Kenyatta shakes Museveni’s hand after his inauguration in Nairobi on April 9 (Daily Nation photo).

A FLY ON THE WALL tells me of very interesting conversations  between Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni and Kenya’s Chief Justice Willy Mutunga at the swearing-in of Uhuru Kenyatta as president.

At the April 9 inauguration held at Kasarani Stadium in Nairobi, CJ Mutunga who was at hand to perform the rituals, sat next to Museveni. To Museveni’s left was Djibouti president Ismaïl Omar Guelleh, and behind him Uganda’s First Lady Janet Museveni.

Museveni and Mutunga were at Dar es Salaam University in the late 1960s and the start of the 1970s when the place was gathering steam as a haven of radical and pan-African scholarship and activism.

Mr Fly On The Wall reports that the president and chief justice took time to renew acquaintances. But then one always has to contend with the African sun. Before long, it was falling on Museveni and Mutunga’s faces where they were seated in the front row of the pavilion.

Mutunga blinked bravely into the sun, but even though Museveni was wearing his trademark wide-rimmed Safari hat, the glare soon became too much for him. He turned and loudly asked Kenyan protocol officials; “What is this? Can someone bring us umbrellas?”

The officials scrambled, and returned with three umbrellas. They gave one to Museveni, the second one to Guelleh, and the third to Janet Museveni.

Mutunga is a stubborn man, so he jokingly chided Museveni; “Eh, you got only for yourself, what about the rest of us?”

Museveni is a master of the comeback, so he chuckled back to Mutunga; “Ah, you, you are dispensable”.

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In a creative and attention-grabbing protest, activists carried pigs and sprinkled animal blood outside the Kenya Parliament to protest what they as as greed by “Mpigs” who are demanding a salary increase. (Daily Nation photo)

•AS WITH ALL THINGS IN KENYA, THERE IS ALWAYS MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE.  The “Class of 2013” Members of Parliament are largely drawn from those Kenyans born in the 1960s and 1970s. 

By the time they came of age and entered public life, the earlier generations of Kenya had helped themselves to all the juicy prime cuts of the hog.  Today their families are living off the fat they accumulated from that fiesta. So this new generation of leaders is looking around for something to feast on but all the land is gone, all the forests gone, cemeteries gone!  There is nothing left except for the money in the cashbox.

My thinking is that there will be no discussion of service delivery to the voters, until the present generation has had their lunch.

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Outgoing Monitor managing editor Daniel Kalinaki (R) and editor Henry Ochieng (L) behind bars recently: Every generation must endure its own trials.The Monitor, Uganda’s main independent daily paper, was closed for 10 days over the “helicopter story”.

The Monitor, Uganda’s main independent daily paper, was closed for 10 days over the “helicopter story”.Among other things, we had been charged with “aiding an enemy of the state of Uganda” with the publication of the story. If we had been found guilty, we could have served up to 30 years in prison, and an extreme judge could have sentenced us to death.

Nearly six months, and having moved to Nairobi at the start of 2003, after many trips to attend court, I left again for Kampala the evening before the judgement, not sure I would come back.

I must admit was difficult standing in the dock hearing the Magistrate read that judgement. In the end, we were acquitted.

I had spent nearly 10 years in and out of courts, so I knew the court clerks, magistrates, judges, and Prisons officers well, some on first name basis. It got to a point where there was a magistrate who would frequently turn to me in the dock and ask when he was struggling to find the right word; “Obbo, what is the correct word for that again?”.

One of the security officers at the court was a big, good-natured woman. I tried to carry her presents most times when I went there. One day when I arrived at court from Nairobi she told me: “You are mad. If it was I and I was already in Nairobi, I would not come back here. What if they send you to Luzira (a famous prison on the Victoria lakeside).” But I was not in it alone, and was not our way.

However, it would be misleading to say we survive on courage alone. We also negotiated and made friends in the system. I had never really thought of that as a time-tested strategy until one day when I sat down to lunch with one of Kampala’s rich men, who is a good friend.

One the weekend programme Capital Gang on Capital Radio in Kampala where I used to appear (in cap) with President Museveni (corner right). When he chose to, he debated. When he needed to, he let the dogs out.

He gives money to both the Opposition (quietly), and to the Museveni campaign (publicly) during election campaigns. We got to discuss how one survives in countries like Uganda that are in “transition”.

He explained to me the way he relates to various interests in Kampala.

“When you live in water”, he told me, “you have to learn to make peace with the crocodiles”. It was the first time I heard that expression, and it made a permanent impression. Iron-fist regimes in Africa, and everywhere I guess, are like feral beasts. If you let them smell fear on you, they will chase you down and eat you. We never allowed them to smell our fear; we stood and took the blows without flinching.

However, governments are rarely monolithic. There are hardliners, there are cowards who fence sit, and there are moderates and progressives who are helpful. We had befriended and made peace with the less dangerous crocodiles, and tried as much as we could to send the signal to the powers that be that we were purely journalists. Troublesome ones yes, and we sometimes got things wrong, but we didn’t have any secret political agenda (few of them believed us).

Most Africa is still like a giant crocodile-infested water. It will be a while before liberal democracy and real civil rights are the norm. The risks for journalists and human rights activists vary from country to country, of course. But they have choices. They can stay and join illiberal governments and work “from inside”. They can run away into exile for their safety. They can stay and be killed. They can stay and be imprisoned. Or they can stay and figure out how to share the water with the crocodiles.

My view is that none of these options is more correct, wrong, or nobler than the other. Each of them involves a difficult decision, its own sacrifice, its own humiliations, rewards, and courage. However, not everyone will have the largeness of heart, or will have been humbled enough by hard reality, to see it that way.

I must end by saluting the Nigerian journalists who stuck it out during the Military Dictatorships, especially under the lecherous and murderous Gen. Sani Abachi, in an environment worse than in Ethiopia and, possibly, Eritrea today.

The free media today in Africa owes Nigerian journalists, and others like the South Africans under apartheid, a lot.

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Kiflu Hussain: Upset with Africa Media Initiative and journalists like this blogger.

My friend Kiflu Hussain,  a decent man and good Ethiopian journalist who lives in exile in the Uganda capital Kampala, is angry with the Africa Media Initiative for holding its next convention in Addis Ababa. Why? Because the Ethiopian regime is a dictatorship that torments journalists.

And he is also unhappy with me, because he thinks I have some wrong-headed views about how journalists and media companies should deal with a government such as Ethiopia’s.

You can read Kiflu’s full blog here (http://ecadforum.com/blog/why-i-am-naming-and-shaming-african-media-initiative-ami). Kiflu’s blog begins with the story of the AMI conference held in Tunis in November 2011:

“On the second day I joined a panel when the forum was divided in different groups to discuss various issues. I followed the panel among which one of the presenters was Charles Onyango-Obbo, a renowned Ugandan journalist and prolific columnist as well as Executive Editor in the Nations Media Group. I was rewarded by his humorous presentation and incisive critic towards the heavy-handedness of his own government against the media. He made the panel discussion, at least to me, interesting through a snide comment he threw against his fellow countryman, Mr. Robert Kabushenga, CEO of the government run, The New Vision who also attended the forum.

“Yet, he nearly disappointed me when he revealed a plan that Nation Media Group chose certain African cities to base permanent branch in a bid to tell the “African story by Africans.” Among the cities chosen for this “honor” was Addis Ababa.

“During discussion time, I raised a question to Charles by reminding him how the Ethiopian regime brooks no space at all for media; how a Nation Media Group correspondent named Argaw Ashine was forced to flee from his own country due to this fact at the time Charles was revealing a plan about Addis; and that Ethiopia is clad with an iron curtain in a way only slightly “better than” Eritrea. And so I sort of asked him on what criteria they chose this city for their project. “

“Acknowledging what I have said, Charles nevertheless said we can’t flee leaving everything to dictators and added the rationalization of NMG or his own that ‘If Coca Cola can do business with these dictators that it’s also possible for media houses to operate as business organizations.’ He included too the fact of Addis being AU headquarters as additional reason.”

I won’t dispute the accuracy of Kiflu’s report, although I have very different recollection of what happened (at least about what I said) or debate him. That is because I do understand where he is coming from.

So I will only give three examples of my very hectic times as Managing Editor of Daily Monitor, in Kampala – where Kiflu has found sanctuary, and what they tells us about the demons that most journalists have to wrestle with in Africa.

The Kampala government was never naturally pro-free press. We fought for it. Some Uganda journalists went into exile under the pressure (just as Kiflu left Ethiopia). Some of us stayed.

The controversial photo of the “Candida Lakony” alleged torture that kicked off one of the biggest storms in Ugandan journalism and got us into deep trouble.

In late 1999 I returned, ironically, from a trip to Addis Ababa. At The Monitor my colleagues had received a photo of alleged Ugandan soldiers in northern Uganda torturing a naked woman who was thought to be one Candida Lakony*. The story later famously came to be known as the “Candida story”, and one of the most controversial any paper had published in Uganda in a long time.

Anyway, after a long internal debate, we published the photograph. Hell broke loose. The managing director (now MP) Wafula Oguttu; the daily Monitor editor David Ouma, and myself were arrested, and eventually charged in court. The Monitor was shut down for a week.

The evening before our arrest, a minister in the Yoweri Museveni, government called me on my cellphone and told me that he and a couple of other “comrades” in government could arrange my escape that night, so that by morning I would be in Kenya.

“Why?”

Because, he said, he had been informed that hardliners in the state were so fed up with the troubles I was giving them, they had decided that this time they were going to torture me, and “I would never come out of prison alive, if ever I did”.

We had gone through so many of these battles, I no longer panicked easily. The following morning I packed a travel bag, put in a change of clothes, anti-malaria tablets, vitamin supplements, said – like many times before – what I thought was my last farewell to my wife, hugged the children, got in the car and drove to the office. The Police came at 10am.

With Andrew Mwenda years late. After a 6-year battle, we scored the biggest legal victory for free journalism in Uganda. (Obbo photo).

There was just one thing I was not going to do – run, or hide. It had paid off. Many people in government disliked us intensely, but they still gave us our respect because we were willing to stand up and be counted. Andrew Mwenda, now the Chief of The Independent magazine, and I had a long battle starting from the Magistrates Court, High Court, Court of Appeal – where we lost at every turn the bid to overturn Uganda’s criminal libel laws. We never gave up. Finally, six years later, we won the most famous legal victory for press freedom in Uganda in the Supreme Court.

Again, in 2002, we ran into trouble with the state in a story alleging that an army gunship had gone down in an area where it was fighting rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. Though the story didn’t specifically say so, the state read it to be suggesting that the helicopter was shot down by the LRA (arguably, it was a reasonable conclusion on their part).

This time it was even worse than the “Candida” story. Police, intelligence, and Military Police police swooped on our offices at around 7pm. They stopped the press, and held the staff. Wafula Oguttu was travelling in North Africa. Again, I got a call. I was at a farm on the outskirts of Kampala talking to then very influential Local Government minister Bidandi Ssali (he has since fallen out with Museveni).

Uganda journalist Bbaale bloodied after he was beaten up by security forces while covering the presidential election in 2011: While media freedoms have improved, risks remain.

I told him what had happened. He asked if I needed any help. I told him I would be fine. I detoured to my house, and found the family was sitting down to dinner. I told my wife (she went through a lot, that fine lady) what had happened and that I was going to the office. The atmosphere in the house was gloomy.

As I approached, I discovered that the street leading to our office had been sealed off and there was a roadblock. I will never forget the sight. There were all these men in uniform, and the lights of my car were just dancing off the barrels of their guns (for a second I thought I was stupid to have returned).

I stopped, and they came and shouted at me, asking whether I couldn’t see that the road was sealed off. I told them I could see that, but that I was Onyango-Obbo, and I believed that it was me they were looking for. They pulled away the barrier without another word and let me through. When I got to the office, the security officers did not know what to do or say. There was a funny moment when the intelligence officer leading the search, a chap whom I knew, said; “Eh, Charles, what are you doing here?”

In other words, they thought I would have taken the opportunity of being out of office when they swooped, to hightail it. The two floors of the editorial building looked like a hurricane had gone through them. I negotiated with the security officers and they let the rest of the staff go, but not before they took everyone’s phones.

I remained at the press, and watched as they carried computers, servers, and boxes of files into trucks away “for investigation”.  We counted the stuff as they did so, and signed for what they had taken. At 2am, I left the office. For the next few days the building was occupied by security officers. Again, The Monitor was closed for 10 days.

Then came the trial. The formal hearing of the case started after I had moved to Nairobi. They let me go because the prosecutors had long ago stopped asking for us to be held in prison or for our passports to be confiscated. As one of the prosecutors said once; “These ones we shall not oppose their bail or ask for their passports. We know they shall never run away”. (Continues in Part II: http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/05/16/the-untold-demons-of-african-journalists-and-living-in-water-with-crocodiles-part-ii/)

*While we were acquitted, the case ended tragically for Ms. Lakony. Lakony had come forward before the trial started and identified herself as the woman in the photo. She was arrested and charged with “giving false information to the Police”. Lakony was brave enough to testify at our trial that she was tortured by her boyfriend as shown in the photograph, although she was in prison. She was found guilty, but fell very ill while still in prison. She was released when she became very ill and died almost immediately after. I am still wracked by guilt over what happened to Lakony.

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The more elections Africa, the more it gets divides over issues like media freedom

It released a report revealing that press freedom has fallen to its lowest level in over a decade globally, and only one in six people live in countries with a free press (http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/freedom-press-2013). This lousy media freedom picture, it said, “was punctuated by dramatic decline in Mali, deterioration in Greece, and a further tightening of controls in Latin America”.

That said, the outlook was not bad for Africa. In large measure because the Arab spring toppled dictatorships in Egypt and Tunisia two years ago, Africa is no longer the predictable hellhole for independent journalism it used to be, although journalists are still murdered in record numbers in Somalia, and places like Eritrea remain a penal colony even for pro-government media workers.

“The trend of overall decline occurred, paradoxically, in a context of increasingly diverse news sources and ever-expanding means of political communication”, Freedom House noted.

And why are media freedoms declining? According to Freedom House: “The growth of these new media has triggered a repressive backlash by authoritarian regimes that have carefully controlled television and other mass media and are now alert to the dangers of unfettered political commentary online”.

Contrary to what it might read like at first glance, Freedom House’s analysis of why things are bad for free media is actually rosy. My sense is that if one looked at the various deeper political and social reasons why media freedoms have declined, the picture is actually very gloomy. This is especially so in developing nations.

I think that there are FOUR far-reaching reasons why media freedoms will deteriorate in places like Africa for many more years before they get better – if at all. One, ironically, is because of the advance of electoral democracy. Secondly, because well-meaning anti-poverty campaigners have  been too successful. Thirdly, because of the globalisation of information that is associated with the growth of the Internet. Fourthly, the ghosts from the 1994 Rwanda genocide – in which party-controlled radio played a key in rallying the murderers – still roam.

In an ideal world, all three factors would have led to more media freedom. So why have they had the opposite effect?

 The “Curse” Of   Elections

These days in Africa, in a year we have more (relatively) competitive elections, than we would have in a period of 10 years in the decade between 1975-1985!

The one-party and military dictatorship phase of African politics, meant that a cross section of elites and civil society were on one side, united by the common experience of oppression. They demanded a free press together with multiparty politics, and free elections as some of the goods that comprised the democratisation basket.

Fast-forward to 2012: Today, we have dozens of political parties, presidential term limits, and both free and rigged elections, “independent” media, websites, blogs, name it.

Political mobilisation, however, has dramatically changed. To win elections, political groups have to woe the support of sections of the elite, the non-elite, the independent media, and civil society. To keep power, they co-opt these groups by rewarding them with access, opportunities, and state largesse. This mobilisation is mostly done along ethnic, religious, regional, or party lines.

Whatever the case, today a government will have a considerable section of the elite, of the media and civil society supporting it. These groups will provide fairly intelligent arguments for the government’s actions, including restricting media freedom. They also give a “respectable face” to governments. The result is that the  1970s-90s consensus about media freedom has fractured.

Because of the way our new democracies mobilise support, and allocate benefits, for every voice and civil society group criticising the government and pushing for more freedom and openness, there is one supporting government abuses and arguing for secrecy and a push back against media freedom. The “democracy game” is no longer lopsided in favour of the democrats—most time it is a draw, and the bad guys are winning it on penalties.

The Anti-Poverty Brigade Was Too Successful For Our Good

For 30 years, from about 1970 to 2000 the biggest policy debates in Africa were not even over democracy, but poverty. Was it “poverty reduction”, “poverty alleviation” or “poverty elimination”? Were the IMF/World Bank policies the right ones? Did markets have a role? Could African states fight poverty? Were NGOs the best vehicles to combat poverty? Should donor support go directly to support anti-poverty projects, or be paid into the central budget? Was debt ruining countries’ possibility to fight poverty? Should debt be forgiven or rescheduled? How much was corruption hampering the fight against poverty? Would the next G7 or G20 Summit do something for Africa’s poor? Where would Bob Geldof’s or Bono’s next anti-poverty gig be? Which Hollywood actress star would be speaking on Africa’s poverty next? What would she be wearing?

A child scavenges for food in a garbage pit near Malanje, Angola. Many good-hearted people in Africa today believe that things like fighting poverty are far more important than media freedom – UMNS Photo.

However, a new constituency also grew from it that considered things like press freedom a “middle class issue”, and the more left-leaning NGOs and intellectuals saw it is a “bourgeois luxury”. That was erroneous, but the pro-freedom folks could only fall back to continuously quoting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s arguments that democracy is the best way to avoid famines partly because of its ability to use a free press.

Nevertheless, the idea that bread on the tables of the poor, and putting rural children through school was more important than “the right of the press to make money through sensationalism” (as the critics of free media like to put it) had become fairly well established.

Globalisation …And The Desire For Good Things

The Internet, satellite TV, and mobile phones, have opened up the world to everyone. Yet, that means different things to an average Kenyan or Ugandan, than it does to an average American. I think for Africans, there is less acceptance of the poverty in which most of them live, and more and more of them now also want a little bit of the good life people in other parts of the world enjoy.

China is rich…and doesn’t have much of a free press. Many Africans increasingly think there is merit to that approach.

That ultimately is a question of HOW they can get it. Every year hundreds of thousands choose to get it by migrating to live and work in North America, Europe, and these days Asia. But for the millions who can’t do that, they want it here.

In the past the question of HOW we could also grow rich was a debate dominated by a few intellectuals and columnists. It was always about three paths. One, the western freemarket/capitalist path (with its multiparty elections). Second, was the authoritarian-first-then-democracy-later path of South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Singapore. Then, third, the African way led by a heavy-handed but magnificent patriarch – e.g. Houphuet Boigny in Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivorie); Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, and such characters.

The African way was never quite convincing, because it never really reduced poverty. But articulate and radical pan-Africanists kept it alive until it crumbled when Ivory Coast went to seed; Gaddafi was beset by a rebellion and eventually lynched; and Ben Ali was run out of power and into exile by “social media” revolutionaries.

But even as it fell out of favour, it was replaced by China’s one-party-Communist-state-capitalist model that was creating fabulous wealth, and transforming the red dragon into the world’s second super power after the USA. And, even better, it looks set to overtake America in less than 10 years.

We had seen the “best examples” of free press, the US and European ones, corrupted in their coverage of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, as Europe is battered by the ill winds of its recession, all other aspects of its politics, including its pluralistic media model, are suffering in prestige.

Amidst it all, most middle class Africans want the prosperity of China, Malaysia and Singapore. More and more of them are actually sending their children to study at universities in these countries, rather than the US and Europe. They have “seen with their own eyes” that they can have it without a free press.

 Demons From The Land Of One Thousand Hills

The remains of the victims of the 1994 Rwanda genocide in which state-controlled radio mobilised for murder: We are paying the price today, and continue in the same folly.

I have not heard or read of a single African minister of Information or Security boss who has not justified a measure to restrict media freedom in his or her country over the last 15 years who has not relied on the bad example of Rwanda’s Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines – French for “One Thousand Hills Free Radio and Television” (RTLM).

Radio Milles Collines, as it is more popularly known, was actually a private radio, but was controlled by the family of then president Juvenal Habyarimana and extremist elements in his National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development (MRND).

It, and the state-owned Radio Rwanda, whipped up the anti-Tutsi passions that resulted in the genocide of 1994 in which nearly one million people were killed.

The documentary  Shake Hands With The Devil, a companion product of a book of the same title by Canadian Lieutenant-General Roméo Antonius Dallaire, who headed the hapless UN peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the genocide, has some chilling moments when we hear the audio from Radio Milles  Collines rallying the extremists to hunt down Tutsis. It informs them of the bushes and hamlets where they are hiding, and urges them to go and finish them off.

I think that 19 years later, African journalists and media freedom campaigners have

Many elections in Africa today are a collective trip to very dark places on the Internet: We emerge with a stench that puts many off from the case for a free media.

not fully come to terms with the damage Radio Milles Collines has done to the cause of press freedom on the continent. What makes it worse, as we saw in Kenya during the early-2008 post-election violence, as well as the recent March election, is that nearly every election in Africa today ends with social media and the Internet diving in the dark and murky depths of hate speech. Many countries just just relive Rwanda 1994 every five years.

To compound matters, the partisanship of many mainstream newspapers, FM radio and TV stations just gets worse. So every other one of the many elections on the continent today ends with societies more divided over the value of media freedom, and with fewer and fewer non-partisan supporters for a free press.

We could argue that Radio Milles Collines was so deadly because there were no anti-Radio Milles Collines operating to counter it. That for the voices, however few they are, that talk peace, fairness, and preach against hate to be able to blog freely, the Internet also needs to be free for those who preach hate. The problem is that increasingly we are speaking to an empty-hall. Most people have left, driven out by despair, cynicism, anger, or left to go into trenches to fight their own new parochial and partisan causes. Press freedom, has very few buyers these days. And I fear that market is not about to rebound.

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Raila: In the biggest contradictiion, he probably lost because he had been very succcessful as a politician.

After the March 4 poll, the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) announced Uhuru winner with 50.07 percent of the vote, with Raila getting 43.28 percent. The IEBC, for sure, fluffed the election and Raila and civil society groups felt there was sufficient ground to go to court to challenge it. After weighing the odds, the Supreme Court said Uhuru had won it fairly.

Uhuru (right) and Ruto (left) celebrate their election victory; the real forces that drove them to the top is more complex than they seem.

Kenya, without doubt, has East Africa’s most open politics – the court proceedings, the election results announcements, the appointment of judges, government officials, name it, all happen on live TV.  Yet, open as it is, it often tells you very little about the real forces driving that politics. Nearly all the opinion polls leading to the election had Raila in the lead. After the December 2012 party primaries that Raila’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) handled badly in many places, the polls started to change in favour of Uhuru.Raila has towered over Kenyan opposition activism, and in the last 15 years, its general politics. It is probably instructive that after the court ruling, the most asked question in newspaper columns was “what next for Raila?” not “how will Uhuru govern?”

In many ways, Raila lost this election because he had won. Son of the father of Kenya’s opposition politics Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, Raila finally shot to fame in the failed 1982 coup, and from then on gained a reputation as a brave and fearless campaigner for multiparty democracy. He served his years in jail for his troubles.

Raila almost seemed to have become addicted to anti-establishment activism. He was at his best when taking on the state and men of power. He honed a political style that needed a huge grievance, and he would ride that wave like few other African politicians could.

And therein lay the seeds of his loss. His ODM assumed Raila’s rebellious character, making it difficult to impose central discipline on it.

Thus when in his Nyanza backyard the ODM big wigs sought to impose candidates in the primaries that the rank and file didn’t like, they did as Raila had taught them over the years – they rebelled. Thus in a region where he was once a near-demigod, the unthinkable happened; Raila was booed on some of his campaign stops.

In the 2007 campaign, which Raila ran with remarkable efficiency (as opposed to 2013) he championed two issues. One of them many people thought he was crazy to push; a highly devolved political system. The other was trimming the powers of the president.

Many people were afraid that devolution would break up Kenya. However, the 2007 election ended in a violent dispute, which was resolved with the formation of a grand coalition with Mwai Kibaki as president and Raila as PM.

The shock of the violence that followed the 2007 poll opened the way for the 2010 constitution. The ODM devolution project was adopted; and the powers of the presidency were dramatically reduced.

Lech Walesa: Was brave and inspirational as an opposition figure – much like Raila – but fall by the roadside as president.

As the bible would say, Raila’s work was done. In reality, there was no emotional or big issue to keep him in politics.

Raila started suffering the problem that most charismatic opposition politicians like him have endured when they get into government; they are just not able to remain the angels and heroes that they were before as a recent article in TIME magazine noted. Poland’s trade union leader Lech Welesa was larger than life when he led the opposition to Communism. He won, and when he became president he was a disaster.

The Czech leader, poet, Nobel laureate Vaclav Havel who led the democracy movement was a near-god. When he became leader, he was uncomfortable in the job, and botched it.

Another Nobel laureate, Myanmar’s (Burma’s) Aung San Suu Kyi, according to TIME is also beginning to look fallible, now that she is free and active in politics.

In Raila’s case, while he was PM, some ODM strongholds meanwhile got  infrastructure built, and Kisumu’s ramshackle airport was renovated and expanded and became the best of its type in Kenya. With that an economic boom that is changing the face of the lakeside city started. The deep sense of exclusion that fuelled Raila’s politics in the past faded.

Raila himself often seemed unenthusiastic on the trail. The election machine he built this time was a faint shadow of the one he had in 2007.

Probably it is because he didn’t have any of the grand causes of the past, because he had achieved nearly all of the key ones with crucial victories in the 2010 constitution. Uhuru and his running mate William Ruto, meanwhile, seemed to have all the burning grievances and motivation going for them.

The common view is that because both Uhuru and Ruto face charges at the International Criminal Court at The Hague for their alleged in the post-election violence in 2008 that killed 1,400 – victory was a life or death matter for them, because it would dramatically improve their chances of being acquitted.

But I see something bigger. Some of the people, most of them from Central Kenya, who were displaced in smaller scale election violence in the Rift Valley, Ruto’s realm, in 1992 and 1997 are still unresettled – just like several thousands from 2008.

For the Central Kenya landed elite, it was absolutely critical that there was no violence in the Rift Valley that uprooted any more Kikuyu people who would end up in their homeland as “refugees”. The long-term implications for the credibility of the traditional Central Kenya leadership, and the risk of the Kikuyu countryside becoming an even more lawless expanse were too high. An Uhuru-Ruto ticket reduced that risk dramatically.

Havel: Was a democracy hero, but uncomfortable in office.

For Ruto, an Uhuru ticket meant that he didn’t have to confront the Rift-Valley-Land-For-Kalenjins hardliners. Eager to make peace, Central Kenya Power was not going to press for restitution for the Kikuyu who lost their lands and homes in 2008 – thus allowing the fellows who seized them to keep them for possibly up to 10 years, making any reversals of their “ownership” impossible by the end of that period.

But something else that I referred to already had also made the 2008 attacks on, especially, the Kikuyu in the Rift Valley impractical in 2013.

Unlike 2008, my sense is that Rift Valley leaders were smart enough to realise that violence that chases farmers from their lands and hurts investment in the region would not be Nairobi’s problem. It would hurt “their” county economy.  These new highly devolved counties, as we noted above, were Raila’s big and emotive issue in 2007. If he hadn’t driven the issue, devolution might have taken longer to come – if at all.

In short, while many people see the Uhuru-Ruto victory as a product of a tribal closing of ranks by the numerous Kikuyu and Kalenjin, I see a sophisticated deal knitted together to protect the economic and social capital of the two communities’ elite.  It was in deep peril. Uhuru and Ruto were not the leaders here; they were merely instruments.

Raila couldn’t pull any dynamics to equal those out of his hat. In addition he became a victim of his success, proving the truth of the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

-A shorter version of this article has been published on http://www.monitor.co.ug

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In Kibaki’s failures also lay the seeds of his success.

Whether or not a clear winner emerges from Monday’s March 4 Kenya election, thus avoiding a second-round run-off in April, one thing is for sure: In State House, President Mwai Kibaki will be packing his last suitcases, preparing to clear out.

A lot has been said about what Kibaki’s legacy will be; how the disputed December 2007 election and the horrendous violence that followed it will

impinge on it; and the extent to which he managed – or failed – to break away from the clientilist Kenyan politics of the past.

That however is a very local Kenyan story. In wider African terms, for all his failings, Kibaki did two extraordinary things. First, he became the oldest president (possibly in the world) to preside over a technology/innovation mini-revolution. So, first, we must ask how Kenya became touted as the “Silicon Savannah” under a president who is now 82 years old, while elsewhere other leaders who are half his age have failed to.

Secondly, the most consistent criticism of Kibaki is that he was too much of a hands-off, bumbling, and disengaged president.  Part of this was a result of failing health during his first months in office following a car accident in late 2002. Still, how did he manage to dig Kenya from the economic grave in which it was in 2003, and made it one of the continent’s most interesting economies? How was it possible that this supposedly half-asleep president in less than 10 years poured more money into public infrastructure than other presidents since independence in 1963 combined had done; and the Nairobi Stock Exchange equity market capitalisation has grown by a record 1,137 percent.

Kibaki launches the Konza Technology City: It is not always that an 82-year-old African president can spur an innovation wave–but picking people like Bitange Ndemo (exteme left) helped a lot.

My sense is that Kibaki did two things that are rarely done in Africa. First, informed by the difficult years Kenya had in the last 10 years of KANU rule, he took the ruling parties (Narc 2003-2007, PNU 2008-2012) out of government, and consigned them to being largely parliamentary parties.

There were no annual national congresses of Narc or PNU in which they made grand declarations about the economy. Several appointments to government were, to be sure, still informed by patronage considerations, but what Kibaki did was return government to some kind of technocratic management.

Without ruling parties meddling too much in government and policy, it opened up a space that was occupied by all sorts of creative forces; the technology community, telecommunication companies, and modernising bureaucrats like Information permanent secretary Bitange Ndemo.

Secondly, Kibaki introduced the “minimalist presidency”. No one had to sit and wait for what the president would do or say. Observers and analysts were reduced to reading Kibaki’s body language, who sat next to him on a podium, who went with him on the few foreign trips he

Thika Superhighway: In 10 years, Kibaki oversaw more investment in Kenya infrastructure than the country had managed since independence in 1964.

made. Amidst loud national denunciation about how he was a do-nothing president and addicted to fence-sitting, Kibaki most times refused to budge from the sanctuary of State House to speak on TV. He gave only one formal media interview in his presidency, to the Sunday Nation. And even with that, the questions had to be sent ahead. The new political certainty thus came from a strange source; the near-guarantee that Kibaki would keep off.

Kenya had in the past become accustomed to a rungu(club)-wielding Daniel arap Moi, a larger-than-life presence who had his finger in every pie.

Kibaki, we now know, was pulling a few strings behind the scenes. But his reluctance to publicly also be the country’s First Patriarch, forced Kenyan society to begin growing up again and to learn how to find its own way in the dark without being led by an all-knowing Father of the Nation.

I can’t think of an African president who has done that in recent times and got away with it. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela took his hand off government early, but the rule of the African National Congress and his obsessive deputy, Thabo Mbeki, were still overwhelming and ubiquitous.

I must admit that my pathological loathing of overbearing Big Men disqualifies me as an objective commentator on this subject, as I am likely to be “too soft” on a politician I think represents the opposite. I believe though that one day in quieter times, it will be written that Kibaki proved that sometimes the best thing a leader can do for his country is to get out of its face. If I were to write that story, I would call that the Kibaki Paradox.

(Also just published in Daily Nation; http://elections.nation.co.ke/Blogs/Obbo/-/1640520/1706138/-/bm31r8/-/index.html)

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Post-election violence in Kenya in 2008: Are fears that it will happen again next week justified?

Yesterday I tried to buy an Economy class seat for a quick dash to Uganda, and return on Sunday to catch the Election Day action on Monday March 4.

There were no seats on any of the flights. Well, I am still waiting for something to open up. Oh, I was told there were two Business Class seats, but then I would have to fork out an additional $550 for an upgrade and taxes – for a 5o minute flight. As Wahome Mutahi (RIP) would have said, I am neither too clever nor too foolish, so I figured there were better ways to spend my money.

The non-availability of seats is unusual. For as long as I can remember, it has always been possible to fly between Nairobi and Entebbe at a few hours notice.

I dug a little bit, and found out – not surprisingly – that it has to do with the Monday election. Many people are afraid that there will be a repeat of the 2008 post-election violence and are high-tailing it.

I know of two big international organisations that stopped their staff from travelling to Nairobi three weeks ago. Another just closed its offices in Nairobi and gave its people several weeks off. Some multinationals have taken most of their non-Kenyan staff “out of possible harm’s way”.

Glittering Nairobi: But for some of its residents, it loses the shine during elections.

No, they are not all going to wait the election out in Uganda. Thing is that seats to flights to Europe from Nairobi sold out days ago. The next city in the region with the most flights out to Europe is Entebbe, so a large chunk of the traffic to Uganda is actually in transit to get flights to Europe.

Most Kenyans and “budget expatriates” who are taking sanctuary in Uganda have been driving across the border over the last 10 days. Ugandan roads and towns, I am told, are teeming with Kenyan registered cars.

Hotels in cities with cleaner air and more affordable rates like Jinja on the River Nile, are doing a roaring business. Joachim Buwembo, columnist for The East African, has called the many people who  are flooding Uganda in fear of election violence in Kenya “election tourists”.

I do perfectly understand, and even laud a man or woman who would flee a country because they fear for theirs and their families safety.

However, I do take a slightly different view. Living in your own, and other people’s countries, is like a marriage. You cannot be in it only if it is good. You also have some responsibility to hang in when it is bad. You cannot

The serenity of River Nile in Jinja, Uganda: Home to a large number of ‘election tourists’ from Kenya.

think a country is worthy enough for you to work in, make a livelihood there, be sustained by its hospitality, but not have the courage to stand with it in times of trial.

In the end, of course, most of us do run for cover or our lives. The point then is whether Kenya is at a point where one needs to do that run.

Some weeks ago I was talking to a good Kenyan friend, a very pragmatic chap with a sharp nose for business and an equal sense of humour. I had mentioned to him sometime back that I was looking to buy a house in a nice leafy suburb. He told me if I had the money, it was now time to buy.

Some people, he said, were nervous and selling their houses rather cheaply and getting out of Nairobi. I wasn’t ready. If the Monday election ends in a deadlock where no one gets the 50% plus 1 needed to win, we shall go into a run-off that will take place between April 4 and 11^th.

There will be more jitters, I suspect. And maybe there will be a few more panic house sellers. If my limbs are not broken, this time I will be ready. For the right price, this time I hope I can buy a house.

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Limuru County Club members (from right) Martha Vincent, Rose Mambo and Caroline Ngugi who were expelled from the golf club speaking to the press after a meeting with their lawyer Philip Murgor (left) in Nairobi February 14, 2103.
(Photo Billy Mutai/Daily Nation).

Why do male golfers hate women? A few days ago, Kenya’s Limuru Country Club expelled three female golfers for opposing a new a rule denying women a voice and a vote in the general assembly – and then speaking about it to the media!

It doesn’t matter what the status of the three women are, but it makes a point to explain who they are. There is Central Depository and Settlements Corporation Chief Executive Rose Mambo, businesswoman Martha Vincent and molecular epidemiologist, Dr Caroline Ngugi.

In other words, they are among the most educated and professional women in the world. Before you ask in which cave the Men of Power at the Limuru Country Club live, it will do well to note that many golf clubs in the world don’t allow women as members.

It was only last year that the otherwise vaunted Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, in the US voted to allow its first women members. Bear Creek Golf Club in Colorado, like another 20 or so clubs in America, still doesn’t allow women to play.  Some golf clubs in the US are so extreme, they will not even permit a wife to drive into the parking lot and drop off her husband.

In countries like the US, you could almost be sure that golf courses that locked out women, also didn’t allow African-Americans to step there; as Augusta and Bear Creek did.

In the UK, for nearly 170 years the prestigious St Andrews Golf Club did not admit women as members.

Limuru Country Club. This what the boys want to have to themselves (Photo Phil Inglis).

It is understandable that golf clubs did not admit women in the backward past when they were considered second-class citizens. But it is extremely unusual that a sports club can vote in 2013 to roll the clock back 100 years as Limuru has done.

This is particularly galling because in Africa, in the early colonial era, many golf clubs did not allow “natives” to be members or to play – they could only serve at the club bar, mow the green, and be subservient caddies. At a wider level, they were part of the same prejudices that excluded Jews and the Irish from such places in the past.

There is more to this sport-misogyny, I think, than just the old boys wanting to hang out in smoke-filled rooms and cut business and political deals without women nearby hearing them and going to “gossip” about it, as they would say. Nor is it because female golfers wearing low-cut tops could distract them. The women – and men – of golf all play almost fully covered up. Golf is not beach volleyball.

There is the usual discrimination at play here, no doubt. Also, I have heard feminists argue that this anti-women behaviour of men is some kind of castration complex.

My suspicion though is that the fact that golfers walk off beating and looking for a small white ball on fairways with forests and water puddles on the edges, transports men to the Medieval Age when they were hunter-gatherers and the women stayed home waiting for them to return with the day’s kill. Thus golf offers the blokes a sweet connection with their ancient primitive selves.

A history of discrimination: Today, it is women. In the past it was Jews and Blacks. (Dailykos).

However, the progress of women in the world – with very many now richer and out-studying and out-graduating men in many countries – sport is going to be the final battle ground.

Not too many people question the fact men and women play separately in nearly ALL professional sports – in athletics, football, basketball, motorsport, volleyball, tennis (at least it has mixed doubles), swimming, gymnastics, boxing, name it.

One of these days a male “traitor” or some feminist group calling itself the Pussycat Army, will ask that most subversive of questions; “Why?”

So, the feminists say, some of us guys have a castration complex. Imagine then, for example, that you opened up boxing and allowed men and women to fight against each other. And in a famous heavyweight clash, a female boxer knocks out the man in the first round to take the world heavyweight-boxing crown. The blow to the collective masculinity of the men of the world would be devastating.

So I am not surprised that you have a Limuru Country Club voting to kick out women. The boys are closing the stables before the horses bolt. Still, the idea that women can be presidents, lead some of the richest companies in the world, fight in wars, go into outer space, and of course be mothers, but can’t be allowed to hit a little ball with a crooked metal club is preposterous.

What puzzles me is that there isn’t a lot of outrage over the action of the Limuru Country Club. Consider what might happen elsewhere in Kenya. For example, the Nairobi Gymkhana Club is one of the oldest clubs

Can we expect this sign to go up at the entrance of the Limuru Country Club soon?

in the city, and home to one of its most famous cricket grounds. Sixty years ago it was largely an Asian club, and Nairobi was still a city where Africans were locked out of whites-only establishments.

Imagine then that today, the Gymkhana decided that no black Kenyans could be members. Or the Exchange Bar at The Stanley Hotel decided that no “native” should step there. There would riots in Nairobi. But Limuru Country Club can go back to this past, and get away with it. Kenyan women would be right to be very afraid.

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I guess it would not have been a genuine Kenyan debate if, as it did, it didn’t linger a little long on the question of ethnicity/tribalism. But maybe that also gave it authenticity.

The twin sisters in “In My Genes”.

Ethnicity is also the staple of mainstream media, and the star of most discussions by the chattering classes on how political goods, including election fortunes, are distributed in Kenya.

To a non-Kenyan looking for a more nuanced view of the country, one of the more sophisticated alternatives to this view of a monochromatic and one-dimensional Kenya that is turned and flipped primarily by tribal passion, it can be found in three other growing media – film, photography, and graffiti. They offer a competing, albeit sometimes overly complex, narrative about what kind of Kenya will go to the polls on March 4.

A couple of documentaries and films come to mind. There is Lupita Nyong’o’s, “In My Genes”, about what it means to live with albinism in Kenya. Then there are two by the Maina Kiai and Lucy Hannan human rights outfit InformAction; “Disputed Fields”, which examines the legacy of the 2008 post-election violence (PEV) in the Rift Valley and the competing ancestral cultural claims and modern-day legal rights to land in the region.

More recently they debuted “Unfinished Business – In Central Kenya” about the forgotten and “invisible” people in the region who have lost out in the last 50 years when two of the country’s presidents were Kikuyus (who, according to the tribal logic of politics, should have taken care of their own but ignored the lowly masses in the region).

A scene from “Something Necessary” (Nation Media Group photo).

Judy Kibinge has been prolific, but her 2009 documentary “Peace Wanted Alive”, which largely focussed on how the poor in Nairobi’s Kibera and Mathare slums responded to the PEV, and her latest release “Something Necessary”. “Something Necessary” is an intimidate look at a family which is part of the clashing identities in Kenya that were unleashed by the PEV in the Rift Valley. And, of course, “Nairobi Half Life”, Tosh Gitonga’s gritty tale of urban crime, angst, and the political time bomb lurking under Nairobi’s wealthy surface.

In the last two years, Boniface Mwangi has thrown his photography in the fray, and more famously became godfather of Kenya’s socially conscious graffiti movement.

There is of course the Kenyan blogosphere and Kenyans on Twitter and Facebook. But here one sometimes sees a fringe and extreme Kenya that is too frightening to behold. Happily, it is too individualised to represent a mass trend.

Why do the stories told by mainstream media in Kenya – and other parts of Africa- differ so much from those that emerge from film, photography and graffiti?

Boniface Mwangi stands against his “subversive” grafitti painting he called “Vultures”.

Actually, the mainstream has a decent excuse; the immediacy and production cycle of daily news doesn’t allow us enough time for reflection. Also, by its nature it attracts spin-doctors and too many hacks that want to score quick political points as commentators on TV and columnists in newspapers.

The other production is structural. The best news media is mostly local, often appealing to core constituencies that are vested in a certain (often narrow) view of a country.

Films take longer, allowing many quiet moments of deep thought, and involve far more people than the most complex story newspaper or TV news will ever do.

While news is local, no film or documentary can expect to be successful by showing only at home. It needs to show in other parts of Africa, and enter many film festivals in Europe and North America for it to be a success and make a modest return on the investment that goes into them – and build a reputation for the directors.

That requires that the parochialism and gratuitous drama that makes local news stories a bit hit, have to be expunged. And the stereotypical narrative that might unnerve liberal global audiences has to be tempered. In addition, a good film or documentary must find a sub-theme in a local story that has universal resonance. Done well, by the end of it is a far better product than you will find in any TV news or newspaper.

On the face of it, most of the documentaries and films listed here have nothing in common. What, you might ask, does a documentary on land and cultural feuds in rural Rift Valley (Disputed Fields), have with an edgy crime drama in Nairobi (Nairobi Half Life), or graffiti on Koinange Street, which is famous for its night prostitutes?

Maina Kiai – a “troublemaker” who loves the uncomfortable and alternative about Kenya.

Actually, they do one thing in common; they speak to the question of what citizenship means in Kenya. If you a Kiisi woman, married to a Luo man, and have a son, he is a Luo-Kiisi, born into a tribe that doesn’t exist in Kenya. The most unambiguous way for him to make a claim is through citizenship, not as a member of a tribe.

If you are a Kikuyu who fled the Rift Valley in the election violence of 1992 and have been living in an IDP camp in Central Kenya (a theme in “Unfinished Business”), you have spent the last 10 years of it under a government by a president from the region who has not taken you out of the camp. You can no longer appear to your Kikuyuness, you cannot play the tribal card. With the ethnic card closed to you, your only way to restitution is by asserting your right as a Kenyan citizen. Maybe, in a surreal sort of way, President Mwai Kibaki might have done a lot of good for Kenyan nationalism by not making that issue his top priority.

And if you are a person with albinism, no matter your tribe, as “In My Genes” revealed, you are very likely face discrimination – no matter your tribe. Without the ethnic and other covers, the only way you can claim to belong in Kenya is via the route of a citizen.

When Mwangi does his graffiti, it is an in-your-face art. You can choose to buy a newspaper or watch a TV channel. But graffiti is along the street where you pass on the way to work every day and thus unavoidable. Therefore it has to arise to a higher standard. It must tell a story that Kenyans from all ethnic groups – and the “aliens” who live in Nairobi (that is what my Kenya government-issued foreigner ID calls folks like me) who pass in front of it accept as valid – or else it will be caricature, and be defaced quickly.

For all these reasons, and more, they tell the Kenyan story better.

The most important lesson I have learnt from having taken the time to watch all these art and media forms is that the rich and powerful don’t desperately need to leverage citizenship. They are doing just fine with or without it. Citizenship, it seems, is the final resort of the weak, the excluded, and the persecuted. The people, who benefit from our countries, are the ones who most need them to survive as united nations.

That revelation just blew my brains away.

••••••••

 A slightly shorter version of this article has been published in Daily Nation Feb. 14, 2013, as “As Elections Approach, Some Kenyans Struggle To Find Their Place In The Land” (http://elections.nation.co.ke/Blogs/-/1632026/1693048/-/10toshp/-/index.html)

African refugees were the first true PanAfricanists and remain the continent’s leading accidental revolutionaries.

I think Binyavanga Wainaina settled one of the vexing questions about Africa: how to write about the continent (or not to write about it, for it is the same thing really) with his wonderful essay “How To Write About Africa”.

That still left unsettled a few other issues, especially the basic one; what is Africa, is it a continent of 54 countries, is it one huge geographical mass, is it a history, is it a consciousness, is two sub-continents – one Arab the other, well, Black Proper – or is it a cultural expression? Clever people; writers, economists, political scientists, aid workers, and other such folk are almost going to war over this. The politically correct position is that Africa is complex, and each of the countries is different, and it is wrong and simple-minded to overgeneralise. Yes, and No.

The answer as to whether Africa is one big country (a messy one at that), or several countries in a continent, some terrific, others hopeless, has been becoming to me slowly.

Our daughter used to attend a study group on the weekends along Ngong Road in Nairobi. I would drop her off, and park the car across the road nearby under some trees. I would sit there reading a book, news magazines, or working on my laptop – sometimes for four hours – as I waited. There is a small green park there, and on a couple of occasions I noticed that a group of young Ethiopians would arrive carrying plastic bags and sit around. They would open the bags and take out food and share it. By the time they were done, there would be over 20 of them. Then they would start playing a football game.

I got interested, and was told by mechanics nearby that they were Ethiopian refugees and exiles. Sometimes, I was told, Eritreans exiles also gathered at the spot. I wouldn’t have known that just by looking.

Then one Saturday I got the time for an appointment I had in central Nairobi terribly wrong, and turned out I had to wait for three hours.

Dictators like Idi Amin became a common African experience.

I decided to go and “pass time” at Nairobi’s St. Paul Church. I had family and friends who used to go there on Saturdays, and they told it was a “very modern” and short service. I got the time for that wrong too, but there was a service going on nonetheless. However, it was in French. Turns out it was the service for French-speaking Congolese, Burundians, and Rwandese who live in Nairobi as political exiles, economic refugees, or plain refugees.

I got immersed in trying to quantify the phenomenon of “micro-Africa” in Kenya, and found that they were many; Somalis from Somalia, Nigerians, Senegalese, Sudanese, Zimbabweans, name it.

I figured that one of the least understood and underreported shifts on the continent is this migration by Africans within Africa and how much they were changing the continent. They are dramatically breaking down the walls that used to make it possible to say that one African country was different from the next

African countries were indeed very different in the colonial period, and the 30 or so years after the 1960s independence period. Those were the days when, if you were calling Rwanda from Kenya, the international telephone was routed through London. It was quicker to fly to Bujumbura from Entebbe, in Uganda, by taking a Sabena flight to Brussels, and then from hop on another Sabena plane from Brussels to Bujumbura.

Some of this still happens. When I was in Dakar, Senegal, recently, a Mozambican editor friend arrived there one day late. Why? Because the quickest flight he could find to Dakar from Maputo was via Portugal, where he would also get his visa to Dakar!

Still, things were not always what they looked like. Slavery and colonialism, divided Africa, yes. However, in a perverse sort of way, they were also the first globalising forces on the continent. It brought Africa in contact with the rest of the world in a very painful way, but slavery and colonialism also became the first mass collective experiences for Africans.

However, the real Pan-African revolutionaries were the refugees. True, they were running away from murderous armies and warlords at home, but the Barundi refugees, for example, didn’t need to go through Brussels to come to Uganda. They took matters in their own hands, or rather legs, and hoofed it through forests, crossed rivers, ignored borders, until they found a safe valley in another country.

Refugees have a very different view of the countries they are passing through from those who arrive in

Fans at AfCon2013: Hard to imagine that when the first tournament was played, only three countries took part.

these same countries by plane. They also tend to have greater impact, because they do so at the retail level – imagine, for example, how much Somali refugees have changed the areas around the Dadaab camps in northern Kenya. They drink the local beer, date and marry the local villagers, and many times destroy the local environment. The latter is harmful, but it is still a serious footprint left behind.

I have met many Kenyans whose parents are Ugandans who lived in Kenya both as refugees and exiles in their tens of thousands in the 1970s and early 1980s. Nearly three out of five times, I have been able to figure out, despite their Kenyan names, and before they told me that they were partly of Ugandan parentage. It is this untouchable “thing” Africa that you will find increasingly many people sharing.

But more direct forces are contributing to turning Africa into one big country, and removing the old distinctions. Most of it is happening by accident.

One of them is football. When the African Cup of Nations was first played in 1957, there were only three participating countries. Today, it is huge and we Africans get emotionally entangled in it (although we don’t fill the stadium seats).

Today, there are many things you find in all corners of Africa – Nigerian films, Desperate Housewives, and the English Premier League (EPL). English Premier League, especially. Football loving Africans are united as fans or enemies of Manchester United, Chelsea, Arsenal, or Manchester City. While the EPL has a considering homogenising effect, it wouldn’t have happened without DSTv and the widespread phenomenon of the sport pub.

It is old in England, but the sports pub has not celebrated its 20^th birthday yet in Africa. England’s influence in Africa, and one of its more enduring effects, has happened long after the end of British Empire and colonialism – and has not needed a single soldier or bullet.

Matatu madness; an urban nightmare, but many Africans find it very familiar.

All this is before we take into account the role our corrupt and murderous generals plays in homologating Africa. Nearly 30 years of military dictatorship in Africa – except a few countries like Kenya, Botswana and Mauritius – again joined the African masses in common suffering. Famines too did the same.

A mad general in khakis in Nigeria, or an Idi Amin in Uganda, became instantly recognisable in Egypt or Guinea. A starving child in Niger, brought sad memories to a grandmother in  Ethiopia. These were not Africa’s proudest and best moments, but they were our moments, the chisels that made our collective history. Just like the joy of the Cup of Nations is a collective celebration, the tragedy of famine became in many ways a continent-wide bond of agony.

Lately, it has been the turn of Dubai to remake Africa. If you walk around Nairobi, you will see many shops – especially the fronts – shielded off and being been redone. When they re-open, they all look like the ones in downtown Dubai. And most of the goods are from downtown Dubai – or somewhere in China. They are doing the same in Kampala and Dakar. The shops off Cairo’s revolutionary Tahrir Square, were among the first to get this Dubai look in the early 1990s. I saw the same thing in Accra and in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, and Addis Ababa. People I ask from other African cities tell me this “Dubaisation” and “Shanghaisation” is happening in their cities too.

Soon, most shops in African cities will look like the shops in Dubai and Shanghai.

I can go on and on, and we will not mention the fashion and the ubiquitous braids, and the insane matatu or daladala minibuses. The short of it that if you live in an African city, there is little to nothing that will be unfamiliar to you to you anymore, no matter which other African city you go to. Africa is becoming one big – and largely unwieldy – country. It is not the united Africa Kwame Nkrumah dreamt of, or Muammar Gaddafi ranted about. It is the one the people have made for themselves.

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To maintain links to its roots as a rebel movement, even civilian government MPs traditionally are required to wear military uniform at their retreats. Uganda is stuck on the road to transitioning to a civilian democracy. (Uganda State House photo).

In the space of a few days last week, Uganda’s minister of Defence, Dr Crispus Kiyonga, and then President Yoweri Museveni, suggested that that if Parliament continues to give the  Executive headaches, the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) might be tempted to step in and stage a military coup.

The outcome a military coup could be terrible, yes, but it’s happening would not be out of character in Uganda.

The surprising thing is that Museveni and Kiyonga acknowledged the possibility in the way they did. That is because it represents a sharp move away from the story on which the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) and Museveni have justified their monopoly of power, and having the army represented in Parliament where they have 10 MPs.

The story is that the UPDF is the “People’s” army, and when as the National Resistance Army took up arms to fight the Milton Obote regime in 1982 as a rebel force, and thousands of peasants died in that war, it was to hand power back to the people. That is what made the NRA war a “revolution”.

Half-civilian president: In crisis or faced with opposition challenge, Museveni always jumps into his military fatigues and picks up a rifle. Here he visited landslide victims in Mbale in full combat garb and AK47.

That power was exercised through the Resistance Councils, later Local Councils at the lower levels; by the National Resistance Council, which later became Parliament at the national level; and the NRM leaders at the executive level. The UPDF’s place in Parliament was, as Museveni used to say, as the “eyes and ears” of the peasants and progressive intellectuals who lost their life in the cause.

For the UPDF to have to stage a coup, would mean the gulf between it and the “people’s organs” it brought into people to exercise power had grown so wide, it needed to break that social contract. In short, what Museveni and Kiyonga are saying is that the “revolution” is over. That is truly remarkable because it would be a formal break from the revolutionary history.

In reality, of course, the revolution ended 15 years ago, but the government maintained the narrative because it was a piece of fiction that still gave it some legitimacy.

Next question then, is why would a coup not be surprising? First, Uganda is a country where there has no leadership transition through the vote – all regime changes have been either through coups, or armed rebellion. It has only a post-independence history of changing government violently, and not a single case of democratic transfer of power. It is therefore more likely to revert to character.

Secondly, and more importantly, it is meaningless to brandish the threat of a coup to cow Parliament and critics, because the transition of power from the military to elected representatives in Uganda has been messy, and not happened as neatly as it has in Ghana, for example. It remains “unresolved business” and will have to come to a head one day.

Youthful and rebellious ruling party MP Gerald Karuhanga, has been a thorn in the side of the government – a problem the Big Men are pushing a draconian solution to deal with.

The NRM rules largely as a military party. A few days ago it ended its annual retreats of Parliamentarians and senior leaders. Like is the custom, the dress code at the retreat is military uniform for EVERYONE (except if you are too small or too big to find a fit).  President Museveni himself, every time he is faced with a crisis or his government is losing an argument to the Opposition, quickly jumps into his military fatigues, straps an AK47 across his chest, and stares them down.

Indeed some scholars have argued that Uganda didn’t democratise. That the NRA still rules as an armed movement, but did two things: It formed the UPDF to create a semblance of a conventional army; and dressed up the NRM rebel movement in civilian garb.

Which leads us to the next and last question; why did the NRM, and particularly Museveni, need to “civilianise”?

Because in this way, it can collect “democracy rent”. Every form of rule has its side benefits. An Idi Amin-type military dictatorship, or the “revolutionary” and one-party rule of the NRM had its pay-off. There was little bureaucracy, so things got done quickly.

If you got a contract, even you bribed for it, you would  be sure to do the job and collect on your inflated invoices. There were few, and even then embattled, independent media outlets to stick their nose in the story. And the courts did not have the “democratic” space that they fluked in the 1995 constitution to make independent rulings, so the possibility that you could go to court to challenge the awarding of a contract and get a fair judgement was nearly zero.

The annual Kampala Goat Race is a festival of hedonism and excess, made possible by the opening of social and a little political space: It would be messy if the land could be governed with a military regime that overthrows all of this (Jamila Hood’s World).

Unlike today with over 100 independent FM stations, TV channels and a Parliament where MPs defy the president, things were easier – even for the corrupt.

The problem is that in Africa (as opposed to Asia) donors, local and internal investors, don’t trust that system, so they put in less money, and you have lower private sector wealth created. This means the government collects fewer taxes, has less donor money, and therefore fewer resources for patronage.

Whereas a corrupt chap in the old regime had an easier time, he had little to steal. Democracy opened the money tap and brought big money (the democracy rent), but also intrusive journalists and independent MPs.

In the old regime, the government had to control people through a vast security mechanism, which it didn’t have enough money to pay for. With democratic rent, it can control the people through patronage. By sharing some of it with the security agencies, it gives them a subjective and selfish reason to protect the political order.

With a military coup, Museveni and NRM would lose the vast democratic rent. And the security establishment would have to base its loyalty to the state on ideology, not bread and wine. Uganda is a country where the grandchildren of the president have to be born abroad in some fancy European hospital, because as the Big Man said, he does not trust the country’s doctors.

It is a country where the lifestyle of the leaders needs the vast rent that its fledgling democracy produces, and they can no longer get the army to accept to “eat ideology”. It’s clear  - between maintaining a façade of democracy and reverting to military dictatorship – which is the sweeter and more rational deal for Museveni & Kiyonga Inc. – the latter.

Would they give still give it up? Yes. The great Greek writer Euripides said that “those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad”. It was true in ancient Greece over 2,500 years ago. It is true in Uganda today.

-A shorter version of this article was first published in The Daily Monitor, Uganda at  http://www.monitor.co.ug/OpEd/OpEdColumnists/CharlesOnyangoObbo/A-coup–democratic-rent–and-the-curse-of-Euripides-in-Uganda/-/878504/1672520/-/11bhr5gz/-/index.html.

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Narc-Kenya candidate Martha Karua: She “spoilt” a “good” story when her party held orderly primaries. (Nation photo)

The just-ended shambolic Kenyan nominations for the March 4 elections have earned the “leading” political parties; the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), The National Alliance (TNA), the United Republican (URP) etc. a lot of scorn and stick on social media and blogs.

They say no good deed goes unpunished, so it was that in the messy and often violent two days of the primaries on January 14 and 15 last week, Narc-Kenya was hardly mentioned in the media frenzy. Why? Because it had had very orderly primaries weeks back, with no fistfights, tear gas, burning tyres, and election officers playing Houdini. Narc-Kenya, you might say, was punished for getting it right.

Parties like TNA, considered to have a lock on Central but with little prospect in Nyanza and western, had quiet or no primaries in these parts of the country. Likewise, ODM, seen as having sewed up Nyanza and many parts of western, but feeble in Central Kenya, had very quiet or, in some cases, also no primaries in Central Kenya. Observers said it would have been a waste.

This led many to argue that “Kenya is more divided” today than at any point in its post-independence life, with parties carving out exclusive ethnic zones, tribal ghettos where “tribesmen and women” fanatically follow one of their own, and would murder or have no time for politicians from other communities.

Last year in March, leaders from the Mount Kenya grouping – the Gikuyu Embu and Meru Association (GEMA) – met in highly charged and much-reported meetings in Limuru.

GEMA has a controversial history, and critics see it as an anachronistic tribal association that seeks to further the political hegemony of the Mountain Kenya elite.

John Githongo: Cautioned about the seduction of oversimplistic narratives. (Nation photo)

Gadfly and former anti-czar John Githongo, a Kikuyu but not a fan of GEMA and a man who has his head fairly screwed on, weighed into the debate. In an article in The Star, he argued that Kikuyu voting patterns and political expression is not monolithic and is more complex than (simplistic) ordinary conversation presumes. Could Githongo be right?

A few weeks ago I made a new friend, a very smart chap from Homa Bay, a Luo who, on the surface, you would rush to say would be a fanatical supporter of ODM leader, Prime Minister Raila Odinga, the “king” of Nyanza.

However, he took a “Githongoist” line. He said it was lazy to argue that Kikuyu are tribal and will always vote only for a Kikuyu. He gave the example of the charismatic Tom Mboya, a Luo, and Jomo Kenyatta’s  minister of Economic Planning and Development at the time of his assassination on July 5, 1969.

Mboya was the first Member of Parliament of Kamukunji constituency in Nairobi. Unlike today, Kamukunji then was what you would call a “Kikuyu constituency”. Though he acknowledged how

Tom Mboya: A Luo, was elected MP of predominantly Kikuyu Kamukunji constituency.

history, and the grievances brought about by betrayals had changed everything, my friend argued that it was “not impossible for Raila to win significant Kikuyu support”.

He said the Kikuyu could vote for Raila the way they did for Mboya. Raila’s problem in the Mount Kenya region, he said, was not that he was a Luo. It was that he was “not addressing Kikuyu’s fears”.

His arguments and those of Githongo inevitably lead us to several questions: What exactly does a tribal vote look like? When a Luo votes for a Luo can that only be a tribal vote?

I think part of the problem is that we have locked African political analysis in a corner where, whichever way you flip it, the conclusion is that we are tribal.

One source of this failing is the refusal to acknowledge that aspirations can coincide perfectly with ethnic category. For example, a Kikuyu concerned about losing his land is less likely to trust a non-Kikuyu, and more likely to believe that his fellow Kikuyu neighbour, who is also afraid of losing his land, will better protect their land. It is logical for him to vote his fellow Kikuyu purely out of enlightened self-interest. To an outsider, though, it is more likely to seem as a tribal vote.

How do you separate the legitimate vote over land, over the presumably illegitimate one for tribe? I don’t know. I would still hold that the substance, the primary reason, for that Kikuyu’s vote is land. However, in terms of public expression, the form it takes is a vote for someone from his tribe.

CORD men, Raila and running mate Kalonzo. If Raila was just a regional creature, he would be irrelevant in Kenya’s politics (Nation photo).

To accuse him of being “tribalistic” would be to confuse substance with form.

But there is even greater difficulty if one looks at the population of Kenya. Though they are the largest national group, the Kikuyu do not have anywhere near the numbers to win the presidency for one of their own without the vote from other ethnic groups.

Jomo Kenyatta would never have become president of Kenya with the Kikuyu vote alone. In the 2002 election, even if the whole of Kikuyuland had voted against President Mwai Kibaki, and for Uhuru Kenyatta, he would still have won.

Even Daniel arap Moi, in the elections of 1992 and 1997, wouldn’t have won with only the Kalenjin vote from the populous Rift Valley.

In 2007, though the election result was disputed and led too the murderous violence that killed nearly 1,400 people, Kibaki beat Raila by just about 232,000 votes. The important thing for me is that if Kibaki had got only the Kikuyu tribal vote, and Raila had received only the tribal Luo ones, and everyone else had voted for Kalonzo Musyoka, Kalonzo would have become president. Kibaki and Raila would have gone home to lick their wounds.

Jubilee chiefs Uhuru (in blue shirt) and running mate William Ruto (to his right): If you choose to focus on the geography of their support base, you will miss its substance (Nation photo).

Clearly, then, the Kikuyu vote did not deliver Kibaki the presidency, nor did solid Luo support allow Raila to claim that he was robbed of victory. How do we explain that in a country that is supposed to be virulently tribal, and in which no president has ever come from a tribe that alone could deliver him State House, other communities still vote for them anyway?

That is too complex a question, and it points to factors that are very difficult to study and explain in a few years. Like the case with other African countries, faced with a question that is so hard to answer, like a river that will never climb a mountain, many Kenyas and observers of the country usually choose the easiest course – to  blame tribalism.

Tribalism makes political life easy. It allows you to choose who is a friend or ally. You are able to quickly identify the enemy – the “other tribe”. It allows you to decide whom to exclude when you are sharing scarce national resources. It is a greater way to build unquestioning loyalty. And it removes one of the things humans hate most – uncertainty. It is the easiest way to explain why you didn’t get that job.

For all its “beauty”, its powerful seduction, convenience, and the neatness it provides to analyse African societies, tribalism is a lie. It is voodoo political and social science.

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Kony: The Abominable One. Time running out for him?

Let’s remind ourselves. One of the big news stories of 2012 was “Kony 2012”, the short documentary video by the American children rights group Invisible Children. “Kony 2012”, which chronicled the atrocities of indicted Uganda war criminal and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader Joseph Kony, became the most viral video in history. It notched more than 100 million views within six days on YouTube.

It also kicked up a storm of controversy and, and inexplicably, virulent hatred against its producer Jason Russell, for the otherwise ordinary sin of “oversimplifying” the Kony story.

The publicity was so much, even US President Barack Obama said his daughters Malia and Sasha saw it and talked to him about it. At the height of “Kony 2012” fever end of March last year, some optimists bet that the outcome would be the capture of Kony by close of 2012. In any event, Obama sent 100 Special Forces troops to help the Uganda army (Uganda People’s Defence Force or UPDF) hunt for Kony in the vast expanse he roams and terrorises, stretching from the forests of Southern Sudan, to Chad, down through eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and into the Central African Republic.

Little changed. There were rumours of sightings of Kony. Stories that he had been cornered, even killed. The UPDF claimed many times to have overrun his camp, but only captured his safari suits and shoes, after he allegedly escaped “seconds before the attack”. A few of his lieutenants have surrendered, been captured, or killed, but not the Abominable One himself.

Pol Pot: Kony’s kindred spirit.

So will they get Kony this year? If I may be flippant, if they don’t, then it might well be because of a South Korean musician called Psy. Some months ago he came along with a dance hit, “Gangman Style” and it became the biggest YouTube sensation ever, totally blowing “Kony 2012” out of the viral waters. By the beginning of 2013, it had entered the history books, having been viewed over 1 Billion times on YouTube! So perhaps Kony is lucky Psy distracted the Internet.

My own take is that Kony might well die in 2013, but it won’t be because some Ugandan crack troops and American Special Forces troops shot him. He might even be captured, but it will have nothing to do with the man-hunting skills of Kony’s foes.

Kony is more likely to end like that dreadful and murderous Cambodian Communist “revolutionary” leader Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge regime murdered nearly 3 million people.

That story has been well told and exhausted: In 1979 Pol Pot fled to the jungles of southwest Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge government collapsed. He and the Khmer Rouge operated near the border of Cambodia Thailand extracting from the rural folk just like Kony, until April 1998 when he died in the jungle. One account has it that Pol Pot died while under house arrest by a faction of the Khmer Rouge. Others that he committed suicide, yet others that he was poisoned. I read a dramatically rendered story about how he died, shaking violently with a massive malaria attack.

My reading is that Kony survives not because he is diabolically clever, but mostly because he has the advantage of operating in a space that the rest of us simply cannot comprehend. The result is that because most of the people who hunt him are highly skilled, but still regular, soldiers they cannot properly enter his mind. It’s therefore difficult to anticipate his moves.

His unusual brutal and gruesome terror tactics forced the Yoweri Museveni government to also adopt extreme measures, corralling nearly 1.6 million people in internally displaced persons (IDP) camps in northern, and adopting aggressive tactics that made it impossible for it to win hearts in the region for 20 years. Kony had his rebels chop off the legs of people who were caught riding bicycles on days that were, according to his bizarre “10 Commandments”, considered to be the Sabbath. Peasants who squealed on the LRA were chopped up and cooked in village squares, or their lips and ears were lobbed off.

All manuals of revolution and rebellion will categorise some people as friends and potential allies, and others enemies. In Kony’s, everyone is an enemy. These manuals variously address how to recruit men and women into the ranks.

The LRA has no need for that. In its later years it relied on troops whom it initially abducted, and its “support” structure is comprised of female slaves and kidnapped children. Kony doesn’t operate in a zone. He operates way outside any.

With time, though, I think the UPDF better understands him and his methods, although he is still able to stay one step ahead. There is a small core of them who have been hunting him for over 10 years.

While he exhausted his enemies by forcing them to spend a lot of resources in a fruitless search for him over areas larger than Western Europe, he also put himself in a situation where he had to learn to adopt and operate in constantly changing foreign cultures and terrains. The problem is that Kony has not been renewing his ranks with shrewd young officers because he does not have the better-educated pool he used to abduct from in northern Uganda. Parts of South Sudan, eastern DRC, and CAR where he has been active are comparatively in the Stone Age.

In early 2012 “Kony 2012″ was the YouTube sensation. By the end Psy’s “Gangman Style” had knocked it into oblivion.

Also, while for nearly 10 years now the LRA has been operating transnationally, it has NOT become a multinational rebel movement, with Congolese, Sudanese, and CAR commanders. Increasingly, it has become a fish out of the water in the central African wild belt where it is active.

One of Kony’s most evil, but effective, ideas were the system of rewarding his officers with captured women. He tapped into men’s worst but most powerful instinct and desire. It seems to have earned him surprisingly deep loyalty from most of his officers who were benefitting from it.

However, it has now been many years, and today probably quite a few young soldiers in the LRA are Kony’s children, or those of his officers. And the women have transitioned from slaves, to bush wives of some sorts – mothers of their children.  Kony and his men can no longer control their camps with terror, or murder their children as easily as they could the ones they used to abduct and were not blood relations.

So one sees a few scenarios. First, his control over the LRA, or what still exists of it, can only slip. That means it might be easier to catch him out.

Secondly, though, the very opposite might happen. Because his children probably

President Obama and his daughters. They told him about Kony 2012.

surround him, Kony might well be enjoying more loyalty. They are likely to carry him deep into the jungles, where they will be isolated, but stick with him. It will be difficult to get out to find medicine for him, and he could be ravaged by malaria or one of the venereal diseases that it is alleged he is suffering from. Kony, therefore, could die lying bare chest under a tree on a mat, much like Pol Pot.

Or, as his pursuers close in on him, he might choose to go out on his terms—put a knife to his throat, or a gun to his head, and end it because he wants his family see him go out manfully. I will be surprised if one of those ends doesn’t arrive in less than 18 months.

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Meles: To some he was a villain, to others a hero and reformer.

One of the key events in Africa of the last 10 years, not just 2012, was the death of Ethiopia’s cerebral but iron-fisted Prime Minister Meles Zenawi.

Officially, Meles died on August 20, 2012, but his critics and enemies (and they are quite a few) believe he passed on early in July, but his ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) hid that fact and kept his body in the freezer as it fought over the succession.

Meles was as admired as much he was loathed. He hated journalists, imprisoned them in record numbers, scorned and tormented the opposition, and those close to him – especially his wife the ambitious Azeb Mesfin – were accused of eye-popping corruption.

Meles was also a hero to many. He took over a dirt-poor country in which famines routinely killed hundreds of thousands, and engineered one of the most dramatic growths in agricultural production in Africa. Second to Rwanda, he presided over the second highest reversal in malaria prevalence on the continent. Well before countries like Kenya started making news for their big infrastructure projects, Meles had been there and done that.

Addis Ababa, the capital, was a dusty ramshackle place 25 years ago. When Meles was done with it, it was a modernish city, complete with jazz clubs, and a completely new skyline.

He pushed the largest expansion of energy production the continent has seen, and a country that once waited to be saved by maize from Kenya, was sealing deals to export electricity to it. By the start of 2011, in a story not reported much, Meles’ Ethiopia toppled Kenya from the perch it had occupied for over 50 years as the largest economy in Eastern Africa.

I spoke to several folks at the World Bank, African Development Bank, and some politicians in Africa who considered his death a “great loss” to the continent. After Thabo Mbeki was ousted as president of South Africa in 2008, many analysts believed that Meles was the only African leader who could sit in a G20 Summit, make an argument as good as anyone else’s in the room, and even win it. When people like South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma go to the G20 today, it’s because they lead big economies, otherwise they are “seat warmers”.  Meles, his fans say, went there because he was in the same intellectual league as the likes of US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. All these stories, however, have been told somewhere at sometime.

Underlying the complexity of the story of his rule, thousands turned up for Meles’ funeral – and there was genuine grief.

The official account by Addis is that Meles died of cancer. His enemies claim he succumbed to a different disease all together. Some claim Aids.

Strangely, little has been said about WHY he died. One of my Ethiopian friends, whose views I trust the most because he neither liked nor hated Meles and is quite thoughtful, brought this up when we met up in November.

“Meles didn’t die of cancer”, he said, “He worked himself to death”. Meles is known to have taken a proper holiday only once. He allegedly was so engrossed in work, he “didn’t just pay attention to what his body was telling him”, my friend said.I asked him why Meles worked so hard.

“I paid attention to many things about Meles that many observers didn’t, and I think his ultimate goal was to restore the glory of Ethiopian empire”, he said. In his view, while most people thought Meles was out to consolidate power for himself, his wife and comrades, there was also a part of him that felt a lot of pain about how far Ethiopia had fallen. “Meles was probably out to rewrite 500 years of Ethiopian history. It is a job that would kill anyone who tried it. And it killed him”, he said.

Maybe there is something to it. And to get a handle on this theory, it is just as well to go back to a 2009 blog on washingtoncitypaper.com.

Written by Tim Carman, it was entitled “Why Do Ethipians Eat So Much Raw Meat?” (http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/youngandhungry/2009/10/02/why-do-ethiopians-eat-so-much-raw-meat)

“You likely know about kitfo, the finely chopped beef mixed with spiced Ethiopian butter and served with awaze or a berbere spice blend or fresh crumbled cheese…the Ethiopian restaurant at which you’ve ordered kitfo will serve it to you raw.

“Kitfo, of course, isn’t the only raw meat offered in Ethiopian cooking (or non-cooking). There’s also tere saga, sometimes known as kurt…

“I mention these two dishes as prelude to a question I hadn’t thought about until this week: Why do Ethiopians eat so much raw meat? The question was raised to me by Jabriel Ballentine, a native of the Virgin Islands…He knew the answer.

“He tells me that raw meat was a war-time invention in Ethiopia — or perhaps “necessity” is a better word, given that troops that cooked their meats were sniffed out by the enemy and slaughtered in their sleep. Ballentine said the troops finally learned it was the smell of roasting meats, and the smoke from their fires, that gave them away. Raw meat, then, was an act of self-preservation.

“Or at least it was a century or centuries ago. Ballentine couldn’t remember exactly which war inspired the raw-meat cuisine.”

When I was in Mogadishu last year in May, I was having coffee with a Somali who is steeped into the history of Ethiopia-Somalia conflicts.

The hungry and haggard were the international image of Ethiopia for decades. Meles thought a once-great empire could do better, and he changed that.

Ethiopia and Somalia fought many wars from the 1500s. Today, Ethiopia is the dominant opponent and is the proud owner of the Ogaden Province, once part of Somalia. Somalia meanwhile is weakened and withered by years of war, lawlessness, and hunger. It was not always this way, the Somali intellectual told me.

He spoke of Ahmad ibn Ibrihim al-Ghazi a 16^th-century Islamic leader idolised in Somali for his jihad against the Ethiopians. I hadn’t heard of him either, so I checked him out on Wikipedia. He mentioned other famous Somalis the rest of the world knows little to nothing about, and how they subdued the Ethiopians.

It was in these 16^th and early 17^th centuries Somali defeats of Ethiopians, that the Ethiopian revolutionaries hiding in the forests and mountains took to eating raw meat because the “feared” Somalis would detect smoke from any barbecue. His eyes literally lit up.

Ethiopia, and Meles in particular, he argued, took a very hardline toward Somalia, and would never allow it normalise, because they feared Mogadishu would raise an expedition to punish them for the “crimes” they have committed against Somalia the last 200 plus years. No one was going to subdue the Ethiopians so much, that they will have to begin eating else raw.

For some reason, there was something seductive in that argument.

The Ethiopian Empire, also known as Abyssinia, lasted from 1137 to 1975 when Hailemariam Mengistu overthrew the Emperor Haile Selassie, murdered the elderly monarch, stuffed his body in a hole, and instituted a reign of terror.

The glorious period of the Ethiopian empire came late, and no monarch symbolised it more than Emperor Menelik II. Born in 1844, Menelik died in 1913. The critical period of his rule was from 1889 to his death. He dramatically expanded the boundaries of the empire, modernised the state, and defeated the Italians, most famously at the Battle of Adwa (or Adowa) in 1896.

Emperor Menelik: Did Meles have a Menelik envy, and did he believe he could remake 500 years of Ethiopian history? Some think so.

Menelik, my buddy suggested, was Meles’ model. And in the things he did, and the role he played as an Africa’s voice in the world, he also privately sought to reinvent the domestic and internal prestige that Menelik enjoyed.

An incident from 2006 when we met him in Addis Ababa when I was part of a delegation of the Committee to Protect Journalists came to mind. The evening before the meeting, we stayed up late strategising on how to manage it.

It was a difficult debate we had, but in the end we agreed that to avoid an unproductive confrontation and end up leaving without any concessions from him on the over one dozen detained journalists, we would not throw things like the UN Human Rights Charter at Meles or lecture him about the need for press freedom. He obviously knew as much about those subjects as we did, so his government had made a deliberate decision to violate them. Rather, we would appeal to his pragmatism, and invoke the ideals of freedom that took him and his colleagues to the bush to fight the Mengistu regime.

Half-way through our meeting, Meles looked surprised that we had not yet lectured him on international law and such things, and realised we weren’t going to. He had spent hours preparing for this approach from us, and yet we were not giving him an opportunity to deploy his counter-attack.

At one point, he paused, and said; “Okay, I know you haven’t brought this up, but let me explain to you why Ethiopians get very upset when foreigners come here and lecture us about how should we should govern ourselves.”

He then plunged into over 600 years to explain why Ethiopians are proud people and how because of their great civilization, they don’t take kindly to people probably had nothing as glorious, trying to teach them about statecraft.

Our strategy paid off. We got more concessions than we had bargained for.

With the benefit of hindsight (thanks to my friend) I should have suspected that that was not just Meles talking. It was the reincarnation of Menelik. In the end though, Meles place in history, will not be as revered. Perhaps he didn’t have enough time. Meles died at the age of 57. However, age alone cannot explain it. Menelik died at the age of 69, only 12 years older. Maybe Meles departed glad that if nothing else, at least he gave it a shot.

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