 percent of Southern voters chose seces-sion, and South Sudan’s reb-els-turned-politicians took power in Juba. They took with them 75 percent of the former country’s oil reserves, a blow to the undiversified Northern economy. ‘ A new war was heating up, of strik-ing political balances within the south, and destabilizing the south by targeting kin-dred groups remaining in the new south’ of the Sudan.

To Page 37


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ANALYSISLOGGERHEADS?

TENSIONS between Tanza-nia and its tiny but hyperac-tive neighbour

Rwanda recently reached a new high pitch with a well-cultivated report published by a key state-owned news-paper, ‘News of Rwanda,’ which said that leaders of the Rwandese rebel armed groups had met with Presi-dent Jakaya Kikwete at a private residence in Dar es Salaam. The report cited names of those present at the meeting and the early departure of a key figure, ex-Rwanda Prime Minister Faustine Twagiramungu, who is said to abhor any direct contact with the FDLR grouping the pro-genocide part of the Rwanda opposition. Kikwete’s report-ed meeting with these rebels

riled the Paul Kagame-led Kigali government to the core.

That the report was vehemently denied by the Tanzanian ambassador to Rwanda, via the Presiden-tial Communications Direc-torate at State House in Dar es Salaam, did not by itself solve anything, but for one element. The envoy to Kigali said that on the supposed date of the meeting, Kikwete was in Davos for the World Economic Forum, which he usually does not miss. He in fact hosted it once (its Afri-can chapter) several years ago. Whether or not ‘News of Rwanda’ could sort out that detail in rebuttal is a different matter, but there are other sources to give an indication of what is likely to have been the case, by implication.

One such source would be AfroAmerica Network, a US-based diaspora forum/ publication overly enthu-siastic about the sort of leadership that Kikwete has exercised in the region, and this before the armed intervention by a UN special brigade with troops from South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi. A May 26, 2013 report by the network had the headline: “Talk to Your Armed Opposition, Tanzani-an President Kikwete Tells Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Joseph Kabila of DRC.”

It was this intervention that set off the diplomatic spat, with the M23 rebels in the Congo threatening to directly target Tanzanian troops if they entered the Congo - and it appears they held the blade part of the sword. Current reports say M23 is reorganising, but that in itself is not news unless it is confirmed that Kagame still has the stom-ach for a M23 rebirth.

What the Rwandan leader may do or not do with regard to M23 is linked with the sort of strategy that Tanzania is likely to have,

Kikwete’s intervention in DRC rhymed with the Bernard Membe operation in the Comoros, while showing a sharp contrast with the ‘talk with your armed opposition’ philosophy

President kagame

Whether the claims of a meeting with armed Rwandan rebels are malicious fabrication or consistent JK diplomacy, the truth remains that Dar es Salaam’s philosophy shall always trigger tension in Kigali. ANIL KIJA

What’s behind the Kikwete, Kagame scuffle

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ANALYSIS

or is visibly seen to have, with regard to the motley groups of opposition relating to Rwanda. Two philoso-phies seem to be clashing in the region as to how to deal with rebel groups, where Kikwete has espoused both lines of thinking in words and action, leaving all stra-tegic analyses paralysed as to what he will do next - and indeed what he actually believes is the way to peace in the region.

He was being praised for the idea of talking to armed opposition leaders, but a few months later he appeared to realise that the gun speaks louder than the microphone; a language he shared with Pretoria and Lilongwe, who were happy enough to join hands to beef up DRC stability. While there is no real philosophy

so to speak that underlines Kikwete’s posture in how to resolve regional conflicts, he has shown an acute pre-dilection to intervene from time to time, either in unex-pected ways or shunning action where it was perhaps expected from him.

He declined to give assis-tance with regard to the Al-Shabaab threat in Soma-lia, evidently not wishing to stroke the beard of the anti-‘Mfumo Kristo’ tiger in his own backyard by active solidarity with extrem-ists in Somalia. Instead he directed his energy to tiny Comoros, where Tanzania has been before, as well as the Seychelles; places whose political conflicts few Tan-zanians are familiar with, but are well represented at community or social level in Tanzania (the Ngazija

people being an aspect of the rainbow civilisation in Zanzibar.)

In that sense, Kik-wete’s intervention in DRC rhymed with the Bernard Membe operation in the Comoros, while showing a sharp contrast with the ‘talk with your armed opposi-tion’ philosophy which the AfroAmerica network was crediting the Tanzanian leader for a great show of leadership. The point here is that if Kikwete has at least one aspect of his mind directed at ‘talking to armed opposition,’ and this applies equally well for all neighbouring countries, in what manner would it be out of place for him to meet the groups and start explor-ing how their positions can be merged, even rhyme, with Kigali? Would he start

the palavers on putting aside arms and rebuilding Rwanda?

Two issues come up in how the Tanzania-Rwanda conflict is being played out, first in the media and then in a wider strategic context. One is that as Tanzania is not a party to internal Rwanda issues in any way, having cleared most refu-gees from that country, it could be taking too intense a position on the matter at hand. That sentiment seems to prevail in Kigali, but if someone looks at the Inter-Governmental Authority for Development (IGAD), it is hard to say that Kenya for instance was a party to the South Sudan conflict, unlike in the case of Somalia. The threat posed to Tanza-nian security by Rwandan

To Page 24

President kikwete

What’s behind the Kikwete, Kagame scuffle

The threat posed to Tanzanian security by Rwandan instability is marginal, but serious

President kikwete


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instability is marginal, but seri-ous.

The other aspect is the spe-cific manner in which both the habit of intervention in terms of military expedition and doc-trine of dialogue as a principle of diplomacy, coexisting in the Tanzanian leader’s thinking on the Great Lakes Region, will apply to Rwanda as a hotbed of the post-1994 status quo. Precisely owing to the source of the Rwanda armed opposition, which is yet to renounce the genocide, and seems to treat charges in that direction as ‘fabricated’ or ‘politically moti-vated,’ all idea of dialogue is to Rwanda - and anyone else who looks at the facts - the same as inviting a Trojan Horse. It is precisely this view of talking to the RPF that led to the Rwanda genocide, as Tutsi paramilitary groups went ahead and assas-sinated the elected Burundi president Melchior Ndadaye, underlining some Tutsi doctrine of supremacy.

This situation leads to a dif-ferent sort of dilemma in the diplomatic and strategic con-text, that so long as Rwanda is not properly a multiparty state, and older theories of evolution towards multiparty democ-racy have now been eclipsed by regional good governance whose underlying premise is democ-racy, the whole idea of talking remains relevant. But there are two types of opposition in Rwanda; one which fits the talking scenario and another which does not.

Rwanda’s key fear is that Kikwete is overly talking with non-reducible elements of Hutu extremism, i.e. the FDLR. That is why Ugandan president Museveni’s response to the Kik-wete maxim about talking to the armed opposition is perhaps the most sanguine: that he only discusses with those willing and isolates the others.

If FDLR are out of the pic-ture, and the issue in Rwanda is about reintegrating dissidents and opening up Rwanda polls to proper multipartism, it could

be reasonable to expect that Kagame could sit up and pay attention. But talking with all elements is a Trojan Horse; as Kikwete has shown with regard to the Comoros and M23, why not crush FDLR first and fore-most?

Tanzanian foreign policy planners need to take a realistic path that a Gandhian posture about things isn’t the best way out of any conflict, and also to remain true to the reality that Kikwete hasn’t exactly been a Gandhian all his years of lead-ership; rather, he has displayed an intuition worthy of Machi-aveli, an instructor of princes on how to rule.

The Venetian Secretary of State at the time of the Refor-mation said what is essential about ruling is ‘to know when to take out the sword, at an appropriate time.’ If the sword

DIPLOMATIC FACES? The two presidents shake hands at a recent meeting

From Page 25

analySiS

Why Kikwete, Kagame differ

Rwanda’s key fear is that Kikwete is overly talking with non-reducible elements of Hutu extremism, i.e. the FDLR

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A p r i l - M a y 2 0 1 4 A f r i c A T o m o r r o wanalySiS

is taken out too early, it could ruin the image of the prince as a ruthless bully and tyrant; if it is taken out too late, it weakens the prince and gives an edge to his opponents, even leads to defeat and execution. When is it therefore the right time to put FDLR under the sword?

It should be right now, in the continuing campaign to pacify eastern Congo, so that those who are there remain as civilians.

Thus there are elements of a ‘uniformitarian’ inter-vention that is needed, that when an opposition is armed and indulgent, it should be reduced to size and become an aspect of civilian conten-tions, as the foundation of good governance in the East African region.

When the Riek Machars of the region and Sultani Makengas learn to use the ballot and not the bullet, seek the support of popula-tions and not play on the

hunger for uniforms and sal-aries on the part of unem-ployed youths, much shall be achieved at the level of good governance. Kikwete has so far shown the way in dealing with intransigent and recalcitrant oppositions in Comoro and the M23, but he should not succumb to the temptation of equating the Kigali government and the FDLR as simply ‘parties to a conflict’.

That is what worries Rwanda and it is evident that the formulation given by Kikwete to talk to ‘your’ armed opposition was unhelpful at the level of defi-nition, weak at the level of morality, and impracticable at politics. His work on M23 may even have removed a burden on the Rwandan leader to account for its presence before world bod-ies, and sheer inability to destroy it by his own hand. Kikwete should follow up with triggering an FDLR exit.

That way, a basis shall have been laid for peace and concord in the region, where the Coalition of the Will-ing is reducing the pride of the Al-Shabaab in Somalia and a different coalition, this time informal (like the Membe/Kikwete coalition with Gen. Omar el Bashir on the Comoros issue), in handling the DRC question. The point is to clear out all armed groups when they are attacked from all sides, not hibernate in border territo-ries and raise a generation of genociders to return to Rwanda and finish the 1994 unfinished diabolism.

Tanzanian pacifism is inclined to see DRC and South Sudan as problem areas, and we should keep

in mind that in the past opinion was ranged against Rwanda and Burundi join-ing EAC because of their history of civil wars.

When a principle is set that armed opposition is forbidden, the Savimbis of today, Riek Machar and Sultani Makenga among others, will learn - hastily if need be - the pros and cons of democracy.

Sir Winston Churchill said that democracy was the worst form of govern-ment except for all the other forms. Therefore no direct instability is posed by DRC and South Sudan joining EAC, if the matter has been put beyond reasonable doubt that armed opposition is ful-ly and totally prohibited.

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If the sword is taken out too early, it could ruin the image of the prince as a ruthless bully and tyrant; if it is taken out too late, it weakens the prince and gives an edge to his opponents



/ 2 6

INTEGRATION OPINION

Heading towards EAC’s single currency prototypeBy John Kimbute

EAST African inte-gration was back on track at the end of November 2013 when the five heads

of state of the East African Community signed a protocol for an East African Monetary Union. This envisages the formation in due course of an East African Central Bank as a fiduciary or issuing agency, and as Kenya has both the strongest economy and a currency print-ing outfit in place, it looks to be naturally favored to be the location of the bank. That is the rule everywhere, as the Euro-pean Central Bank is located in Frankfurt although often it is headed by a French governor, and New York is easily the key world financial centre.

While three of the EAC member states had seemingly been showing inordinate zeal to go forward with integration plans ahead of two more cau-tious members - namely Tan-zania and Burundi - this time no one could demonstrate that they wished to run faster. There has been no word from Nairobi, Kampala or Kigali to the effect that the three countries mak-ing up the so-called ‘Coalition of

the Willing’ would like to speed up the pace of implementation of the EAMU protocol, though there were some misgivings about the watered-down text signed in Kampala. Had it been the final protocol on the matter for the currency union to start in earnest, they would object.

Further down the road, it is possible that differences could emerge, for as they say in the UK, ‘boys will be boys.’ So there are certain attitudes one might not be able to snatch from Tanzania, and those per-haps more typical of Kigali or Nairobi, while on many fronts Kampala isn’t as ‘willing’ as it is often made out to be. There is an element of devotion to the wider dream of an East African Federation which to an extent one could say is shared by the five leaders almost equally, the difference being their room to maneuver. It is also possible that some leaders need the wider union or federation more than others, in relation to sta-bility at medium term level.

One communication aspect that has been noticed since then is the ease with which the regional press can now talk about ‘East Africa,’ remind-ing one about how the term ‘shrank in meaning’ at the time of independence, and now

it regains its sense. The term ‘shrank’ because East Africa came to independence without Rwanda and Burundi being part of the camp, seemingly permanently fused with their giant neighbour to the west, the Congo, especially because they use the same technical or business language - French. It was the Rwanda genocide and also the protracted negotiations on the realization of peace in Burundi which changed things, as these efforts were conducted exclusively within East Africa and that is still the situation, whereas the Congo is a neigh-bour like any other, without a sense of shared destiny. In addi-tion, Rwanda opted to become bilingual at the technical level, rejecting the dominance of French and rapidly instituting the use of English, its teaching, etc.

Yet in part East Africa has taken up the ways of West Africa where Nigeria formed the basis of a regional politi-

TOGETHER AS ONE: Presidents of EAC member countries. From left: Burundi’s Pierre Nkurunzinza, Tanzania’s Jakaya kikwete, Uganda’s Yoweri Musev-eni, kenya’s Uhuru kenyatta and Paul kagame of Rwanda

/ 2 6

/ 2 7


cal entity to put a stop to devastating wars across the region, fomented by senseless rebellions for the direct acquisition of diamond fields, etc. It was a matter of being totally unsatisfied with how things were going in neighboring countries, where Kenya moved to actively intervene in Somalia after Al Sha-baab extended its doctrine of combating tourism to include the Kenya coastline with a series of attacks in Mombasa, and in 1980 and then in 1998, major strikes in the capital Nairobi. In 2011, Kenya more or less said that was just enough.

This intervention despite being backed up by major external powers cre-ated a sense of destiny, as the ‘coalition of the willing’ actually worked together to put up a force to combat Al Shabaab. Kenya was the backbone and main

force, as its entire military was to an extent a reserve force for the active brigade or two in Somalia, while Uganda and Rwanda, their forces stretched somewhat due to internal rebellion perched on the borders, joined the fray. Tanzania stood out from the war seeking to avoid imported conflict with Al Shabaab, until it reckoned it also had to intervene in the Congo, backed by South Africa and erstwhile adversary Malawi.

Surprisingly this inter-vention created more of a sense of destiny in East Africa than the more robust intervention in Somalia

could ever do, as the Soma-lia push was to underline the principle of inviolabil-ity of borders, while the crushing of M23 had a more profound impact. It actively quelled all practi-cal expression of the much-fancied Hima Empire, a notion stitched together in the wake of the Congo expedition by Rwanda and Uganda forces back-ing a former Tanzanian resident, Laurent Kabila to remove the tired Mobutu administration while the aging marshal was dying of cancer. Cutting short the dream of total domination was to effectively introduce the project of disciplined

harmonization; that is what EAMU stands for.

At the same time, Presi-dent Kikwete has been battling psychologically with something he has only recently admitted, namely the fact that Tanzania has been sliding unremit-tingly and remorselessly on the Doing Business Index of the World Bank. From somewhere around 121 when he was coming into office to 147 or slightly below at the moment, and rising discontent all over the country that has to do with economic dissatisfac-tion, it was clear charting out a new horizon was vital. Still as he is leaving office in a matter of ‘weeks’ politically speaking, since the country has been in the throes of a general elec-tion mood despite that it is nearly two calendar years before voting is done, the

Tanzania stood out from the war seeking to avoid imported conflict with Al Shabaab, until it reckoned it also had to intervene in the Congo, backed by South Africa and erstwhile adversary Malawi To Page 28


/ 2 8

thrust forward had to be cautious.

What has not really caught the public eye is that the president has done that sort of opening up twice in recent weeks, first signing on the EAMU protocol, and then a pact being concluded with Canada for the mutual protection of investments. It was not a revolutionary doc-ument for it didn’t advance on any of the grounds that have made it hard for Tan-zania to actually jump into the bandwagon of a proper people centred common market in the region. But it at least effectively removes the government’s hearing aids in relation to possible acquisition of shares of min-ing companies as reactionar-ies in Parliament have been shouting for several years now.

Surprisingly, dissent on the project, if in mild tones, has been registered from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), whose man-aging director Christine

Lagarde had time to address the question, and seemingly reflected from the troubles of the European Monetary System (EMS). Debate about what was wrong with the EMS continues, but it has two discordant notes that need to be straightened, especially because Tanzania has a tendency to pick the false view as automatically right. It is the idea that in a monetary union of poor and rich countries the poor are crushed, which is false because they attract capital, due to cheaper labour and other assets.

The proper concern that economists bent on maximis-ing government expenditure and thus detest controls on budgetary spending as well as borrowing limits is that it is lack of harmony in that direction that brings up problems. A country joins a wider entity in currency, and retains its old ways which presume that if debts pile up it will devalue or otherwise allow its currency to depreciate, thus effec-tively liquidating the debt,

especially if it is government debt denominated in the local currency, as is the case with Treasury bills or bonds. With currency union the debts have to be paid in the unified and strong currency, which thus leads to crisis, and radicals interpret the crisis as the rich lending to the weak, ‘exploiting’ them.

While the clamor for most of the period of the fourth phase was to aban-don the relative rigour of the third phase (meanwhile as fundamental controls remain in place ostensibly for the national interest), the sharp inflation of 2006 and high levels in recent years restored the old wis-dom. There is no doubt at

the moment that the most important requirement in economic management is the controlling of inflation, and so that social services can get higher allocation than they get at present, it is vital that sectors that are now under state entities called companies should be divested, so that they start paying billions of shillings in taxes.

This need includes the state companies for electric-ity, ports, railways, airline, insurance, roads, even water which is sold in boozers and not flowing in taps. .Resis-tance to these features of liberalisation has ensured that Kenya spends 32 per cent of its budget on educa-tion while Tanzania spends 18 per cent and it has great-er needs than Kenya, for the simple reason that Tanzania spends trillions subsidizing parastatals. MPs wisdom that the government should just add more money is crip-pling, and with the EAMU protocol, these things are likely to become clearer in due course.

integration

The idea that in a monetary union of poor and rich countries the poor are crushed, is false because they attract capital

From Page 27

Heading towards EAC’s single currency

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A Chinese military contractor recently on duty in Tanzania

was caught attempting to smuggle gemstones out of the country. The arrest of Zhong Lei on August 20 last year by the Tanzania Minerals Audit Agency (TMAA), as reported in the Tanzania Guardian newspaper, came not as an isolated criminal activity by a Chinese national, but as one of several others.

Tanzania may be

facing a difficult predicament over its relations with China, although actions taken so far suggest economic national security is slowly getting the upper hand to let foreign criminals know that Tanzania is getting tough; maybe not tough enough thus far, but getting tough, somehow.

Zhong Lei, who was in the country building a military airfield somewhere, was caught

with an assortment of illegally possessed gemstones at the Julius Kambarage Nyerere International Airport. He was about to catch a flight to China carrying 14.522 grams of gemstones valued at USD 15,825.51 (Tsh. 25,320,816).

TMAA ordered his arrest, but the Tanzania People’s Defence Forces (TPDF) intervened to stop the arrest. It seems there were China-Tanzania relations to consider, especially as pertains to military links. TPDF told TMAA that Zhong Lei was their man.

The two government

institutions then agreed in principle to save the image of the army by letting Zhong Lei fly out to China without facing charges of attempted smuggling. But they agreed that the gemstones be confiscate. The predicament here is in the choice Tanzania has to make when criminals are Chinese – a predicament similar to a man who discovers a close friend who has helped him for so many years is also helping him in another way, in the woods, sleeping with his wife.

Sting operations are going on around the country to avert mineral smuggling as well as

letting the Chinese sleep on our marital beds

DIPLOMACY

in Tanzania law enforcement organs rolled out the red carpet for a suspected Chinese criminal to step on because beijing is just too good a friend to be embarrassed. JAsTON biNAlA

/ 3 1


poaching. In the case of Zhong Lei, events show that non-Chinese suspects do not get the luxury that he received, of getting off scot-free. Joint operations involving TMAA, TPDF, the Tanzania Intelligence and Security Services (TISS) and the Police Criminal Investigations Department (CID) have saved billions of shillings in recovered gemstones from foreigners attempting to smuggle them out of the country. Court cases have been filed.

The sting operations include those conducted

at the Julius Kambarage Nyerere International Airport (JNIA) and the Kilimanjaro International Airport (KIA), where gemstones valued at over Tsh 1.6 billion have been saved from suspected smugglers, according to an investigation by The Guardian.

The investigation, funded by the Tanzania Media Fund (TMF), learned that on August 20 last year , officers from the TMAA headquarters in Dar es Salaam, TISS, the CID department at Kawe Police Station in Kinondoni district and the TPDF ambushed a house at Jangwani Beach and found one British national named Robert Twist in illegal possession of a wide assortment of gemstones.

His possession of the gemstones contravened section 18(2) of the 2010 Minerals Act. A TMAA official said the catch was the result of TMAA-CID cooperation. The police contacted TMAA one

day earlier to say they had searched Twist and found him in possession of various types of gemstones. The police needed another search with experts this time for verification and valuation.

The second search was conducted in the presence of officers from TMAA, TISS, and the TPDF. The minerals found were listed in the presence of the suspect and other witnesses, including the suspect’s lawyer. TMAA determined the minerals to weigh 81,494.85 grams valued at USD 680,256.29 (Tsh 1,088,410,064).

On September 4, the police submitted to TMAA another parcel of gemstones taken by the police during the first search at the suspect’s home. This other lot contained gemstones with 1,111.90 grams worth USD 156,248.97 (Tsh 249,998,400). An illegal possession of gemstones case

To Page 32

diplomaCy

The predicament here is in the choice Tanzania has to make when the criminals are Chinese – a predicament similar to a man who discovers a close friend who has helped him for so many years is also helping him in another way


/ 3 2

has been filed in court under case file CD/IR/3140/2013, according to TMAA, and Twist is out on bail.

An Asian national was also caught on October 22 last year, attempting to smuggle through KIA a packet of Tanzanite gemstones worth USD 123,000 (Tsh 200,000).

A case has been filed in the district magistrate’s court in Hai, Kilimanjaro region. The Asian suspect meanwhile is also out on bail.

Tanzania similarly awaits the fate of three other Chinese nationals caught in Dar es Salaam in possession of elephant tusks and therefore

linked to poaching. The 706 pieces of ivory found in their house represents more than 200 elephants killed in the country’s national parks and game reserves. The Chinamen were found hiding the elephant tusks in a Mikocheni house in

Dar es Salaam.Packed in sacks and boxes

and disguised as snail shells mixed with garlic, the ivory was hidden in a manner that needed informed intelligence to uncover it. Even the then minister for natural resources and tourism, Khamis Kagasheki, and police officers at the scene were stunned by the ingenuity of the hiding place.

The three Chinese nationals implicated in this criminal activity were Che Jinzhan, Xu Fujie and Huang Qin, who were said to use a special Toyota Noah microbus with registration number T713 BXG to transport the ivory pieces from the elephant

From Page 31

Tanzanian authorities bow to a Chinese national caught smuggling out gems

GOOD FRIENDS: Chi-nese President Xi Jin-ping (waving) with his host Tanzania’s Jakaya kikwete. Behind are the duo’s spouses.

The 706 pieces of ivory found in the house of three Chinese nationals represents more than 200 elephants killed in the country’s national parks and game reserves

diplomaCy

/ 3 3


killing fields to the house.

The Chinese angle to elephant killings in Tanzania took an even more sinister look on November 14, when a container with more than 1,000 pieces of ivory was intercepted in Zanzibar enroute to China. The state-owned Daily News newspaper speculated that this container load could also be linked to the same three Chinese nationals.

In a related event last October, Hong Kong authorities confiscated USD 26.7 million worth of ivory found in two shipping containers. The authorities seized a total of 1,209 pieces of ivory tusks and three pounds of ivory ornaments arriving there in containers from Kenya and Tanzania.

Hong Kong customs were on alert after a tip-off from Guangdong officials in China. On October 16, Hong Kong officers inspected a container from Tanzania claiming to carry plastic scrap and found USD 13.5 million worth of ivory. A day later, a second

container from Kenya was seized with ivory valued at USD 13.2 million, according to Hong Kong customs.

Seven people, including one Hong Kong resident, have been arrested by Chinese authorities in connection with these cases, according to a customs spokeswoman there.

When Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visited Tanzania earlier in 2013, his host President Jakaya Kikwete is reported to have made a quite revealing statement when asked whether China is pursuing a neo-colonial policy in Africa.

He said Africa needs a market for its products and technology for its development, all of which China is ready to provide. “What is wrong with that?”, President Kikwete queried.

Events on the ground suggest there could be something wrong in the China-Tanzania relations. Yes, China and Tanzania have enjoyed a long and friendly relationship in past decades. One notable

fruit of this relationship is the 1,800-kilometer-long Tanzania-Zambia railway (TAZARA), which was built with the help of China.

Tanzania took a socialist path shortly after obtaining independence in the 1960s. Back then, socialist China was trying hard to re-enter the UN. The newly independent Zambia was in the meantime having a hard time exporting bronze from its own mines. China decided to help build the TAZARA railway in the 1970s, so that Zambia could export bronze through Tanzania.

But this gesture came at a hefty price, according to the Chinese national television station CCTV. Over 64 Chinese workers paid with their lives during the construction of the

railroad. In 1971, China was finally re-admitted to the UN. Among the African countries that supported this motion, Tanzania played an active role. Today, the two countries still maintain close ties.

And yes, of the five East African Community member states, Tanzania continues to attract the most Chinese investment, with USD 3 billion flowing into its mining sector in 2011, with their cooperation also covering a wide range of areas in the political, economic and military spheres. Tanzania has taken 25% of Chinese investments in Africa so far.

But as this story connotes, there is an ugly side to this flowery China- Tanzania relationship which may be calling for deeper scrutiny.

In a related event last October, Hong Kong authorities confiscated USD 26.7 million worth of ivory found in two shipping containers. The authorities seized a total of 1,209 pieces of ivory tusks and three pounds of ivory ornaments arriving there in containers from Kenya and Tanzania

Tanzanian authorities bow to a Chinese national caught smuggling out gems

diplomaCy

Get An Indepth, Analytical Report of Issues That Affect Tanzania at This Website: www.tzbusinessnews.com

diplomaCy


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There has been no Afri-can as great as Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela in

the modern age. Across two centuries, he played impor-tant roles for the continent and the world in general. He is recognized as the key figure in ending apartheid in his country during the 20th century and a universal symbol of the fight against oppression and discrimina-tion of any kind. In the 21st century, he is the man who underlined unconditional forgiveness.

Like no African before, Mandela got the western world to view this continent as a bastion of peace, recon-ciliation, understanding and the dawn of the new world order, rather than the tra-ditional stereotype jungle of war lords, famine and abject poverty.

And for the next century or so, it is unlikely that there shall emerge another global citizen so ready to sacrifice himself to foster a gallant fight for the equality of all peoples.

Upon his death on 5 December 2013, aged 95 and after a six-month battle against pneumonia and other respiratory issues, the entire world mourned and at the same time celebrated his humanitarian legacy. He served only one term as president of democratic South Africa (1994-1999), but it was his lifelong struggle to right the ills of racism and injustice that transformed him into an international hero with an almost God-like quality, to the extent of convincing the whole world to sing his praises in unison.

The Mandelamanic worldProbably no other man

in history has had his name attached to as many

things in so many places as Mandela. There are 16 townships and 31 streets in South Africa named after him; internationally, from Zimbabwe to Britain, there are 39 streets, roads, vil-lages and institutions all bearing his name. The name appears also on monuments, sculptures, stadia, discov-ered particles and flowers – no one else in living memory

has ever gained such global recognition.

The city of Cardiff, in Wales, named a street after Nelson Mandela. In London, the street where the anti-apartheid movement has its headquarters is called ‘Mandela Street’. The street in Glasgow, Scotland where the South African consulate is sited, has been renamed after Mandela. New York

City authorities renamed the square in front of South Africa s mission to the United Nations ‘Nelson and Winnie Mandela Plaza’. Sen-egal’s president Abdou Diouf inaugurated Soweto Square and Nelson Mandela Avenue in downtown Dakar. The Harlow township authorities in the UK renamed a major road in honour of Nelson Mandela.

ANALYSIS

LEADERSHIP

Man of the CenturyPeople come and go, some of them leaving a lasting legacy behind them. Nelson Mandela was one of those chosen few. CHRis KidANKA recounts

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Others are Mandela Avenue in Falkirk, Scotland; Mandela Close in London’s Fulham borough; Mandela Close in Norwich, England; Mandela Close in County Durham, England; Man-dela Close in Sunderland, England; Mandela Link in Grimsby, Lincolnshire; Man-dela Place in Watford, Hert-fordshire; Mandela Road in Canning Town, London; Mandela Way in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England; Mandela Way in Southwalk, London.

Also Mandela Way in Stoke-on-Trent, Stafford-shire; Mandela Street in Lambeth, London; Mandela Street in Stockwell, London; Nelson Mandela Avenue in Harare, Zimbabwe; Nelson Mandela Avenue in Wind-hoek, Namibia; Nelson Man-dela Boulevard in Caracas, Venezuela; Nelson Mandela Close in Harlesden, London; Nelson Mandela Close in Muswell Hill, London; Nel-son Mandela Highway in Kingston, Jamaica; Nelson Mandela Marg interchange in New Delhi, India; Nelson Mandela Road in Kidbrooke, London.

Nelson Mandela Street

in Tunis, Tunisia; Nelson Mandela Street in Beau-Bassin, Mauritius; Nelson Mandela Street in Port Louis, Mauritius; Nelson Mandela Street in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Nelson Mandela Street in Terre Rouge, Mauritius; Nelson Mandela Walk in Sheffield, South Yorkshire; Nelson Mandela Expressway in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania; Nelson Mandela University of Science and Technology in Arusha, Tanzania; Mandela Village in Morogoro, Tan-zania.

In war-torn Somalia, legislator Mohamed Omer Dalha has asked the Somali

government to name any important public venue, gov-ernment building, or street in Mogadishu after Mandela to forever commemorate the crucial role he played in Africa’s history.

“Nelson Mandela was a legendary man in his coun-try and across the world,” Dalha told the online news portal Sabahi.

World leaders bow to Madiba

Upon his death, for the first time in history, the world’s attention turned to Africa for a good ten days – not to witness mass carnage

TRIUMPHANT: Clockwise; Nelson Mandela saluting crowds after his release from prison; Julius Nyerere (rights) Mandela, his wife Win-nie and Nyerere’s wife Maria at a state banquest in Dar es Salaam; Mandela with his grand daughters

To Page 36

analySiS


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by power mongers, or to see starving children, but to cel-ebrate a life well-lived.

US president Barrack Obama said of Mandela that “he achieved more than could be expected of any man… the world has lost one of the most influential, courageous and profoundly good human beings that any of us will ever share time with on this earth…he belongs to the ages.”

What probably makes Mandela so great is indeed not only his fight against white domination, but his fight against domination itself. And this led people like Tony Blair, whose coun-try (Britain) at one time tagged Mandela a ‘terrorist’, to confess that “Mandela made racism everywhere not just immoral but stupid; something not only to be disagreed with, but to be despised. In its place he put the inalienable right of all humankind to be free and to

be equal.”Retired US president Bill

Clinton called Mandela “one of the world’s finest human beings”. He said history will remember Nelson Mandela as “a champion for human dignity and freedom, for peace and reconciliation.”

Israeli prime minis-ter Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas may be tra-ditional foes who may not agree on many things, but they do agree that Mandela was an icon in global under-standing and reconciliation. Perhaps cautious not to praise Mandela’s firm stance against Israeli domination over Palestine, Netanyahu

said: “He will be remem-bered as the father of the new South Africa.”

On his part, Mahmud Abbas said: “The Palestin-ian people will never forget his historic statement that the South African revolution will not have achieved its goals as long as Palestinians are not free.”

Comparisons with Jesus Christ

In an unparalleled manner, Mandela coupled spirituality and politics. The only other leader who could be compared to him at this level was Mahatma Gandhi. Peter Oborne, The Telegraph’s chief political commentator, goes further and compares Mandela to Jesus Christ.

He writes: “There are very few human beings who can be compared to Jesus Christ. Nelson Mandela is one. This is because he was a spiritual leader as much as a statesman. His

colossal moral strength enabled him to embark on new and unimaginable forms of action. He could lead through the strength of example alone.

“Most politicians, including those in demo-cratic countries like Britain, inspire their followers by appealing to their basest instincts. Mandela appealed to the noblest and most splendid part of our fallen nature. Only one other 20th century leader can be spo-ken of like this — Mahatma Gandhi. Mandela and Gan-dhi made us all better peo-ple, and our world a much better place.

“It is also important to remember that even though Mandela was a South Afri-can and Gandhi was Indian, they did belong to all of us. This is because they both taught a universal message. They refused to represent simply a clan, a sect, a tribe, a class, a race or even a single religion”.

RECONCILIATION: Mandela poses for a photo with the last apartheid president, WF, de klerk and recalling his days behind the bars

From Page 35

A man the world will remember

“the South African revolution will not have achieved its goals as long as Palestinians are not free”

analySiS

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This has fed conflicts since secession.

‘Trouble was inevitable with no agreement on where the border was, or how the South would ship oil across its bellicose northern neigh-bor to Port Sudan. When South Sudan eventually hit back and stopped pump-ing oil earlier this year, the UN and the Africa Union demanded peace talks. To date the parties cannot even agree which map to use to demarcate the border.’ Yet another sphere of contention was opening up, that ‘the flagrant theft of government money by South Sudanese officials has rightly infuri-ated international support-ers, as has the smothering of a free media and political opposition. As so often in Africa, the patient, resource-ful citizens are let down by their rulers. But what-ever South Sudan’s faults, it bears far less responsibil-ity than Khartoum for the decades of misery visited on its wretched but resilient people.’ There is an idealistic bent to that assessment, fail-ing to see in the repression and corruption the fabric of the new state, not its occupa-tion legacy.

Even before hostilities actually broke out, as cattle

raiding and intermittent local conflicts were the order of the day, experts at the Overseas Development Insti-tute in London were affirm-ing that ‘historically, ethnic clashes and cattle raids were common in South Sudan, but they were conducted with spears and genocide was never the intent.

They resulted from demand for high bridal dow-ries. The Murle and Nuer are both agro-pastoralist tribes that depend exten-sively on subsistence farm-ing and cattle-herding,’ an analyst was contending. The shift came with the inter-state war and what comes up after the secession of the south, where the analyst asserted that ‘during the North-South civil war the tribes of southern Sudan were united by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) in their common battle for independence from Sudan. However, it is now likely that traditional hostili-ties between southern tribes will escalate over cattle, land and grazing rights.

And truly, in the months following independence, bit-ter ethnic tensions erupted in massacres and revenge attacks, with ethnically based militias sweeping the land.

Kill-ing and cattle raids spanned out in the Warrap, Unity and Jonglei States. No longer were they using spears

but were now armed with machine guns and vehicles with high caliber machine guns, which ignited ethnic massacres in Jonglei state that took on the character of genocidal massacres. The government of South Sudan has no heavily equipped army spread across the mainly jungle countryside, to put a stop to the raids. ‘In late December 2011, eight thousand Lou Nuer fighters known as the White Army entered the small Murle village of Pibor. They sys-tematically burned huts, looted cattle, and killed men, women and children. Prior to their arrival the raiders blatantly broadcast their intent to commit genocide: We have decided to invade Murleland and wipe out the entire Murle tribe on the face of the earth.’ It is a statement that shows people are not ready for the rule of law but guns.

‘The Murle are a small tribe, a minority in their own land. The virtual absence of a viable police force in South Sudan makes them especially vulnerable in con-flicts. Both the government and the United Nations peacekeepers failed to pro-tect the Murle tribe. UN military observers watched the Nuer burn down huts

and kill innocent civilians. The attacks exposed the gov-ernment’s failure to protect its own citizens. The South Sudanese government has been reluctant to interfere in the feuds between the two tribes due to the fact the Lou Nuer play a crucial role in supplying the South Suda-nese army.’ That is also the main base of Dr Machar.

‘Since December 2011, Murle warriors have retali-ated. There has been a sig-nificant spike in revenge attacks, between the Lou Nuer and Murle tribes. Murle fighters regrouped and have already hit several Nuer villages, killing dozens of civilians and abducting children. In response to the attacks, President Kiir, himself a Dinka, launched a program aimed at disarming civilians across the Jonglei state.

Some 12,000 soldiers and police were deployed to collect an estimated 30,000 weapons from Jonglei civil-ians. The UN estimated that in 2011, some 350,000 people were displaced in those attacks. Observers point out that nearly 350,000 people returned from Sudan to South Sudan and most were living under deplor-able conditions, tying down the government’s ability to react to emergencies, caused by undisciplined groups stealing cattle with machine guns.

So by the time there was government breakdown on account of funds transferred from oil accounts, estimated at $8 million, it was not a disruption of peace but a heightening of conflicts. Could this be the finalizing conflict or a total break-down?

Salva kiir Riek MacharFrom Page 21

The war and the future of S. SudannewS


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WHO IS WHO

January Makamba, Tanzania, Deputy Minister of Communication, Science & Technology and Member of Parliament

Makamba is one of Tanzania‘s rising stars in government. He is cur-rently the Deputy Minister of Communication, Science and Technology and is rumored to run for President in 2015. Makamba is a Member of Parliament for Bumbuli constit-uency in the National Assembly of Tanzania. Before running for the Bumbuli parliamentary seat, Makamba was aide to Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete for 5 years.

Named Young Global Leader class of 2013 by the World Economic Forum, Makamba comes from a political family; his father, Yusuf Makamba was Secretary General of the ruling CCM party. In 2013 Makamba was awarded an NDI Democracy Award by the National Democratic Institute which “honors indi-viduals and organizations that have exhibited a sustained commitment to democracy and human rights, and have dem-onstrated leadership, integrity and courage in their dedication to democratic values and prac-tices”.

Chinedu Echeruo, Nigeria, Tech Entrepreneur & Founder of Hopstop.com and Tripology.com

Echeruo is a Tech entrepre-neur and founder of HopStop.com which he reportedly sold to Apple in the “billion” dol-lar range. HopStop.com is a mobile and online application that provides mass transit directions door-to-door mass transit, taxi, walking, biking and hourly car rental directions in major metropolitan markets throughout the U.S., Canada, U.K, France, Australia, New Zealand and Russia. In 2001, HopStop was named one of the 100 fastest growing companies in the US by Inc. magazine. Chinedu also founded Tripology.com, an interactive travel refer-ral service focused on connect-ing travelers with travel special-ists which was later acquired by USA Today Travel Media Group. Echeruo obtained an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S from Syracuse University.

Mohammed Dewji, Tanzania, Group Chief Executive Officer of Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited

Dewji is the Group Chief Executive Officer of Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL) and at 39 is the young-est member of the Forbes’ Africa’s 50 Richest list with an estimated networth of USD $500 million. The MeTL Group began as a family business, a small trading company which Mohammed transformed into one of the largest industrial conglomerates in East Africa, with interests ranging from real estate, agriculture, finance, distribution and manufactur-ing. The company employs more than 24,000 people across Tanzania and accord-ing to Dewji, generates annual revenues of USD$1.3 billion. Dewji has been a Member of Parliament in the National Assembly of Tanzania since 2005. Dewji graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in International Business and Finance with a minor in Theology.

kola karim, Nigeria, Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Shoreline Energy International

Karim is the Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Shoreline Energy International, a Nigerian con-glomerate with interests that span oil & gas, power genera-tion, engineering, commodities trading, infrastructure and con-struction across sub-Saharan Africa. In 2012, Shoreline Energy partnered with U.K-based Heritage Oil in acquiring a stake in OML 30, an oilfield asset in Nigeria for a reported $850 million. An avid polo play-er, Karim was named Young Global Leader class of 2008 by the World Economic Forum.

Ashish J. Thakkar, Uganda, Founder and Managing Director of Mara Group, Mara Foundation and Mara Online

Thakkar is the Founder and Managing Director of Mara Group, a diversified conglomer-ate with approximately USD $1 billion in revenues, according to Thakkar. The group operates in operates in 19 of the 46 sub-Saharan African nations, as well as in India and the United

January Makamba, Tanzania, Deputy Minister of Communication, Science & Technology and Member of Parliament

Makamba is one of Tanzania‘s rising stars in government. He is cur-rently the Deputy Minister of Communication, Science and Technology and is rumored to run for President in 2015. Makamba is a Member of Parliament for Bumbuli constit-uency in the National Assembly of Tanzania. Before running for the Bumbuli parliamentary seat, Makamba was aide to Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete for 5 years.

Named Young Global Leader class of 2013 by the World Economic Forum, Makamba comes from a political family; his father, Yusuf Makamba was Secretary General of the ruling CCM party. In 2013 Makamba was awarded an NDI Democracy Award by the National Democratic Institute which “honors indi-viduals and organizations that have exhibited a sustained commitment to democracy and human rights, and have dem-onstrated leadership, integrity and courage in their dedication to democratic values and prac-tices”.

Chinedu Echeruo, Nigeria, Tech Entrepreneur & Founder of Hopstop.com and Tripology.com

Echeruo is a Tech entrepre-neur and founder of HopStop.com which he reportedly sold to Apple in the “billion” dol-lar range. HopStop.com is a mobile and online application that provides mass transit directions door-to-door mass transit, taxi, walking, biking and hourly car rental directions in major metropolitan markets throughout the U.S., Canada, U.K, France, Australia, New Zealand and Russia. In 2001, HopStop was named one of the 100 fastest growing companies in the US by Inc. magazine. Chinedu also founded Tripology.com, an interactive travel refer-ral service focused on connect-ing travelers with travel special-ists which was later acquired by USA Today Travel Media Group. Echeruo obtained an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and a B.S from Syracuse University.

Mohammed Dewji, Tanzania, Group Chief Executive Officer of Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited

Dewji is the Group Chief Executive Officer of Mohammed Enterprises Tanzania Limited (MeTL) and at 39 is the young-est member of the Forbes’ Africa’s 50 Richest list with an estimated networth of USD $500 million. The MeTL Group began as a family business, a small trading company which Mohammed transformed into one of the largest industrial conglomerates in East Africa, with interests ranging from real estate, agriculture, finance, distribution and manufactur-ing. The company employs more than 24,000 people across Tanzania and accord-ing to Dewji, generates annual revenues of USD$1.3 billion. Dewji has been a Member of Parliament in the National Assembly of Tanzania since 2005. Dewji graduated from Georgetown University with a degree in International Business and Finance with a minor in Theology.

kola karim, Nigeria, Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Shoreline Energy International

Karim is the Group Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Shoreline Energy International, a Nigerian con-glomerate with interests that span oil & gas, power genera-tion, engineering, commodities trading, infrastructure and con-struction across sub-Saharan Africa. In 2012, Shoreline Energy partnered with U.K-based Heritage Oil in acquiring a stake in OML 30, an oilfield asset in Nigeria for a reported $850 million. An avid polo play-er, Karim was named Young Global Leader class of 2008 by the World Economic Forum.

Ashish J. Thakkar, Uganda, Founder and Managing Director of Mara Group, Mara Foundation and Mara Online

Thakkar is the Founder and Managing Director of Mara Group, a diversified conglomer-ate with approximately USD $1 billion in revenues, according to Thakkar. The group operates in operates in 19 of the 46 sub-Saharan African nations, as well as in India and the United

The 10 most powerful men in Africa 2014

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Arab Emirates. Headquartered in Dubai, Mara Group partici-pates in sectors ranging from financial services, information and communications tech-nology, manufacturing, real estate and agriculture. Thakkar also launched Mara Online, a portfolio of online and mobile platforms that allow users to communicate, interact and col-laborate with each other. The serial entrepreneur advises the Presidents of Tanzania and Uganda and runs Mara Foundation, a social enterprise that mentors young African entrepreneurs. He signed up for Virgin Galactic‘s first mis-sion to space.

Mamadou Toure, Cameroon, Founder and Chairman of Africa 2.0

Toure is the founder and Chairman of Africa 2.0, an initiative-driven advocacy group that brings together emerging leaders represent-ing African countries and the diaspora, who share a com-mon vision of the continent’s future. In 3 years of existence Africa 2.0 has already grown into an organization with a global footprint in 26 countries and rallied some of the most influential continental and glob-al leaders. As the Managing

Director with General Electric (GE) Africa, Toure currently leads a regional Investments and Project Finance team supporting all GE businesses (power, water, mining, oil & gas, transportation, health-care, aviation) with financing solutions across sub-Saharan Africa. Toure received a distinction as “New Leader for Tomorrow” by the Crans Montana Forum in 2011. He was selected in 2012 as of one of the 100 Most Influential Africans by the New African Magazine. In 2013, Toure was ranked among the “25 Faces of the new Africa” by BRICS Business Magazine

Amadou Mahtar Ba, Senegal, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the African Media Initiative

Mahtar Ba is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the African Media Initiative (AMI), a pan-African organiza-tion aimed at strengthening the media sector in Africa. Ba is also a co-founder and Chairman of AllAfrica Global Media, Inc – owner and opera-tor of AllAfrica.com, one of the largest distributor of African news and information world-wide. For three years in a row, Mahtar Ba has been selected as one of the 100 Most Influential Africans by the New African Magazine, in 2011, 2012 and 2013 respectively. He was also listed in the top 500 Africans contributing to the rise of the continent by the Africa24 magazine published in March, 2011.

Simdul Shagaya, Nigeria – Tech Entrepreneur and Founder of konga.com and DealDey.com

Shagaya is the founder and CEO of Konga.com, Nigeria’s largest online shopping por-tal and DealDey spinoff site. Konga.com, Africa’s answer to Amazon.com, is an e-commerce platform that sells goods and services directly to consumers. Shagaya is also the founder & Executive Chairman of DealDey Limited, which offers services and products at discounted prices. In 2013 Shagaya won the All Africa Business Leaders Awards’ Entrepreneur of the Year award. HumanIPO select-ed Konga.com as one of the African technology startups of 2013. Shagaya is a graduate of George Washington University, Dartmouth College and holds an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Ben Magara, Zimbabwe, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Lonmin

Recently appointed as the Chief Executive Officer and as a Director of Lonmin, the world’s third-largest platinum mining company, Magara is tasked with improving industrial rela-tions and guiding the platinum

miner’s turnaround strategy after strikes last year triggered violence which killed 46 people including 34 strikers shot dead by police in a single day at its Marikana mine. With a mining career that spans 26 years, Magara was previously the Chief Executive Officer of Anglo Coal South Africa responsible for Anglo American total coal business in South Africa and revenues of around USD $2 billion. Magara, who speaks seven languages, has a degree in Mining Engineering from the University of Zimbabwe.

komla Dumor, Ghana, Lead Presenter on “Focus On Africa” and BBC World News’ European morning segment

In memoriam. The highly-respected presenter of “Focus on Africa”, BBC’s flagship and first-ever dedicated daily TV news show on BBC World News died of cardiac arrest on January 18 earlier this year at his home in London. Dumor, who was named one of “100 Most Influential Africans” in 2013 by New African magazine, had “established himself as one of the emerging African faces of global broadcasting.”As a lead presenter for BBC World, Dumor had considerable influ-ence on how the continent is covered.

He leaves behind a powerful and enduring legacy; how the continent is reported. “There’s so much more to tell about Africa than the usual stories about war, famine and dis-ease.”

-Forbes

who iS who


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A week is a long time in politics,” former UK Prime Minister Harold Wilson once

said. This could not have been truer for a few weeks ago.

At the beginning of the week we were discussing such “mundane” subjects as MP Nandala Mafabi’s fall from grace.

The 11-day retreat by the NRM in Kyankawanzi while significant was not expected to throw up much different from the usual chest thumping.

But what started out as a morning walk on Saturday led by President Yoweri Museveni ended up as a lunch where a section of NRM MPS mooted the unopposed candidature of Museveni as party flag bearer in the 2016 presidential elections. Reports are MPs literally had to stand up to be counted on the proposal. While we were still debating whether this was reflective of the party mood, no one underestimated the significance what had happened at Kyankwanzi never mind it was around a lunch of roast meat.

If we had doubts a resolution was passed on Tuesday, signatures and all that proposed Museveni as the flag bearer, urged him to offer himself as a candidate and discourage some senior leaders from trying to present themselves as possible flag bearers in the next election.

The last resolution should

have raised eyebrows but probably didn’t.

There are still more formalities to go through before this resolution can be formally adopted by the party and executed but clearly the battle lines have been drawn.

For outsiders looking in on the party there are a few interesting things to note from this recent development.

That there was a near

consensus that the resolution carries the day. Even if there is suspicion that some party members may be getting restless, clamouring for ventilation of the party that they publicly put pen to paper in support of unopposed Museveni candidature speaks volumes.

The naysayers were quick to suggest that while the MPs have shown support most of them in their hearts do not believe in the project. In politics when perception comes up against fact, perception often wins. A perception has been created that our very own representatives to parliament have given the project a greenlight it will be an uphill struggle to reverse that perception.

Secondly, the opposition who understandably are not keen on another Museveni run were caught flat footed and only managed the usual emotional tirades. They don’t savour another run against the president because they have a dismal record against him to begin with and secondly, related to the first for the opposition to have any chance they will have to field a single candidate. The dynamics of cobbling together such an alliance as the past has shown, leave the respective opposition leaders weaker coming out of the polls than when they went in.

And finally while we

have all taken it for granted that Museveni will be the party’s flag bearer for the fifth successive presidential election, the president had made no comment on the matter as at the time of writing. We might tear at our hair, gnash our teeth and cover our heads in ash at the turn of events but this is politics, away from the sanitised version you learnt in school.

Political parties are about winning and retaining power as means of advancing their own agenda.

Politicians and political parties by extension are not going to work themselves out of power if they can help it. In the resolution the NRM did not mince words about this.

The Democrats in the US

or the Conservatives in the UK or Christian Democratic Union in Germany may couch their message in more flowery language but the bottom line is getting and retaining power.

Also it should be remembered that whereas Museveni may have his own political ambitions, each of the MPs is weighing his own chances in the next election and how a Museveni candidacy would affect it. Forget ideology this as much about self-preservation as prolonging the administration. It has not been lost on some that if the president accepts a party nomination it will be his last term, given the 75 year constitutional age limits for candidates intending to run for president.

That would disqualify Museveni in in 2021 – barring a constitutional amendment, but would open the door to other potential contenders in the party.

Professor Gilbert Bukenya is the only one who has openly declared he will seek to be the party’s flag bearer in the coming election. With this Kyankwanzi declaration the other rivals’ hands have been forced they will have to declare their intentions one way or another before the momentum for an unopposed Museveni nomination gathers momentum and shuts the out of the running.

May you live in interesting times, is a Chinese curse. We would all be well advised to brace for interesting times ahead.

The author is a political commentator based in

Kampala, Uganda

COLUMNMuseveni again? Surprise! Surprise!

SHILLING & CENTSPaul [email protected] ; Twitter @pbusharizi

The naysayers were quick to suggest that while the MPs have shown support most of them in their hearts do not believe in the project. In politics when perception comes up against fact, perception often wins

“

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If I had met Nelson Mandela lying peacefully on his deathbed,

surrounded by family members a few minutes after 08.15 hrs on 5 December 2013, I would not have wept. Instead, I would have been proud to meet a warrior right at the peak of his victory – about to be crowned winner. I would have whispered into his ear – I’m sure he would have heard me – and I would have said:

“Tata Madiba! You are sleeping…only sleeping. They say you are dead, but you are not dead. And you will never die Tata. Your courage conquered death from the very day you survived the worst of punishments – the death sentence. You proclaimed the power within you by saying those famous words:

‘During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if need be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.’ “It was not because you did not feel fear, but because you conquered the fear. It was you who once said: ‘I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it....The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear’.

“You may not have the muscles of a heavyweight boxer like

Mike Tyson, but you have knocked down mighty establishments of injustice, hatred and oppression – against all odds. You may not have the big brains of Albert Einstein or Aristotle, but yours is a well-argued philosophy – the philosophy of live and forgive, which you taught in the classroom of your own heart. You did not preach a new faith like Jesus Christ and the Prophet Muhammad, but you have bequeathed us a conviction.

“Your lesson of consistency in what we believe in is treasured deep in my heart. We shall never again fear the evil forces of cruelty when fighting for justice in our continent. I remember very well your dictum: ‘Those who conduct themselves with morality, integrity and consistency need not fear the forces of inhumanity and cruelty.’

“This is not the end; it is the beginning. You are now rising as a morning star, heralding the dawn of Pax Africana and the brotherhood of mankind. The beginning of an era where we will not see people hating their fellow people because of the colour of their skins or pronouncement of

their creeds. You once said: ‘I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days’.

“Yes, fight it on Tata. Just like your brothers Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, Julius Nyerere, Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Edward Mondlane and others did.

“I know you would wish to sleep in a peaceful death. You once said: ‘Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity’. Don’t sleep Tata. Just fight on. You are now free. Free from the limitations of your body. That freedom, as you said, comes with responsibilities. Remember again what you taught us: “I can rest only for a moment, for with freedom come responsibilities, and I dare not linger, for my long walk is not yet ended.’

‘Come on Tata, let’s continue the fight.”

The author is the Founder and Managing Editor of

Africa Tomorrow

COLUMNA whisper to the teacher of hearts

THINkING ALOUDWith Chris [email protected]

Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity


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Africa is a continent of 11.7 million square miles or 30 million square kilometers.

It is populated by people who are either similar or linked in terms of language and culture. There are four linguistic groups in Africa. These are: the Niger-Congo group of languages (including the Bantu languages and the Kwa groups of languages); the Nilo Saharans group of languages (Cushitic, Nilotic and Nilo-Harmitic languag-es); the Afro-Asiatic languages (Arabic, Tigrinya and Amharic); and the Khoisan languages. The population of Africa is now 1,033,000,000 (one billion thirty three million)

Africa is the origin of man, (5 million years ago), the cradle of civilisation (Egyptian civilisation); and the three founders of the three great religions of the World (Chris-tianity, Judaism and Islam) were harbored by Africa in their early lives. These were Moses, Jesus and Mohammed.

Yet by 1900, the whole of Africa, except for Ethiopia had been colonised by the British, the French, Belgians, the Spanish, the Italians and the Portuguese. Why? It was on account of the political fragmentation Africa found itself in, the fact that her people either similar or linked notwithstanding. The Chiefdoms and Kingdoms that governed us at that time were simply too weak to defend us. In Uganda, for instance, we had four Kingdoms and a number of Chiefdoms. The Kingdoms were Bunyoro, Buganda, Ankole and Tooro. There were Chiefdoms in Busonga, Lango, Acholi etc. The British were able to conquer them one by one, even using one against the other. It was only towards the end that two of our Kings - Kaba-lenga of Bunyoro and Mwanga of Buganda – tried to unite to fight the British. By that time, it was too late. The British working with

local traitors and also taking advantage of the brutality of some of these Kings, gained the upper hand.

Kabaka (King) Mwanga is the one who killed a total of 47 young Christian converts, between 1885 and 1887; the majority were killed in 1886 by burning them at stake (burning them alive). Were our ancestors conquered

on account of guns only? I do not think so because other people without guns, but better organised, were able to defeat the imperial-ists. These were the Chinese and the Japanese. Even the Ethiopians were able to defeat the Italians at the battle of Adua. It is the scale of organisation and the use of the terrain that mattered.

The ignominious defeat of old Africa was a vote of no confidence in that old Africa. Our Chiefs tried to resist but they were all defeated.

The African people are, how-ever, a very resilient people. Unlike

the red Indians of America, the Azecs of Mexico, the Incas of Peru, the Caribes of the Caribbean of the Aborigines of Australia, the European invasion did not lead to our extermination. In spite of the million that perished in the slave trade, the million that died in the colonial wars of the million killed by the diseases, the Africans survive.

By 1957, Ghana, the first Afri-can country to do so, had got its Independence. How did we achieve this freedom? What were the factors that helped us? There were three factors that helped us to get our freedom back:

The first one is the continued resistance by the African people, this time led by the African nation-alists and not by the tribal chiefs; the second one is the inter-Euro-

pean wars – the so called 1st World War and 2nd World War – in effect inter imperialist wars for the re-division of the colonial possessions –i.e ourselves, and, the third is the support of Socialist countries - The Soviet Union, China and Cuba etc.

It was these three factors that forced the Imperialists to retreat in Asia (India, Pakistan, Indonesia, etc) Africa and the Middle East. That is how we got our indepen-dence.

Did we use the Independence to insure ourselves against future recolonisation, maginalisation and arrogance? The answer is, unfortu-nately, ‘No’.

The former Imperialist coun-tries are still messing up Africa by promoting wrong and crimi-nal schemes. In Uganda, they, for instance, helped the coup of Iddi Amin in 1971. That mistake cost Ugandans 800,000 people extra-judicially killed between 1971 and 1986.

Lumumba in Congo was killed in 1961. That cost the people of Congo almost 50 years of turmoil which they are now trying to con-clude. In Rwanda, the meddling by external forces caused the death of 1 million Africans in 1994. The meddling has not stopped.

During the Libyan crisis, a plane carrying African Heads of States on the AU mission in that crisis was stopped by NATO plane over African soil!! The Afri-can input in the Libyan crisis was totally ignored. Up to now, Libya is in crisis.

There are even attempts to attack the core African values on the family in, for instance, the matter of homosexuals. Indeed, in the West, they, for instance, criminalise polygamy by law. In Africa it is and always has been

part of our way of life. Yet we do not complain. When, however, we legislate against the homosexu-als, in response to the provocation by Western-sponsored NGOs vis-a-vis our traditional values we are threatened with sanctions. This is all ‘dharau’ – contempt as we say in Swahili.

Why is Africa still held in con-tempt? It is entirely our fault. We have not yet used our tremen-dous, unequalled potential by con-verting it into strength. This failure has been on account of failing to detect 10 strategic bottlenecks: The first five are ideological dis-orientation, attacking the private sector, inadequate infrastructure that causes the cost of doing busi-ness to be exorbitant, an under-developed human resource that is uneducated population which also in poor health.

The other five are small inter-nal markets that cannot stimu-late and sustain large scale pro-duction by providing adequate demand; lack of industrialisation and continuing to export unpro-cessed raw-material whereby we get much less money than those who convert those raw-materials into final products and also export jobs to other countries, an unde-veloped service sector which phe-nomenon under utilises our huge potential in tourism, transport and banking; underdeveloped agriculture – In Uganda, through research, we have discovered that the farmers can produce 53 tonnes of bananas per hector instead of 10 tonnes the peasant have been getting – in Brazil they are already getting 80 tonnes of banana per hector per annum.

The other two bottlenecks are lack of democracy and lack of ideology creating a Criminal State – a State that, for instance, kills people extra-judicially instead of upholding the dignity of the peo-ple and their inalienable rights.

The author is the President of Republic of Uganda. This article

is an extract from his speech delivered in Midrand, South

Africa on March, 18th this year at the occation of commemorat-

ing 10 years of the Pan African Parliament . We edited it to fit

our style and space.

OPINIONThe cost of ideological disorientation

GUEST COLUMNISTYoweri Museveni

During the Libyan crisis, a plane carrying African Heads of States on the AU mission in that crisis was stopped by NATO plane over African soil!! ...this is all ‘dharau’ - or contempt as we say in Swahili

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Starting and closing business is one of the components of doing

business, within the economic reforms context in Tanzania.

Studies in this component championed by reformists through the World Bank resolve to assist developing countries to attract both for-eign and local investments, revealed a plethora of con-straints which needed specific strategic interventions, if the concerned countries were to make any meaningful achievements in that area.

Among the notable chal-lenges so revealed, included inappropriate institutional structures of various imple-menting agencies, hostile and unfavorable legal and regula-tory regimes, inordinate and preposterous issues like cor-ruption and related irrational considerations in Government departments and other public institutions which had a role in the facilitation of invest-ments.

To address those con-straints, the World Bank in conjunction with respective Governments, embarked onto designing and instituting reform measures. Identi-fied legislations considered to contribute to the causes of the identified constraints were reviewed with a view to either amend or replace them altogether.

The implementing Gov-ernment departments and/or public institutions were restructured, privatised, contracted out or outright abolished. Members of staff of the relevant departments were redeployed with a view to building up and strength-ening their capacities to cope with the changes coming as a result of the reforms. Monitoring and evaluation exercises were undertaken to track the effectiveness of the

reforms.In the area of starting

and closing business the new Companies Act Cap 212 was promulgated to replace the Companies Ordinance (also Cap 212). The earlier Gov-ernment Department of the Registrar of Companies was transformed to become a Gov-ernment Executive Agency with a semi-autonomous status with some freedoms to improve the decision making process which it was hoped would enhance its efficiency and effectiveness in its pub-lic service delivery. Staff compliment was redeployed, new staff recruited through an open and transparent recruitment system. A new administrative structure was instituted to clearly separate the statutory functions from the administrative ones.

Despite these significant and very ambitious reforms that brought quite remark-able changes with a tre-mendous improved public service delivery the expected corresponding increase of the users of the services was not so impressive, although a significant increase of the companies, business names, industrial licenses, trade and service marks raised annu-ally and of course increased income were recorded.

The staff had to put extraneous energy in market-ing and adoption of strategies that were deliberately done to incentives the users of the services to earn said the increments which can safely be said not to be the direct outcomes of those reforms. It means therefore that increments higher than the recorded ones would have been recorded if the reforms would have been as effective as everyone had anticipated.

In the subsequent World Doing Business Reports, Tan-zania is one of the countries that have not been doing very well despite the Govern-ment’s efforts to implement the said reforms. It would appear; according to those Reports, not very remark-able improvements have been recorded suggesting the possibility of either failure to consider certain factors which would have been neces-sary to be considered if those reforms were to be success-fully implemented, or their improper implementation due to unknown reasons.

A quick and unofficial attempt to review the proba-ble causes of the decimal suc-cess of the reforms indicates the availability of the chal-lenge right from the reform design stage. Whereas the

main thrust of the reforms was directed to effect changes on the implementing agencies responsible for doing business in the country; including the legal and regulatory frame-works relevant to that area, very little if anything, was done to create and enhance the awareness capacity of the intended beneficiaries of the reforms; the entrepreneurs; specifically the small and medium enterprises.

The service recipients’ side was either ignored, at the time of the reform design stage, or simply forgotten as an essential side of the reform process. It seems no one in that reform architec-tural process thought of the need to create a critical mass of entrepreneurs to form a segment of informed benefi-ciaries of the reforms who are aware of what to expect from the reformed implementing agencies.

In fact the availability of such group could have assisted even the reformers to monitor and evaluate the suc-cess or failure of the reforms and what kind of intervention would have been necessary to be embarked on to put the reform process back on track with a view to achieving the intended reform objectives.

COLUMNThe challenges of doing business in Tanzania and the effects of reforms

CORPORATE WORLDEsteriano [email protected]

The auhor is the archi-tect of Tanzania’s Business Registration and Licencing

Authority (BRELA) and has been its CEO for 13

years. He is now working as Corpoorate Governance

Consultant


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By Africa Tomorrow Correspondent

Ethiopia, officially known as the Federal Demo-cratic Republic of Ethiopia, is the

most populous landlocked country in the world and the second-most populated nation on the African conti-nent. With over 91,000,000 inhabitants, it occupies a total area of 1,100,000 square kilometers (420,000 square miles).

Ethiopia is one of the old-est locations of human life known to scientists, and is widely considered the region from which Homo sapiens first set out for the Middle East and points beyond. Tracing its roots to the 2nd millennium BC, Ethiopia was a monarchy for most of its history. Alongside Rome, Persia, China and India, the Kingdom of Aksum was one of the great world powers of the 3rd century. In the 4th century, it was the first major empire in the world to officially adopt Christianity as a state religion.

During the late 19th-century ‘Scramble for Africa’, Ethiopia was the only African country to defeat a European colonial power and retain its sovereignty as an independent country.

Unmatched heritage Ethiopia is the origin of

the coffee bean and a land of natural contrasts; with its vast fertile west, jungles

and numerous rivers, the world’s hottest settlement to the north, Africa’s largest continuous mountain ranges, and the largest cave on the continent at Sof Omar. It also has the highest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Africa.

Ethiopia’s ancient Ge’ez script, also known as Ethiop-ic, is one of the oldest alpha-bets still in use across the world. The Ethiopian calen-dar, which is seven years and some three months behind the Gregorian calendar, co-exists alongside the Oromo calendar. The majority of the population is Christian and a third is Muslim; the country is the site of the first Hijra in Islamic history and has the oldest Muslim settlement in Africa at Negash.

A substantial population of Ethiopian Jews, known as Beta Israel, resided in the country until the 1980s, but most of them have since then gradually emigrated to Israel. Ethiopia is also the spiritual homeland of the Rastafari movement, which globalised its flag colours worldwide via pop culture and reggae music.

Centre of African civilisation

East Africa, and more specifically the general area of Ethiopia, is widely considered the site of the emergence of anatomically modern humans, Homo sapi-ens, in the Middle Paleolithic some 200,000 years ago.

The earliest known modern human bones were found in Southwestern Ethiopia, and are known as the Omo remains.

Remains of Homo sapi-ens idaltu were found at a site in the Middle Awash in Ethiopia, and dated to about 160,000 years ago. They may be an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens, or the imme-diate ancestors of anatomi-cally modern humans.

Around the 8th cen-tury BC, a kingdom known as D’mt was established in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. Its capital was around the current town of Yeha, situated in northern Ethiopia. Most modern his-torians consider this civiliza-tion to be a native African one, although Sabaean-influ-enced because of the latter’s hegemony of the Red Sea.

Others view D’mt as

the result of a mixture of Sabaeans of southern Ara-bia and indigenous peoples. However, Ge’ez, the ancient Semitic language of Ethiopia, is thought to have developed independently from Sabaean (also South Semitic). As early as 2000 BC, other Semitic speakers were living in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where Ge’ez developed. Sabaean influence is now thought to have been minor, limited to a few localities, and disappear-ing after a few decades or a century. It may have been a trading or military colony in alliance with the Ethiopian civilization of D’mt or some other proto-Aksumite state.

Early foreign relationsIn the early 15th century,

Ethiopia sought to make dip-lomatic contact with Euro-pean kingdoms for the first time since Aksumite times.

Ethiopia: Exciting facts

Ethiopian children in traditional attire

A f r i C A t o m o r r o w M a r c h - A p r i l 2 0 1 4

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A letter from King Henry IV of England to the Emperor of Abyssinia survives. In 1428, the Emperor Yeshaq sent two emissaries to Alfonso V of Aragon, who sent return emissaries. They failed to complete the return trip. The first continuous relations with a European country began in 1508 with Portugal under Emperor Lebna Den-gel, who had just inherited the throne from his father.

This proved to be an important development, for when the Empire was sub-jected to the attacks of the Adal General and Imam, Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi (called “Grañ”, or “the Left-handed”), Portugal assisted the Ethiopian emperor by sending weapons and four hundred men, who helped his son Gelawdewos defeat Ahmad and re-establish his rule. This Ethiopian–Adal War was also one of the first proxy wars in the region as the Ottoman Empire and Portugal took sides in the conflict.

When Emperor Susen-yos I converted to Roman Catholicism in 1624, years of revolt and civil unrest fol-lowed, resulting in thousands of deaths. The Jesuit mis-sionaries had offended the Orthodox faith of the local Ethiopians. On 25 June 1632 Emperor Fasilides, Susen-yos’s son, declared the state religion again to be Ethiopi-an Orthodox Christianity. He expelled the Jesuit mission-aries and other Europeans.

Between 1755 and 1855, Ethiopia experienced a period of isolation referred to as the Zemene Mesafint or “Age of Princes”. The Emperors became figure-heads, controlled by warlords like Ras Mikael Sehul of Tigray, Ras Wolde Selassie also of Tigray, and by the Oromo Yejju dynasty, such

as Ras Gugsa of Begemder, which later led to 17th-cen-tury Oromo rule of Gondar, changing the language of the court from Amharic to Afaan Oromo.

Ethiopian isolationism ended following a British mission that concluded an alliance between the two nations, but it was not until 1855 that Ethiopia was com-pletely united and the power in the Emperor restored, beginning with the reign of Emperor Tewodros II. Upon his ascent, he began modern-izing Ethiopia and recentral-izing power in the Emperor. Ethiopia began to take part in world affairs once again.

Emperor Tewodros II’s rule is often cited as the beginning of modern Ethio-pia, ending the decentralized Zemene Mesafint.

Modern EthiopiaAfter many dynasties,

Haile Selassie I was crowned Emperor on 2 November 1930 with the titles “King of Kings”, “Lord of Lords”, “Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah”, and “Elect of God.” The name itself translates to “Power of the Trinity”. He is seen by the Rastafari as Jah incarnate.

The early 20th century was thus marked by the reign of Emperor Haile Selassie I. He actually took over the modernization of Ethiopia from 1916, when he was made a Ras and Regent (Inderase) for Zewditu I and became the de facto ruler of the Ethiopian Empire. Fol-lowing Zewditu’s death, he was officially made Emperor in late 1930.

Haile Selassie’s parents shared three Ethiopian ethnicities: the Oromo and Amhara, the country’s two main ethnic groups, as well as the Gurage.

The independence of

Ethiopia was interrupted by the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and Italian occupation (1936–1941). In 1935, Haile Selassie delivered an address to the League of Nations that made him a worldwide figure, and the 1935 Time magazine Man of the Year. Following the entry of Italy into World War II, British Empire forces, together with patriot Ethiopian fighters, officially liberated Ethiopia in the course of the East African Campaign in 1941. An Italian guerrilla cam-paign continued until 1943. This was followed by Brit-ish recognition of Ethiopia’s full sovereignty (i.e. without any special British privi-leges) with the signing of the Anglo-Ethiopian Agreement in December 1944. On 26 August 1942, Haile Selassie I issued a proclamation abol-ishing slavery; Ethiopia had between two and four million slaves in the early 20th cen-tury, out of a total population of about eleven million.

In 1952, Haile Selassie orchestrated a federation with neighbouring Eritrea. He dissolved this in 1962 and annexed Eritrea, which resisted and finally won its Eritrean War of Indepen-dence. Haile Selassie also played a leading role in the formation of the Organiza-tion of African Unity (OAU) in 1963.

Climate and weatherMost major cities and

tourist sites in Ethiopia lie at a similar elevation to Addis Ababa and have a compara-ble climate. In less elevated regions, particularly the lower lying Ethiopian xeric grasslands and shrublands in the east of the country, the climate can be signifi-cantly hotter and drier. Dal-lol, in the Danakil Depres-sion in this eastern zone, has

the world’s highest average annual temperature of 34 °C (93.2 °F).

During the Ethiopian rainy season in July and August, there are still usu-ally several hours per day of bright sunshine. The average annual temperature in Addis Ababa is 16 °C (60.8 °F), with daily maximum tem-peratures averaging 20–25 °C (68–77 °F) throughout the year, and overnight lows averaging 5–10 °C (41–50 °F).

EconomyAccording to the IMF,

Ethiopia was one of the fast-est growing economies in the world, registering over 10% economic growth from 2004 through 2009. It was the fastest-growing non-oil-dependent African economy in the years 2007 and 2008. Such growth decelerated moderately to 7% in 2012, and is projected to be 6.5% in the future – reflecting weaker external demand and an increasingly constrained environment for private sec-tor activity.

Ethiopia’s growth per-formance and considerable development gains came under threat during 2008-2011 with the emergence of twin macroeconomic chal-lenges of high inflation and a difficult balance of payments situation. Inflation surged to 40% in August 2011 because of a loose monetary policy, large civil service wage increase in early 2011, and high food prices. For 2011/12, end-year inflation was pro-jected to be at about 22 per-cent, but single digit inflation figures were expected to be reached during 2012/13 with the implementation of tighter monetary and fiscal policies.

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M a r c h - A p r i l 2 0 1 4 A f r i C A t o m o r r o w


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IMPORTANT BUSINESS EVENTS IN AFRICAEvent’s Name: Propak East Africa 2014Event Type: ExhibitionVenue: Kenyatta International Conference Center, Harambee AvenueDate: 1st - 3rd April 2014 Contact: Tel: + 44 (0) 207 216

6060Fax:+44 (0) 207 216 6050Propak East Africa is the brand new event in Kenya for the

manufacturing industry of East Africa. Brought by the organis-ers of Propak Africa, the largest packaging, printing and plastics exhibition in the whole of Africa, and will be the first truly inter-national platform for suppliers of the industry to promote their products and services to the international audience.

Event’s Name: Africa LPG Trade SummitEvent Type: ConferenceVenue: Accra, GhanaDate: 8th - 9th April 201Contact: Tel: +(65) 6346 9130Fax: +(65) 6345 5928

CMT’s inaugural Africa LPGtrade Summit will be held on 8 - 9 April 2014 in Accra, Ghana. The summit will bring together the senior executives and decision-makers from LPG exporting, importing, marketing and distribution companies with government representatives, inves-tors, regulators, financial institutions and suppliers of cylinders, technologies and accessories.

Event’s Name: Batimaide 2014 Building and Construction Con-ference and ExhibitionEvent Type: Conference/Exhibi-tionVenue: Congres Hall Bonanjo, Doula, CameroonDate: 10th - 17th April 2014

Contact: Tel: +44 (0) 20 8605 0509Fax: +44 (0) 20 8605 0512

Since the first edition in 2008, BATIMAIDE has seen a con-tinuous increase in the number of participants at each edition which confirmed the relevance of the concept and the need to sus-tain it. This exhibition and conference provide useful information to businesses and institutions involved in the construction and building sectors of Cameroon in particular and Africa in general.

Event’s Name: Cloud World Forum Mena 2014Event Type: ConferenceVenue: Habtoor Grand Beach Resort & Spa Hotel, DubaiDate: 14th - 15th April 2014Contact: Tel +44 (0)20 7017 5506Fax: +44 (20)

Cloud World Forum MENA Closed with 360+ attendees in total including 267 enterprise and operator representatives - 77% at CxO level! 40+ speakers discussed all the hottest topics in the Cloud industry from industry leaders including du, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Starwood Hotels, GulfAir and more.

Event’s Name: Republic of Congo International Hydrocar-bons Conference & Exhibition 2014Event Type: Conference/Exhi-bitionVenue: Palais des Congres, BrazavilleDate: 14th - 16th April 2014

Contact: Tel: +44 207 700 4949Fax: Fax: +44 207 681 3120CIEHC-2 will be a turnkey event covering the opportunities

and challenges associated with doing business in the Republic of Congo’s hydrocarbons sector. It will feature a three days of confer-ence sessions, a trade exhibition, interactive workshops and tech-nical and touristic excursions.

Event’s Name: 20th Western Africa Oil, Gas/LNG & Energy 2014Event Type: ConferenceVenue: Windhoek Country Club, Windhoek, NamibiaDate: 14th - 16th April 2014Contact: Tel: +27 11 880 7052

The “Western Africa” arena covers a vast oil and gas explora-tion zone, one of the world’s richest and most promising for ven-tures- from Morocco to the Cape, including island states, with an enormous offshore zone and hydrocarbon potential, alongside prospective deepwater blocks, ultra-deep opportunities only to date marginally explored, Exclusive Economic Zones, and promis-ing pre-salt potential analogous to Brasil, plus numerous existing onshore basins (producing and immature, as well as frontier) and a huge interior domain across 27 countries – in effect, fully one half of Africa and the continental land mass of over 30, 000 sq km

Events-Africa.com

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