Debating democracy, gender and Africa's liberation

An impressive gathering of experts, policy makers, academics, activists and practitioners sat on the eve of the Africa Liberation Day (ALD) at the UN Economic Commission of Africa to address the issue of democracy, good governance and the Pan-African idea on the continent. It is a timely discussion, since over the past two years vast political shifts, albeit not underwritten by concomitant economic changes in many of the countries, have been witnessed across the continent, rejuvinated by the Arab Spring early in 2011.

For women, whom I like to refer to as democracy’s subjects, the benefits that have derived out of these democratization processes remain tenuous. The relationship between democracy and human rights is often taken for granted, and the extent to which women’s human rights is mediated through processes such as elections, constitution making and economic accountability even more so.

Political contestations are an important indicator of the extent to which countries have travelled on the path of political accountability, and scrutiny of elections under the rubric of ‘freedom and fairness’ often underscores the desire by both local and international participants to see to it that those who access political office do so through a broad consensus of the diverse political, cultural, social and economic interests represented by the state.

In other words, elections are predicated upon a balance of disparate forces, and the assumption therefore that those who eventually hold office fairly represent a cross section of the electorate. Often when we can enumerate the extent of women’s participation – more than 60% for example in South Sudan’s referendum vote last year – then the fact of women’s fair representation is taken for granted, and women’s interests automatically subsumed under this conclusion.

But what happens where democratic elections turn violent, when state security forces are implicated in acts of impunity against the public, indeed when women identify, as they did during the last elections in Kenya and in Zimbabwe, security forces as being the main perpetrators of violence in general, and sexual violence against them?

What happens when the transitioning state is brought into the equation, not as the mediator of democratization, as is expected of it, but rather as an obstacle beyond which citizens seek to re-emerge as worthy subjects? What happens when the very democratization processes through which the state seeks validation instead delegitimizes it?

When women, more than half of Africa’s population, feel too physically insecure to line up and vote out of fear of violence, then they involuntarily remove themselves from spaces of democratization. When African women, more than half of whom are to be found in the informal sector, are routinely targeted and harassed by ‘public order’ police and state authorities, then they begin to retreat further away from spaces where the state could account for them and protect them.

The contradictions inherent in the ways in which African states respond to their vulnerable populations are not something that the mere statement of democratic practice(s) can simply resolve. African women rendered invisible in the informal sector, and whose particular vulnerability to ethnicized and sexualized forms of violence during highly contested elections is undermined by gender-blind conclusions of elections as being ‘free and fair,’ shall continue to be marginalized under any essentialised discourse of democracy.

As the continent reflects on the significant path of progress it has so far treaded in the postcolonial period, it is also necessary to reinsert a more critical discourse into the ways in which we calibrate our freedom and liberation. A time is coming when women will no longer accept appropriation of their names and aspirations when they cannot identify in substantive terms the economic, political or social benefits to them that is claimed.

In the continued assertion of the pan-African ideal, African women’s demands for accountability ought no longer to be taken for granted. In the words of the late Pan-Africanist teacher Dr. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem, no initiative of development should be taken on behalf of African women which does not place them at the centre of the solution.

The ‘public order’ regime rears its ugly head in Uganda

Uganda may soon be at par with Sudan if a law proposed by the ruling party, the Public Order Management Bill, sees light of day. While application of the law has been arbitrary, those that have borne the brunt of Sudan’s Public Order Law are mainly street vendors, tea sellers, in general small-scale business people working in the informal sector. Women, however, are disproportionately affected – many have lost their lives, been sexually harassed, physically injured and psychologically abused. Many more have simply been forced to quit, unable to sustain the substantial losses to their businesses.

The public order regime is a statement of the paranoia of governments, meant to instill fear in the citizenry, intended to create an artificial dependency between state and business, and is a tactic of containing dissidence. The Public Order Law touches on the most personal, seeking to determine even the kind of clothes market women wear on their bodies, expressly prohibiting perfumes, cosmetics and jewellery!

To many an outsider, this sort of public regulation reeks of opportunism. Only regimes desperate to present themselves as being in touch with the changing character of society would resort to measures such as these which really are frantic attempts at holding on to elements of society it still deems as being ‘good’. Only such a regime would imagine that an attack on society’s margins can resolve society’s problems.

In Uganda, the proposed law seeks to suppress freedoms of assembly, of expression and a host of other liberties that will become more apparent with its implementation. President Yoweri Museveni has indicated his desire to see the Bill urgently passed into law ‘to catch up with wrong elements within society pursuing hidden agendas and those inciting violence in public’.

The ruling party is evidently unsettled by the recent surge of protests in Uganda’s capital Kampala. Many groups are on edge and making increasingly loud demands on the state, taking positions against the state. Primary school teachers, municipal council workers, and a section of civil society have routinely taken to the streets over the past months, and have persisted despite violent suppression by state security forces.

The Bill seeks to outlaw the use of megaphones, loudspeakers, loud hailer and public address apparatus except with written permission of the Inspector General of Police or an authorized officer. What constitutes a public gathering has shrunk to mean that even a one-person protest can be deemed to be a demonstration.

The law society, civil society and human rights defenders in Uganda have predictably criticized the law as being repressive and unconstitutional. The government has, however, shown little regard in the past for such rhetoric, although at the same time Museveni has displayed a remarkable ability to read the country’s mood and respond to pressure in neutralizing ways. Civil society organisations on their part have shown little imagination with regards to taking on the state, and display even less originality in the way of mobilizing for change among its own ranks.

Civil society in Sudan is not any better. Most organisations are torn between manufacturing loyalty towards the state and remaining loyal to their various constituencies. It is a tough call, particularly given the difficult funding and operating environment that places a premium on loyalty to the regime. Still, civil society forms a crucial median between state and society and its role in taming the public order regime cannot be gainsaid.

There are many urgent questions that plague countries in Eastern Africa and the Horn, most especially how to handle the spillover of the conflict between South Sudan and Sudan. The internal suppression of citizens at a time when their energies and anxieties ought to be focused upon the bigger picture is therefore suspicious and must be resisted at all cost.

Can Kenya’s oil discovery break the historical ‘curse’?

The reaction of most Kenyans to the news this week that oil had been discovered in the northern parts of the country has been understandably muted. Or at least the reaction of the majority who are disconnected from the elite classes, and whose recollection of recent post-independence history of the corruption, looting and plunder of state resources leaves them with no illusion that the much anticipated oil wealth might change their fortunes.

The discovery of oil in Turkana is itself not a remarkable fact. It comes in the wake of recent similar discoveries made in Tanzania and in Uganda’s Bunyoro-Kitara kingdom, all three of which lie within the same petroleum system. East Africa, dominated by the East Africa Rift System, and overlooked in terms of its hydrocarbon potential for many years, is increasingly viewed as an exploration hotspot, with recent discoveries in the Albertine Rift and offshore Tanzania leading to a resurgence in interest.

Similarly expected are the opinions that have characterized discourses surrounding the discovery. These range from the factual pessimism of the historical ‘resource curse’ that burdens most oil-wealthy states in Africa, the empirically tested fact that the discovery of oil in especially fragile states is bound to generate intensive competition, corruption and power struggles around this one resource, often at the expense of other sources of wealth, and often at great human and humanitarian cost.

Another important conversation is inspired by anti-imperialist sentiment, the despair brought about by the long incursions into Africa by foreign-owned oil companies – Tullow Oil in the case of Kenya –and their irresponsibility and harm caused in cases where governments have not been strong enough, or interested enough to protect the livelihoods and indeed lives, of local populations. These cases, ranging from Niger to South Sudan, are all too well known.

Turkana district is synonymous, for most Kenyans and internationally, with the Kakuma refugee camp, which has hosted tens of thousands of refugees from across the region. The camp was established in 1992 owing to the plight of about 30,000 Sudanese ‘walking boys or ‘lost boys’ and girls who were forcefully pushed out of Ethiopia following the demise of the Iron Curtain and subsequent collapse of the Derg regime.

The camp continued to expand in response to the massive displacements that were taking place as a result of the general chaos and civil strife that marked the Great Lakes and Horn regions of Africa throughout the 1990s. At its height, the camp is estimated to have hosted nearly 70,000 women, men and children fleeing violence in Somalia, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi. South Sudanese children at one point made up nearly 48% of the camp population.

This background lends political context to the local dynamics that have characterized life for the local nomadic pastoralist Turkana community in Kakuma. It will be no surprise that the recent discovery least benefits the locals. A region historically marginalized from the country’s economic and political mainstream, the Turkana have in turn not been magnanimous hosts of refugees, with whom they have for a long time struggled over access and use of natural resources, especially water and grazing land.

If not carefully managed, the disenfranchisement of the Turkana is bound to deepen at the hands of its own government with the oil discovery, the devolved system of development sanctioned by the new constitution notwithstanding. Lessons for Kenya on the (mis)management of oil resources abound from across the continent that ought to be heeded. The manufacturers of conflict are already hard at work, and the merchants of doom stand prepared to move in, to canonize the victims and capitalize on need. Breaking the resource curse; this might soon, and rightfully, become inseparable from Kenya’s national question.

Do we know what women spend their entire days doing?

Two lectures, by two inspirational women, one a middle-aged American politician, the other a young Nigerian writer, both self-affirming feminists, have inspired me over the past two days. The former, by U.S. secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking at the ‘Women in the World’ summit, affirmed the idea that every woman should be able to make choices about their own lives: about what they wear, how they worship, the jobs they do, and the causes they support. In a striking lamentation she united women in their variously situated struggles against a common enemy. She spoke of the perpetual focus that extremists everywhere place on women, and challenged the apparent need of extremists to ‘control the way that women dress, how women act, including the decisions women make about their own health and their own bodies’.

The latter was novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2012 Commonwealth Lecture, in which she flawlessly affirmed her belief in the notion of a shared, common humanity. Both her refusal to take humanity for granted, and her plea that humanity is in fact something we must always keep searching for, were poignant. To quote her, “it is easy to assume that our collective humanity is self-evident, that we do not need to search for it, but we live in a time of numbers and facts, in a world where an acceptable response to the news of a death, is to click the ‘Like’ button on facebook. We live in a world where we can easily find information about GDP and infant mortality and life expectancy, but not about that which most motivates people, human desire”.

She speaks for those that have been forgotten in the dismal reductionism of everyday life, ruefully reminding us that we live in a world where we so often quote figures of the number of the dead in Iraq, Afghanistan and Congo, until they become just that, figures. She projects her desire for a different way of being, and beyond merely consuming these news articles, often wonders what the people in Congo dream about. How do they fall in love in Afghanistan? How do they resolve family quarrels in Iraq? What do they like to eat? Ultimately, she argues that despite the necessity of knowing about the dead and the dying, and despite these figures being essential, they must, they should, coexist with human stories. ‘We should know how people die, but we should also know how they live’.

A story has been told time and again of a group of visitors that landed upon a village in South Sudan not so long after the war, deserted in the late morning save for the children playing about. When asked where their mothers were, the children, quite disinterested, said that they did not know. A similar question about their fathers’ whereabouts elicited the excited response that the men were ‘at work’. Upon reaching the market center, the visitors were surprised to find all the men gathered under trees in groups, sitting, drinking tea, playing board games, chatting, creating networks. Still no sign of the women. It is only long after dusk that one woman after another, sometimes in small groups, other times solitary, slowly begins making their way back, with heavy loads on their heads.

These women are invisible to the undiscerning eye. They do not exist to their children, nor do their communities account for them any longer. The abuses they suffer in the course of their day to day lives are equally invisible. They are almost completely erased from the memory of the state, save for the ‘GDP’ that Chimamanda speaks of, the numerical reduction of our humanity that so forcefully prevents us from finding out who the person next to us is, what they eat, whom they love, and how they live. These invisible women exist all around us: in Addis Ababa they are the firewood carriers enslaved for a pittance, in South Sudan they toil from dawn till dusk, with no memory of visitors ever passing through their villages, in South Africa they are ill-treated contract labourers on our university campuses, and municipal street cleaners working overnight so that we wake up to spotless pavements. Across the world they are trafficked across borders for domestic servitude and criminalized for serving the million dollar sex industry, under appalling conditions.

These women have been rendered invisible and robed of their right to make choices. Women’s right to choose, what Hillary Clinton sees as being a fundamental test of democracy, must be restored. This can only happen when communities begin again to recognize the humanity of the women who serve and reproduce them every day. Quite simply, communities and states must begin to account for women’s invisible labour, and the best place to start is by recognizing the very existence of these women. To ask how many of us actually remember the sound of the laughter of our mothers, daughters, wives, or sisters.

Signs of unease in South Sudan

And its precious oil resource is at the heart of it. There was a vivid expression of this in the sight of Southern Sudanese lined up along the streets of Juba town early this week to welcome President Salva Kiir Mayardit upon his return from the AU summit in Addis Ababa. Significantly, this was the first summit Kiir attended as representative head of state of the newly independent country, and therefore the first at which he had the opportunity to present in a speech to his contemporaries, the position of South Sudan, now a sovereign state, on a number of issues. Arguably the most significant of these is the question of oil wealth sharing and the current crisis facing Sudan and South Sudan. His speech reiterated South Sudan’s desire to avoid war at all costs, touching on the principle of ‘peaceful coexistence’ and the need for ‘reasonable and fair commercial engagement’ between the two countries. But this desire is probably only ostensible, if public displays (of anything) can reliably be used as a yardstick. Back on the streets, quite aside from the obvious message that those in charge appeared to be putting across by actively blocking off a major road and holding up most traffic into town for up to six hours, it was nonetheless the sheer, unmitigated display of power and military presence when the president finally arrived and was escorted from the airport that quite stirred. The sight of tens upon tens of heavy 4x4s (the standard means for most South Sudanese elites) and military vehicles mounted with heavy machine guns, seemed almost like a declaration of war. Or a declaration against any notion that one might have regarding South Sudan’s willingness to remain docile on a question over which it remained in conflict for more than two decades. To insiders, the provocation made by Sudan cannot be ignored, and this show of ‘solidarity’ with the president on the stand he had adopted at the collapsed Addis talks – that the country’s wealth, borders and security would be protected as all costs – was necessary. Jubilant citizens carried banners announcing that “South Sudan is not a province of Sudan”, and “South Sudan’s oil belongs to its people!” These tended to evoke sympathy: it is not this country’s doing that Khartoum brazenly continues to edge back on its obligations under the oil-sharing agreement. Neither does it help that most of the oil infrastructure lies on the territory of Sudan. South Sudan has faulted Sudan’s unilateral decision to enact a bill to levy a fee of $32.2 dollars per barrel of oil that passes through their territory, accusing it of diverting and confiscating the oil by force while negotiations were taking place to determine a fair fee. South Sudan considers this a violation of their sovereignty, and has taken the decision to cease oil production indefinitely. Despite the governments assurances to the contrary, this is a move which if let to stand, is bound to hurt both countries severely, and almost certainly open up South Sudan, already feeling the weight of a growing humanitarian crisis due to violence in Jonglei state, to the vagaries of foreign aid dependence. South Sudan’s oil, that which Alex de Waal has termed as its doomsday machine, continues to bind this country’s historical trajectory inextricably to a story told through perpetual cycles of war.

Quote

"Books reveal your true self, guide you to what you will become, and illuminate your world just like the sun lights your day. There are two truths in this world, the first is God which is a permanent truth, and the second; the world, is temporary. We came to this life to read the second truth in order to understand the first, and those who do not know are the ones who do not read."

- Khalil Ashour-

Egyptians shall not be cheated out of their revolution

I visited Cairo a couple of weeks ago. To those who enquired, my impression of the Revolutionary Tahrir Square was that I thought it felt too sanitised. I could not explain it beyond this English word that refers, among other meanings, to the act of ‘making something more acceptable by removing unpleasant or offensive features from it’. In that beautiful large space, at the time laid bare, manicured and too tidy, something seemed absent. I could not help feeling that the masses crawling around it in the evening traffic and on foot should instead have been surging into it. Some of my companions walked into the empty square and made soundless protest gestures, much to the amusement of the motorists and pedestrians, some of whom I could have sworn looked on almost longingly. As if they knew that time was running out within which to reclaim and immortalize this historic space that the post-Mubarak military regime sought to erase from their consciousness. Well, Egypt has again imploded, with violent protests taking place in Tahrir Square over the past few days. The people are demanding postponement of legislative elections which they are certain will be a sham amidst the violence and negotiations. They have rejected the façade of a military-led transition to civilian rule, and are angry at the slow pace at which reforms have been conducted, if at all. The people are aware of Egypt’s geo-political significance in the region, and are suspicious and resistant to external intervention on their behalf. The Military Council’s ostensible resignation left the people unperturbed; they want an end to military dictatorship. Period. Protestors have been killed in the clashes, but Egyptians will not accept anything less, nor should they. My other impression of Cairo, of a great city drowning in abject poverty drives me to hope that this time victory shall truly be of the people, who no doubt recall a time when visitors left only with the memory of its architectural splendor.