Boko Haram’s latest victim may have been Nigeria’s national elections.
Citing security concerns as reason for postponing the nation’s February general elections by six weeks, the Nigerian authorities have once again succumbed to the bogey of insurgency and insecurity bedeviling Africa’s largest and most populous economy.
The elections will now be held between March 28 and April 11 this year. National Security Adviser, Sambo Mohammed Dasuki, says the government will flush out the terrorists in six weeks. It was a shaky excuse. Nigerians are watching; waiting to see what security magic government will weave in six weeks.
The postponement has near and far reaching implications for the nation and the rest of Africa.
Professor Attahiru Jega, Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), had previously maintained the commission’s readiness to conduct free and fair polls. Now INEC’s independence and neutrality is being questioned. According to media reports, government may even be shopping for a new, more compliant chairman for the commission.
If this happens, it will translate to political chicanery and serious credibility worries for INEC and the incumbent administration, which funds the commission. The fear that even the new election dates may not be sacrosanct is palpable. Constitutionally, federal and state-wide swearing-in of elected officials must be held on May 29. Observers have called this unfolding scenario a looming coup against democracy in Nigeria.
A prolonged political crisis in Nigeria would further harm efforts at national harmony and stall trade and investment in West Africa, already hit by the Ebola crisis, insurgencies in northern Nigeria and Mali, a democratic interregnum in Burkina Faso, poor external trade balances, fiscal deficits, weakening currencies and mass unemployment.
For most of 2014, Africa’s global image was defined by the Ebola epidemic, despite the scourge being confined to a few countries in West Africa.
Ignoring Africa’s rising middle class, the epidemic revealed the specter of a failing continent,  with poor sanitation, poor health budgets, poor health education, poor medical inventories, poor infrastructure, an entrenched culture of graft and official disregard for society’s commonwealth.
Nigeria’s democratic debacle will therefore be an ignoble chapter in the history of Africa.
For the last 30 months or so, the rest of the world struggled to empathize with Nigeria over its inability to curb the despicable rein of the Islamist fundamentalist group. Boko Haram has made the Sahel forest region around the Lake Chad basin its homestead, launching sporadic attacks into northern Nigerian cities and towns at will; making a mockery of Nigeria’s national security and defense systems. Huge sections of north eastern Nigeria have thus been rendered comatose and ungovernable.
A regional diplomatic initiative involving the governments of Chad, Cameroon and Nigeria failed to plug the onslaught. Indeed the group has become bolder. Last month, Boko Haram threatened to ‘deal with and defeat’ an African Union anti-Boko Haram special force. The group has unleashed more mayhem on northern Nigerian towns even after it kidnapped over 200 teenage girls from their Chibok village school in April 2014.
The political season began last autumn and soon, it would seem that the world had moved on from the sad case of the Chibok girls and the #BringBackOurGirls social media campaign. The conscience of the nation was on the chopping block. Also on the chopping block were investor sentiment and market forces. Agriculture and the automobile industry welcomed new investments in 2014; in the same period, the Nigerian Stock Exchange saw its market cap decline by $8.5 billion, a 13% drop.
Slumping oil prices forced the finance ministry to lower its economic projections for 2015. This year’s national budget was consequently slashed by $3 billion. Nigeria has never saved for the rainy day, largely due to politicians who earn stupendous salaries and allowances and insist on appropriating proceeds from the reserve Excess Crude Account (ECA). Nigeria’s four petroleum refineries operated at less than 50% of their installed capacity between 1985 and 1999 and have remained dormant since then. Parochial politics and economic perfidy has ensured that no new refineries were built in over 30 years.
If business is a natural extension of politics, then it is easy to see why Nigeria Inc. will continue to underperform. The consistent heating of the polity and absence of truth in practically all spheres of Nigerian life is a key hindrance to progress. The system resists reforms. Governance is driven by regional and religious sentiments. The current political class offers little hope. With little or no ideological difference between political parties, defections across party lines is the order of the day. It would therefore seem that principles have no place in Nigerian politics.
With a raft of political parties, presidential and governorship candidates vying for office, this will be the country’s most hotly contested and most expensive elections ever – complete with rented crowds, political hubris and multi-million-dollar media blitz. Nigeria’s cash-and-carry political culture was fully at work.
The late Chinua Achebe once quipped that the problem with Nigeria was Nigeria. The master storyteller would be turning in his grave now, as his beloved nation treks further away from established democratic ethos.
The protracted survival of Boko Haram is a national embarrassment and a scandalous testimonial for leadership in Nigeria. It reflects the failure of the social contract between government and the governed. And as the world prepares to replace the Millennium Development Goals with a new set of goals and priorities this year, Nigerians will also be desperately seeking to replace the mirage of hope with tangible political and economic achievement.

A Coup Against Democracy?

There’s no better place to take a photograph of Rosette Chantal Rugamba than on the terrace of the landmark Hotel des Mille Collines by Kempinski in Kigali. It’s easy getting permission for this from the hotel’s management. Rugamba is well-known here and a regular.
The hotel affords a 360-degree view of the city and its splendorous rolling hills. Rugamba, in an orange suit and necklace, views the twinkling lights of Kigali and takes a deep breath of the crisp night air. She has had much to do with this vision of the city.
Twelve years ago, she was appointed Rwanda’s tourism head by the country’s president Paul Kagame tasked with turning around the country’s tourism infrastructure.
She had never lived in Rwanda before that. Her parents had fled the country to Uganda in 1959 and she grew up as a refugee with her seven siblings. Her parents never let them forget they were Rwandan first. The children were encouraged to learn French and culturally attuned to their country’s traditions. Be it books, music or dance, their home reverberated with Rwandan nuances, as the family lived on hope they would one day return home.
Her father was a brewer and her mother a teacher, but their humble home was always open to fellow Rwandans.
“There was always plenty of food,” recalls Rugamba. “And if you had to roll out a hundred mattresses, so be it.”
As her parents’ first-born, there was pressure on her to perform – and excel. She studied political science at university in Uganda. She married Henry, an Ugandan, and thereafter moved to London. Her husband worked for the British telecom industry, while she started her career with Harrods as a customer services manager. Today, she lauds herself for having been among the team that launched the first Harrods store at Terminal 3 in Heathrow airport. Yet another milestone: she was “among the 100 people” who started Eurostar.
“I am the sort of person who always wants to start things,” says Rugamba. Although she was settling well in the United Kingdom, in her heart, she recalled the songs of Rwanda, the songs of its flowing rivers and rolling hills.
In 1984, she decided to “risk a trip” to Rwanda, which was still in the throes of the liberation struggle.
“I wanted to experience the country and so toured it for the first time. I was satisfied but not sure if I would ever see it again.”
In 1996, Rugamba joined British Airways as its sales and marketing manager for East Africa, and she subsequently moved to Uganda. Rwanda’s horrific 1994 genocide was still fresh on her mind.
“We used to do a lot of fund-raising for the people and the soldiers. My mom’s family was completely wiped out.”
In 2002, she received a call from Kagame, asking her to return to her homeland. At the time, things looked positive for Rwanda.
“I asked myself ‘what value can I add?’. I am eternally grateful to the President that he unleashed the potential I never knew I had.”
Kagame wanted her to raise Rwanda’s profile through tourism and turn it into an engine for economic change in the country.
“The brief I got from him was ‘make sure every tourism dollar is spent in the country’,” says Rugamba.
When she took over as the Director General of Tourism and National Parks in January 2003, she was six months pregnant and a newcomer in her own homeland.
“The tasks in front of me were huge. I was coming back to a country I had never lived in and tasked with tourism in a country that had never known it. I felt like a tourist in my own country,” she says.
Yet, she embarked on the job with passion.
“The country was embedded in me. I was so excited that for the first time I was given a Rwandan passport, the one given to government officials but one that came with responsibility. It actually meant I was now a part of the transformation of the country.”
It also came with personal sacrifice – for a while. She came to Rwanda leaving her family behind in Uganda.
“My husband said ‘you go, we will be fine, you are getting a chance to serve your country, we can manage’. Women can’t do it without the support of men,” says Rugamba.
The first thing she did on the job was getting on the radio every Sunday at 3PM, talking about the country’s tourism potential and the role Rwandans would play.
“Tourism is multi-faceted and for it to succeed, the masses needed to be involved. We had to get the coffee, tea and ICT sectors as well to support it.”
Her mandate was to grow the tourism numbers, build restaurants and hotels, and offer tourists local handicrafts and every reason to visit Rwanda.
“Rwandans are very patriotic and they linked [tourism] to the visionary leader they loved so much. Until then, everyone only knew Rwanda for the 2Gs: the genocide and gorillas. It was time to showcase whatever else Rwanda had to offer.”
Tasked with reinvigorating tourism in the ‘Land of the Thousand Hills’, for the next seven years, Rugamba reoriented the sector putting in place new policies and strategic master plans. She launched the country internationally with a new pitch: ‘Rwanda – the new dawn of Africa’.
“I was so determined to sell the vision. I went to the [East Africa] region, gathered the tour operators and brought them here. The target was high-end eco-tourism.”
Eugene Rutagarama, who as the Country Director of IGCP (International Gorilla Conservation Programme) worked closely with Rugamba for eight years, extols her ability to tackle problems and take a stand on tough issues.
“Rosette Rugamba is an energetic person, an inspiring leader to her peers and to any person who happens to know her well. I was always impressed by her innovative approach to complex situations and her strong desire to reach a high level of accomplishment,” he recalls.
In time, her efforts paid off.
By the time Rugamba stepped down in 2010, tourism had become Rwanda’s top foreign-exchange earner. The tourism master plan for Rwanda’s Vision 2020 had been laid out, and the country was a stand-alone destination in the East African bloc.
In 2003, when she took on the job, tourist numbers in Rwanda were a mere 13,000. When she left in 2010, that figure had risen to 790,000.
In 2013, Rwanda had 1,137,000 visitors and tourism generated $293.6 million. The number of hotel rooms in the country has risen to 8,417. It was 650 when Rugamba started in 2003. To accommodate the demand, the current airport has recently been expanded and a new airport is being built in Bugasera.
It was time for Rugamba to find a new challenge.
“I saw what tourism could do for Rwanda. I wanted to do the same for Africa. My vision is to go everywhere,” she says.
She chose to turn entrepreneur, starting Songa Africa, a luxury tour company focusing on sustainable tourism.
“There was room for an indigenous luxury tour company headed by a woman. I had the passion, local knowledge and appreciation of the luxury clientele. I started with an old laptop and a contact book, but with a vision.”
In March, her company completes five years. She admits to having international celebrities, presidents, film stars and media moguls as clients. She has been consistently recognized as one of East Africa’s leading tourism and conservation strategists.
“What happened to me is magical,” she says.
Rugamba’s company is launching its first custom-built luxury eco-lodge in March and will be rolling out three five-star lodges to the tune of $5.5 million. Her company is also getting into conference tourism in line with Rwanda’s strategy to position itself as a business destination.
All this has meant extensive travel for Rugamba.
“Oh my goodness! I have hardly been in the country these last three months,” she says. But wherever she goes, all roads lead her back home to Rwanda.

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Harrods, Heathrow, Home

It is 16 years since Nigeria drew back from the abyss in the former colonial town of Kaduna. In February 1999, 5,000 Christians took to the streets in an anti-Sharia march to protest the introduction of the strict Islamic penal code. Their contention was that Nigeria’s constitution did not allow federation, or state, to adopt any religion.
The march sparked a deadly confrontation between Christians and Muslims. Three days of street fighting left at least 2,000 dead. President Olusegun Obasanjo dispatched troops to restore order as conflict threatened to spread. He managed to head off conflict, but the rumpus around Sharia law did not go away.
Obasanjo tried to persuade northern governors to hold off on Sharia law; days before, Kano in the north west, signed a Sharia bill. Weeks later, Zamfara State amputated the right hand of Buba Jangebe after a Sharia court convicted him of stealing a cow. Four northern states: Sokoto, Zamfara, Kebbi and Kano have adopted Sharia law since 1999.
Many northern politicians felt marginalized by the new republic under Obasanjo. They complained of a southern and Christian bias and latched onto the rigors of Sharia law to boost waning support. It was seen by the rest of the country as a political compromise.
Fast forward to 2015, as the six-year Boko Haram insurgency continues to rage. Boko Haram has condemned northern governors who have adopted Sharia law. The militants believe the brand of Sharia law practiced in the country is not true Islam and have vowed to wage war until the entire country falls under their brand of Sharia. In this struggle, Boko Haram has captured around 20 small towns along Nigeria’s border with Chad and Cameroon. Militants have also taken larger towns like Mubi in the north eastern state of Adamawa.
Boko Haram renamed Mubi ‘Madinatul Islam’ or the City of Islam. Tens of thousands fled as the invaders hoisted their flag in the deserted emir’s palace and warned that ‘true’ Sharia law was now in force. A market thief was convicted by a Sharia court and his hand amputated to make the point.
Seventeen-year-old Aisha Ibrahim recalls the day Boko Haram rolled into town in with armored cars, trucks and motorcycles. She was still in school when the town was rocked by the sound of gunfire. She ran home to find her parents had fled, leaving her grandmother behind. In the fraught weeks that followed, she says, her best friend, Umma, was forced into a marriage with one of the militants. She feared the same fate and fled to Yola in the hope of finding her parents and four siblings. Her father has not been found, his whereabouts unknown. She is now back in Mubi after the Nigerian army took back the second-largest commercial center in Adamawa State after Yola.
Mubi is also the largest cattle trading center in Nigeria. The cattle rearing northerners use the Mubi cattle market as an important trade post to sell livestock to traders from as far as Lagos.
These days the southern businessmen fear to travel north and the insurgency appears to be killing the meat trade, which has yet to recover from a recent truck drivers’ strike.
On the other side of the city, Pastor Titi Adewumi, leader of one of the many churches that dot the landscape of the Adamawa State capital, says residents are depressed by all the security checks. All movement between 12AM and 5AM is prohibited as part of a state of emergency. Interestingly, worshippers are searched before they enter their local mosque or church. But while Yola residents complain about the quality of life, they know things could be worse; Boko Haram at the time of writing were engaged in a fight to the death for the control of the Borno State capital, Maiduguri, where a total ban on all movement has been imposed.
In Mubi, there is hope. Retired Colonel, Taboyi Elam Dong, says the recapture of Mubi shows that the Nigerian military is winning the war against Boko Haram. Other towns recaptured include Gwoza in Borno State and Potiskum in Yobe State.
Most people here feel the government is not doing enough as hell lurks around the corner.

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The People For Whom  Hell Lurks  Around The Corner

Ethiopia boasts a kaleidoscope of cultures, from animistic tribes in the southern Rift Valley to its orthodox Christian heritage in the northern highlands. This ancient land offers both the intrepid traveler and religious pilgrim an opportunity to sample the variants of Abrahamic religions practised with unique zeal.
The Kingdom of Axum in what is present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea was one of the first Christian countries in the world, having officially adopted Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century. Ethiopia is mentioned over 37 times in King James’ version of the Bible. Today, Ethiopia continues to predominantly be Christian (63%) and the majority of Christians are Tewahedo Christians, who belong to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
I could feel the deep influence of Christianity traveling around the country. Both Islam and Christianity have flourished here side by side for centuries.
Lalibela, a remote town located at an altitude of 2,800 meters, is known around the world for its churches carved from living rock. The 13 rock-cut structures dating back to the 12th century are said to represent Jerusalem. The rock churches are connected to one another by labyrinthine tunnels with a small river in the middle, which the Ethiopians named the Jordan, in keeping with the idea of Jerusalem.
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The churches were not constructed in a traditional way but rather were hewn from the living rock of monolithic blocks. These blocks were further chiseled out, forming doors, windows, columns, various floors, roofs etc. In addition, several passages, drainage trenches, catacombs and hermit residences were also carved out. Proclaimed as an UNESCO World Heritage site, the churches of Lalibela are also a significant engineering feat, given that they are built atop artesian well formations that bring the water up to the top of the mountain ridge on which the city sits.
Arriving at the Church of Bet Madane, the largest monolithic church in the world (carved out of live rock), I found throngs of pilgrims occupying the many niches in deep prayer. The church is cut 15 meters down, its roof forming the shape of a Greek cross. The roof of this church is leveled with the ground and reached by stairs descending into narrow trenches. Worshippers were crouched, seated and often times standing, in deep individual prayer, following passages from the Bible.
Pursuing one’s religious beliefs in deep silence and quietitude in an amazing setting is something I will never forget.
In one particular church, I found the remains of thousands of Coptic pilgrims. There is a huge pit of strewn bones, skulls and shockingly well-preserved bodies of people who walked from Egypt and Syria to be buried in the church 1,500 years ago.
Upon visiting other churches, I noticed many pilgrims were slumbering in various nooks of these dark churches, tired from fasting and listening to chants all day. There were numerous nuns in traditional head covering. The scene was surreal and I could feel myself transported back in time.
It is said that there are a 1,000 monks in Lalibela amongst a population of 10,000. The priests of many temples were proud to display the treasures of the temples, stored in huge wooden cabinets hidden behind silk curtains. They include beautifully-illustrated Bibles written in Aramaic, and icons, silver crosses and ritual silver vessels used for worship.
Next stop was Axum, considered to be the holiest city. The city was the original capital of the Kingdom of Axum (1st-6th AD). Axumites developed a distinctive architecture exemplified by giant obelisks, the oldest of which date from 5000–2000 BC.
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The Ethiopian Orthodox Church claims that the Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion in Axum houses the Biblical Ark of the Covenant in which lie the Tablets of Law upon which the Ten Commandments are inscribed. Fascinated by such a possibility, I entered the church and sat down with the large gathering of pilgrims, enjoying and appreciating the beautiful paintings inside this male-only enclave.
A religious land and a deeply religious people in a very ancient landscape is what I mainly observed traveling over 1,000 km inside the country. The beautiful smiles of the children and the elegantly-draped women who were glad to talk and be photographed were an added bonus. Ethiopia is still an unexplored gem. Boasting nine World Heritage sites, amazing religious traditions, world-class archeological sites and a host of beautiful people, Ethiopia is an ideal stopover, especially during Easter.

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Where History And Faith Meet

The thatched roof houses and brown earth make Awra Amba, in the Amhara area of northern Ethiopia, look like any African village. But this is no ordinary village.
Here, young girls go to school, and walk short distances from their homes to get to them. Once home, they don’t have to trade their textbooks for chopping boards or babies. Household chores don’t await them. In Ethiopia, less than half the girls don’t go to primary school, but not so in Awra Amba – they all do.
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Take Trissew Fente for instance. She chose not to marry before turning  19. Child marriages are common in the rest of Ethiopia, but not in Awra Amba. Fente opted to marry a man of her generation, and didn’t need to ask her family’s permission for it.
There were no celebrations, no dowry paid. The union was desacralized. Today, 30 years old, she is a mother of three and has opted not to get pregnant again.
Fente uses oral contraception. Awra Amba supports family planning methods, and opposes the practice of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). The villagers are well aware of the long-term health issues associated with it.
“We don’t inflict [excision] on our daughters because this creates many complications at birth,”
says Fente.
In Ethiopia, excision is punishable by law (since 2005). Yet, it’s believed that more than 70% of Ethiopian women continue to be victims of this practice – the country has one of the worst rates in the world.
“The people in Ethiopia think we’re crazy. Personally, I think their customs are terrible,” says Fente, as she works away on her wooden loom, traditionally an activity men engage in on the continent.
Petite she is, but performs this physically-arduous job just as skillfully as the men.
In Awra Amba, men and women get the same pay. The jobs are not distributed as per gender, but according to skill-sets. Here, women can be seen ploughing the land while men bathe the children and prepare injera, a pancake made out of a cereal grown locally.
“Doing a woman’s job does not change my sex, it changes my ignorance” is one of the mottos of this community created by Zumra Nuru, a 70-year-old illiterate peasant.
Known for his trademark green hat, Nuru founded this exclusive community at Awra Amba in 1972. Village lore has it that he decided to create his own utopia based on impressions from his childhood, when he witnessed the gross inequalities between his mother and father.
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The beginnings were difficult, as Nuru sought to emancipate and free himself and his community of binding religious ties. Today, the community is made up of a hundred families who follow the unique egalitarian principles set by Numra for a self-sustaining society.
Hopefully, his model will encourage Ethiopia – and the rest of Africa – to come up with other more unique and emancipated concepts that benefit their communities – and the women.

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Ethiopia or Utopia?

This year Lonmin, the world’s third largest platinum producer, will try to save its African business.
After a disastrous couple of years, the future of Lonmin hung in the balance in November as the platinum mining giant needed a $407-million bailout to keep going. It was the third capital raising in six years.
Wounded by declining platinum prices, electricity shortages, slow demand, and strikes, the company’s financial circumstances deteriorated sharply. To make matters worse, the company frittered away money.
“In the boom times around 2004 and 2005, Lonmin went and bought a ground in the Northern Province around the Plat Reef, a property called Akanani. Akanani was bought for almost a billion dollars. Today, in our books, it’s worth zero. So that billion dollars went down the drain,” admits Lonmin CEO, Ben Magara.
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Magara says a further billion dollars was wasted when Lonmin embarked on a failed mechanization program. The rock was too hard and shafts too narrow.
“To try and reverse all those challenges has needed even more money,” says Magara.
On the morning of November 19, Lonmin went cap in hand to its shareholders for an emergency capital injection. Prior to the meeting, other shareholders sold out of Lonmin. The share price went down from $8 in December 2010, to just 16c in November just before the meeting.
In London, Lonmin offered shareholders a 94% discount as part of its rebuilding plan. The Public Investment Corporation (PIC) saved the day by increasing its stake in Lonmin by 23% from 7%.
Even though the bailout was successful, 6,000 job losses are expected by September. Paul Theron, the CEO of asset management company, Vestact, reckons Lonmin’s shareholders are growing tired of bailouts.
“It’s a bit like SAA (South African Airways) where they say ‘this is one last bailout please’, but unfortunately that is exactly what happened in the past. The management team has raised additional funding in order to increase equity and to pay down debt, but then proceeded to run business in a way that didn’t result in a sustainable profitable scenario,” says Theron.
“No one anticipated that we would see this level of oversupply in the industry and this level of self-demand and this level of poor prices. A lot of people assumed that once the supply side started to calm down, there would be an immediate response in terms of higher platinum prices.”
Lonmin is hoping upon hope it can save its 106-year-old African operations and more than 30,000 jobs.

Lonmin Tries A Lazarus

If you own a Twitter or Facebook account you would have seen the recent anger leveled against Walter Palmer for shooting Cecil, Zimbabwe’s most renowned male lion. You may have also heard the outcries of comedian Ricky Gervais and the general public last year about United States television host, Melissa Bachman, and football cheerleader, Kendall Jones, who both posted pictures of lions they hunted in South Africa. These hunts were labeled unethical, barbaric and cruel. But, as I waded through a plethora of social media posts, I noticed that the criticism never seemed to consider the ecological dangers of trophy hunting or, contrastingly, its use to generate revenue for wildlife management.
The African lion is 220 kilograms – with a muscled physique enabling them to hunt buffalo and giraffe – that possesses a roar that can be heard from five kilometers away. I can understand why people have a problem with the ethics of wealthy hunters killing lions in Africa, but there are deeper issues. With as few as 22,000 lions left in just seven population strongholds on the continent, many of Africa’s lions are in crisis. Furthermore, male lions group together, and depend on the size and protective power of their coalitions to protect their prides from neighboring males who will kill non-related offspring when they attempt to gain control of a pride. Hunting too many male lions destabilizes the defensive power of male coalitions and doesn’t allow adult males to be in an area long enough to protect their sons and daughters.
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In Zimbabwe’s Hwange National Park, where Cecil was killed, a team of Oxford University researchers, led by Andy Loveridge, found that between 1999 and 2004, 24 of the 62 radio-collared lions were shot by trophy hunters. Overhunting halved the ratio of males to females and new males killed unrelated cubs. Zoologists, Matt Becker and Elias Rosenblatt, found a similar trend in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, where trophy hunting was the leading cause of lion deaths, resulting in fewer cubs, low teenage and adult male survival and lower life expectancies for females. Even the world’s most tenured lion biologist, Craig Packer, showed that Africa’s lion stronghold, Tanzania, was being subjected to overhunting in a lot of the hunting blocks across the country over the past decade.
Trophy hunting of large carnivores affects almost every large mammal, from black rhinoceros to elephant, and even common antelope like impala. The list is endless and so is the need for developing scientifically robust techniques to protect populations against the negative effects of hunting.
But, there are several places in Africa where animal populations are holding steady despite being hunted. The leopard population in the north of South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province suffered from unscrupulous hunting, with 40% of the population dying between 2002 and 2004. However, with a series of legislative reforms, a cap in quotas and intensive population monitoring, the population recovered to near capacity. The lion hunting management scheme, pioneered by Colleen Begg, in Niassa National Park, Mozambique, is another place where large carnivores are hunted but are not declining. Niassa employs a reward system with its outfitters, encouraging them to hunt older animals – considered safe for the population because they have sired at least one litter of cubs to independence – then their quota increases for the next season. If the hunter chooses a young individual or a female then their quota will decrease. Even in Zimbabwe, the land of the mythical Cecil, lion hunting is now capped, and lion populations have been stable since the hunting reforms made by Loveridge and his team.
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Millions of people in Africa live inside or on the borders of protected wildlife areas and their associated management zones. Many have to protect their livelihoods and sometimes their lives against animals such as lions and elephants. Surprising to most, many of Africa’s parks are linked to trophy hunting and the revenue generated from it. Recent science suggests hunting contributes to local economies and livelihoods. A recent study by Peter Lindsey, a leading wildlife management policy expert, and his colleagues found that approximately $400,000 generated through trophy hunting in Mozambique is ploughed back into the management of Niassa National Park, which amounts to 20% of the parks funding. On a larger scale, the $11 million generated by the Zambia Wildlife Authority, the country’s wildlife management and conservation body, is made up of $5 million from trophy hunting.
In 2000, a study by Michael Humavindu and Jonathan Barnes found that trophy hunting constituted about 14% of Namibia’s annual tourism and $19.6 million in gross output. But what about money going back to local communities? Lindsey found that in Tanzania 60 to 65% of hunting income from wildlife management areas, where wildlife and people live together, goes back to local communities. In Zambia 50% of hunt license fees and 20% of concession fees go back to communities. They also found families in wildlife-rich game management areas get about 17% more income and have a 7.8% better chance of finding a job than those living outside. Similarly, Humavindu and Barnes found about 24% of income earned from Namibian hunting went back to the poorer sector of the population.
Some of these statistics are difficult to ignore, especially if one considers Africa’s population growth will surpass China and India in the next 35 years. Much of this population growth will take place inside or along the borders of some of Africa’s largest wildlife areas.
Two recent studies suggested if lion hunting was banned in several countries, as much as 59,538km2 of wild land could become unviable for hunting. What would happen to that land? Although some operators could opt to try game drives or birding safaris, there is nothing to say that the land won’t be used for agriculture or the lions will not get poached.
Replacing hunting with tourism and photographic safaris might be plausible in some areas, but will be dependent on wildlife sightings in hunting zones being as good as those in national parks and whether the animals are scared of vehicles and people or not. In Zimbabwe’s Matetsi concession, a large hunting zone bordering Hwange National Park, the densities of buffalo, giraffe, kudu and zebra were similar to those of the national park between 1995 and 2010. However, if one looks at Zambia, the majority of game management areas have far fewer numbers of wildlife compared to their neighboring national parks. This would make safaris difficult unless they were geared towards specific species, rare birds or landscape and culture.
The Zimanga Private Game Reserve in South Africa has an intriguing idea of creating an artificial wetland and state-of-the-art bird hide which would allow photographers an eye-level opportunity to photograph animals. If such initiatives were attempted in Botswana, Zimbabwe and Tanzania, and community members were integrated into these ventures, they could become profitable. However, at this stage, there is no legal framework linking community benefits and photographic tourism in national parks. Is it not time to make it easier to pick up a camera than a rifle?

Can Hunting  Save Animals?

It has been a tough seven years in Barbourfields, a suburb of Bulawayo in Matabeleland North in Zimbabwe, where drought has driven people within an inch of their lives. Here children wake up to a spoonful of sugar and hot water.
This is life at the sharp end of the global food shortage and it is hungry and painful. Their only comfort is that it was even worse seven years ago.
“There was no food at all. Most food products were imported from Botswana and South Africa. We didn’t even have corn. When I saw a queue, I would just join, even though I didn’t know what it was for. It was the norm. There were queues everywhere,” says Xoli Dube.
In tough economic times, Zimbabweans queued for everything from food to fuel.
“It was like an everyday job for us. I remember a day I even fainted while queuing. I remember my neighbors used to eat pap with water and sugar. Many people couldn’t even afford to buy beans.”
Most of what the people had farmed was destroyed by the scorching sun in one of the worst droughts in history, in an economy that was already struggling.
Seven year later, many parts of Africa face the same fate. Drought cuts yields making farming a risky business.
According to Grain SA agricultural economist, Wandile Sihlobo, the drought in South Africa has led to a 27% decrease in a summer crops production basket, from 16.5 million tons in 2014 to 11.9 million tons in 2015. Crops that are staple food for most Africans, such as maize, decreased by 30%, from 14.3 million tons in 2014 to 9.9 million tons in 2015.
It means Africa spends at least $25 billion on food imports every year.
In South Africa, the 2015/16 total maize imports in November stood at 536,687 tons, which is 70% of the grain the country used. South Africa’s forecasted imports for this season is 770,000 tons. South Africa contributes a minimum of 630,000 tons annually to the Southern African region.
Hunger knows no friend but a provider. Monsanto, a sustainable agriculture company that delivers products to support farmers, wants to be that provider.
Located in Benoni, a mining town east of Johannesburg, in South Africa, Monsanto says it has created a product to mitigate the effects of drought – Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA); genetically modified (GM) drought-tolerant and insect pest-protected maize varieties. Maize is the staple for 300 million Africans.
“Drought is a very complex issue and there’s no single solution to address it,” says Mark Edge, Director of Water Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) Partnerships at Monsanto.
For nine years, WEMA has been testing and developing conventional and GM maize hybrids in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa. It aims to boost productivity by 20 to 30%, in a project worth $85 million.
“Our first introduction of conventional white maize hybrids, which is sold under the brand name DroughtTEGO, started in 2013 in Kenya and has shown promising harvest results… To date, we have more than 40 unique conventional hybrids approved for commercial release across the five countries,” says Edge.
On its website, Monsanto shares a story of Bertha Otor, a resourceful Kenyan farmer who was one of the first to plant DroughtTEGO.
A year later, Otor says she is continuing to see positive results and has increased the area with maize on her farm. She began farming in 1994.
“There was no rain, there was nothing to eat and I was having a baby. I decided to work with my hands and not wait for my husband to bring food for us. The weather always keeps changing. If you plant your maize and the rains are not there, [crops] will get spoiled and you lose everything,” she says.
Otor says her yields have increased and the maize is bigger since she began using the WEMA seeds.
However, the Director at the African Centre for Biodiversity, Mariam Mayet, says the safety of the drought tolerant gene has not yet been proven.
The safety of genetically modified organisms (GMO) has been an issue of controversy over the years. GM developers and some scientists claim there is a scientific consensus on GMO safety. Mayet says this is due to the lack of enough scientific evidence published to date, which prevents conclusive claims on safety, or of lack of safety, of GMOs.
“They are scale-neutral and can benefit smallholder farmers as much or more than commercial farmers. They are only one of many valuable technologies and tools in agriculture,” Edge replies.
Mayet argues there have been negative consequences for human health and environment in many communities due to use of chemicals in agriculture.
She says Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) maize and cotton have been supplied to smallholder farmers through government-sponsored interventions for free, or at subsidized rates, and farmers have not been able to experience the real costs of the seed.
“Bt maize is currently sold at about double the price of popular non-GM hybrids and five times that of the price of open pollinated varieties,” she says.
Some studies, however, argue that even though Bt maize is expensive, farmers will benefit over a period of years compared to hybrid conventional maize.
“But the resistance of the stem borer has been revealed to be highly variable between seasons, and thus during years and at sites that experience low insect pressure, the economic benefit of planting Bt maize can be negative. It will be hard for smallholder farmers who don’t have resources to counter the impact of these losses in years if the cost of Bt maize seed fails to pay off,” says Mayet.
She says GM crops also have health concerns.
“GM crops heavily use agro-chemicals such as glyphosate, most commonly known as Roundup. This year, the International Agency for Research into Cancer (IARC), which falls under the World Health Organisation (WHO), has classified glyphosate as a ‘probable human carcinogen’.”
Proponents of GMOs claim that the use of the GM seeds reduces the need for pesticides. However, according to Mayet, case studies show that the use of pesticides and herbicides has increased with use of GM seeds, especially in cases where there is pest and weed resistance.
“This has a huge effect on biodiversity with run-off chemicals from agricultural farms which contaminate water sources,” she says.
Her solution to end world hunger?
“Focus on agroecology by government should be key to ensure that smallholder farmers are at the centre of food production and promote food sovereignty,” she says.
Will improved yields and greater paydays come with GM technology or traditional seeds? The choice is yours.

The Dry End Of The Stick

Farming is anyone’s game, even if you can’t see.
Forty-five-year-old Nobuhle Mthembu had a severe migraine, aged 10, that cost her her sight.
“I woke up one morning and I just couldn’t see. My eyes were closed. My grandmother washed them with water and my eyelids opened but I have never been able to see since then,” she says.
The business of food has become her solace and living.
In an orange overall, on this cloudy winter’s day in the coastal KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, she navigates around the plot with her walking stick. Mthembu can do everything those with sight can, if not more.
“I use my sense of touch to do my work and run this business. Planting is easy and I can do it the same way a person with eyes can, the difficult part is weeding after planting has been done. Because I can’t see, I can’t use tools because I might take out the good too. So I have to use my hands. I touch around the plants and I can feel the difference between weeds and crops and I pull out the weeds.”
Water is pumped into tanks and buckets from a stream, running along the bottom of the plot, to irrigate the crops. Shipping containers are used to store produce.
“Even if we are disabled, there are things we are capable of doing.”
Mthembu has memory as her guide. She spent her childhood watching her grandmother farm.
“I enjoyed being in the fields with my grandmother. I used to cry to help at all times until they allowed me to. I told myself, blind or not, I will farm,” she says.
Because of her zeal, her grandmother gave her a field, the size of half a football pitch, to plant.
“In October, on my birthday month, my grandmother said I should plant peanuts on my section. I was very happy. The peanuts I planted grew and were amazingly big and I noticed that this is my gift, and I could make money from it. ”
“Farming is my thing. I grew up in a family that made its money and food through farming. My grandmother liked farming and I was always with her. Even after she died, I continued with the work,” she says.
Following her dream to make money, in 1989 she started a vegetable garden with her sister, Bukani Latha, who is paralyzed on one side.
“We realized that, as a disabled person, depending on the government doesn’t help because the disabled social grants are not enough and we need to contribute to the economy,” says Mthembu.
She gathered disabled people for a meeting to encourage them into the field. It was a long journey of 10 years.
In 2009, she gained permission from the local council to farm a plot of land at Inchanga, near Cato Ridge in KwaZulu-Natal. She finally founded the 19-member Bukani Sibonelo Disabled Women’s Co-operative. The council helped with seeds.
“This team gives me hope.  Every day, we make a difference in our lives and in those of our families, and most importantly we add value in the country by promoting food security through the items we sell,” says Mthembu.
The team grows spinach, cabbage, carrots, potatoes, beetroot and mushrooms. These are sold nearby, given to the needy and supplied to clinics.
Mthembu has won four awards and says they encourage her to work harder.
“I want my work to inspire other disabled people to get involved in agriculture and do the best they can instead of begging on the street.”
Profits and prizemoney are ploughed back.
“We now want to expand our work by supplying major retailers which could bring in good money for us. People may laugh or look down on disabled people but when you offer something valuable, the way they look at you is different,” she says.
Mthembu wants to read braille, there is no doubt she will. She has already proved where there is a will, there is fertile field and a way.

‘Blind Or Not,  I Will Farm’

One day, the world may go to war over rice. Food is the new oil.
About 795 million of the world’s people, 200 million of them children, are hungry. Most of them are in Africa and Asia. It will cost $267 million per year to end world hunger by 2030. That is $160 annually for each person, according to the United Nations.
The business of food could be the business of the future. Most of the world is putting bricks and concrete over its fields and importing food. This could mean good business for entrepreneurs who harness the fertile red soil of Africa.
FORBES AFRICA dedicates this issue to food and the investment case.
Over 60% of the world’s arable land is in Africa, 65% of Africans work in the fields and 35% of South Africa’s gross domestic product (GDP) comes from agriculture and food, according to Old Mutual Investment Group’s Director of Strategic Projects, Craig Chambers.
At least $25 billion in food imports are coming into Africa; and food is wasted on the continent.
According to Duncan Vink, Joint Managing Director of UFF Agri Asset Management, 39 million hectares of agricultural land in Africa is physically suitable for irrigation but only 7% of this farmable land is currently irrigated, and in sub-Saharan Africa that figure is only 3.7%.
“There is no doubt that the opportunity within African agriculture is really vast, we have a decent pipeline of anything between $200 and $400 million in opportunities in Africa,” says Chambers.
For years, farming was going out of fashion but entrepreneurs are rediscovering it. Necessity may prove the mother of food production ripe for investment.

Food The New Oil

It’s 10AM and the scorching summer sun burns over the lush suburb of Rosebank in Johannesburg. On this morning, under the shade of a tree, in the quiet backyard of a law firm office, is Africa’s top boxing promoter Rodney Berman, the guiding spirit of Golden Gloves Promotions. In a light blue short-sleeve shirt and cut-off jeans, Berman meets an equally casual boxing trainer Colin Nathan. Almost two years ago, a suited Berman met Prince Albert II at the Palace of Monaco, a meeting a world away from this tree in Rosebank, but at the heart of his business fortunes. On that day, an African entrepreneur met a prince with an idea of making money out of putting Monte Carlo back on the boxing map.
“It will take time, but we will build Monaco as one of the boxing Meccas in Europe,” says Berman.
The two men, under the tree in Rosebank, finalized the undercard fight for the next Monte Carlo bout between Hekkie Budler, the South African WBA and IBO minimum weight champion, and Jesus Silvestre, a Mexican with a famous first name and a strong jab. Budler defended his titles against Xiong Zhao Zhong in Monte Carlo in October.
The drawcard for February 21 in Monte Carlo, with a $3-million purse, is undefeated Russian Gennady Golovkin against Martin Murray, an English middleweight.
“It will break all the previous records, notwithstanding the Marvin Hagler and Norberto Rufino Cabrera fight in 1979. Television audiences all around the world will have it. It’s the fruition of what we have been working towards for more than 30 years, in a nutshell. I was very fortunate that I was into Golovkin, who in my opinion is the most exciting fighter in the world today, and even Mayweather respectfully ducks him. I understand Mayweather wishes to beat the Rocky Marciano 49/0 record. He is entitled to it, he has earned his greatness,” says Berman.
It’s a fight that sprang from an African connection with Monte Carlo – Princess Charlene, the wife of Prince Albert II. The former Olympic swimmer was born in Zimbabwe and bred in Benoni, a suburb east of Johannesburg. Her father, Michael Kenneth Wittstock, a former salesman in Johannesburg, had a chance conversation about boxing in Monte Carlo with the South African Emperor’s Palace Casino chief executive. He recommended Golden Gloves to Wittstock and his royal in-laws.
“The reality is I am very proud of the fact that I am from South Africa, the backburner of boxing in the world. Without the financial muscle and without the talent my opposition has, we are still regarded as one of the leading promotion companies in the world, which is a big endorsement. One thing Monaco has done for me was to level the playing field to put on Murray and Golovkin, where on the South African basis, you talking R4 million ($350,000) just for one fighter. HBO television will pay $10 million for the fight; I can’t reasonably expect to get that amount of money. The casino will pay $5 million and the crowd will pay $2,000 for a ringside seat, so despite all that, for over 30 years we have managed to build this reputation,” says Berman.
Berman has come a long way since his first venture into the fight game. That was with Charlie Weir, known as the Silver Assassin because of a streak of white hair, and Bushy Bester. It all began amid blood and fury at Wembley Ice Rink in Johannesburg on August 29, 1977. Weir, who died of cancer at the age of 35, knocked out Bester in the first of six rounds to become Golden Gloves’ first middleweight champion. The company produced more than 50 world champions, most South Africans. Among them: Vuyani Bungu; Welcome Ncita; Brian Mitchell and Budler. It took Golden Gloves 12 years to breed a world champion. Ncita won the world super bantamweight title in Israel against Fabrice Benichou in 1990.
Berman’s 37-year career in boxing has rarely been dull. He staged one of the greatest upsets in the history of heavyweight boxing at Brakpan, a grimy mining town east of Johannesburg, in 2001. The swaggering British millionaire heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis lost to underdog Hasim Rahman in the fifth round. The fight, which Lewis dedicated to Muhammad Ali, was described as the greatest upset since Gene Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey in 1926.
Speaking of Ali, another Berman adventure was the great man’s daughter’s fight in 2006. The historic first female professional bout in the continent between Laila Ali and Gwendolyn O’Neil, of Guyana, was cancelled at the last minute when a Cape Town promoter couldn’t find the money. Ali’s fee alone was $522,000. She won Berman’s rematch at Emperor’s Palace, in Kempton Park, Johannesburg, on February 3, 2007. Apparently, it was Ali’s wish that his daughter fight in Africa, as he fought in Kinshasa in 1974, the famous Rumble in the Jungle with George Foremen.
Many people saw the historic fight of Laila as a breakthrough for female boxing in Africa. Berman disagrees.
“In my opinion women should not be boxing. To me it’s not a sport for women,” Berman says.
The 72-year-old father of two believes casinos are the future.
“Monte Carlo Casino is the most magnificent casino I’ve ever seen. Boxing revolves around casinos. The Mayweathers, the Pacquiaos, the Klitschkos the Mitchells and even the Baby Jakes, they could have never achieved what they had achieved without pay television and casinos. The national televisions around the world cannot afford to pay what these boxers command and what they are entitled to,” he says.
Peter Leopeng, a veteran boxing analyst in South Africa, agrees.
“In America, Madison Square Garden was the Mecca of boxing before MGM Grand in Las Vegas took over. Mayweather fought most of his fights in MGM; Las Vegas is known worldwide as the capital of gambling. Casinos pay promoters to host their fights; it’s not about boxing but the event. These events attract punters and gamblers to the casinos and that means more money to them,” says Leopeng.
Golden Gloves has more than 300 international fights under its belt, but Berman himself has never thrown a punch. He is a football fanatic and played at the University of Witwatersrand in the 1960s. Berman tells FORBES AFRICA he was a good goalkeeper and if were not for his lack of height he would have turned professional. During the political turbulence in the country in 1993, Berman staged a friendly between Orlando Pirates and Italian side AC Milan, at Ellis Park, in Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela, who was to become president the following year, attended the 3-2 win by the Italians along with 60,000 fans.
Berman was close to Mandela and has fond memories. During Laila Ali’s fight, Berman welcomed Mandela, ready to usher him to his ringside seat.
“As he was getting out of his car he shouted: ‘Rodney, Rodney, you may not remember me, its Mandela here, Nelson Mandela.’ That’s the kind of man he was. He just made everybody feel comfortable.”
Though the future appears bright for Golden Gloves, Berman says he’s concerned about the dimming talent of boxers and administration in his country. There’s no point of taking boxers to fight for international titles when they are not up to it, he laments.
“It’s not about the greatness of the promoter but it’s the greatness of the boxer. You can be the best promoter but if the level of boxers is lowering, you can’t do anything. Africa is not good at producing heavyweights. Nigeria is trying but it’s not good enough. It is a sad indictment,” says Berman.
Even so Berman – the ring entrepreneur – is ready to go another round. Monte Carlo or bust!

The African,  The Prince And  The $10-Million Fight

The FORBES AFRICA Person of the Year for 1324 could very well have been a certain flamboyantly wealthy King of Mali, says Martin Meredith, the celebrated British historian of Africa.
“The richest man, that the world has ever seen, was Mansa Musa. [He] makes a Hajj to Mecca, arrives in Cairo and literally hands out gold bars to the waiters. He wrecks the money market for ten years or more&#8230; that story of his arrival eventually finds its way to Europe&#8230; the first European map, the Catalan map of 1376, has a portrait of [him] with a caption that says, ‘this is the richest man that the world has ever known.’”
<div id="attachment_3417" style="width: 226px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3417" class="size-medium wp-image-3417" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Martin-Meredith-216x300.jpg" alt="" width="216" height="300" />Martin Meredith</div>
His gold-dishing arrival in Cairo inspired the first Spanish expedition to the continent, hunting Musa’s gold. The expedition set out for West Africa, searching for the fabled ‘River of Gold’, but the crew got lost and all were presumed dead.
At his death, Musa was worth around $400 billion, which make’s Bill Gate’s $81.8 billion look paltry.
As his empire fell, so did Africa.
“I discovered the extraordinary parallel themes of African history, compared to what is going on now. It has always been that Africa has been this enormously wealthy continent and yet it is the poorest continent. There’s a paradox about it,” says Meredith, who examines this 5,000-year paradox in his latest release, The Fortunes of Africa.
Meredith has had two careers in Africa, far from gold bars; first as a journalist, then as a historian. After fulfilling his boyhood dream of navigating the Nile, when 21, he moved to Lusaka and became a journalist.
“The first president I ever interviewed was Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, at the age of 22. He was a sort of giant intellect. We were sitting out in the State Palace in Dar es Salaam, looking out across the sea and there was Nyerere, hoping for real intellectual debate. Instead, he was faced with a green, inexperienced reporter who wasn’t giving him any argument!”
After 15 years reporting on the continent, he left to become a research fellow at Oxford University which spawned a shelf of books.
“I am essentially a story-teller, which is what journalists are, but the stories I tell have a very large dimension,” he says.
His first book, 1979’s The Past is Another Country, was a story of a soon-to-be independent Zimbabwe. Since then, he has written on everything; from elephants to Nelson Mandela. His most successful was The State of Africa, a contemporary history.
His latest title came after a year’s research. He calls it a standard history of Africa, which picks apart the economic roots of conflict and poverty on the continent, drawing on years as a foreign correspondent.
“This extraordinary World Bank figure [says that] 40% of Africa’s private wealth [is] held outside Africa which [contrasts] with the Asian experience. They have levels of corruption which are pretty high too but what happens there is that wealth is ploughed back into businesses, they might be mafia-type organizations, but they build factories and industries so the money is ploughed back.”
On the other side of the gold coin, Africa has a penchant for vanity projects like the Pyramids of Giza right to Mobutu Sese Seko’s ruined Gbadolite Palace, which had a private concord airstrip so he could fly off shopping.
“The money in Africa is taken out by the ruling elite and the growing middle class, so it’s safe and secure and they can enjoy buying properties in Europe. London is awash with Nigerian millionaires! Corruption happens everywhere, you expect a certain level of it. Where the focus of ambition lies in making as much money as possible, regardless of the circumstances, that is when it becomes dangerous. It affects so many African countries.”
The greed-inspired accidents of history are at the root of Africa’s woes. The Spanish expedition, inspired by Mansa Musa’s riches, led to centuries of extraction of African wealth for foreign gain. Hence, the birth of the infamous resource ‘curse’.
If in the last 5,000 years of this continent, the past has become our country, then, as the old adage goes, those who do not learn, or remember, their history are condemned to repeat it.
Meredith is certain to write it.

Person Of The Year For 1324

It was 6,900 kilometers from home in Cape Town in sweltering, overwhelming, heat of the inky black jungle. Architect and bird watcher, Vernon Head, stood with a spotlight in hand, on a remote jungle mountainside in Ethiopia’s Great Rift Valley looking for something few on earth had seen before.
“It’s a strange place at night… You know that not many people have been there, especially at night. Everything that comes into the spotlight, you are never sure it is something new,” he says.
It wasn’t easy in the darkness; the fluorescent light attracted a host of flying creatures. Bats flew in the air, insects stuck in Head’s teeth and stinging flying ants crawled up his legs. This was the hunt for one of Africa’s most elusive animals. Head and his team, carrying nets, looked over their shoulders as they risked gun-wielding villagers, who resented their intrusion. They scoured every bush. This was the hunt for the world’s rarest bird, the Nechisar Nightjar.
The hunt began with a phone call from England. Over the crackling telephone line, Head, who was in Cape Town, heard the story about a roadside relic in a paper bag; a muddy bird’s wing that was found by Cambridge-based scientists on safari in 1990.
“On that expedition, three hundred and fifteen species of birds were seen; sixty one species of mammal and sixty nine species of butterfly were identified; twenty species of dragonflies and damselflies; seventeen reptile species were recorded; three frog species were filed; plants were listed. And the wing of a road-killed bird was packed into a brown paper bag,” says Head.
The wing sent the scientific world aflutter.
“Normally to describe a bird species you need the actual bird, which means you need to have seen it. In this case they just had a wing squashed in the mud next to this smugglers track on a plain of the African rift valley in southern Ethiopia. It became known as the only bird species ever described to science that no one had ever seen,” he says.
For 20 years, experts have tried in vain to catch a glimpse of the nightjar. The wing sat gathering dust in the drawers of the British Natural History Museum in Tring, England. Ian Sinclair, a bird watcher, was on the phone to Cape Town and wanted Head’s help.
“In the field guides that list the birds of Africa, when you go to the nightjar section and get to the part where is says Nechisar Nightjar, you just see a drawing of a wing. Then you look at the map next to the wing [and] there is a little ‘x’ with a question mark. It’s quite exciting; you want to see it… [Sinclair] said to me ‘why we don’t give this a go?’”
It was an $18,000-voyage of discovery that Head, Sinclair and two other bird enthusiasts wouldn’t pass up. Their first port of call was protection; bird watching is strangely fraught with danger.
“In that part of southern Ethiopia, there are still a number of tribes that are remote and their cultures are remote communities detached from the modern world. They still traditionally fight over grazing land. These fights over grazing land, where in the past they used traditional weapons, they are now using AK-47s. It’s never a good idea if you are a bird watcher and you are driving through a valley and on either side are a bunch of people with AK-47s that have a disagreement with each other. You have to have some security. Preferably people from one of the tribes who understand the nuances,” says Head.
Many bird watchers have laid down their lives spotting birds. A tiger killed David Hunt in the Jim Corbett National Park in India; Phoebe Snetsinger survived being raped in New Guinea before dying in a road accident in Madagascar; and Ted Parker died in an air crash on route to Ecuador.
“[Bird watching] is a big ecotourism industry. It’s massive. Bird watching in America makes more money than golf; it’s a $60-billion business. There still are these weird things out there. Nature is quite resilient in our modern day. There are secrets out there in nature waiting to be unravelled,” says Head.
“When I was six or seven, on my grandfather’s farm, I learned to go bird watching on the wild open plains of Northcliff, before it became a city. It’s strange when you drive through it today and you used to run around here and see Burchell’s coucal and aardvark. There was even rumored to be a Leopard in the Roodepoort hills. That’s only some 40 years ago,” says Head.
A world away, in the heat under the stars in southern Ethiopia, Head’s spotlight falls on a very large thorny bush and catches a pair of a golden copper-red reflection: eyes.
“We knew what to look for. We knew it was going to be a nightjar. I mean we’d seen the wing. The bird we saw, funnily enough, was a male, but the wing itself was from a female. We were able to deduce this because of the white in the wing, it was slightly creamier. Male nightjars generally have bigger white patches. And it had this huge white patch in its wing. It made it unlike it was any other nightjar in Africa. There was no doubt.”
After all the 6,500 kilometers, mean insects and the heat, the men couldn’t catch it. The nightjar flew away into the night. Head and his fellow bird watchers continued to record the sighting, a precious notch in the bird watching community. Just another day in the strange and dangerous world of bird watching.

Guns, Bats And Biting Insects In The Steamy Darkness

There’s no better place to take a photograph of Rosette Chantal Rugamba than on the terrace of the landmark Hotel des Mille Collines by Kempinski in Kigali. It’s easy getting permission for this from the hotel’s management. Rugamba is well-known here and a regular.
The hotel affords a 360-degree view of the city and its splendorous rolling hills. Rugamba, in an orange suit and matching necklace, views the twinkling lights of Kigali and takes a deep breath of the crisp night air. She has had much to do with this vision of the city.
Twelve years ago, she was appointed Rwanda’s tourism head by the country’s president, Paul Kagame, and tasked with turning around the country’s tourism infrastructure.
She had never lived in Rwanda before that. Her parents had fled the country to Uganda in 1959 and she grew up as a refugee with her seven siblings. Her parents never let them forget they were Rwandan first. The children were encouraged to learn French and culturally attuned to their country’s traditions. Be it books, music or dance, their home reverberated with Rwandan nuances, as the family lived on hope they would one day return home.
Her father was a brewer and her mother a teacher, but their humble home was always open to fellow Rwandans.
“There was always plenty of food,” recalls Rugamba. “And if you had to roll out a hundred mattresses, so be it.”
As her parents’ first-born, there was pressure on her to perform – and excel. She studied political science at university in Uganda. She married Henry, an Ugandan, and thereafter moved to London. Her husband worked for the British telecom industry, while she started her career with Harrods as a customer services manager. Today, she lauds herself for having been among the team that launched the first Harrods store at Terminal 3 in Heathrow airport. Yet another milestone: she was “among the 100 people” who started Eurostar.
“I am the sort of person who always wants to start things,” says Rugamba.
Although she was settling well in Britain, in her heart, she recalled the songs of Rwanda, the songs on its flowing rivers and rolling hills.
In 1984, she decided to ‘risk a trip’ to Rwanda, which was still in the throes of the liberation struggle.
“I wanted to experience the country and so toured it for the first time. I was satisfied but not sure if I would ever see it again.”
In 1996, Rugamba joined British Airways as its sales and marketing manager for East Africa, and she subsequently moved to Uganda. Rwanda’s horrific 1994 genocide was still fresh on her mind.
“We used to do a lot of fundraising for the people and the soldiers. My mom’s family was completely wiped out,” says Rugamba.
In 2002, she received a call from Kagame, asking her to return to her homeland. At the time, things looked positive for Rwanda.
“I asked myself ‘what value can I add?’. I am eternally grateful to the President that he unleashed the potential I never knew I had.”
Kagame wanted her to raise Rwanda’s profile through tourism and turn it into an engine for economic change in the country.
“The brief I got from him was ‘make sure every tourism dollar is spent in the country,’” says Rugamba.
When she took over as the Director General of Tourism and National Parks in January 2003, she was six months pregnant and a newcomer in her own homeland.
“The tasks in front of me were huge. I was coming back to a country I had never lived in and tasked with tourism in a country that had never known it. I felt like a tourist in my own country,” she says.
She embarked on the job with passion.
“The country was embedded in me. I was so excited that for the first time I was given a Rwandan passport, the one given to government officials but one that came with responsibility. It actually meant I was now a part of the transformation of the country.”
It also came with personal sacrifice – for a while. She came to Rwanda leaving her family behind in Uganda.
“My husband said ‘you go, we will be fine, you are getting a chance to serve your country, we can manage’. Women can’t do it without the support of men,” says Rugamba.
The first thing she did was get on the radio every Sunday at 3PM, talking about the country’s tourism potential and the role Rwandans would play.
“Tourism is multi-faceted and for it to succeed, the masses needed to be involved. We had to get the coffee, tea and ICT sectors as well to support it.”
Her mandate was to grow the tourism numbers, build restaurants and hotels, and offer tourists local handicrafts and every reason to visit Rwanda.
“Rwandans are very patriotic and they linked [tourism] to the visionary leader they loved so much. Until then, everyone only knew Rwanda for the 2Gs: the genocide and gorillas. It was time to showcase whatever else Rwanda had to offer,” says Rugamba.
Tasked with reinvigorating tourism in the ‘Land of the Thousand Hills’, for the next seven years, she reoriented the sector putting in place new policies and strategic master plans. She launched the country internationally with a new pitch: ‘Rwanda – the new dawn of Africa’.
“I was so determined to sell the vision. I went to the [East Africa] region, gathered the tour operators and brought them here. The target was high-end eco-tourism.”
Eugene Rutagarama, who as the Country Director of IGCP (International Gorilla Conservation Programme) worked closely with Rugamba for eight years, extols her ability to tackle problems and take a stand on tough issues.
“Rosette Rugamba is an energetic person, an inspiring leader to her peers and to any person who happens to know her well. I was always impressed by her innovative approach to complex situations and her strong desire to reach a high level of accomplishment,” he recalls.
Her efforts paid off.
By the time Rugamba stepped down in 2010, tourism had become Rwanda’s top foreign-exchange earner. The tourism master plan for Rwanda’s Vision 2020 had been laid out, and the country was a stand-alone destination in the East African bloc.
In 2003, when she took on the job, tourist numbers in Rwanda were a mere 13,000. When she left in 2010, that figure had risen to 790,000.
In 2013, Rwanda had more than 1.1 million visitors and tourism generated $293.6 million. The number of hotel rooms in the country has risen to 8,417. It was 650 when Rugamba started. To accommodate the demand, the current airport has recently been expanded and a new airport is being built in Bugasera.
It was time for Rugamba to find a new challenge.
“I saw what tourism could do for Rwanda. I wanted to do the same for Africa. My vision is to go everywhere,”
she says.
She chose to turn entrepreneur, starting Songa Africa, a luxury tour company focusing on sustainable tourism.
“There was room for an indigenous luxury tour company headed by a woman. I had the passion, local knowledge and appreciation of the luxury clientele. I started with an old laptop and a contact book, but with a vision.”
In March, her company completes five years. She admits to having international celebrities, presidents, film stars and media moguls as clients. She has been consistently recognized as one of East Africa’s leading tourism and conservation strategists.
“What happened to me is magical,” she says.
Rugamba’s company is launching its first custom-built luxury eco-lodge in March and will be rolling out three five-star lodges to the tune of $5.5 million. Her company is also getting into conference tourism in line with Rwanda’s strategy to position itself as a business destination.
All this has meant extensive travel for Rugamba.
“Oh my goodness, I have hardly been in the country these last three months,” she says. But wherever she goes, all roads lead her back home to Rwanda.

Harrods, Heathrow,  Home

He may be a bit slower these days, but the ball still sticks to his feet as if it were on a string. Forty years on, Paradise Moeketsi dribbles like the maestro who broke the law to teach him. His name was Sir Stanley Matthews – the black man with a white face who thought the game could overcome all.
On this same Soweto street, then a patch of field, Matthews changed Moeketsi’s life.
<div id="attachment_3390" style="width: 217px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3390" class="size-medium wp-image-3390" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/2669097-207x300.jpg" alt="" width="207" height="300" />Stanley Matthews outside-right for England and Blackpool FC, in action during a match for Blackpool. (Photo by Frank Harrison/Getty Images)</div>
“I was highly influenced by this man. He used to play without any formation. A lot of people say Mandela is the greatest, I disagree; it was him. He was a gentleman; he was never given a yellow card or a red card! He’s phenomenal, out of this world,” says Moeketsi.
Moeketsi was one of Stan’s Men, the team Matthews fostered in Soweto. His teacher was the David Beckham of his time who broke the law on segregation in sport to coach in the township.
Now a football coach in his own right, Moeketsi practises everything that Matthews preached. In his 20 years, the Soweto coach has trained and mentored young players who made it to the South African national team, Bafana Bafana.
“I met [Matthews] when I was very young. I was around 11 and now I’m 51. It was the first time, personally, that I met a white man,” he says.
Matthews’ trained 60 young players under the eye of apartheid police in what was as much about courage as it was about sport.
“It was unsafe, a white man in Soweto; in those days it was difficult. I thought [that] white people were not good, that they were bad people, but I changed&#8230;”
For many of Stan’s Men he was the first white man they had ever seen, if not, he was certainly the first who had been kind to them.
Matthews’ first trip to Soweto was in 1955. Completing his pre-season training with his young wards, he returned to England just as his team, Blackpool, was ready to do battle with Arsenal at Highbury.
According to Matthews’ memoir, The Way It Was, his manager, Joe Smith, was anxiously waiting for him in the team’s hotel lobby.
“Where the bloody hell have you been?” he says.
“South Africa, I rang and told you but you never listen,” replies Matthews.
“When did you get back?”
“Last night.”
“Are you match fit?”
“Yes.”
That day, Matthews, who had kicked his last ball in Soweto, played what is considered one of his best games for Blackpool securing a 3-1 victory. His boots may have lived in England but his heart was in Africa.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3392" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/IMG_2612-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
“I had some extraordinary experiences during my time in Africa. In Ghana in 1956, I was crowned King of Soccer&#8230; The initiation was a real crowning as befits a king and left me not a trifle embarrassed. A witch doctor danced around me then spat on a football [that] I had at my feet. I was then seated upon a throne, a crown placed on my head, and my clothes removed and replaced by traditional Ghanaian robes&#8230;”
Matthews travelled through the continent; from Ghana to Zimbabwe but most of his time was spent in Soweto coaching Stan’s Men. He moved to South Africa briefly with his wife, Mila, in the 1970s.
“It was 1975 and apartheid was, of course, still very much in force&#8230; I never had any luck with it and for years had happily stayed in Soweto on my visits there to coach. I simply ignored it and for the most part, I am relieved to say, those misguided people who inflicted it upon that beautiful country chose to ignore the fact that I flouted its rules,” he says in his book
According to Matthews, Stan’s Men were a promising bunch of dreamers who were funded by the Sunday Times newspaper in Johannesburg.
“The boys told me that their dream was to go to Brazil and play football there, though they knew this would never happen.”
Moeketsi and his fellow teammates had a point. It was the height of apartheid, an exit permit for a black football team would have been nigh impossible. Then there was the issue of money, none of their families could afford a passage to Brazil. They believed it was mere fantasy.
Matthews decided to make the trip happen, flouting apartheid to the extreme. He used his reputation and connections to secure money from a Coca-Cola executive and the Sunday Times. A Brazilian airline offered 16 free tickets to Rio de Janeiro.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-3393" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Marie-photo-300x196.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="196" />
Then, Matthews and his men headed for the airport under the threat of arrest.
“I figured that if we turned up at the airport for our flight, the authorities would not prevent us from leaving the country because it would cause a major incident,” writes Matthews.
He was right. They let him go, with the first all-black football team to tour outside of South Africa. The authorities were content to send two secret agents to tail them.
Moeketsi, like many of the Soweto players, couldn’t make the trip.
“My grandfather was worried that I wouldn’t come back so I didn’t go. It was difficult; a once-in-a-lifetime trip and our parents said ‘No!’”
On the flight there, Gilbert Moiola, the 18-year-old team captain, turned to Matthews and shook his hand.
“Stanley, you are a black man with a white face,” he said to his coach, a title coined during the crowning in Accra.
The team arrived to a hero’s welcome and a grand reception. Along with meeting Pélé, they also trained with Brazilian coaches including Zico. Matthews even had tea with the Great Train Robber, Ronnie Biggs, at his Rio apartment, who told him that he was a fan of Charlton Athletic.
The legacy of that remarkable trip, even for Moeketsi who did not go, is strong in Soweto.
“It took so long to forget about him. Even today, he’s still alive in Soweto. His spirit is still with us,” he says.
Matthews died in 2000, just months after he made his last trip to Soweto, before Moeketsi had a chance to say goodbye.
“I asked him to take me to England, but unfortunately he passed away.”
In 2010, the year the football World Cup came to South Africa, Moeketsi finally made the trip to Stoke City, the club where Matthews made his name in the town where he was born. It had been almost four decades since he first saw Matthews gliding across the rough Soweto pitch.
“The important part of it is me being able to fulfil my dream, to lay the wreath on Sir Stan’s grave to say thank you so much… I’d [wanted] to come and thank him and say rest in peace,” he told journalists at the stadium where Matthews’ remains are buried.
Matthews’ daughter, Jean Gough, stood beside him and was clearly touched.
“It’s so wonderful that he’s come all this way just to do this. It’s really emotional for me,” she says as they both battle tears.
On the note attached to the wreath was the farewell that Moeketsi couldn’t deliver in person.
“Sir Matthews, thank you so much for what you did in our country&#8230; I will never forget you.”

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