Combating Student Zealotry

Ebenezer Obadare writes in Elombah:

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and one of the most corrupt in the world, is also one of the most religious. Poll after poll marks the increase of a powerful religiosity which is permeating every aspect of life in the country from politics to popular culture. But nowhere does Nigeria’s obsession with religion manifest itself more vigorously than on its university campuses.

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India's Mela Economy...Have we recognized Africa's equivalents?

In 3QuarksDaily Aditya Dev Sood writes about India's 'Mela Economy'...analogues of our Jua Kali's,Nnewi's ,Suame Magazine's and other under recognized informal networks? :

In the absence of malls and supermarkets, and given the diffuse distribution of the population in the countryside, a system of local weekly markets operates, which cycles through the countryside, so that on any given day you might be able to find a local market less than five kilometers away. You might go there to buy groceries or staples or fuel or essential tools and supplies, but you might also go to sell what was cooking or pickling or spinning or weaving or otherwise in preparation within the house. Most of the buyers at such santhey-s or haat-s or peth-s or similar weekly local markets might at the same time or on other days be sellers. The relationship between buyers and sellers is direct, and in principle at least, reversible. Through the propagation of the charkha, the manual spinning wheel, Gandhi's social philosophy expressly enjoined all of us users to also be creators of value. The village market and Gandhian economy, therefore, follows a decentralized peer-to-peer model, the very antithesis of the modern retail chain, and of late capitalist consumerism in general.

Mela-s are more festive, extensive and intensified versions of local markets, conducted to an annual rather than weekly calendar, often in alignment with harvest cycles. The people must have something to trade and something to trade with, for there to be a reason for a mela. The form of the mela seems to promote a kind of critical regionalism, similar to the wine concept of terroir: the kinds and varieties of goods available can be known on the basis of where they are from, the special techniques were employed in the creation, and the distinctive natural materials of which they are constituted.

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Image courtesy Times of India and Global Economy

Nwaubani, Ngugi and the Nobel

Molara Wood's riposte to Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s "dont award another African a Nobel piece":

...it’s baffling that, nearly 25 years after Nigeria bagged her own Nobel through Soyinka, a Nigerian writer saw nothing wrong in suggesting that a Kenyan should not get the prize. Ngugi, Soyinka and Achebe have since the 60s formed the great tripod of the humanising literature of Black Africa. Soyinka has his Nobel, Man International Booker winner Achebe has been celebrated to the heavens for ‘Things Fall Apart’, and suddenly it’s a Nobel for Ngugi that will spell the death of African writing?
Nwaubani’s argument is deeply flawed; and it is regrettable that someone with a platform like the New York Times to postulate about Africa, chose to use her new-found international voice in this manner. The author of ‘I Do Not Come To You By Chance’ must realise that it will not be by chance that her argument will play into Western prejudices about Africa and African writing. ‘Oh, let’s not give another African a Nobel because, knowing no better, they’ll only copy themselves.’ Might as well go the whole hog and cite Shakespeare’s Iago: “These Moors are changeable in their wills.”

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Ethnicity a Bogeyman? Perhaps Not

Codrin Arsene reviews Ethnicity INC by Jean and John Comaroff:

What if, the authors ask, the future of ethnicity lies in its capacity to incorporate identity (incorporate as in creating a legal corporation based on ethnic grounds) and couple this normative shift with the progressive commodification of one’s ethnic group culture? The authors think that the new product could efficiently represent the interests of its members. They argue that the commodification of culture doubled by the branding of the newly marketed entities could trigger the formalization and the institutionalization of the consumption of culture in ways that would be beneficial to those creating and generating culture in the first place.

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The Story Of Human Rights

From United from Human Rights

Via 3QuarksDaily

A Path toward Active Youth Citizenship

In CIPE:

Rahel Weldeab, second place winner of the 2009 CIPE International Essay Competition talks about the importance of fostering a sense of citizenship among Eritrea’s youth.
She says, “Active citizenship on the part of the youth ensures that their voices are heard; such participation develops and strengthens the opportunities for young people to learn their rights and responsibilities.”

Article at a Glance

• Citizenship is not innate; it needs to be taught and cultivated in young people through civic education and leadership training.

• Citizenship includes both rights and responsibilities; for youth to become active citizens, they need to be given a voice in decision-making processes that affect them.

• In order for young people to develop a sense of citizenship, they must first realize the positive role they can play through active civic participation.

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How to start a Revolution

In Sahara Reporters Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo writes:

A revolution is not an intellectual activity. It is not something you can will into existence by standing on the sideline, even if you are cheering. Revolution requires action, commitment and sacrifice.If you are not taking action; if you are not making serious sacrifices; if you are not committed for a long-haul, you are just a mere reactionary.Initiating a revolution is like planning a coup. You want to change the dominant order of things. The beneficiaries of the current order will not sit back and watch you throw them out. They will put up fierce resistance because their way of life is threatened.

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Ending Poverty (period)

Bopreneur writes:

I hope that we can end poverty, but I believe it will happen one family at a time, one business at a time, one community at a time. The path of human development is a frustratingly slow one. To figure out how to improve income or health for a thousand people is worthy work, and should be celebrated, even if it doesn't "scale up" to millions. The venture that has served 1,000 people has a better chance than the idea that has served none.

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The Fruits of Disaffection

George Ayittey writes in FP:

Africa only has to look within to find the causes for radicalization. About 60 percent of Africa's nearly 1 billion people are less than 30 years old. In the past few decades, these young people have become increasingly disaffected, lost, and restless, and who can blame them? Poorly educated and jobless, they have few role models with moral stature. The value system has collapsed. Hard work and entrepreneurship no longer assure success and wealth. Political connections matter. The richest men in Africa are often heads of state and ministers. Of the 209 African heads of state since 1960, fewer than 15 can be classified as good, clean leaders. The rest -- an assortment of military brutes, briefcase bandits, and crackpot democrats -- are decidedly uninspiring.

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“Progress-Resistant” Cultures?

Kenyan Entrepreneur reacts to a David Brooks Haiti Op-Ed about "Progress-Resistant Cultures"

...culture has a lot to do with a country’s progress. I’ve said before that Africa’s poverty can be attributed to the fact that Africa does not have a culture of production. If something cannot be extracted from the ground (e.g. oil, gold, etc, etc) – we simply will not create or make it and this culture of non-production is the main cause of Africa’s poverty. That’s why foreign aid hasn’t worked. It’s because the do-gooder’s of the world have refused (out of fears of being labeled “racist” – have refused to confront this underlying question of culture).

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Tyranny & Misrule

Emmanuel Franklyne Ogbunwezeh writes:

Africa is being ceaselessly raped by the political class, because “We-The People” are all sleeping on our responsibilities of conscientiously disobeying these tyrants and rising to repossess our land and heritage. Our pettiness empowered the rise of midget tyrants across our continent. That is to say that whenever a society is governed by the ‘organized irresponsibility’ of a clique of renegades, the timid acquiescence of the majority gave it its legitimacy. And when this becomes the case, such a society becomes an unwitting witness to the inauguration of its own decay. It consumes itself, a la Ola Rotimi, in the heat of its own unwisdom...History has equally shown that whenever or wherever bandits rule, organized irresponsibility rules. That is not the unsettling dimension of it all. The fearful thing here is not only the extent to which this irresponsibility is organized, but the ease with which it co-opts and conscripts the majority into a mode of default timidity; where they remain frozen; immobile, clueless, and disorganized, while reckless power rips their commonwealth asunder.

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Wealth creation is an Active process-Andrew Mwenda

Andrew Mwenda wrote in 2008:

Wealth creation is an active process. If we accept it as Africa’s challenge, it would follow logically to ask: who are the wealth seeking and wealth creating agents in society? The answer is: Private Enterprise! Enterprising people are always a minority, but the rule of capital is that it only survives by multiplying and multiplies by creating jobs and therefore incomes for many and taxes which governments use to provide social services – clean water, health and education to the poor. To be politically incorrect, the solution for Africa may be to invest in the enterprising few and make them richer. That will have laid the foundation to end the misery of the poor majority.

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Challenges of being Kenyan

In African Arguments L. Muthoni Wanyeki writes about the travails of Kenyan citizenship:

Our current Constitution, in effect, recognises only citizenship by descent from a Kenyan male—and, in limited circumstances, by naturalisation. It is not enough to be born here. To be Kenyan, you have to be born to a Kenyan father—and, even if you were born elsewhere, as long as your father is Kenyan, you’re in. Although being in is not automatic if you are from the north. And you can, of course, also be in if you chose to naturalise—but doing so means that you have to forfeit any citizenship claims you might hold elsewhere.

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Impunity Personified

Chido Onumah writes in Sahara Reporters:

After almost fifty years of independence, we ought to be used to the buffoonery of our rulers. But even for a group of people accustomed to elite perfidy, nothing could have prepared us for the shenanigans of our rulers since November 23, 2009, when the president was flown out of Nigeria to an unknown destination.
From the initial lie about the purpose of the president’s absence, to the swearing in of the new chief justice, to the purported signing of the 2010 budget by an obviously comatose president, to the latest claim by the president’s chief economic adviser that the president recently spoke to a few top officials of the regime, including the vice-president, we have witnessed countless fawning state officials trying to outdo one another. Atop this Hall of Shame is Michael Kaase Aondoakaa, Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice. I do not think anything could have prepared us for the antics of Mr. Aondoakaa, who to all intents and purposes, is the evil genius underwriting the current charade by making sure it gets a veneer of legality.

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The Many Ways Africans are Dying

In Culture Kitchen Leo Igwe writes:

Africans are dying but have not gone into extinction, and may not in the foreseeable future. So Africans are dying while they are living. Sounds like a contradiction? No, not at all. As Ben Okri said, dying in this case has to do with living. Africans are dying because Africans are living many lies. Africans are living without asking questions. Africans are living in the cave of their own prejudices. Africans are living the life imposed on them by others. I would like to explain this further...

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Religious And Motivational Books Offer Little For National Growth

Bakare-Yusuf founder of Cassava Republic on damaging publishing trends:

...she argues that religious and motivational books have overwhelmed the nation's reading imagination, the new trend she describes as dangerous since knowledge from such areas does not direct the growth that a nation like Nigeria needs. Nigerians, she contends, need to read creative works so as to be able to question the leaders as to how they are led...a country does not move forward through reading motivational books nor is it going to move forward through religious texts. The people might move spiritually but that's about it. We need books that allow us to question the very fabric of our existence and imagine a different world than what we have now. And, I don't think we might find that in motivational books or religious texts.

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Alienating Nigeria

Robert Amsterdam in Huffpo on alienating Africa's most populous country:

In summary, we have here the largest African state with the largest youth population and the most Muslim citizens, governed by a severely ill and president who hasn't been in office for months, where the corrupt walk free and the reformers are persecuted. I strongly maintain my conviction that Nigerians are peaceful people who do not deserve the insult of being included any watch list, but urgent changes are required from the government to insure against the emergence of extremism.
Terrorism is not the problem with Nigeria, it is corruption and poor governance which pose the greatest security threat - and that's where diplomatic efforts should focus, not these kinds of insulting lists which just further punish the victim

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Playing Ostrich about Islamic Extremism in Nigeria

In CSIS Richard Downie writes

The threat posed by Islamist militancy in Nigeria is first and foremost a threat to Nigeria itself. This is a large, chaotic, and badly governed country split along ethnic and religious lines. A predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south coexist in a permanent state of tension. Furthermore, the north is chronically underdeveloped and home to a mass of unemployed and restless youth, who, if the experience of other countries is anything to go by, tend to be vulnerable to extremist messages. Nigerians might be right when they dismiss the Abdulmutallab case as a one-off, but they would do well to guard against complacency.

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Pseudo-Intellectuals in the 'Poverty of Ideas'

In Pambazuka:

What constitutes an intellectual in the South African context?’ asks Leslie Dikeni in this week’s Pambazuka News, ‘Who is an intellectual and who isn’t?’ In an extract from a new book of essays, ‘The Poverty of Ideas’, Dikeni separates the ‘real intellectuals’ from a new breed of ‘pseudo-intellectuals’ that have emerged in recent years: The ‘celebrity intellectual’, the ‘commercial intellectual’, the ‘policy analyst’ and the ‘new gender activist’...[continue reading]

Achebe on "The Leadership Crisis in Nigerian Politics"

In Chinua Achebe writes:

There is a story about Bernard Shaw arriving at the New York harbour, and being immediately surrounded by journalists as he stepped off the ship. But before even the quickest of them could open his mouth, the celebrated playwright stopped them cold as he fired off: ‘Don’t ask me what you should do to be saved; the last time I was here I told you and you haven’t done it!’ I feel very much the same way about what is happening in Nigeria. We know what we should do, yet we refuse to do it. Instead we have been “blowing grammar” all over the country as if our problem stems from insufficient argument. So I have turned down or simply ignored all previous invitations to join the talking.

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The Urban Poor & Apathy

John Iliffe writes:

In normal circumstances, the urban poor, while resenting corruption and the gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’ were too vulnerable, divided, dependent on patronage, committed to rural values, and aware of recent social mobility to challenge their rulers openly.

via Aid Thoughts

Dictatorship more dangerous than climate change

Alemayehu G. Mariam writes in Pambazuka:

The inconvenient truth about Africa today is that dictatorship presents a far more perilous threat to the survival of Africans than climate change. The devastation African dictators have wreaked upon the social fabric and ecosystem of African societies is incalculable.

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Sahel Opera

Sahel Opera is

"...a durable project with a lasting, though partly intangible influence. New talent has been scouted for the Opera and has received an international platform. The Opera has created direct employment and, once the project is finished, the people involved will have skills and experience that help them develop new collaborative relations in the region and beyond, a process of broadening intercultural exchange. Furthermore, the production has created a new infrastructure - both cultural and logistical – that will remain..."

via Yayemarieba

How External interferences helped to produce militant Islamism in Somalia

Markus Virgil Hoehne writes about a classic case of blowback in African Arguments

Somalia has made international headlines for almost two decades now, first as a state of civil war characterized by clan warfare and humanitarian catastrophe, then as a failed state, and finally as a potential safe haven for Islamic terrorists. Contrary to the assumption about ‘black holes’ and ungoverned spaces voiced by politicians and some academics, the Harmony Project of the Center for Combating Terrorism at West Point has recently shown that the absence of a government in Somalia did not automatically provide fertile ground for Al Qaeda terrorism.

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Private Equity Strengthens

This is Africa reports:

According to research from the Emerging Markets Private Equity Association, fundraising for sub-Saharan African funds grew from $800m in 2005 to $2.2bn in 2008. Perhaps more surprisingly, fundraising in the first half of 2009 held up well despite the economic downturn curtailing GDP growth across Africa to just over 1 percent. EMPEA’s figures also point to a diversification of the funding base – in 2006, only 4 percent of the limited partners surveyed by the trade association were invested in African funds, compared to 38 percent in 2009.

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The Tragedy of Umar F. Mutallab

In the wake of the Umar F. Mutallab terrorist incident, Sahara Reporters Aliyu Tilde eviscerates Nigeria's elite and ruling class :

On contemplation, I think the real reason why we elite are afraid of our newly acquired feather is because of the inconvenience that we will suffer from whenever we visit overseas or the opportunities we will miss in our hideout countries where we send our children to study after celebrating the collapse of our public schools at home; where we take our wives for delivery after we have allowed our hospitals to deteriorate; where we hide the billions we steal daily from public coffers; where some of us think is the Promised Land. Think about it: what restrictive measure would the average Nigerian, who will never have the opportunity to board even a domestic flight be afraid of? Will the airport scanners scan him on his farm? Indeed, we are crying for ourselves, for our interests, not for Nigeria

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The rot in the Banking Sector - 'A Thief and a Whiz kid'

The private sector is just as rotten, Salisu Suleiman writes:

The kind of theft that has taken place in our banks in the four short years of post consolidation has left civil servants and other public sector workers looking like angels. The entire banking sector workforce is less than 100,000. A few crooks among them have, at the risk of generalization nearly crippled the entire Nigerian economy. Add to them the plethora of crooked stock broking firms, insurance companies and other private sector operators you wonder the sorts of underhand deals that go on virtually unreported.
A civil servant that steals is a corrupt official. A businessman that steals 10 times as much is a whiz kid.

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Extremism, Religion & Africa

Kingsley Ewetuya writes in Politics Africa

In perhaps his most iconic work, Fela Anikulapo Kuti in the song “Coffin for Head of State” irreverently bemoaned the unseemly encroachment of Christianity and Islam in our politics, commerce and national affairs...He satirically lambasted the influence of the clergy and Imams–particularly their unbarred access to those who line the corridors of power. In doing so, he was labeled a heretic and an anti-establishment radical who opposed the social order that these religions create for the betterment of mankind.

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Integrity in Politics: An Oxymoron or a Real Possibility?

'Integrity in Politics' from a "..Public panel discussion presented by the "Managing for Integrity"' featuring Nuhu Ribadu and others:

Nigeria's Leadership Vacuum

John Campbell writes CFR:

President Umaru Yar'adua appears likely to leave office soon. Nigeria's king makers--the country's competing and cooperating power brokers--seem poised to reassign presidential duties and responsibilities elsewhere because the ailing president can no longer exercise them.

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African Repatriation

In Project Diaspora:

In this age of interconnectedness and always on communications channels, every once in a while, interesting opportunities fly in through our inbox here at PD HQ. One such connection that we couldn’t pass up from sharing with you guys comes from the enterprising minds behind African Repatriation web portal. General manager Adam Goodier sent us details on the new service geared at catering to African neo-diasporans with an eye on joining the “reaspora” movement. Reversing the decades-old African brain-drain has always been a passion of ours, so it’s nice to see a member of the Diaspora taking charge making sure your trip back home is an easy decision.

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ALBINO-In the Shadow of the Sun by Johan Bävman

In We Make Money Not Art a profile of World Press Photo prize winner:

Johan Bävman followed the lives of Tanzanian albinos, an exposed and vulnerable group in one of the world's poorest countries. Many African albinos are hunted and killed for their body parts, believed to bring luck, wealth, good health, etc. In addition to discrimination, and a recent wave of murders, the albino population face serious medical issues. Eye problems often lead to a lack of education among albino people and living under the equatorial sun exposes them to skin cancer.

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