Jacob Zuma is a natural born political survivor. On Tuesday South Africa’s president <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/aug/08/jacob-zuma-survives-no-confidence-vote-south-african-president" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">overcame</a> an eighth no confidence vote, despite the mountain of evidence of corrupt conduct that has emerged in recent months.
But it may prove to be a Pyrrhic victory – for him and most certainly for his party, the African National Congress (ANC). <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2017-08-08-zuma-supporters-celebrate-his-win-outa-considers-legal-action/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“Hollow”</a> was the word that one opposition leader, Bantu Holomisa, used afterwards, while the Economic Freedom Fighter’s leader Julius Malema employed a well-known Africa proverb: “When you want to eat an elephant you do it bit by bit”.
Zuma’s political death is proving to be a protracted affair. There was an air of expectation on Tuesday that recent allegations of “state capture” – attested to by a welter of evidence from the so-called <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.za/2017/06/01/the-new-gupta-emails-are-a-lot-heres-what-they-say-in-5-quick_a_22120706/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">#guptaleaks</a> – would be enough to persuade a sufficient number of the members of the ruling ANC to support an opposition-sponsored no confidence vote.
In the event, after a fractious two-hour debate scarred by ugly banter across the floor of the National Assembly, the motion fell short of the 201 votes required to remove Zuma and his cabinet. But yesterday was remarkably different. On the previous seven occasions that the opposition have tabled no confidence votes since Zuma’s power began in 2009, the ANC has remained steadfast in its support for its beleaguered president. Yesterday’s vote was a watershed for the liberation movement that brought an end to apartheid in 1994: around 30 of the 223 ANC MPs who voted yesterday sided with the opposition.
As the ANC’s chief whip, Jackson Mthembu, ruefully observed afterwards, this is true pause for reflection for the ruling party. Never before has such a significant number of the parliamentary caucus rebelled and defied the party whip.
Zuma’s streetwise political skills are well-known. So too is his adeptness at using executive patronage to secure the loyalty of party members as has been made clear in the revelations <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-22513410" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">arising from his links to the Gupta family</a>.
<h2>The secret ballot saga</h2>
But the back story to the unprecedented rebellion within his own party was the method of voting as much as Zuma’s political skullduggery. For the first time, parliament was compelled to allow MPs <a href="https://www.businesslive.co.za/bd/national/2017-08-07-mbete-allows-secret-ballot/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">to vote in secret</a>. This followed a <a href="http://www.702.co.za/articles/251722/bantu-holomisa-explains-parly-rules-on-secret-ballot" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">legal challenge</a> to the rules by Holomisa’s United Democratic Movement.
In its 22 June <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-06-22-read-in-full-concourt-ruling-on-secret-ballot/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">judgment</a>, the Constitutional Court – an institutional beacon of excellence and integrity in the context of the “capture” of other state bodies – had held that the speaker of the National Assembly had the discretion to order a secret ballot in exceptional circumstances.
Since the ruling, a number of ANC MPs have gone public with testimony of intimidation and even <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2017/07/12/makhosi-khoza-s-daughter-receives-death-threats" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">death threats</a> in the case of Makhosi Khoza. In turn, the ANC shot itself in the foot when one region of Zuma’s home province, KwaZulu-Natal, demanded that disciplinary proceedings be brought against Khoza after she had called for Zuma to go. The intervention served to underline the need to depart from the generally established principle of open voting.
Accordingly, speaker Baleka Mbete had little legal choice but to opt for a secret ballot, even though it would encourage dissenting voices among the ranks of the ANC caucus. Politically, she had probably done the political mathematics and, as the national chairperson of the ANC, was confident that regardless of the shield that she said was necessary to protect ANC MPs so that they could vote with their conscience, the numbers would still work out in Zuma’s favour.
And so it proved: 177 MPs voted for the motion, and 198 against (with 9 abstentions). Since the opposition has 151 MPs, at least three of whom were absent through illness, it means that that at least 29 and possibly as many as 35 ANC MPs jumped ship.
<h2>Win-win for the opposition</h2>
But it was a win-win situation for the opposition. Afterwards, in the unseasonably balmy winter’s evening outside the parliament in Cape Town, one after another of the leaders of the opposition spoke cheerfully about the political future and of the health of South Africa’s democracy.
They may have lost the battle, but they feel confident that they will win the war. After all, it is clear that Zuma is now their greatest electoral asset, with <a href="http://www.biznews.com/leadership/2017/05/31/ipsos-poll-zuma-unpopular/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">several polls </a>(including the respected <a href="https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2016-05-19-afrobarometer-trio-of-polls-show-shifting-attitudes-but-voters-would-still-opt-for-anc/#.WYo8na17Gi4" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Afrobarometer</a>), showing that across race and class, trust in Zuma has collapsed since he was returned to power for a second term in 2014.
Last year, the ANC suffered its first major electoral setbacks since the advent of democracy in 1994 when it <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-revolt-of-south-africas-metropoles-a-revolution-of-rising-expectations-64617" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">lost control</a> of three major city governments in Pretoria, Johannesburg and Port Elizabeth. Now, its political management skills appear to be in disarray as factionalism and deep, painful divisions dominate internal party politics. This is all unfolding in the run-up to what is likely to be a bloody five-yearly <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/venue-anc-54th-national-conference" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">national elective conference</a> in December, at which the ANC will elect a new President of the party to succeed Zuma.
That may or may not mark the start of a new era of renewal for the ANC. But Zuma’s term as President of the country is only due to end in 2019. A lot more damage could be done to the country’s economy and its prospects for growth.
The consequence of that, however, is that the ANC will face the prospect of losing its majority at the national polls for the first time since Nelson Mandela’s historic victory in 1994.
Yesterday may have been a victory for Zuma. But in the longer term it is likely to come to be seen as a major defeat for the ANC. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/richard-calland-182127" target="_blank" rel="author noopener noreferrer">Richard Calland</a>, Associate Professor in Public Law, University of Cape Town
Originally published in <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conversation</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/82244/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />

No confidence vote: a victory for Zuma, but a defeat for the ANC

Anti-terrorism and transactional relationships are likely be the main features of US President Donald Trump’s Africa policy. But if Trump’s proposed cuts to the state department hold, the US will be less and less of a presence on the continent, according to <a href="http://www.businessofgovernment.org/bio/gregory-f-treverton" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Prof Gregory F Treverton</a>, who directed the US <a href="https://fas.org/irp/nic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">National Intelligence Council</a> in the Obama Administration.
Treverton, who is currently Professor of Practice at the <a href="https://www.usc.edu/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">University of Southern California</a>, is a world authority on security and intelligence. I put a number of questions to Treverton who visited South Africa recently to deliver the keynote address at a <a href="http://www.dirco.gov.za/docs/2015/dirco0714.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">South African Council on International Relations</a> conference on South Africa’s relations with Africa.
Why is Donald Trump’s foreign policy so incomprehensible?
I wish I knew! It’s a continual struggle between, on the one hand, the true believers, the American firsters who are anti-trade and anti-engagement in what they see as an unfriendly world, and on the other more traditional conservative Republicans.
The pattern has been that the more traditional conservative Republicans, like the Secretaries of State and Defence, tug policy in a more familiar direction, only to have the president blow the process up with a tweet condemning the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/paris-climate-agreement" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Paris climate agreement</a> or <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/30/trumps-tweet-tirade-against-germany-could-backfire-on-us.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">labelling</a> Germany an unfair trader. The intensity of the struggle is reflected in the continuing haemorrhage of leaks, all from the very top of the administration.
Didn’t the post-Second World War liberal international order need a shake up?
Yes, and perhaps in that sense we’ll end up thanking Trump, if, and this is a big if, we get through the next years without a major crisis or too much broken crockery. Some of Trump’s complaints, like (America’s Western) allies bearing too little of the burden, have been true for a long time. And the reaction by Americans to the sense that they pay too much for the “public goods” of international economics and security has been going on for a long time.
Polls routinely show that Americans <a href="http://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/nov/09/john-kerry/yep-most-people-clueless-us-foreign-aid-spending/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">think</a> the country spends on foreign aid 20 or 30 times what it actually does. So, too, the questioning of what we all too easily call the “liberal international order” has been growing over time.
You suggested that Russia under <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/vladimir-putin" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Vladimir Putin</a>, is a declining power. Doesn’t the evidence point in the other direction?
It surely is a declining power, though Putin has played a weak hand extraordinarily well. It is in demographic decline, and far from modernising the Russian economy, Putin has only deepened its dependence on hydrocarbons. My fear is that as the country declines, it will be all the more tempted to turn to what tools it retains – cyber attacks and nuclear sabre-rattling.
How do you think Trump’s Africa policy will turn out?
In <a href="http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/01/11/rex-tillerson-pick-for-secretary-of-state-breaks-with-trump-on-key-issues/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">testifying</a> before Congress, Secretary of State <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-38281954" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Rex Tillerson</a> probably was as clear as the administration could be given its disarray. Africa was in the “turning to other countries” category, and he began with the fight against terrorism. He did, though, mention the economic opportunities in Africa, mostly in the sense of business that might be done. I suspect those will continue to be the emphasis.
So does this mean that anti-terrorism and transactional relationships will be the main features of Trump’s Africa policy?
I think they will continue to be the main drivers, for better or worse, though not the only drivers. The country will have to respond to major humanitarian crises whether the administration wants to or not. And some of the legacy programmes of the last two administrations, like the <a href="https://agoa.info/about-agoa.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">African Growth and Opportunity Act</a>, or the <a href="https://www.pepfar.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief </a> have had bipartisan support, so we’ll see how they fare in the congressional budget process.
And, if this is so, what are the long-term implications of this for US relations with the continent?
If Trump’s proposed cuts to the <a href="https://www.state.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">State Department</a> and <a href="https://www.usaid.gov/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">USAID</a> hold, the US will be less and less of a presence on the continent. The main beneficiary, diplomatically, will be China, followed by the Europeans and perhaps even Russia, though it doesn’t have much to contribute except arms sales.
If there is any silver lining, perhaps it will be that Africans, and particularly South Africans, will realise they have to take more initiative on their own.
When it comes to the US itself, you raised the possibility that it might break up? Were you speaking in abstract terms, or is this a real possibility?
I meant it mostly as a metaphor and as a touchstone for thinking about the future. I don’t think it’s likely, but it does have to be considered.
What is certain is that the next few years will be a kind if a guerrilla war, one mostly fought in the courts, between the US federal government and the “blue” (read Democratic Party-controlled) states, led by California, over climate change, immigration and other issues.
What does the Trump presidency mean for these ideas?
So far it seems bound to increase the divide in America. Trump has talked and acted entirely to please his base. He has played on fear, fanning it by portraying the country in dire straits surrounded by a hostile world. So far that base – especially older and often poorer white Americans – seems to have been satisfied by word, words they see as validating them.
But we’ve known from the beginning that Trump can’t deliver on his promises: those “good” low-skilled jobs in manufacturing or mining (as he has portrayed them) aren’t coming back. So we’ll see, but I expect that realisation to only deepen the anger and disaffection. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/peter-vale-189558" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Peter Vale</a>
The co-hosts of the conference Treverton addressed were the <a href="https://www.uj.ac.za/faculties/humanities/JIAS" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study</a> (JIAS) and the <a href="https://www.wits.ac.za/wsg/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Wits School of Public Management</a>.
Originally published by <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conversation</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81424/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />

Look to China for the main beneficiary of America’s likely retreat from Africa

At midday, on a bright Wednesday on June 8, 1966, the small sugarcane farming community of Groutville, outside Durban, in South Africa’s coastal province of KwaZulu-Natal, was shocked and surprised. On that day one of the most powerful United States politicians landed in a small aircraft, on a soccer field, in their town. Against the law, the New York senator Robert Kennedy stepped out of the plane on his way to visit the banned chief and President of the African National Congress (ANC), Albert Luthuli.
Albertina Luthuli, now 84 and Albert’s eldest daughter, was a medical student at the Non-European Medical School in Durban at the time when her mother called her home because an important visitor was coming to meet her father.
“That one was a historic moment in the history of apartheid South Africa. Robert Kennedy’s bother, JF Kennedy, who was the president of the United States had been shot in Dallas. Robert Kennedy had been the attorney general under John Kennedy. He felt that what his brother was doing was important to change the world… and South Africa was the hotspot of human rights violations at the time,” Luthuli tells FORBES AFRICA at the house in Groutville where she grew up. It was converted into the Luthuli Museum in August 2004.
In 1966, the South African government warmly received Kennedy and his wife Ethel. Government officials took them around the capital city of Pretoria and to the urban township Soweto, where they visited mineworkers in hostels. Albertina says the government took Kennedy where they could show him a success story about South Africa, but he was not fooled, he insisted on meeting the banned ANC leader in his village to learn of the struggle Albert was leading against oppression.
“Pretoria’s response to that was that our leader is a communist, therefore we would not let you go see him,” she says.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/life/2017/07/07/painful-price-courage/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Painful Price Of Courage</a>
The government didn’t want anything to do with Kennedy’s visit to Luthuli but the American embassy took him there under diplomatic immunity.
“Can you imagine? They landed on a soccer field right down there and then they had a talk. Under the restraining orders Chief [Luthuli] was only allowed to talk to one person at the time. So, they sat on a bench outside this yard, which is the big memory of that event, and they talked. They sat close to each other, there was chemistry,” recalls Albertina, a retired medical doctor who spent 21 years in exile.
She says the meeting of minds on a bench was a great annoyance to the government. Last year, the daughters of the two leaders remembered the day and sat together on the same spot their father sat 50 years before. Kerry Kennedy had flown to South Africa just to meet Albertina.
Within two years of the meeting on the bench, both men would be dead. Like his brother, Kennedy was shot dead by an assassin in California, just two years after visiting Groutville in defiance of the South African authorities.
“It was an act of intolerable defiance; they couldn’t really take it lying down. This man has visited Luthuli and at that point they felt they were controlling with banning orders. They had refused international leaders who wanted to come see him. To them this visit was completely unacceptable,” says Albertina.
“As family we believed it played a part in the death of my father, because they were quite happy when the special branch kept my father under surveillance so that he doesn’t influence others. But I can confirm the executive ANC members, like the Mandelas, they used to meet him underground and discuss their matters.”
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/06/02/dusty-walk-hero/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Dusty Walk For a Hero</a>
In August 1962, the future president, Nelson Mandela, was disguised as chauffeur while driving his fellow activist Cecil Williams. They were arrested on their way home from Durban to Johannesburg, at a police roadblock in Howick. Mandela had just returned from traveling through Africa and London where he had received military training and drummed up support for the ANC. He was jailed for five years for leaving the country without a permit and causing strikes.
“Mandela had a background with the youth league, so the youth of the time worked very close with the leadership of the movement. When the ANC decided it was time for the armed struggle it was at the same time continuing with the non-violent militant struggle. Mandela was then given the task to champion the cause of the armed struggle in particular in Africa. So he used to come to my father to report about the progress,” says Albertina.
Just before Mandela was arrested, he convinced Chief Luthuli to support the armed struggle. It was launched on December 16, 1961, a few months after Luthuli had accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.
<div id="attachment_32883" style="width: 450px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32883" class="wp-image-32883" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Albertina-187-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="440" height="295" />Albertina Luthuli stands outside the Luthuli Museum in Groutville (Photo by Motlabana Monnakgotla)</div>
Albertina says the young militant Mandela learned to be disciplined from her father, which helped South Africa transition to democracy in 1994.
“He learned the struggle was going to be long and difficult. When he was on Robben Island, he became a teacher like my father,” she says.
The truth about the death of Chief Luthuli in 1967 is not so easy to uncover.
“The circumstances around his death haven’t been told and we can’t tell because we were not there. Only the government of the day told its version. When they had the inquest, the postmortem, the district surgeon and everybody else, they were all functionaries of the system. So they did as they were told,” says Albertina.
Chief Luthuli was president of the ANC from 1952 until 1967, when he died, in what was said to be a train accident, 10 kilometers from his Groutville home. As with the Kennedys’ assassinations in 1963 and 1968, many believed Chief Luthuli was assassinated by a government wanting to get rid of him.
Just like their home when she was growing up, Albertina’s surgery was constantly raided by the police, in Clermont, a township outside Durban. Because she feared for her life, and those of her children, Albertina went into exile with her husband Pascal Ngakane, an ANC activist and also a medical doctor. Albertina worked in health in the United Kingdom, Lesotho and Zimbabwe.
At home, the Chief, as many called Luthuli, was just an ordinary father who loved his wife and children. Albertina, the second-born who had six siblings, described her home as peaceful where hard work was king. The Chief met his wife Nokukhanya at Adams College where he taught and she was a student.
“Both our parents were teachers at Adams College. My home was really a school away from school, with parents entrenching hard work. All of us were asked what we wanted to be when we finished school, so that they could have a hand in helping you along the line,” says Albertina.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/woman/2016/12/01/steve-biko-still-alive/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">If Steve Biko Were Still Alive&#8230;</a>
She grew up at a time when girls weren’t encouraged to pursue science and mathematics, but in the Luthuli family this was not the case.
“You found the schools, even the one I went to, St Francis College, sort of shutting you down because you are a girl, because you will be sitting in class with boys. So, my father took it upon himself to speak to the principal and said ‘this is what my daughter wants to do. She’s not going to be distracted by boys, she knows what she wants’. That’s how I later became a medical doctor,” she says.
It wasn’t just family. Groutville, a village in the heart of sugarcane fields, drew workers from afar. Many of these farmworkers had never been to school, so menial jobs were all they could do. The Chief reached out to these people, living in compounds, offering them basic lessons and political teaching.
“He started a night school, but it wasn’t a registered school; it was an informal school where he also taught these men about their basic rights, how not to become victims of abuse in the hands of employers,” says Albertina.
“One of the things he loved was music. Here at home we had a choir. All of us, the mother, the father and children, would sit here in the dining room and sing together. My mother sang soprano, father a baritone and us children fitted in cantata,” she says.
“Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi was educated at Adams College and he grew up in this environment where (Zulu) royalty didn’t pay much attention to education, so he became this education hungry heir to the Buthelezi throne. It was close to the Zulu King throne. He visited my father and introduced himself,” says Luthuli.
From then, Buthelezi joined a group of Zulu chiefs mentored by Chief Luthuli.
“If my father had not died in 1967, a lot of this war, between Zulu to Zulu and Zulu to other Africans, could have been avoided. I believe that, because Buthelezi admired my father, he could have reconciled the differences between the parties. The people around Buthelezi encouraged the black on black violence,” she says sadly.
The untimely death of a father that sadly may have led to the untimely death of many innocent sons.

My Father, Kennedy And Me

Like the proverbial cat with nine lives, South Africa’s scandal-ridden president, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/jacob-gedleyihlekisa-zuma" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jacob Zuma</a>, may well have escaped yet again with his political life. This despite another resounding loss in the country’s highest court.
The Constitutional Court <a href="https://www.timeslive.co.za/politics/2017-06-22-read-in-full-concourt-ruling-on-secret-ballot/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ruled</a> that there was no constitutional bar to the Speaker of the National Assembly, <a href="http://www.news24.com/Tags/People/baleka_mbete" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Baleka Mbete</a>, opting to employ a secret ballot in a no confidence vote in parliament. She’d originally asserted that she didn’t have the authority to make this decision, prompting several opposition parties – furious at Zuma’s increasingly dictatorial project of <a href="http://ewn.co.za/Topic/State-Capture" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“state capture”</a> – to take the matter to court.
South Africa’s judicial system continues to hold firm. This is despite the fact that there appears to be a concerted and well coordinated campaign by a group of politicians and businessmen to undermine the integrity of state institutions as well as to exploit their weaknesses to prosecute a project of self-enrichment and rent-seeking. The campaign is pivoted around the now notorious <a href="https://mg.co.za/tag/gupta-family" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Gupta family</a>.
Zuma has been brought to book repeatedly by the courts. In March last year, the Constitutional Court <a href="http://city-press.news24.com/News/constitutional-courts-damning-judgment-zuma-violated-his-oath-of-office-20160331" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">found</a> that Zuma, as well as parliament, had violated the Constitution. It did so by failing to defend and uphold the constitutional authority of South Africa’s ombud – it’s Public Protector – who had conducted an investigation into the president’s private homestead, <a href="https://mg.co.za/report/zumaville-a-special-report" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Nkandla</a>. She found that Zuma and his family had unlawfully benefited. He was required to pay back nearly R8 million (around $620,000) to the state. Yet, following a <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2016/04/01/Full-text-of-President-Zumas-speech-on-Concourt-Nkandla-judgment" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">half-baked apology</a>, Zuma held onto power.
In parliament he’s survived a number of no-confidence votes <a href="http://www.sanews.gov.za/south-africa/mps-reject-motion-no-confidence-against-president" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">mounted</a> by the opposition. He also dodged two such attempts in the national executive committee of his own party, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) – <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2016/11/27/anxious-wait-for-outcomes-of-hanekom-s-motion-against-zuma" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">one</a> in November last year and most recently <a href="http://citizen.co.za/news/news-national/1526627/netshitenzhe-tables-motion-of-no-confidence-in-zuma-at-nec-meeting/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">in late May</a>. He’s been backed by an increasingly slender yet sufficient number of loyalists and nationalists for whom Zuma provides political cover for their populist and self-serving call for “radical economic transformation”.
<h2>Tipping point</h2>
The tipping point for the latest legal skirmish was Zuma’s reckless and apparently self-interested decision to <a href="https://theconversation.com/firing-of-south-africas-finance-minister-puts-the-public-purse-in-zumas-hands-75525?sr=16" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">fire</a> South Africa’s widely respected minister of finance, Pravin Gordhan, on 30 March this year.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/current-affairs/2017/06/01/tale-two-ministers/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">A Tale Of Two Ministers</a>
Despite a cold war with Zuma, Gordhan had <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-cant-save-itself-just-by-talking-the-talk-it-must-walk-the-walk-73863?sr=7" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">held the line</a> against “state capture” for 15 months after his reappointment in December 2015. And so as night follows day, Gordhan’s removal precipitated an immediate ratings’ agency downgrade. The downgrade added further pressure to an already weak economy, undermining any prospects of economic growth to address the high levels of unemployment and inequality that threaten its precarious social stability.
Once again, in response to Zuma’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/stakes-for-south-africas-democracy-are-high-as-zuma-plunges-the-knife-75550?sr=21" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">ill-considered cabinet reshuffle</a>, the largest opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, tabled a motion of no confidence in the national assembly. There has been an apparent shift in attitude in the ANC’s parliamentary caucus suggesting that the no-confidence vote might have a chance of succeeding. Many ANC MPs are now anxious about the party’s prospects at the 2019 national election and their own political future.
But there’s also concern over Zuma’s apparent hold over many backbench MPs. Many of them fear retribution and expulsion should they vote against the president. If an MP ceases to be a member of the party on whose list they stood at election time, they automatically lose their seat in parliament.
Because of this one of the smaller opposition parties, the United Democratic Movement, requested the speaker to use a secret ballot to enable MPs to vote with their conscience. Mbete, who is also the national chairperson of the ANC, refused. She claimed that she did not have the power to make the decision.
The Constitution is unclear. It provides for the president and the cabinet to be removed by the national assembly by a bare majority following “a vote”. In the secret ballot case, the court could have interpreted “a vote” to mean “a secret vote”. Equally, however, the failure of the Constitution to specify a secret ballot in the case of a no confidence vote could mean an open ballot was intended.
So on June 22, the Constitutional Court took neither route. It held that the Constitution could have provided for a vote by secret ballot or open ballot. It did neither. Rather it held that, the national assembly has… in effect empowered the Speaker to decide how a particular motion of no confidence in the President is to be conducted.
Accordingly, the Court set aside the Speaker’s decision that she lacked constitutional power to order a secret ballot. Notably, Zuma had entered the proceedings to argue, like the Speaker, that there was no power to order a secret ballot and no need to do so.
The court pointedly observed that Mbete has “an enormous responsibility” to ensure that when she decides whether on a “situation specific” case-by-case basis a secret ballot should be employed. She should do so on a “rational and proper basis”, with due and careful regard to a purpose of the no confidence vote. Importantly, the court noted that the primary duty of MPs is to the Constitution and not to their parties.
The implication is that the ability of MPs to vote with their conscience in such a situation is clearly a factor that the speaker should take into account when making her decision. Some critics will regard the court’s “guidance” as insufficiently precise. But the court was clearly anxious not to encroach on separation of powers – perhaps mindful of the virulent claims from some quarters of “judicial over-reach”.
Mbete will have to choose between her loyalty to her president as one of the ANC’s <a href="https://mg.co.za/tag/anc-top-six" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“top six”</a> leadership and her duty to the Constitution as speaker.
<h2>Zuma unperturbed</h2>
Later on the same day of the judgment Zuma was <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2017/06/22/watch-zuma-answers-questions-on-state-capture" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">answering questions</a> in parliament. Judging by his typically thick-skinned signs of confidence, the president is not unduly perturbed by the court’s ruling.
While the court stated the power to decide on whether to hold a secret ballot or not should “not be exercised arbitrarily or whimsically”, Zuma has already made it clear that he expects Mbete to decide that a secret ballot is inappropriate or unnecessary.
Parliament returns after its current mid-year winter recess in August. If Mbete once again declines to hold a secret ballot, her decision will, in turn, then be subject to judicial review application. In due course the court could be forced to order her to hold a secret ballot.
So despite the Constitutional Court judgment, and the lucidity of it’s reasoning, a no-confidence vote held with a secret ballot is still some way off. Until then, Zuma lives to fight another day.
But with every day passing, December’s ANC national elective conference gets closer. Then Zuma’s term as president of the ANC expires. Then his power will decline potentially decisively.
One way or another, Zuma is running out of political lives.
&#8211; Written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/richard-calland-182127" target="_blank" rel="author noopener noreferrer">Richard Calland</a>, Associate Professor in Public Law, University of Cape Town
&#8211; Photo by <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/author/jay-caboz/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Jay Caboz</a>
This article was originally published on <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conversation</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80009/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />

AnitZumaMarch_JC-4

South Africa’s Jacob Zuma running out of political lives

The Speaker of the Zambian National Assembly, Patrick Matibini, has <a href="http://www.enca.com/africa/zambias-parliament-suspendes-48-opposition-lawmakers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">suspended 48 opposition legislators</a> for 30 days as a punishment for unauthorized absence from the parliament. Their offence? To have been missing for President Edgar Lungu’s state of the nation address in March.
The suspension of the MPs does not come as <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-talk-about-zambia-as-it-falls-from-grace-under-president-lungu-77520" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">a great surprise</a>. Hardliners from the ruling Patriotic Front have been pushing for something along these lines for some time. The ruling party was quick to try and disassociate itself from the Speaker’s actions. But, as Zambian commentators have pointed out, the action fits into a broader web of measures designed to intimidate those who question the president’s authority.
The most significant was the arrest of opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema, who remains in jail on trumped up <a href="http://www.africanews.com/2017/05/20/zambia-s-political-climate-and-treason-trial-of-hichilema-worrying-eu-mps//" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">treason charges</a>.
While the latest development in Zambia’s growing political crisis doesn’t come as a shock, it will disappoint those who were hoping that Lungu would be persuaded to moderate his position. Instead, it appears that the decision by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to <a href="http://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2017/06/11/pr17214-zambia-imf-staff-concludes-visit" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">go ahead with a bailout</a> package despite the government’s democratic failings has emboldened the president to pursue an authoritarian strategy.
As a result, a swift resolution to the current political standoff seems unlikely.
<h2>Roots of the crisis</h2>
For some time Zambia was considered to be one of the more competitive democracies in Africa. But a period of backsliding under Lungu has raised concerns that the country’s inclusive political culture is <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-talk-about-zambia-as-it-falls-from-grace-under-president-lungu-77520" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">under threat</a>. The current impasse stems from the controversial elections in 2016 when Lungu won a narrow victory that <a href="http://af.reuters.com/article/topNews/idAFKCN10Q163" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">remains contested</a> by the opposition United Party for National Development.
Hichilema, the leader of the United Party for National Development (UPND), has stated that his party will not recognize the legitimacy of Lungu’s victory until its electoral petition against the results is heard in court. The initial petition was <a href="http://allafrica.com/view/group/main/main/id/00045643.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">rejected by the Constitutional Court</a>. But its decision was made in a way that had all the hallmarks of a whitewash. The UPND subsequently appealed to the High Court. Hichilema’s decision to make his party’s recognition of the president conditional on the petition being heard was designed both as an act of defiance, and as a means to prevent the government from simply sweeping electoral complaints under the carpet.
Until the court case is resolved, the opposition is committed to publicly challenging the president’s mandate by doing things like <a href="https://diggers.news/guest-diggers/2017/06/14/the-wholesale-suspension-of-upnd-mps-legal-but-undemocratic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">boycotting his addresses to parliament</a>. In response, members of the ruling party have accused the United Party for National Development of disrespect and failing to recognize the government’s authority. It is this that appears to lie behind Hichilema’s arrest on treason charges.
<h2>Punishing parliamentarians</h2>
The suspension of UPND legislators needs to be understood against this increasingly authoritarian backdrop. It is one of a number of steps taken by those aligned to the government that are clearly designed to intimidate people who <a href="http://democracyinafrica.org/called-professor-nic-cheeseman-causes-zambia-controversy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">don’t fall into line</a>. Other strategies include public condemnation of the government’s critics and proposals to break up the influential Law Association of Zambia.
Efforts by the <a href="http://en.rfi.fr/africa/20170614-zambian-government-played-no-part-suspension-opposition-mps-says-spokesman" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">president’s spokesman</a> to disassociate the regime from the suspensions have been unpersuasive. The official line of the ruling party is that the speaker of parliament is an independent figure and that he made the decision on the basis of the official rules. It’s true that the speaker and the parliamentary committee on privileges, absences and support services have the right to reprimand legislators for being absent without permission.
Nonetheless the argument is disingenuous for two reasons. The speaker is known to be close to the ruling party, a fact that prompted Hichilema to <a href="https://diggers.news/guest-diggers/2017/06/14/the-wholesale-suspension-of-upnd-mps-legal-but-undemocratic/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">call for his resignation</a> earlier this year. And the committee’s decisions are clearly driven by the Patriotic Front because it has more members from it than any other party.
The claim that the suspension was not government-led lacks credibility. This is clear from the fact that Patriotic Front MPs have been the most vocal in calling for action to be taken against boycotting UPND MPs.
<h2>IMF lifeline for Lungu</h2>
There are different perspectives on the crisis in Zambia. Some people invoke the country’ history of more open government to argue that Lungu will moderate his position once the government feels that the opposition has been placed on the back foot. Others identify a worrying authoritarian trajectory that began under the presidency of the late <a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/politics/2013/10/01/power-comes-fall/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Michael Sata</a>. They conclude that things are likely to get worse before they get better.
One of the factors that opposition leaders hoped might persuade President Lungu to release Hichilema and move discussions back from the police cell to the negotiating chamber was the government’s desperate need for an economic bail out. Following a period of bad luck and bad governance, Zambia faces a <a href="https://www.lusakatimes.com/2017/04/03/zambia-facing-debt-crisis-fundanga/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">debt crisis</a>. Without the assistance of international partners, the government is likely to go bankrupt. This would increase public dissatisfaction with the Patriotic Front and undermine Lungu’s hopes of securing a <a href="http://democracyinafrica.org/zambia-president-lungu-third-term/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">third term</a>.
But the willingness of the IMF to move towards the completion of a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/zambian-leader-sees-swift-subsidy-cuts-in-1-2-billion-imf-deal" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">$1.2 billion rescue package</a> suggests that authoritarian backsliding is no barrier to international economic assistance. In turn, IMF support appears to have emboldened the government to continue its efforts to intimidate its opponents.
IMF officials, of course, will point out that they are not supposed to take political conditions into account and that their aim is to create a stronger economy that will benefit all Zambians. This may be true, but the reality is that by saving the Lungu government financially the IMF is also aiding it politically. Whatever its motivation, the agreement will be interpreted by many on the ground as tacit support for the Patriotic Front regime, strengthening Lungu’s increasingly authoritarian position. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/nic-cheeseman-180800" target="_blank" rel="author noopener noreferrer">Nic Cheeseman</a>, Professor of Democracy, University of Birmingham
Originally published in <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conversation</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79533/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />

Zambia slides towards authoritarianism as IMF props up government

After accepting his <a href="https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2001237873/raila-odinga-it-is-nasa-unveils-flag-bearer" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">nomination</a> as the presidential candidate of the main opposition coalition recently, Raila Odinga <a href="http://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2017/05/10/nasas-joshua-raila-prays-at-israels-wailing-wall-ahead-of-election_c1558553" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">likened himself to Joshua</a>, the biblical figure who led the Jews to the Promised Land.
Odinga was appealing to people disaffected with the performance of the Jubilee government. But he was also appealing to the religious sensibilities of the Kenyan electorate where Christianity has a strong presence.
Religion is omnipresent in Kenya. The line between religion and politics is often thin. This is well illustrated by the fact that gospel music serves as an important vehicle for political mobilisation. Most of the <a href="https://www.cnbcafrica.com/news/east-africa/2017/01/12/nasa-new-party-on-kenyan-political-scene/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">National Super Alliance’s</a> campaign rallies feature a rendering of the popular gospel song “Mambo yabadilika” (things are a-changing).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROY5KeXRkPA
Odinga, as well as President Uhuru Kenyatta who is seeking re-election under the Jubilee Party in the August 8 polls, have sought to endear themselves to the main religious communities. Kenyatta even had members of the Supreme Council of Kenya Muslims, the National Muslim Leaders Forum and the Jamia Mosque visit State House where they <a href="http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/news/2017/05/muslim-leaders-vow-rally-community-behind-president-kenyatta/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">pledged their support</a> for his re-election bid. Religion and politics are entwined, each to some extent complicit in the providential authority of the other.
Odinga and Kenyatta aren’t alone. In their quest for the votes of the religious constituencies, all political aspirants have sought to present themselves as people of faith.
But other equally important dynamics shape political relationships in Kenya. Religious symbols operate cheek by jowl with what political scientist Jean Francis Bayart has referred to as the <a href="http://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/9labe9r4se65i789685q56i9p/export/cv/Leguil-Bayart-Jean-Fran%C3%A7ois-resume.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">“politics of the belly”</a>. A third factor makes for an even headier mix – ethnic affiliations. Combined, these three factors distort democracy, and the way in which elections are run in the country.
<h2>Eating campaign money</h2>
On a recent visit to western Kenya during the party primaries I was struck by how voters’ actively sought cash handouts from politicians. And there is no shortage of candidates ready to offer money to the electorate as an inducement to vote for them. A young man who gave me a ride on his motorcycle taxi spoke with pride about his busy schedule these days – “eating campaign money” by night and working by day.
Elderly men and women were seated along village lanes looking out for election candidates who might offer them “something small.” They were open to offers from whichever politician turned up. The amounts they got ranged from around 100 shillings ($1) to 1,000 shillings ($10), often not enough even to feed a family for a day. But the money counts for a lot in the context of extreme poverty.
I also attended an election campaign rally in which a candidate presented what seemed to be a well-thought-out blueprint for the development of his local ward. At the conclusion of the presentation, one person in the audience broke the silence with a bold demand for more tangible results:
<blockquote>That is enough speech-making, can you now talk to us?</blockquote>
“Talking to us” was easily understood to mean that it was time to give cash gifts to seal the bond.
Demands like this are not unusual during election campaigns in Kenya. They have been a regular feature of elections as long as anyone can remember. One can only imagine what this year’s campaign will be like on the back of a severe drought that has <a href="http://af.reuters.com/article/investingNews/idAFKBN17U1Z3-OZABS" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">deepened inflation</a> and led to <a href="http://www.nation.co.ke/newsplex/2017-kenya-drought/2718262-3872970-vniwqd/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">economic hardships</a>.
Building a democratic culture in the context of extreme hardships is a big challenge. As in many African countries undergoing democratic transitions amid conditions of high poverty, economic circumstances hinder or dissuade people from participation in the political process.
<h2>Politics of the belly</h2>
So what’s the relationship between religion and handouts? They interact and influence each other in myriad ways. Politicians distribute goods for the bellies of their clients in return for political loyalty. In this context, democracy as a competitive process in which citizens freely elect their leaders is thrown out of the window.
The Kenyan Muslim leaders’ assurances of support for Kenyatta needs to understood against this background. The leaders – hint, hint – expressed gratitude to the president for appointing the highest number of Cabinet secretaries and Principal Secretaries from the (Muslim) community.
A common pattern of religious accommodation in post-colonial East African states has been <a href="http://14.139.206.50:8080/jspui/bitstream/1/2400/1/Haynes,%20Jeffrey%20(ed.)%20-%20Routledge%20Handbook%20of%20Religion%20and%20Politics.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">documented</a>. Reflecting trends in Kenya, various religious groups have worked with governments and parties, irrespective of their political philosophies and ideologies.
It is also important to locate religion and politics in Africa within the broader context of ethnicity which has been sustained, and even strengthened, through the political distribution of goods and wealth.
The logic here is not based on universal ideas of human rights and citizenship but rather on networks of tribal patronage and clientelism. Politicians offer their ethnic clients certain material and symbolic gestures such as invocation of tribe, money, jobs in exchange for political support. It is an insecure means of organising support, admittedly, and one that is constantly at risk of corrupt indulgence in order to fund private benefit.
Thus <a href="http://africasacountry.com/2014/05/the-politics-of-the-belly/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Bayart’s politics-of-the-belly </a>casts a long shadow on the deployment of culture in African states. It demonstrates that religion has followed patterns established by the politics of ethnicity in which merit and common good does not matter.
The current campaign confirms these various forms of symbolic and symbiotic relationships within Kenyan politics. Religious services and rhetoric, money tokens and ethnicity are an integral part of the political system. They will likely again be the main influence in the coming election.
Kenya’s political elite has historically been formed in mission schools, mostly within their ethnic groups and subject to ethnic expectations. Thus it’s an elite formed by – and crippled by – ethnic pride. Religious actors have not escaped a similar elite formation. Thus Kenya’s children of God are rarely Kenyans at large. &#8211; Written by <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/joseph-wandera-338843" target="_blank" rel="author noopener noreferrer">Joseph Wandera</a>, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies, St Paul&#8217;s University
This article was originally published on <a href="https://theconversation.com/africa" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Conversation</a>
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79310/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />

What Will Decide The Kenyan Election? A Dose Of Faith, Tribe And Hard Cash

No doubt, African nations and institutions remain resolute in their quest for peace and prosperity.
As the African Development Bank (AfDB) takes ownership of this grand mission through its High 5 development priorities, the West Africa sub-region, host to the bank’s headquarters and the location of Africa’s poorest, largest and fastest growing economies, continues to be a source of cheer and sobriety in equal measure.
West Africa’s political, economic and investment climate has been inundated lately with news of the new government in Ghana settling down to the business of governance; the inglorious exit of Yahya Jammeh, the Gambian politician and former military officer who ruled The Gambia from 1994 to 2017; Cote d’Ivoire’s modest macroeconomic achievements, now hinged on its 2016-2020 National Development Plan; Liberia’s preparations for presidential elections in October and Nigeria’s ongoing struggles with the health of its inflation-prone economy.
Equally distressing for Nigerians is the deteriorating health of President Muhammadu Buhari, as they marked two years of his administration last month. While economic stagnation and inertia were the dominant features of Buhari’s first year in office, his second year has been riddled with political and policy spats between the legislature and executive. Buhari’s recurrent disappearing acts have also not helped matters. For the second time this year, he had to be flown to London for urgent medical attention at the beginning of May, heightening fears of his incapacity to lead and govern Africa’s largest economy by GDP ($594.28 billion as at 2016).
Sadly, it is difficult not to connect Buhari’s private and personal struggles with the economic and public affairs of the nation. His physical and cognitive absence from the administration and shenanigans of governance has turned out to be the defining character of his tenure so far. It is also a symbolic reflection of Nigeria’s inability to lead the rest of Africa as the continent pursues social and economic rejuvenation.
To attain its numerous lofty goals for the continent, the rest of Africa and the AfDB will need the democratic engine of the Nigerian nation firing on all cylinders. Ghana’s former president John Dramani Mahama once said if Nigeria sneezes, the rest of West Africa catches a cold. With approximately 184 million inhabitants, Nigeria accounts for 47% of West Africa’s population, and has one of the largest populations of youth in the world, according to the World Bank, which also expects 1% and 2.5% growth for Nigeria’s economy in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
Clearly, harnessing the energy and creativity of Africa’s youth will be key to transforming the continent’s fortunes over the next several decades. Also crucial is intra-Africa trade, currently at 12%. Africa needs to trade with Africa, increasing the exchange of goods, services and investment across our fragmented borders.
Linked to trade and Africa’s youthful population is bio-technology and Africa’s capacity to feed itself. When African heads of state gathered in the Indian city of Ahmedabad during the 17th annual general meeting of the AfDB last month, the future of agriculture in Africa was top of the agenda. While the continent is hoping to feed itself and eradicate malnutrition by 2025, the average age of farmers on the continent is currently 60 years.
AfDB President Akinwumi Adesina says: “There are opportunities to empower the youth at each stage of the agricultural value chain as ‘agripreneurs’. Young people are doing new and amazing things in the agricultural space all over the continent but need to be motivated.”
The Bank sought to showcase young African Agripreneurs during its week-long Indian meetings, hoping to prove the point that Africa’s youth can be catalysts for job and wealth creation. Between 2010 and 2015, it had deployed $5.5 billion in agriculture sector investments, covering a portfolio of 6,000 projects and youth operations in agriculture and allied industries in Cameroon, Sudan, Nigeria and several other countries. It is working with scientists at the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria, to empower young farmers under the Empowering Novel Agri-Business-Led Employment (ENABLE) youth program.
Keen to replicate the trailblazing works he did as Nigeria’s agriculture minister between 2010 and 2015 across Africa, Adesina once told this writer, “My vision for Nigeria’s agriculture sector is that we will use agriculture to produce stupendous amount of wealth&#8230; and become an agriculturally industrialized economy.”
Let’s hope this vision comes true.

GettyImages-140177271

Agriculture Behind Africa’s Health

As a fellow human being, I hated watching President Robert Mugabe shuffle to the umpteenth world stage for his umpteenth appearance in his 94th year. It seemed to take an age for the ruler of Zimbabwe, for more than 37 years, to struggle to his seat; it looked painful.
In my mind was the President Mugabe, then 72, who bristled physically and verbally in a tough interview I held him to at State House, in Harare, in 1994, when Zimbabwe had a thriving  economy. On that long sunny autumn day he had the clipped eloquence and mental agility of a university professor. Even as an open-minded new arrival, it was clear he was spinning his answers to questions about the economy and opposition, but at least he did it with polish and a dash of mischief.
“Who told you that?” he asked professorially whenever I caught him out.
<div id="attachment_31381" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31381" class="wp-image-31381 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-631829258-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-631829258.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-631829258-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-631829258-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-631829258-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />US actor Forest Whitaker (R) delivers a speech, flanked by Chairperson of the Schwab Foundation Hilde Schwab, during the Crystal Award ceremony on the eve of the opening day of the World Economic Forum, on January 16, 2017 in Davos.</div>
For a moment forget the criticism surrounding Mugabe; here was an elder of Africa, who spent 10 years in prison, dropping off now and again, before a thin crowd at WEF Africa on an early panel on fragile states.
First question: did he consider troubled Zimbabwe a fragile state? Mugabe mentioned his country’s vast resources, 14 universities and a 90% literacy rate.
“Zimbabwe is one of the most highly developed countries in Africa… We are not a poor country, you can’t call us fragile, I can call America a fragile state,” says Mugabe to chuckles from the audience.
“And yet my people back home are crying!” says one of the hundreds of Zimbabweans working in Johannesburg’s petrol stations when we discussed the story a few days later.
Mugabe blamed rival political groups for conflict in his country and had sharp words for Islamic states.
“If you look into the Islamic world and talk about Isis and various other groups, it will appear the belief is the more violence you inflict on the population the greater the people will listen to you and join your side. That is a dangerous one and I do not know how it is still to be remedied.”
At the other end of the age spectrum was idealistic fellow panellist 35-year-old Victor Ochen, the youngest African nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. The former cobbler and charcoal burner grew up amid war in Lira, in northern Uganda, a fiefdom of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.  In FORBES AFRICA, in April 2015, the year he was nominated, Ochen told us how he wept and threw stones at soldiers as they tore up charcoal beds that he hoped were going to pay for his education. The shocked guerrillas let him live to speak truth to power at WEF Africa 2017.
“When young people complain it is called a protest; when leaders speak it is called an excuse,” he says.
<div id="attachment_31380" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31380" class="wp-image-31380 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/HMcClintock_VU0D13181-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="682" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/HMcClintock_VU0D13181.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/HMcClintock_VU0D13181-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/HMcClintock_VU0D13181-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/HMcClintock_VU0D13181-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Victor Ochen</div>
“Every year, hundreds of Africans die in the Mediterranean Sea trying to escape Africa. Why do they leave, what is wrong? It is because of the lack of integrity of power.”
Sharing the stage was Hollywood star Forest Whitaker, a UNESCO Special Envoy for Peace and Reconciliation,  who played former Uganda President Idi Amin in the 2006 film The Last King of Scotland. Unlike other Hollywood stars, he helps African children on the ground, rather than adopt them.
“The people of South Sudan are resilient, they want to stay in their country, they don’t want to leave but they are forced to leave their crops because of the conflict.”
Whitaker, born in Texas and bred in California, has been working quietly in the dust of warring South Sudan where 50,000 have been killed and more than half the people have no food. No one knows him there, he says, which helps in his work. This includes helping child soldiers lay down their weapons, giving them a sense of purpose, by teaching them how to deal with conflict instead of perpetuating it.
“The youth are now negotiating conflicts in their communities. They are dealing with everything from negotiating with the army to stolen cattle,” says Whitaker.
Many African leaders could do well to listen to the passionate voices of Ochen and Whitaker.

Robert Gabriel Mugabe

The Pain Of Mugabe

It was David and Goliath. With sling shot in hand, two tiny human rights groups, Earthlife Africa Johannesburg (ELA) and the Southern African Faith Communities’ Environment Institute (SAFCEI), stood in the way of the Goliath that is the deal to build nuclear that could cost more than a R1 trillion ($73 billion).
It was a court battle that raged for a year and a half. On April 26, the ELA and SAFCEI lawyers stood face-to-face with government counsel in the Western Cape High Court, Cape Town. The ELA and SAFCEI disputed the costly procurement process, saying it was illegal and nontransparent.
On this day, Goliath crumpled and activists danced and sang in victory on the sidewalk outside the court. The celebration was blessed by a downpour in this drought-ridden city.
Judge Lee Bozalek declared the South African government’s nuclear deal to be unlawful and unconstitutional. Most important was the scrapping of secret intergovernmental agreements with Russia, the United States and South Korea, which the activists argued was the right of the public to know.
“Victory for justice and the rule of law and the people of South Africa,” says Makoma Lekalakala, ELA branch coordinator.
Other key decisions made by government were found to be illegal, including its decision to hand over procurement of nuclear to Eskom, South Africa’s state power utility, rather than the National Energy Regulator of South Africa.
“All the information that people have been requiring on affordability etc. must come into the public realm. We need to know exactly what is going on with the deal and it needs to happen in a transparent and open process as the government has repeatedly said it would do, but keep not doing,” says Adrian Pole, lawyer for SAFCEI and ELA.
<div id="attachment_31370" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31370" class="wp-image-31370 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Koeberg_JC-4-1024x683.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="683" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Koeberg_JC-4.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Koeberg_JC-4-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Koeberg_JC-4-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Koeberg_JC-4-768x512.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Koeberg Nuclear Power Station</div>
It means back to the drawing board for nuclear energy in South Africa. From now on any nuclear proposals will need to be passed in Parliament and opened up to the public, which could take years.
“It’s been a long hard struggle. We are only two small organizations but this is really a victory for democracy. It means the people of South Africa can now participate in their future. There is no more nuclear deal, there is no more Russian agreement. Parliament has to step up. If the president wants to push any more deals it has to go through Parliament properly and any idea we might go nuclear is off the table,” says Liz McDaid, SAFCEI spokesperson.
McDaid has more reason to celebrate than most. She was there from day one, when the human rights groups announced they would take down the deal in court from a small room in a backstreet office with a handful of journalists in Newtown, Johannesburg.
Another organization standing against the deal is the Organization Undoing Tax Abuse (OUTA). Ted Blom, OUTA’s Energy Portfolio Director, believes the expense alone could have crippled the country.
“We are tired of government’s approach that runs roughshod over the need for meaningful public engagement and due process. The pro-nuclear lobbyists and government officials arrogantly ignore their need to be accountable and to provide detailed explanations to the public on why we need new nuclear plants, or what the true costs of these will be,” adds Wayne Duvenage, OUTA Chairperson.
Studies showed the nuclear deal to be unaffordable, despite what government believes, argues David Fig, a Political Economist and Honorary Research Associate at the University of Cape Town. He notes that the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) developed models showing that new nuclear is likely to be much more expensive than coal or renewable energy.
“The price ticket for nuclear – which some estimates put at more than R1 trillion – doesn’t take into account the costs of operation, fuel, insurance, emergency planning or the regulation or decontamination at the end of the life of the reactors,” he writes in The Conversation.
The nuclear deal, overseen by South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, is also muddied by allegations of corruption, according to Fig.
“A more likely reason for Zuma’s zeal is the involvement of the Gupta family with whom he has close ties. The family’s web of interests around the nuclear deal is complex. What is known is that the Gupta family controls South Africa’s only dedicated uranium mine. The family has developed close relationships with key individuals at Eskom,” says Fig.
On the other side of the argument, there is a claim the ruling is an overstatement. Kelvin Kemm, Chairperson of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa), called for caution when interpreting it. The nuclear physicist argues that the court ruled on an administrative process, not on the wisdom of nuclear power.
“A false impression has been created that this judgment is anti-nuclear. It is not and comment to that effect is premature and regrettable,” says Kemm.
“One positive aspect of this ruling is that it presents the opportunity for the facts and truth to be fully aired and debated so that rational people can think and decide on realities not hearsay. The anti-nuke lobby has had the platform to themselves, not least because the nuclear industry has been quiet. This will change. Necsa and the nuclear industry intend to step up efforts to put the facts before the court of public opinion and to present a balanced and evidence-based case for nuclear energy as the right energy option for South Africa.”
“The nuclear industry in South Africa operates to the highest global business and ethical standards and applies world best practice to planning and operational procedures. To suggest that those working within it adhere to anything less is at best inaccurate and a great disservice to a highly professional body of experts.”
Government says it will look over the judgment before it decides whether to appeal.
The battle over nuclear is far from over, but the victors are likely to redouble their campaign after they have dried off from their dance in the rain.

Koeberg_JC-3

False Dawn For New Nuclear In Africa

Sabalele village, in Cofimvaba, a town in South Africa’s Eastern Cape, boasts a brand new tar road off the N6 between Queenstown and East London. On the side lies an unoccupied house on a hill with peeling cream paint. The small brick house has a yard half the size of a football field; a huge family gravestone stands next to the wire fence. A pita toilet is on the one side and a disused kraal on the other; the sun-dried grass reaches your knees.
<div id="attachment_31412" style="width: 695px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31412" class="wp-image-31412 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/06/Chris-Hani-008-685x1024.jpg" alt="" width="685" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Chris-Hani-008.jpg 685w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Chris-Hani-008-300x448.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Chris-Hani-008-600x897.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Chris-Hani-008-201x300.jpg 201w" sizes="(max-width: 685px) 100vw, 685px" />Statue of Chris Hani outside the community centre</div>
Inside, the only remnants that show people once lived here are a coffee table draped in white cloth, old broken red sofas, and two photographs hanging on opposite walls of the dining room. One is of martyr Chris Hani and the other of his parents Gilbert and Nomayise. It’s an understated memorial for one of the best known names in African politics. Often, it doesn’t see a soul for six months at a time.
<div id="attachment_31363" style="width: 695px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31363" class="wp-image-31363 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-003-685x1024.jpg" alt="" width="685" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-003.jpg 685w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-003-300x448.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-003-600x897.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-003-201x300.jpg 201w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-003-768x1148.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 685px) 100vw, 685px" />Lungile Gongqa</div>
This was the home Hani and his five siblings grew up in. His father died in 1994 and mother in 2000; both were buried by the wire fence and eventually the entire family moved out.
On this cold Saturday morning in April, the month Hani was gunned down 24 years ago on the driveway of his house in Boksburg, Johannesburg, hundreds of people gathered in Sabalele village to commemorate him; not with a rally or church service but with sweat and striving in the annual Chris Hani Freedom Marathon.
This five-year-old race, a community hall with a bronze statue, and a district municipality named after him are a few things the municipality has to keep Hani’s name from oblivion. The old and young, who never got a chance to know Hani, came to walk and run the path to his Catholic school.
“You must be very strong to run this one, this is a tough course, it’s gravel. Can you imagine a young Chris Hani walking here every day of his schooling,” says Enoch Skosana, the race official and marathon winner.
Skosana says the run is symbolic of how Hani carried his country on his shoulders in later life. With the African National Congress’ (ANC) armed wing, uMkhonto we Sizwe, Hani commanded thousands of soldiers with the same zest, he says. The retired Skosana won several half marathons before forming a development club supported by his former team, Nedbank Running Club, in Gauteng.
“To me, as a councillor and politician, this event is a milestone. Chris Hani himself never entered the Canaan he fought before he died in the hands of apartheid defenders. Chris Hani District Municipality is proud of the whole commemoration of its son. In my view I would like to have a running club established here, so that we can have more long distance runners who are putting this district on the map,” says Wanda Vani, a ward councillor for 23 villages around Sabalele.
Vani says despite a small development in the Sabalele, many villages do not have tar, nor running water. He also laments high unemployment of youth – the race only provides jobs for a few.
The 25-kilometer marathon honoring Hani may be among the smallest on the calendar of Athletics South Africa (ASA) but it has been growing in stature and created at least one Olympic athlete. Lungile Gongqa was the 2017 Two Oceans Marathon winner in Cape Town. He came through the ranks of this dusty village, near where he grew up in Ngcobo. When it started in 2012, Gongqa was the first winner. He went on to represent his country at the 2016 Rio Olympics but didn’t finish because of a hamstring injury.
<div id="attachment_31364" style="width: 778px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31364" class="wp-image-31364 size-full" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-010.jpg" alt="" width="768" height="514" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-010.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-010-300x201.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-010-600x402.jpg 600w" sizes="(max-width: 768px) 100vw, 768px" />Athletes before the 25 kilometer race</div>
“In my first running competition I was excited to take home a t-shirt and a roll-on as my prize. I was only 18 years old at the time. I knew my parents would be grateful for that. But things got better when I won this Chris Hani race in 2012, the prize was R7,500 (around $550). I was not a member of any club, so that meant I had to train by myself and pay my own transport. This is one of the reasons I have approached the municipality with the idea to coach the up-and-coming runners in the district. I didn’t finish school but I can make a living from the sport,” says Gongqa.
Gongqa, who runs for Nedbank Running Club in Cape Town and travels between there and the Eastern Cape, won R250,000 ($18,500) at the Two Oceans Marathon.  Gongqa, who flew from Cape Town to support the race in Sabalele village, believes there are many more Olympians to unearth here.
Inspiration could be taken from Lusapho April, a long distance runner from Uitenhage, Eastern Cape, who was a new entrant in the Hani race. He represented his country at the 2012 London Olympics and 2016 Rio Olympics, and finished third in the New York City Marathon in 2013. April holds the record of winning the Hannover Marathon, in Germany, for three consecutive years between 2011 and 2013.
<div id="attachment_31367" style="width: 860px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31367" class="wp-image-31367 size-full" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-111.jpg" alt="" width="850" height="569" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-111.jpg 850w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-111-300x201.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-111-600x402.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Chris-Hani-111-768x514.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 850px) 100vw, 850px" />Small brick house,Sabalele village, in Cofimvaba</div>
“Being here is just to honor the man for what he did for the country. And also I never run in these conditions in the village, I just wanted to partake to encourage the future athletes from around here. It’s not every day you see someone who has been to the Olympic Games coming back to run here. I was humbled to see some local boys running with torn shoes and soccer boots, they showed me that there’s so much hunger to achieve their dreams,” he says after finishing the race in second spot and with a limp.
Both April and Gongqa were chuffed to see hundreds of school children running alongside their parents. Just like young Gongqa, the unlikely young competitors were ecstatic to walk home with their new oversized white-shirts and medals, even if there was no roll-on.
Hani would have been proud.

SACP-CHRIS HANI

Running For A Hero

Each year some people have the privilege of doing a political tour of South Africa. From Nkandla, President Jacob Zuma’s home in KwaZulu-Natal, through Johannesburg’s Constitutional Court, Stock Market, Soweto and other attractions to Parliament in the Cape, Hout Bay’s squatter camp and the lovely wine farms.
The tour’s emphasis is on politics and the political people of the country. They meet the players in politics, business, the media, health and education. Fortunately for us, former president Thabo Mbeki agreed to meet us at his Foundation.
Mbeki was in a wonderful mood, sharing his stories, answering our questions, asking a few of his own. Most fascinating for me was his answer when asked to explain why his liberation party moved away from nationalizing mines and banks.
“Well, we went to Cuba in 1986, and you know before our meeting Fidel Castro asked us to bring a copy of the Freedom Charter with us. But he asked it three times, three times!”
“We asked ourselves, we heard you the first time, why ask again?”
“He then told us when we saw him – with the document – that the government Cuban rum is called Cuban Club, and that it is owned by Cuba, it is the best rum, but does not do as well as Bacardi. The owners of Bacardi left Cuba in a hurry but had to leave the vats.”
“Fidel then said, ‘Now you know good rum is made by mixing old rum with new, but Bacardi left in a hurry, taking everything but leaving the old vats. Yet they set up in America and sold a completely new rum. It was not great, it lacked the Bacardi flavor, it was all new and all they had was the name,’ he told us.”
But it was enough.
“‘So,’ said Fidel, ‘we quickly went to France and Europe and registered the names of Cohibas and other cigars, so if those companies also left we would still have their names. ‘Now tell me, ‘ Fidel said, ‘how many mining engineers do you have in the ANC?’”
“We looked at each other and said we did not know if we have any, probably none at that time (1992).”
“Then he said that if we took over Anglo American and nationalized them, we would have to ask them to do the mining, to manage it and run the mines because we could not, and they would then deliberately mine badly, because they would be angry that they had been nationalized. ‘Rather wait a bit,’ Fidel told us, ‘then in 15 years or so you can start taking over as you develop the capacity.’”
“It made sense, so we went back and convinced our people.”
I asked why Mandela, when he first came out of jail, in his first speech in Cape Town, said mines and banks would be nationalized?
“When Mandela was released it was a bad mistake of ours. We had been in talks with government and they had agreed they would give us nine or 10 days’ notice before releasing him, they would call my home with a code name and message, like ‘it is going to rain on Sunday November 1’ and we would have time to prepare.”
“But I was away, with Oliver Tambo in London, so when Zanele (Mbeki’s wife) was called by this strange person with a fairly innocuous message for me she waited a few days and then told the wife of Oliver Tambo to tell me the message. His wife also waited a few days and then said to him ‘Oh, tell Thabo somebody called Zanele to say it is going to rain on Sunday November 1.’”
“I got the message and thought nothing of it. I had forgotten what that meant. Me, I made that mistake… Later I suddenly remembered and realized, it was our code agreed with the South African government, but by then it was the day before his release.”
“We quickly tried to write a speech but failed and those inside South Africa wrote the speech, but they had not yet been told how we had changed our minds on nationalizing the mines and banks despite what it said in the Freedom Charter. So that’s why Mandela said what he said.”
I was aghast. I had written several times to say it was at Davos that the first democratic president had changed policy on nationalization. Mbeki laughed.
“Davos being the place he changed his mind is really just one of many stories&#8230;”

Nationalization Is A  Rum Deal

African literature cannot be completely told without a mention of one Can Themba. This was the kind of journalist he was. In defiance of racist laws, Themba attended white church services; he was yanked out of church, beaten and arrested for trespassing.
Canodoise ‘Can’ Themba was born in 1924 in Marabastad, a township outside Pretoria, the capital city of South Africa. Themba wrote for the South African black magazine called Drum, in Johannesburg, in the 50s, a publication that spawned a generation of talented young black journalists. Because of his man-about-town manner Themba was popular among thugs and educated alike in Sophiatown, the now defunct suburb where both black and white lived. Themba called his abode, at 111 Ray Street, the House of Truth where his friends gathered to carouse and debate. They called him the ‘shebeen intellectual’.
Essop Patel, the late South African judge and poet, wrote about Themba’s house of truth and drink in a book he edited, The World of Nat Nakasa. Nakasa, a Harvard graduate who later died in exile in America, was Themba’s colleague from Durban; Themba welcomed him to Johannesburg.
“For those with the Karamazovian lifestyle led by Can Themba and his ‘pards’ in a room called the ‘House of Truth’ in Sophiatown, Nat’s initiation must have looked like leading a lamb to the slaughter-block. The curious and interesting thing is that while Nat conducted himself as something of a dilettante from the word go, there was plainly nothing bogus about him. He cheerfully sank into the Bohemian life with Can Themba and his crew in Sophiatown and later drifted into the twilight world of ‘mixed gatherings’ and ‘mixed parties’ in Hillbrow,” writes Patel.
Siphiwo Mahala, who has never touched a drink, is a scholar of Themba’s work and African literature. He wrote a new play about Themba, along with veteran actor Sello Maake kaNcube. He of all people knows that Themba would have chuckled at the thought of a teetotaller writing play about his life half a century after his death.
Last winter, Mahala premiered the bio-play The House of Truth at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. Maake kaNcube depicts the little known story of talks Themba had with Nelson Mandela and Walter Sisulu while they were students at the University of Fort Hare – a cauldron of African nationalism, in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. The politicians asked him to rally his journalism colleagues behind their movement, the African National Congress, but Themba made it clear he would choose alcohol over politics.
“I am a student of African literature. I remember distinctly when I first encountered Can Themba it was obviously his most popular short story – The Suit. I read it from an anthology by different South Africans called To Kill A Man’s Pride. What struck me about the book, until that moment I had not read a book that depicts a township life like I know it. In the same book I read The Music of the Violin by Njabulo Ndebele. I was probably in standard eight or thereabout, around about 1992. Ultimately, when I finished school I wanted to study literature, because when we grew up most of these writers’ work wasn’t available in our school syllabus,” says Mahala.
Mahala’s interest and devotion to the work of Themba was by chance when he was a master’s student in creative writing at the University of the Witwatersrand, in 2002.
“I presented my short story called Mpumi’s Assignment in the creative writing course. During feedback people kept on saying it reminded them of Can Themba’s The Suit. At that point, I wasn’t sure whether to take it as an offense or take credit. Somewhere it felt like they thought I have plagiarized. There’s a scene there where a woman finds an earring that is not hers in their bedroom. So, she asked her husband whose earring this is, he says it’s his and he is trying to be hip. So, she says okay put it on. And this guy happens to be a teacher and is forced to wear the earring to school. So, they took that and associated it with The Suit.”
Mahala reread The Suit to examine the similarities. In the process of reading, he thought the story needed a conclusion.
“We last heard of the adulterous man when he ran away clad only in underwear. That’s where I thought of writing The Suit Continued, which was published in 2002,” says Mahala.
The Suit Continued didn’t only become the introduction of the introverted Mahala in Johannesburg’s literary scene, he made it his academic project, uncovering Can Themba’s oeuvre. It bothered Mahala that the story of Themba was largely told from the time he worked for Drum.
“Now we have established this connection between Siphiwo Mahala and Can Themba. There are so many academic papers and reviews linking us. So, I felt obliged to know better about Can Themba, the person. I spent a lot time with ‘Bra Willie’ Kgositsile who used to regale me with stories of his own upbringing and life in Sophiatown and encounters with Can Themba,” he says.
Mahala, the author of a novel When A Man Cries (2007) and a collection of short stories African Delights (2011), said the late professor and vice chancellor at the University of Fort Hare, Mbulelo Mzamane, challenged him to immerse himself in Themba’s work.
<div id="attachment_31488" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31488" class="wp-image-31488 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-1024x681.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="681" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-600x399.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Siphiwo-Mahala-172-768x511.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Above: Siphiwo Mahala with actor, Sello Maake kaNcube</div>
“He had been pushing me to go back to school to study towards a PhD on Can Themba. In 2013, he said to me: ‘You already know so much about Can Themba, and chances are, your supervisors wouldn’t know as much you know about Can Themba’,” he recalls.
In 2014, Mahala enrolled for a PhD at the University of South Africa. His research sent him back to where it all started, at the University of Fort Hare, and Grahamstown, where he was born, in the Eastern Cape. From the university Mahala retrieved Themba’s correspondence with the Transvaal Department of Education. Themba, who studied English but wanted to teach, had a long and miserable run-in with the education department. He was refused promotion because he lacked a teacher’s qualification. There’s a rich archive on Themba’s life at The National English Literary Museum in Grahamstown, lying just 20 kilometers from Mahala’s home in Joza township.
“Fortunately, I didn’t struggle so much. Now I am depicting a real character as opposed to crafting a fictional character. I had to reflect on Can Themba’s life as much as possible, this including the kind of music he listened to, his behavior in general. The play goes beyond the carbon character that has been created about Sophiatown. You see Can Themba in love, you see Can Themba as a family man, you see Can Themba frustrated. The issues of his troubles with the education department were never written about. I didn’t have to be creative that much, the creativity was demanded mostly in packaging the story,” says Mahala.
The idea to have the story of Themba in film was hatched in those interactions with the poet and professor of English, Kgositsile. The film A Teacher in the Newsroom features the scholars and writers; Kgositsile, Pitika Ntuli, Don Mattera, Nadine Gordimer, Joe Thloloe, Muxe Nkondo, wife Anne and daughters Morongwa and Yvonne Themba.
Mahala thought it would be unfair to compare Themba to his privileged contemporaries like the prolific Nadine Gordimer, a friend of Themba.
“Nadine in many was ways was privileged as a white person despite identifying herself with the struggles of the black people. The major distinction here is that fact she lived until her nineties, Can Themba died at 43, she had over 30 years to write after Can Themba had died. She could establish herself even further. I think for a man of his talent, his capabilities, his potential wasn’t fully explored.”
The Suit was published in 1963 in the inaugural issue of The Classic, a literary journal founded by Nakasa and Gordimer. Three years later the politically-charged story was banned after the apartheid government declared he was a “statutory communist”.
The following year, Themba died in exile in Swaziland without a book to his name. Thanks to his friendship with Italian catholic priest, Angelo Ciccone, Themba was the first non-priest to be buried at St Joseph’s cemetery in Swaziland.
Playwrights Barney Simon and Mothobi Mutloatse adapted The Suit to theater production which Maake kaNcube performed at Johannesburg Market Theatre at the dawn of democracy. A French adaptation followed in 1999, and the play toured the world between 1999 and 2014. Former President Thabo Mbeki posthumously bestowed Can Themba with the Order of Ikhamanga, in 2006.
The 50th anniversary of Themba’s death will be celebrated with his stage work The Suit, Crepuscule, and The House of Truth, around South Africa.
“I think from 1993, during the South African transitional period, more and more people started knowing about Can Themba. During that period, many of the exile people were coming back and many of them knew Can Themba,” says Mahala.
Mahala had merely expected Maake kaNcube to lend his theater expertise.
“But the wonderful surprise was that he didn’t only like the play but wanted to perform it. So, the full-cast play had to be changed to one-man play per his advice.
“So, when I wrote this, I knew Sello is the real person that feels and knows Can Themba. I have dealt with so many academics and people who are related to Can Themba, but they don’t feel him as much as Sello does,” says Mahala.
“Can Themba, if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be the actor I am now,” says Maake kaNcube.
You can be sure the man himself is raising a glass to Mahala and sees the irony in the playwright teetotal chronicler – wherever he is.

The Literary Bon Viveur  Who Drank,  Fought  and  Wrote  Furiously

One of the last survivors of the rebels who faced death with Nelson Mandela was a genial soul with a resolve of iron.
Ahmed Kathrada was one of the great worker bees of the struggle against apartheid in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the shadows of Liliesleaf, a smallholding in the middle-class northern Johannesburg suburb of Rivonia, used as a hideout by underground activists, Kathrada, wrote, worked and photocopied pamphlets tirelessly. When the struggle called upon him to pose as a white man – he dyed his hair, put on make-up and a moustache to pretend to be a Portuguese man called Pedro. It was a disguise that fooled people; despite this, he never felt comfortable going into restaurants where people of color were not allowed.
Discomfort in the heat of an armed struggle, against a brutal regime, shows the gentle soul that was Kathrada. He may have been strident when it came to principle, but never fell for bravado; humility was his middle name. He admitted to me once, in an interview for CNBC Africa, that he feared he could have broken if he had been tortured by special branch after his arrest half a century before. His heart was always tender and 26 rough brutal years in prison left few callouses. Once, on national radio, I heard Kathrada break down when a caller reminded him of a comrade who had been tortured to death more than 50 years before.
<div id="attachment_5630" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5630" class="wp-image-5630 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/funeral-076-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Kathrada’s widow Barbara Hogan and nephew Nazir</div>
If the scars were deep, Kathrada’s spirit kept a salving sense of humour. With a laugh, he told me how Govan Mbeki – the father of South Africa’s former president Thabo – used to sell eggs he coaxed from the Liliesleaf chickens to his fellow activists, despite their protestations. He also told me how the underground activists of Liliesleaf used to sell vegetables.
“Our best customer was the Rivonia Police!” he chuckled. It was the police of Rivonia who raided Liliesleaf with dogs, in July 1963, putting Kathrada behind bars on his way to trial for sabotage that carried the death penalty.
Even in the shadow of death Kathrada, in the so-called Rivonia trial in Pretoria, never lost his sense of humour. Prosecutor Percy Yutar quizzed him, on the stand, about a person who went by the initial K, referred to in Nelson Mandela’s diary. Yutar pressed in an attempt to humiliate: did Kathrada know anyone with the initial K?
“Yes,” replied Kathrada, “Mr Khrushchev.”
Even the judge laughed. The court spared Kathrada and his comrades the rope at the end of the trial in 1964.
“We subsequently found out that life was to mean life,” he said with gentle irony through his trademark smile.
When Kathrada emerged from prison, in 1989, apartheid had taken a lot more than his youth; it also took his birthplace. The place he grew up in, Schweizer-Reneke, in South Africa’s North West province, was bulldozed by the authorities in the cause of keeping the races apart.
Incarceration took even more. Computers, hotel room cards instead of keys and the paraphenalia of the modern world were a mystery. He tried driving on motorways that he had never seen, once, but found it too stressful. Even a harmless ATM spelled confusion as Kathrada found out one Sunday morning when he went to draw money with fellow Robben Island prisoner Laloo Chiba.
“He put in his card and it was swallowed, then I put my card in and pressed a few buttons and it was also swallowed. We had to phone the bank and they came to open up the ATM and get our cards out. Now Barbara gets my money for me,” he told me.
Former minister Barbara Hogan was Kathrada’s loving partner and they appeared kindred spirits. Kathrada would have loved to raise a family – a big gap in his life. The prison guards, on Robben Island, used to keep children cruelly out of sight of prisoners; Kathrada told me of the pain of more than two decades without that most natural sound; the carefree laughter of a child. Hogan was his family.
“When I phone home from overseas my first question is: ‘What happened in Isidingo (A TV soap opera), my second question is about whether the country has been overthrown!” says Kathrada drily.
One or two people in the African National Congress would whisper to you that Kathrada could be a bit star struck when it came to big names and would occasionally drop everything to be with them. It was Kathrada who accompanied the then United States senator Barack Obama to Robben Island.
When it came to integrity, there was never a waver, nor whiff, of scandal around Kathrada. I shall remember him for six words he shot back to me in the studio in 2010. I ventured that there was a rising generation of young people who chose not to know, nor care, about the causes and sacrifices of the struggle.
<div id="attachment_5632" style="width: 211px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5632" class="wp-image-5632 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/funeral-041-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />Winnie Madikizela-Mandela and Julius Malema at the funeral in Johannesburg, South Africa</div>
“That is what we fought for.”
The principled and upstanding way of Ahmed Kathrada that South Africa is poorer for losing; sadly, many of those principles he fought for have been abandoned by a generation old enough to know better.

Farewell To A Gentle Soul

On April 3, the rating agency Standard &amp; Poor’s Global (S&amp;P) downgraded South Africa to junk status following the reshuffling of several cabinet ministers, including finance minister Pravin Gordhan and his deputy Mcebisi Jonas. President Jacob Zuma’s reshuffling received mixed reaction from the people, but even worse, the downgrade that followed rocked the country’s markets. And more was to come; four days later, Fitch Ratings announced the second downgrade.
Azar Jammine, Chief Economist at Econometrix, says the downgrades can hurt the economy in three ways.
<div id="attachment_5619" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5619" class="wp-image-5619 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/march-047-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />Zuma must fall protest</div>
“When business confidence is low, businesses don’t invest in capital formation. If you reflect on what happened in 2016, the economic growth rate was just 0.3% but when you look at the breakdown thereof you see that consumer spending grew by nearly 1%, government spending grew by nearly 2%, exports exceeded imports, so why was growth why so low? The answer is because capital investment fell by 4%, and one fears that we are going to see more of this going forward,” he says.
“People are focusing a lot on the impact on the rand, but in fact that’s neither here nor there. All that happened thus far the rand has retraced some of the gains that it made in January and February. At this current exchange rate, the impact in boosting inflation and interest rates will not be too severe. What is has done is to get rid of any hope of a cut in interest rates, and to that extent has dampened the business confidence.”
“The third way in which downgrades are likely to impact negatively is through the increase in the long-term interest rate which is going to raise government’s cost of servicing its debt. Government and parastatals have to borrow R260 billion ($19 billion) or about 5.5% of GDP in the coming year. Now, already, long term interest rates have risen by 50 basis points and the impact on cost of servicing debt in the longer term will be substantial, around R15 billion ($1.1 billion) to R20 billion ($1.45 billion), which will be taken away from the ability of government to spend on all sorts of vital areas of infrastructure and social requirements.”
Jammine isn’t writing off any possibility of a third downgrade from  credit rating agency Moody’s. He doesn’t expect to see improvement under the new Minister of Finance, Malusi Gigaba, who has little experience in finance.
“If the new minister carries on the way he has about the radical economic transformation, then that dashes the hopes of credit agencies regarding adherence to fiscal discipline. The moment you have that, the ratings agencies are going to downgrade you, and that’s a big concern. If S&amp;P and Moody’s local currency debt decline to junk status, then South African government bonds will fall out of the Citigroup World Government Bond Index.”
Iraj Abedian, an economist and CEO at Pan African Investments and Research Services, also has doubts about Gigaba.
<div id="attachment_5618" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5618" class="wp-image-5618 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/march-17-300x201.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="201" />Zuma must fall protest</div>
“He’s been a weak leader in the ministries he led before and his current comments on the downgrades have been contradictory. It seems he doesn’t understand the gravity of the problem, he has little time to allow himself to learn basic economics, but we can hope he transforms himself for the benefit of the country and the people,” he says.
Abedian says South Africa can return to normality within five years only if Gigaba doesn’t listen to clueless politicians and rather pays attention to the markets’ demands.
Jammine, however, says we haven’t seen the worst yet. There’s a huge burden on Gigaba to try and convince the markets that he’s not going to go crazy with government spending. He fears the new minister doesn’t understand the implications.
“First, he said you don’t go and downgrade a country just because of the change of one person, and then after that he said he knew about the downgrade, so the statements were totally contradictory. In the same way, he says we are going to be committed to radical economic transformation and then argues that we are committed to fiscal discipline, this also tends to be contradictory.”
If the minister cannot heed to the advice of economists, there’s a risk of a long spell of recession and social upheaval as the living standards of ordinary people in South Africa deteriorates, says Jammine.
Ordinary South Africans are aware of the damage that Zuma’s reshuffle has done. More than 100,000 marched on the streets to show the president their displeasure.
“It’s bad news as the people started to ask whether South Africa is going the route of Zimbabwe or Venezuela, for example,” says Jammine.
“What you have right now is a huge divide between what the president himself has termed ‘clever blacks’ and white monopoly capital, who are seen to do all this to benefit themselves. They are being accused of making a big brouhaha about the ratings downgrades in order to persuade people the impact would be bad for the poor. The reality is that it would be worse for the poor than the middle [and] upper income groups because a fall in the value of the rand tends to push up the share prices of the companies listed on the stock exchange that have huge investments overseas. Secondly, higher interest rates improve the returns on pensions people hold. So pensioners and those who have a lot of shares will do well out of this.”
The South African Reserve Bank Governor Lesetja Kganyago lambasted politicians who questioned the credibility of rating agencies when they should be taking the people into their confidence.
“We are going to engage the credit ratings on their own terms. When you lose your investment grade ratings, your government is going to pay more to raise debt and when your government does that, your banks are going to pay more to raise debt and they will pass those costs to businesses and household and then it doesn’t become nice. It is going to affect the poor and the middle class who rely on credit,” says Kganyago at the monetary policy forum.
Jammine agrees the poor will suffer from this as there will be job losses and rises in inflation. So, what can the government do?
“The best thing the government could do is reinstate Pravin Gordhan and Mcebisi Jonas, or to put someone in Gigaba’s place. Gigaba has a very poor reputation in the way he managed the ministries of public enterprise and home affairs previously.”
“You may shout about the credibility of the agencies until the cows come home, the fact is the international investors do pay attention to these credit rating agencies… you can try and pretend they don’t count, but they will cost you a lot of money.”
Despite the upheaval seen on the streets, it is not the first time South Africa has faced economic meltdown and certainly won’t be the last. In 1994, the new government inherited a treasury with huge amount of debt that rose sharply as a result of a massive increase in defence spending.
<div id="attachment_5624" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5624" class="wp-image-5624 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/AnitZumaMarch_JC-3-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />Zuma must fall protest</div>
“Nelson Mandela and his minister of finance that he appointed in 1996, Trevor Manuel, realized that the only way to get back on course was to actually cut back on government spending rather than increasing on populist needs. That restored a lot of confidence in the South African economy but it took a long while. But it was only after the 2001 crisis that South Africa’s economy started picking up, but we did see credit ratings gradually improving and Standard &amp; Poor’s actually put us on investment credit rating for the first time,” says Jammine.
It is said that one of the reasons the Gordhan was fired was that he defied Zuma’s wish to commission Russia to build a $70-billion nuclear plant in South Africa.
“That is also why people are concerned the President appointed Gigaba instead of Pravin – in order to sign a nuclear deal. The fear with the nuclear deal is that it will cost R1 trillion, that it will be unaffordable. Our total public debt is R2 trillion and it will increase our debt in one fell swoop 40% to 50%, something that will stifle the ability to spend on everything else. What is particularly worrisome to people is why there is this dramatic desire to embark upon a nuclear deal? There are strong suspicions, as has been the case with other smaller projects that the president is personally involved with, that the Russians are paying him to get this deal through,” says Jammine.
This time, the president may have overplayed his hand. South Africans of all colors and creeds united to defy him.
President Zuma Bites Back
<div id="attachment_5617" style="width: 610px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5617" class="wp-image-5617 size-medium" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/GettyImages-667743392-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="600" height="400" />Presidents Jacob Zuma&#8217;s Birthday Celebration</div>
While tens of thousands protested outside at the gates of the Union Buildings in frustrationon april 12, President Jacob Zuma ate cake – after all, it was his 75th birthday.
Eighty kilometers away from the crowds chanting down his name, Zuma celebrated in Kliptown, Soweto – the place where the Congress of the People drew up the guiding Freedom Charter in 1955 – with dancing, singing and speeches.
&#8220;Do not be fazed by people who are saying we are marching, we are marching, today was declared a national day of action. What is it? Zuma must go. What has he done? He is not running the country properly, he must go. You can&#8217;t even pick up the essence for the protest, it&#8217;s complicated to be the opposition. I am trying to put you at ease because if they don&#8217;t protest they wouldn&#8217;t be the opposition,&#8221; says Zuma in Zulu, his mother tongue.
&#8220;Don&#8217;t let the opposition make decisions on your behalf; you would have lost your way, because regardless of who the next leader is they will never be satisfied.&#8221;
Sitting next to him in a lavish armchair were some of his closest allies – Deputy Secretary General of the ANC Jessie Duarte, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane and Social Development Minister Bathabile Dlamini.
Zuma seemed unconcerned that key figures of the ANC were absent, among them the likes of  Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa, Secretary General  Gwede Mantashe, and Treasurer General Zweli Mkhize.
The president chose to send a clear message to those who have been calling for him to step down. He said he would be willing to do so if called upon by the ANC.
&#8220;Even if you said tomorrow I should step down from my duties, I will gladly do that with a pure heart, but what I want to tell you my leaders is that I will be ANC until the day I die.&#8221;
It is not the only event in which Zuma has shrugged off opposition. Two days before, at the Chris Hani wreath laying ceremony in Thomas Nkobi Memorial Park, east of Johannesburg, he criticized the 60,000-strong national march on April 7.
&#8220;There is a resurgence of racism in our country… Many placards and posters displayed beliefs that we thought had been buried in 1994, with some posters depicting black people as baboons. It is clear that some of our white compatriots regard black people as being lesser human beings or sub-human,&#8221; he said.

One Decision, Many Repercussions, Millions Angry

It’s a busy Thursday morning in South Africa’s famous Vilakazi Street, in Orlando West, in Soweto with tourists roaming about. This street was not only home to two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, but also legendary musician Sipho ‘Hotstix’ Mabuse.
On this day, at a wine bar, Mabuse leans on the table to make his point. He feels up-and-coming musicians should be wary of exploitation.
“If one is not stable then you lose your mind and values. When you’re young, starry-eyed and ignorant you get so exploited by promoters, record companies; everyone takes advantage of your naiveties. If you don’t have resilience you end up an alcoholic or a drug addict just to numb the pain of what the industry can inflict,” he says.
Mabuse started playing the drums at the age of eight, an instrument that he would master so well that a fellow band member, Condry Ziqubu, gave him the nickname ‘Hotstix’.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="size-medium wp-image-5606 alignright" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Hotstix-020-201x300.jpg" alt="" width="201" height="300" />
His journey began 50 years ago, when he formed a band, The Beaters, at high school in Soweto.
“We were adored by the media and everyone. The Beaters became popular among the students in universities and high schools. We toured to neighboring countries like Botswana, Lesotho and Namibia.”
In the 1970s, they visited Zimbabwe as an Afro-funk group and named themselves in honor of the future name of the capital city.
“Zimbabwe was known as Rhodesia back then; we were influenced by the grounds of black consciousness. We were conscious of our surroundings and interacting with the struggle itself. It was imperative for us to change the name to Harari.”
In 1982, the band split. A devastating moment for Mabuse. He likened the split to a beautiful marriage that suddenly crumbles.
“I had put so much energy, love and commitment in the band. I felt like all my efforts were in vain.”
Mabuse launched his solo career and produced the hits Jive Soweto, Rise and Set Me Free. His funky township disco-jive jam, Burnout sold 500,000 records.
“A band member passed away while we were in Harare. Before his death, I made a promise to him that because he made fire when the cold wind was blowing I’ll keep the fire burning. One of the things I did was to go to studio and record a song Set Me Free. I don’t know if it was somewhat a paradox that was I refereeing to the split itself or allowing myself to go solo,” he says.
Staying on top is hard.
“To stay relevant, one has to be inventive. My music evolves with my age. I performed at some event recently and I was amazed at the response. When I started playing, the response was just overwhelming. I get goosebumps because I didn’t imagine that people would still remember the music I did 40 years ago. After I performed they kept asking for more,” says Mabuse.
“Music has provided me with things that I never imagined I could have. I managed to build homes, raise my children, and travel the world. If it wasn’t for music I wouldn’t have had the privilege of meeting the late Nelson Mandela or Bill Clinton.”
All of this didn’t come easy. For black musicians under apartheid, performing was a struggle.
“It was difficult to make music freely. I remember we were performing with Percy Sledge, an American artist. Black musicians were curtain-raisers and we couldn’t play in certain white venues so that white people could not see us. If we were found in town after 12AM, we had to state why we were there. If we say we’re a band, they’d ask what is a band? For them, black musicians were nothing but vagrants.”
With fluctuating royalties, Mabuse says it’s difficult to save money.
“The music industry is fickle. We don’t get jobs that continuously pay us. It’s important for us when we get money to plan around it but we cannot have a saving plan. Sometimes musicians stay for two to three years without getting royalties.”
According to the 66-year-old Mabuse, a retirement annuity is a must.
“People don’t understand how important it is. If I knew what I know now about money 40 years ago, I probably would have been a billionaire.”
Mabuse and his band members dropped out of school in Grade 11, for music. He says fame made them lose focus.
“In high school we dropped out without realizing it. The pressure was too much, so was the music, the money and women,” he says.
In 2012, at the age of 60, Mabuse joined an adult basic education training program at a school in Klipspruit, Soweto, to get his matric.
“Now that I’m older and wiser I know that education is powerful. I am grateful that I was able to get education, otherwise I would not be getting royalties because I wouldn’t have the knowledge of what music means in terms of financial and economic gains. I still get royalties for all the music I released,” he says.
He recently produced a documentary about his song Jive Soweto for the BBC. He also plans to study anthropology at a university away from home.
For musicians, maybe it’s better to remember his parting words rather than his songs.
“If they do not have expertise, it’s better to invest with those that have expertise. First of all, find a good lawyer, manager and pay them. If you don’t have money, get them into some kind of a deal because then you will be protecting yourself for a lifetime. Stay focused and don’t believe the hype.”
Maybe young musicians should print out these words and put them on the wall.

Category: Politics

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

More from Politics