by Gwynne Dyer
Within two days, Samuel Kivuitu retracted his declaration of a Kibaki victory, saying that the electoral commission had come under unbearable pressure from the government: “I do not know who won the election … We are culprits as a commission. We have to leave it to an independent group to investigate what actually went wrong.”
But Kibaki is digging in, and innocent Kikuyus—many of whom did not vote for Kibaki, despite the announced results—are being attacked by furious people from other tribes. Meanwhile, the police and the army obey Kibaki’s orders and attack non-Kikuyu protesters. It is not Odinga who needs to accept the “result” in order to save Kenya from calamity; it is Kibaki who needs to step down.
He probably won’t, in which case violence may claim yet another African country. But don’t blame it on “tribalism.” Kenyans are not fools, and they know when they have been betrayed.
About 1,300 people were killed in the ethnic violence following the 2007 election, and several hundred thousand were burned out of their homes and wound up in refugee camps. Mediation by former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan led to a power-sharing deal in which Kibaki remained president, Odinga became prime minister (a post that was resurrected for the occasion), and the two parties joined in a “grand coalition” that left only a tiny opposition group in parliament. There has been little progress on the list of reforms that was agreed to, but many of the politicians from both parties who were appointed as ministers have done quite well. The popular verdict is that “they’re eating together,” and the decline of Kenya continues.
It has not fallen as far as Zimbabwe, however. Zimbabwe is much less complex ethnically than Kenya and it once had the best-educated population in English-speaking Africa, but the leader of the liberation war is still president thirty years later, and he just will not let go.
June 21, 2008
ZIMBABWE: CUTTING THE LOSSES
Opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai was right to withdraw from the runoff presidential “election” in Zimbabwe on Sunday. Thousands of his supporters have been kidnapped and tortured by President Robert Mugabe’s thugs since the campaign started, and eighty-six have been murdered already. Thousands more would probably have suffered the same fate if the election had gone ahead, and it would all have been for nothing. Mugabe was determined not to let the opposition win, regardless of what the voters did. He even said so.
“Only God can remove me,” Mugabe has been saying in recent speeches, vowing that he would refuse to give up the gains of the liberation war because of an ‘x’ on a ballot paper. He claims that the major opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), is part of a plot by the British government, Zimbabwe’s former colonial ruler, to reimpose white rule on the country.
Whether this is genuine paranoia or merely low cunning, it lets the eighty-four-year-old president justify the reign of terror he has unleashed against opposition supporters since he lost the first round of the election to Tsvangirai as “a second liberation war.” In wars, you can kill people who oppose you, and you are not obliged to count the enemy’s votes.
So, many opposition party organizers have been killed, and in rural areas thousands of them have been driven from their homes in order to give Mugabe a clear run in the runoff election. And Mugabe’s strategy was clearly going to succeed: either he would win a majority of the votes because enough MDC supporters had been terrorized into staying home, or else he would win the count later on.
He didn’t win the count the first time, in late March, because he was overconfident. He let too many foreign observers in, and he allowed local vote tallies to be posted up at polling stations and didn’t realize that opposition activists would photograph them. Whatever the real vote count was, Mugabe’s tame Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC) was unable to massage the outcome enough to give him a first-round victory: most of the local voting totals were too well documented.
After a month’s delay, the ZEC released results showing Tsvangirai with about 48 percent of the vote to Mugabe’s 43 percent. That was enough to force a second round of voting, since a candidate had to get more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round to avoid a runoff.
It was the best that the ZEC could do for Mugabe, but it was a huge humiliation for the liberation-war hero who has ruled Zimbabwe since independence in 1980. His advisers should have seen it coming, however: Mugabe has misgoverned Zimbabwe so badly that this once-prosperous country now has 2 million percent inflation.
One-quarter of the population have fled to South Africa to find work and support their families. Many more at home would be starving without the remittances from South Africa, as foreign food aid only gets through to supporters of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front) Party. And public health has been neglected so badly that Zimbabweans now die, on average, at a younger age than any other nationality in the world.
Mugabe may not even know these statistics, but armed forces chief General Constantine Chiwenga, now the real power behind the throne, certainly does, and so do other regime members. They just don’t care. If they lose power, they lose everything, for almost all their wealth was acquired illegally, and they have killed too many people.
In the past week, there have been reports of senior military and political figures showing up at torture sessions of MDC militants who were subsequently released. The message was clear: we do not fear prosecution for this because we will never relinquish power.
So Morgan Tsvangirai had to decide how many more lives he wanted to sacrifice in order to force Mugabe to steal the election openly. But how would that discredit Mugabe any more than the crimes he is committing right now? And what good does it do to “discredit” him?
Mugabe is a scoundrel and a tyrant, and the people who run his government and his army are brazen thieves, but there will be no effective intervention in Zimbabwe from outside. The only African leader who has enough clout to do that is South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, and he will never act against his old friend Robert Mugabe.
Other African leaders will cluck ineffectually, but nothing will be done. Zimbabweans are on their own, as they always really were. Tsvangirai and a majority of the MDC have belatedly realized that there is no point in waiting for justice to prevail—but they have probably not yet thought beyond that. Basildon Peta, the head of the Zimbabwean Union of Journalists, certainly has. As he wrote after Tsvangirai announced his decision: “I hope it won’t be another long round of Thabo Mbeki’s timid mediation while Zimbabwe continues burning. The MDC must now do what it should do to rid Zimbabwe of this shameless criminal. The opposition party knows what that is, though I can’t print it here.”
Well, I can. It’s called revolution in the streets.
Like Odinga in Kenya, Tsvangirai finally accepted a power-sharing deal brokered by foreign mediators in September 2008. Mugabe remained president and the opposition leader got the post of prime minister, but the all-important control of the security forces was retained by the ruling ZANU-PF party. There has been a slight recovery in Zimbabwe’s devastated economy but foreign donors are still withholding aid on the assumption that ZANU-PF will just steal it. Tsvangirai has no discernible influence on the government’s conduct, but does not appear to have any better options. Mugabe will not leave power voluntarily—and revolution in the streets does not seem very likely either.
September 1, 2009
ETHIOPIA: POPULATION, FAMINE AND FATE
A quarter-century after a million Ethiopians died in the great hunger of 1984–85, the country is heading into another famine. The spring rains failed entirely, and the summer rains were three weeks late. But why is famine stalking Ethiopia again?
The Ethiopian government is authoritarian, but it isn’t incompetent. It gives fertilizer to farmers and teaches best practices. By the late 1990s, the country was self-sufficient in food in good years, and the government had created a strategic food reserve for the bad years.
So why are we back here again? Infant death
s are already over two per ten thousand per day in Somali, the worst-hit region of Ethiopia. (Double that number counts as full-scale famine.) Countrywide, 20 percent of the population already depends on the dwindling flow of foreign food aid, and it will get worse for many months yet. What have the Ethiopians done wrong?
The real answer (which everybody carefully avoids) is that they have had too many babies. Ethiopia’s population at the time of the last famine was forty million. Twenty-five years later, it is eighty million. You can do everything else right—give your farmers new tools and skills, fight erosion, create food reserves—but if you don’t control population growth you are just spitting into the wind.
It is so obvious that this should be the start of every conversation about the country. Even if the coming famine in Ethiopia kills a million people, the population will keep growing. So the next famine, ten or fifteen years from now, will hit a country of a hundred million people, trying to make a living from farming on land where only forty million faced starvation in the 1980s. It is going to get much uglier in Ethiopia.
Yet it’s practically taboo to say that. The whole question of population, instead of being central to the international debate about development, food and climate change, has been put on ice. The reason, I think, is that the rich countries are secretly embarrassed, and the poor countries are deeply resentful.
Suppose that Ethiopia had been the first country to industrialize. Suppose some mechanical genius in Tigray invented the world’s first steam engine in 1710, the first railways were spreading across the country by the 1830s, and, at the same time, Ethiopian entrepreneurs and imperialists spread all over Africa. By the end of the nineteenth century, Ethiopians would have controlled half of Europe, too. Never mind the improbabilities. The point is that an Ethiopia with such a history would easily be rich enough to support eighty million people now—and if it could not grow enough food for them all, it would import it. Just like Britain (where the industrial revolution actually started) imports food. Money makes everything easy.
In 1710, when Thomas Newcomen devised the first practical steam engine in Devonshire, the population of Britain was seven million. It is now sixty-one million, and they do not live in fear of famine. In fact, they eat very well, even though they currently import more than a third of their food. They got in first, so although they never worried in the slightest about population growth, they got away with it.
Ethiopia has more than four times the land surface of Britain. The rain is less reliable, but a rich Ethiopia would have no trouble feeding its people. The problem is that it got the population growth without the wealth. Stopping the population growth now is extremely difficult, but not doing so means that famine will be a permanent resident in another twenty years.
The problem is well understood. The population of the world’s rich countries has grown about tenfold since the earliest days of the industrial revolution, but for the first half of that period, it grew quite slowly. Many babies died, and there were no cures for most epidemic diseases. Later the death rate dropped, but by then, with people feeling more secure in their lives, the birth rate was dropping, too. In most of the poor countries the population hardly grew at all until the start of the twentieth century. But once the population did start to grow, thanks to basic public-health measures that cut the death rate, it grew faster than it ever did in the rich countries.
Unfortunately, economies don’t grow that fast, so these poorer countries never achieved the level of comfort and security that allows most people to start reducing their family size spontaneously. At the current rate of growth, Ethiopia’s population will double again, to 160 million people, in just thirty-two years.
You’re thinking: that will never happen. Famine will become normal in Ethiopia well before that. No combination of wise domestic policies, and no amount of foreign aid, can stop it. And you are right.
What applies to Ethiopia applies to many other African countries, including some that do not currently have famines. Uganda, for example, had five million people at independence in 1960. It now has thirty-two million, and at the current growth rate, it will have 130 million by 2050. Uganda is only the size of Oregon.
History is unfair. Conversations between those who got lucky and those left holding the other end of the stick are awkward. But we cannot go on ignoring the elephant in the room. We have to start talking about population again.
Kenya, Zimbabwe and Ethiopia are all relatively well-run countries: the institutions of the state still exist, the roads are maintained, more or less, and the power is on in the cities for much of the day. There is another, quite numerous category of African countries that are run extremely badly, by extremely bad people. And for some reason that I simply don’t understand, West Africa has the nastiest regimes and civil wars on the continent.
December 11, 2009
THE WEST AFRICAN CURSE
There have been political horrors in other parts of Africa—the genocidal former regime in Rwanda, the current regime in Zimbabwe, and any Congolese regime you care to name—but the worst regimes seem to arise along the stretch of tropical coastline between Ghana and Senegal.
Sierra Leone, Liberia and the Ivory Coast have all lived through nightmarish civil wars after long-ruling dictators died or were killed and junior officers seized power. Gambia has been ruled for the past fifteen years by a former army lieutenant, who now imports witch doctors from Guinea to hunt down witches who he believes are trying to kill him. And now Guinea has fallen into the hands of junior officers.
It’s a classic pattern. For fifty years after independence, from 1958 to 2008, Guinea was ruled by just two “big men”: Sékou Touré for twenty-six years and then Lansana Conté for another twenty-four. They and their cronies stole all the money, of course, while over 90 percent of the mineral-rich country’s ten million people continued to live on less than a dollar a day. At least they lived in a relatively safe and orderly poverty.
Then Lansana Conté died late last year—and within hours, a group of young officers broke into the main television station to announce that they were taking over the country. Their leader was an army captain called Moussa “Dadis” Camara, who promised to hold free and fair elections by 2010, and that he would not run for the presidency himself.
Sensible promises, as before 2008 nobody except his own family and his junior officer friends had ever heard of “Dadis” (as he calls himself). He has no experience or qualifications relevant to running a government, but a presidential palace is a nicer place to live in than a barracks, and the pay and perks are much better, too. The experience kind of grows on you, and eventually you ask yourself: why leave?
If a general had taken power after Lansana Conté’s death, he might have kept the promise to hand power over to a democratically elected civilian president, for generals already have comfortable houses, limos and lots of stolen money. However, generals usually don’t have direct command of troops.
That’s why it’s so often the junior officers who seize power in West Africa: they have the troops, and they are not much constrained by traditional ideas of military discipline. They seize power because it’s the only way to change their own lives for the better—and they generally start to quarrel among themselves after a while because they have already broken all the traditional bonds of hierarchy and discipline.
Guinea has now moved on to the next stage of the process. “Dadis” began talking about running for president himself last August. “I have been taken hostage by the people, a part of the people, with some saying that President Dadis cannot be a candidate and others saying President Dadis has to be a candidate,” he told Radio France Internationale. In a burst of frankness, he added that if he did not stand for election another military officer would take over the country.
At that stage, Dadis probably had still had the backing of the other young officers. They were doing very nicely, too, and why would they complain as long as the supply of girls, drink and drugs kept flowing? But then
the civilians got involved.
Various political groups that had opposed Lansana Conté for years now saw democracy being stolen from them again. They held a rally in Conakry’s sports stadium in late September to protest against Dadis’s presidential plans. Lieutenant Abubakar “Toumba” Diakité, another member of the military junta and the head of the presidential guard, was sent to deal with the situation.
He did so by massacring them. His soldiers slaughtered 157 people and raped dozens of women inside the stadium. Twenty women were kidnapped and videotaped for several days while they were being raped and tortured. It is possible that “Toumba” exceeded his instructions; the reaction certainly exceeded his expectations.
The junta denied it all, but the evidence was overwhelming. The African Union, United States, European Union, and the Economic Community of West African States all imposed sanctions on the junta, with ECOWAS president Mohamed Ibn Chambas saying bluntly that Guinea’s military rulers were using state power “to repress the population … If the military junta has its way it will impose yet another dictatorship on them.”
The United Nations sent a mission to investigate the massacre, raising the possibility that the International Criminal Court might bring charges against junta members for crimes against humanity. Dadis apparently concluded that it was time to throw Toumba to the wolves.
On December 4, Dadis went to the barracks where Toumba’s troops are based in Conakry: not a wise move, as Toumba shot him in the head and went on the run. Dadis was flown to Morocco for emergency surgery, and the remaining junta members chose “General” Sékouba Konaté to act as front man in his absence.
