The early twentieth-century South African educationist and writer, Davidson Don Tengo Jabavu, was no stranger to irony. Responding to news of the outbreak of the First World War, he commented wryly in September, 1914 that Africans had been ‘taken by surprise that the European nations who led in education and Christianity should find no other means than accumulated destructive weapons to settle their diplomatic differences’.
Like many others at that chilling moment, this pacifist viewed the war as a distant European catastrophe. As we reach the centenary of the cataclysmic Great War of 1914-1918, images of the Western Front and of the conflict as a bloody European affair continue to dominate popular historical memory, and not solely in Western countries.
Further back in time, significant figures grasped that it was a dramatic global struggle, far-reaching in its destructive and transforming impact on Europe’s enormous imperial territories overseas and their hundreds of millions of colonial inhabitants. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was just one of those observers. With Britain the major colonial power in Africa, for Churchill it followed that British Africa would be at war with Germany, just as night followed day. Italian leader Benito Mussolini observed that every continent was engulfed by the same crisis and not a single part of the world had been able to avoid being shaken by what he called the cyclone of 1914 to 1918.
In that sense, the war experiences of imperial Britain, imperial France and imperial Germany were as much about the fortunes of Africa as about the fate of men in the trenches of Europe. Aside from anything else, even those soldiers were by no means all European. In all, the French recruited almost 400,000 West African and North African colonial troops to fight German invaders. Many others who were pulled into Europe kept their heads down, serving the war effort as military laborers. Even crops exported from its African territories helped keep France on its feet. Africans thus became an inseparable part of the war.
Another perspective points us towards Africa itself. After all, it was there that the war actually started. The very first shots were fired by West African infantrymen of Britain’s Gold Coast Regiment early in August, 1914 when British and French colonial forces invaded Germany’s colonies of Togoland and Kamerun. That extinguished the delusions of some local colonial administrators that Africa might have been left to remain neutral. What they feared was the unsettling effect of European hostilities on the security of white rule.
Africa was also where the war finally ended. It was still simmering on the continent after it had ended in Europe. In the week following Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, East African askari &#8211; guerrilla fighters under German command &#8211; picked off a British motorcyclist in Northern Rhodesia. Among his scattered papers was a notice that the war had ended. It came as a rude surprise to the German commander, General Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck. Now obliged to surrender, he did so grudgingly, moaning that he was only giving up because his country had been defeated in Europe.
Some of the war’s quirkier stories were as good as any fiction, if not better. In the Union of South Africa’s conquest of German South West Africa in 1915, they included General Louis Botha’s decision to swop his horse for a motorcar for his triumphal entry into the enemy capital of Windhoek. With an eye on awaiting war correspondents, he had been keen to shed his rural Boer commando past in favor of appearing as a modern industrial soldier. Unfortunately for the prime minister’s dignity, his driver had possibly had one brandy too many on the way to victory and drove into a ditch. A year later, the obsessively fit and healthy Jan Smuts, commander-in-chief of the large Allied campaign in East Africa, was not exactly popular among his more idle and chubby generals. At the sound of their commander’s approaching Buick car, officers ducked out of their tents and tried to hide away, desperate to avoid having to accompany him on some strenuous mountain walk.
Meanwhile, lower down in the ranks, ordinary soldiers and army laborers enduring arduous tropical bush conditions faced another kind of daily menace. On top of malaria, typhoid, dysentery and other parasitic diseases which toppled many thousands, there was the aggravation of wandering elephants, giraffe and rhino getting in the way, the threat of venomous snakes around tents and the danger of hungry lions and leopards prowling near campsites.
Of course, the real human costs of the war in Africa were not inflicted by wild animals. Forming a grim undercurrent, these losses were immense. On one hand, it is true that Allied campaigns to deprive Germany of its West African and South West African ports and wireless facilities by conquering its colonial territories involved little effort and minimal loss. Pretoria, for instance, gained control of a huge south western territory at a cost of a little more than 100 troops.
On the other hand, German East Africa was a nut that could not be cracked as easily. There, in an unrelentingly ferocious and destructive contest which oozed across from East Africa into Central Africa and down into South Eastern Africa, opposing forces engaged in a long and gruelling see-saw struggle. The wholesale plundering of peasant lands and mass conscription of villagers that it brought imposed a terrible toll. With horses and other draught animals laid low by tsetse fly and trucks unable to cope with the poor terrain, both sides resorted to conscripting men to work as transport porters and carriers. Britain alone recruited at least a million laborers. Overworked, malnourished and exposed to appalling conditions, up to 200,000 died. At the same time, around 300,000 inhabitants of German-occupied areas perished from the effects of famine as their livestock and crops were looted by soldiers. The suffering didn’t end there. Late in 1918, the deadly worldwide Spanish influenza struck hard, spreading throughout the continent to infect populations already weakened by the war.
By then, the region had not only been feeling the burden of a war that was embraced by many white colonists but which was otherwise resented by the vast majority of their black subjects. It was also adapting to its momentous consequences. In what has sometimes been termed the second partition of Africa, Germany was eliminated from the continent. To the victors, including South Africa, went the spoils. Jan Smuts was now able to advance his vision of the new Union of 1910 becoming a Greater South Africa. As for Britain, by securing control of German East Africa as Tanganyika, it was finally able to realize Cecil Rhodes’s bombastic vision of an all-red road from the Cape to Cairo. Until African decolonization and independence decades later, the First World War settled which powers would keep what.
Still, looking back from where we are now, we can also see that the end of hostilities did not mean a simple return to business as usual. Following the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, control of the conquered colonies was mandated by the newly-created League of Nations. Although limited in practice, for the first time this introduced the principle of international humanitarian trusteeship into colonial Africa. In effect, those states which had gained new territories were their guardians and could not do entirely as they wished with them.
In post-war decades both Britain and France found themselves having to commit new educational, medical, administrative and commercial resources to the development of their African possessions to beef up the legitimacy of their colonial rule. After the blood and chaos of the war, colonial rule needed to provide Africans with security, stability and progress.
Inevitably, the glimpse of mighty European powers on the ropes left a deep mark on the consciousness of returning African war veterans. The hollowness of Europe’s claims upon superior civilization and enlightenment had been laid bare. There was widespread disillusion that Africans’ wartime sacrifices and contributions had gone virtually unrecognized and unrewarded.
Black South African papers like Abantu Batho applauded United States President Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of national rights and freedom from oppression. If that was being prescribed for European nations after 1918, should there not also be recognition of the justice of African claims? Less than a century ago, it was still too early.

Fighting And Famine On The African Front

It’s hard to believe that two years have passed since the tragic killing of 34 miners in Marikana. The horrific visuals of the shooting on August 16, 2012, remain fresh in the mind. Thousands of mine workers had been protesting against their meagre wages and poor living conditions when police opened fire, killing 34 of them. Police say they were provoked. South African’s were in shock like the rest of the world. Many believe the disaster was waiting to happen while others say the tragic events started a revolution. What did become clear that day is that despite the courageous fight against apartheid being won, the battle against inequality in South Africa is far from over. But has anything changed in the last two years?
<div id="attachment_2969" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2969" class="size-medium wp-image-2969" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/051201050-Desai-683x1024-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" />Amsterdam, 30-11-2005 International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam IDFA 2005 Rehad DESAI Jury Amnesty Award Foto Felix Kalkman</div>
South Africa has some of the most valuable minerals in the world. For decades, men have slogged, under poor safety conditions, to recover these precious assets from deep beneath the ground, touching and feeling the gems, but never having ownership of them. The mining industry remains South Africa’s biggest revenue earner. Considering the importance, one would assume employees in this sector would be well taken care of, if not by their employers, at least by the government.
For years, mine workers and labor unions have raised their concerns, hoping for change. The recent Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) strike in the platinum sector made sure that this time the pleas of workers will be heard. Relentlessly, for five months, workers were gripped with poverty, hunger and cold until finally there was some respite. The unprecedented 22-week strike made history. The three major platinum producers finally agreed to higher wages, not what Amcu was demanding but enough to get them to return to the mines.
Reaction to the wage deal was mixed with many industry analysts calling it a loss for the workers.  Amcu called it a victory. But will this victory see real transformation in the mining industry?
Amcu leader Joseph Mathunjwa, now a household name, says the strike was not just for social justice but also to honor the workers that were killed at Marikana. Two years later, the Farlam Commission of Inquiry set up to probe the shooting is still trying to find out what led to the tragedy and who was responsible.
Political activist and filmmaker, Rehad Desai, has placed together his account of what happened on that day. In his new documentary Miners Shot Down, Desai pieces together witness accounts, interviews with political heavyweights and even victims that survived the shooting, to expose the social injustices that exist on the mining grounds of Rustenburg, 120 kilometers northwest of Johannesburg.
The film also tells a story of how the ANC, a party once obsessed with fighting for human rights and social and economic equality, lost its way and ended up in Marikana.
Miners Shot Down is a chilling account of the events that led to what has been dubbed the Marikana massacre, using video footage and interviews from the seven days in which miners were striking for better wages.
“I thought it was very important to attempt to set the record straight, to show people what happened and in the process of showing people what happened you begin to understand why it happened,” he says.
Desai was born into a politically active family. His father, Barney, was a leader of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) and the family had to flee South Africa in 1963. Desai grew up in Britain but his parents constantly reminded him of his roots. While still a teenager, he joined his father in politics, passionate about fighting racism and capitalism. Both returned to South Africa in 1990. Rehad became a trade unionist with socialist ideals but after his father died, he ventured into television and film producing. To date, he has a string of documentaries to his name, many of which have garnered international acclaim for human rights.
His latest film is a story of working class South Africans that have been failed by their government, a government they believed was on their side.
“I think the revolution is coming back, the question is will there be a mature enough leadership to lead it or will the ANC, our ruling party, be mature enough to lead it, to be able to address the very real issues that this country faces or will they continue to follow the same path where the bulk of our people are excluded from the benefits?” asks Desai.
He is steadfast that the shooting on that fateful day was no accident, no measure of self-defense, but a conspired action to eliminate a problem. The film pieces together footage not seen by the public, scenes of the days before the shooting.
“It didn’t just happen, there were events that led to the shooting,” says Desai.
Horrific scenes of dead miners lying on the ground gives you an instant jolt back in time to the attacks carried out on innocent black people under apartheid, children scrambling for safety from gunshots. Desai admits that miners retaliated, but only after they were shot at first.
“Just as they were nearing their informal settlement, a number of vehicles moved in quick succession to sort of box them in, block them off and as that happened and as the miners drew nearer, teargas was fired at them, birdshot and rubber bullets, one of the mineworkers got his pistol out and fired back.”
This was the scene captured by television crews, played out on screens across the world, leading many to believe that the police fired in self-defense. But, Desai wants to know why police had live ammunition and why they had 8,000 rounds of ammunition that day. It is a question that is still being probed by the Farlam Commission of Enquiry. For Desai, it is clear cut; someone from the top gave the order.
Desai’s film takes a poignant look at the ANC as a movement and ruling party over the last 20 years, by following Cyril Ramaphosa.
“Cyril’s story from the 1980s, tells the story of the ANC, a movement which was heroic, courageous, vibrant, responsive, democratic which led a struggle against a white minority regime and succeeded,” says Desai.
Ramaphosa, once passionate about worker’s rights, formed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) in 1982. He later became a politician serving under Nelson Mandela. He left in 1999 to become a successful businessman, returning to politics in 2013.
At the time of the Marikana shooting, Ramaphosa was a non-executive member on the Lonmin board. The Marikana mine belongs to Lonmin.
“With the political kingdom the ANC gained, they lost sight of the bigger issues related to our economic democracy and we can see that story encapsulated inside the life trajectory of the man who’s become the deputy president of the ANC,” says Desai.
In March, Miners Shot Down was released at the One World film festival in Prague. The film took top honors, winning the Vaclav Havel Jury award for its exceptional contribution to human rights. It also won the Camera Justitia Award at the Movies that Matter Festival in the Netherlands.
The documentary is part of an ongoing campaign for justice by the miners and their families. They want the police to be prosecuted. Instead, miners are facing murder charges for the police that were killed. Explosive evidence recently emerged at the commission about killings committed by mine workers.  Witness accounts of atrocities committed by Amcu members, attacks on their fellow members for defying strike orders, the brutal mutilation and murders of police and of members of the rival union NUM. The commission expects to continue for some time as more new evidence comes to light.
The latest evidence again raises questions, what kind of struggle is this? No doubt there will be more stories to be told about Marikana.

Holding Up A Mirror To A Massacre

“Welcome back,” said the sign at the end of the strike. This bitter dispute ended with smiles and handshakes under Christmas lights at the mine gate.
On June 25, across the platinum belt near Rustenburg in the North West province of South Africa, 120 kilometers north of Johannesburg, around 70,000 miners went back to work. The Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) reached a wage settlement the day before with platinum producers Lonmin, Implats and Angloplats.
“It is our sincere hope that our companies, our industry, our employees and all stakeholders will never again have to endure the pain and suffering of this unprecedented strike period. None of us, nor the country as a whole, can afford repetition,” says Ben Magara, Lonmin CEO, after the union signed a three-year agreement.
At one of Lonmin’s mines in Marikana, hundreds of mineworkers walked in darkness to clock in. Their supervisors and bosses formed a guard of honor to welcome them back. But production was far away in the first weeks of the return. Miners were inducted and went through health checks before setting foot in the shafts.
“Previously, mining companies just put their workers back to work straight away. That’s not Lonmin, we are not here for the quick and short term solutions. We’re for a sustainable business with the interest of the person at heart,” says Mark Munroe, Lonmin’s mining division and safety head.
Lonmin says it could be six months before full production is reached.
Munroe says from the beginning of the strike, Lonmin invested in mine maintenance to protect the shafts from damage and keep ventilation working. Engineers have also been hard at work managing water underground.
“We shut down with the cognisance it will go on for a long while. In fact, we put extra mine support in place. We put plans in certain configurations so that we wouldn’t need so much maintenance and check-ins. All the water was stored,” says Munroe.
The separate agreements reached with each company are effective from July 1, 2013 for Amplats and Implats and Lonmin on October 1, and will run until June 2016. Employees with basic salaries less than $1,126 a month will receive a $94 increase over three years.
“This victory ushered a paradigm shift in the entire mining sector. This also shifts the media mindset that our demands were ridiculous,” says Amcu president, Joseph Mathunjwa, after signing the agreement.
Mathunjwa says they have established a task team that will look at worker share ownership. This means miners could own part of the mines they closed for five months.
Former Anglo American strategist, Clem Sunter, supports this.
Sunter says Kumba Iron Ore, a subsidiary of Anglo American, has an employee share ownership scheme which since December 2011 paid out gross dividends to employees of more than $56,000.
“The shares won’t stop strikes but they will reduce the odds that they will go on strike for a long time. It is a step towards a more inclusive economy,” he says.
“The worker shareholder scheme is a very good idea that needs to be encouraged because it could change their lives for the better. It will give workers a meaningful stake from the company revenue,” says Andrew Levy, a labor economist and consultant at Andrew Levy Employment.
Levy says if the workers wishes are granted, it will be prudent to familiarize them with economic literacy to understand the share price of their companies.
“Workers will think carefully about going on strike because they are directly benefitting in the economy,” he says.
The mine owners hope so.

Painful And Costly Strike Ends With Glee And Hope

The Walmart/Massmart transaction unleashed fierce public debate. Fears about the ‘Walmart effect’ were everywhere: falling prices killing local suppliers, job losses and a squeeze on the unions.
Grant Pattison, the former CEO of Massmart, did not see it coming.
“In none of the scenarios did we identify that, one, government would take a negative view; two, that they would take that negative view through the competition authorities.”
When it came to employment issues, Pattison did not foresee obstacles because retrenchments were not on the cards and he had assured government and organized labor that the company would continue to meet its obligations under South Africa’s labor laws. He does not think he could have done anything differently.
The Competition Commissioner, Tembinkosi Bonakele, who was deputy at the time of the transaction, has a different view. In a dissertation submitted to the University of Pretoria, he argues that the companies’ stakeholder management was poor in the run-up to the transaction. He places much of the blame on Walmart, for not having a clear communications strategy and relying too heavily on Massmart. At the competition hearings, Walmart was adamant that it left key decisions to Massmart, and would not be drawn into questions about its reputation in the United States.
Massmart encountered more hurdles. After the Competition Tribunal had cleared the merger, with conditions, the South African Commercial, Catering and Allied Workers Union (Saccawu) took the matter to the Competition Appeal Court. In South African law, the authorities are required to examine the effect that a merger has on employment, often placing a cap on merger-related retrenchments. The appeal court imposed stricter conditions on the transaction; including the reinstatement of workers that Massmart had retrenched before Walmart’s announcement of the deal.
The implementation of this condition is contested. At the time of writing, Massmart and the union differed on whether the order to reinstate workers had been fulfilled.
On the other side of the coin, in the last three years, Massmart pushed ahead with expanding its grocery shops at the lower end of the market and increased fresh produce. It also bought shops such as The Fruitspot, a fresh produce processor, and Rhino Cash &amp; Carry, a small grocery store chain.
At the Tribunal, Massmart estimated that store expansion between 2011 and 2013 would create 6,403 jobs. The company claims 7,795 additional jobs were created in that time.
What of those hopes and fears, debated so passionately before competition adjudicators?
Firstly, price. Massmart’s annual reports indicate that estimated product inflation within the group is below consumer inflation, but this was so even before the transaction. There have been no dramatic price reductions, though Massmart’s entry into grocery retail with Cambridge Food has shaken up the lower end of the market. Levels of unionization remain the same as before. The number of employees with medical benefits are reported to have increased from 41% in 2010 to 54% in 2013. The average monthly minimum wage has increased from  $201 in 2009 to  $253 in 2013, in line with consumer inflation, though poorer employees are likely to have struggled to make ends meet. The flexible workforce has increased from 33% to 38%.
Secondly, trepidation. The big fear was that South African suppliers would be forced out by Walmart’s clout. Pattison says that this pressure had already been dealt with in the early 2000s. South African retailers know their way around China, Malaysia and Vietnam and are better at this than Americans; who have had the luxury of being courted by manufacturers from those countries.
Guided by two reports from economists, the Competition Appeal Court ordered Walmart-controlled Massmart to form a fund to help suppliers. One report, produced by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and James Hodge, had argued that any amount short of $47 million will almost surely fail. The court ordered the creation of a $22 million fund to limit the risks of the transaction.
The fund offers loans, grants, technical support and training. More than $1.5 million has been spent on farmers. Since 2012, smallholders have sold around $700,000 of food. It is reported that 645 seasonal jobs have been created by farmers. Less than $94,000 of the $9.1 million has been granted to manufacturers.
While a lot of the angst over the Walmart/Massmart deal has been lifted, there is still a long way to go before everyone is happy.

What Were We Worried About?

Old soldiers never die, they merely become security guards.
Zimbabwe’s struggles are epitomized by the life of Themba Moyo (not his real name), a former captain in the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) who left the country he served for Johannesburg in 2001. He is one of the estimated 500,000 to three million Zimbabweans who have fled the country since 2000, according to the Global Zimbabwe Forum.
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Moyo once commanded more than a thousand men, at Inkomo Barracks in Harare, but now works for a security company earning less than $200 a month. His story is one of many untold stories of Zimbabwe’s economic decline.
According to research by the Southern Africa Political Economy Series Trust (SAPES Trust), Zimbabwe has lost 50% of its skilled manpower to neighboring countries and Europe &#8211; journalists, science teachers, doctors, engineers, as well as soldiers.
“Our research established that there are over 100 Zimbabwean lecturers working at universities in Cape Town alone, with an insurance company, Old Mutual, employing over 120 Zimbabweans at senior management level, while the United Kingdom has 10 senior engineers working for its railway sector,” says Ibbo Mandaza, the director of SAPES Trust.
Clad in his navy blue security guard uniform, puffing an almost exhausted cigarette just outside the control room, Moyo clocks on at a student residence in Auckland Park, Johannesburg. When he talks you can see flashes of the professionalism and discipline of a soldier.
Moyo says he signed on as a 25-year soldier, but as Zimbabwe’s troubles worsened he found life unbearable.
“The lifestyle I was now used to started vanishing in my face. I could hardly afford taking my wife and two children shopping as my salary could hardly be stretched beyond basic essentials. When I came here, my expectations were very high, I dreamed of driving a good car, building a nice house and sending my children to better schools than where I studied. It didn’t take me long to realize that my expectations would never materialize. I settled for a more realistic and pragmatic life of starting from the bottom,” he says.
“Now I am working to survive and not to better myself. With my current job, I cannot afford paying school fees for my child’s tertiary education. I only hope that my firstborn son gets a job as soon as he finishes high school. It pains me failing to give my children a better life from what I received from my parents,” says Moyo, fighting back emotion.
Also struggling is Zanele Nyathi, a United College of Education (UCE) graduate now working as a receiving clerk at a hardware shop in downtown Johannesburg.
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“I have considered going back home several times, but it’s not tenable as I am a breadwinner. I take care of my parents, my child and my late sister’s, but eking out a living is a struggle,” says Nyathi.
A teacher by profession, Zanele also joined the great trek south to do a job beneath her training.
South Africa Research Chair in Mobility and Difference, Loren Landau, says migrants are employable, especially in menial jobs, but the remuneration is poor and the risk of abuse great.
Landau says poor economies in Africa can’t retain skills meaning there are more Malawian doctors working in Manchester than in Malawi.
“If you dumped Malawian doctors or other skilled professional back into their country from Manchester, they may well end up farming bananas as the Malawian economy lacks the capacity to employ and fairly remunerate a highly skilled workforce,” says Landau.
“Migrant skilled labor is increasingly becoming more mobile. People will look all over for where they can best use their skills. With restrictions on entry to the [United States], Europe and Australia, many of South Africa’s immigrant professionals may have come here as a second-best choice.”
Landau posits around 4% of South Africa’s 51 million people are migrants.
He notes that developed countries like the United States are harvesting en masse from developing countries’ skilled workforce due to better conditions and prospects of professional growth.
If Moyo’s story is anything to go by, Zimbabwe’s migrant percentage is likely to grow as the country’s struggles could send even more of its people on the beaten track down south.

The Agony Of A Captain  With No Soldier Nor Hope

It’s a haunting image. A terrified woman lies flat on the floor of a coffee shop where she might have been sipping a cappuccino just minutes before. Beside her are her two young children. The woman clings to her son and clutches her daughter by the elbow. Empty bullet casings are scattered around them. But what really makes the picture so powerful is how it depicts a safe and familiar scene as anything but. This is a split second in the life of a mother fighting for her children.
<div id="attachment_2947" style="width: 187px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2947" class="size-medium wp-image-2947" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/RTX13XVR-1-177x300.jpg" alt="" width="177" height="300" />Kenya Defence Forces soldiers comb the rooftop of the Westgate shopping mall, on the fourth day since militants stormed into the mall, in Nairobi September 24, 2013. Somalia&#8217;s al Shabaab Islamist group said on Tuesday its militants were still holed up in a Kenyan shopping mall they attacked at the weekend and there were &#8220;countless dead bodies&#8221;, raising fears the death toll could be higher than 62. REUTERS/Noor Khamis (KENYA &#8211; Tags: CIVIL UNREST CRIME LAW MILITARY) &#8211; RTX13XVR</div>
Nairobi-based photojournalist Tyler Hicks, of The New York Times, took the photograph and, in May, won a Pulitzer Prize for it.  A month after it was taken, the woman in the picture contacted him. They found themselves talking about the mall music.
“In covering conflict, it often isn’t the big things that you remember. It’s not the loud explosions or gunfire that your mind focuses on but often it’s some small detail,” he says on a call from Iraq.
“With all the shooting and running around and people screaming there was this very calm music echoing through the shopping mall.”
The woman told him she spent almost five hours lying in that very place with her children, trying to keep them calm and quiet. She remembers quietly singing along with that same mall music to her children to try to distract them and keep them still.
Hicks has risked his life many times to take the photos that have defined his career but this one sticks with him.
“That picture for me sums up what happened there, this is an attack on innocent civilians. The fear on her face and this amazing scene of her trying to hide and protect her kids,” he says.
Since the mall siege a year ago, Nairobi has been under persistent attack. A few months after Westgate, a hand grenade was thrown on to a minibus in the city suburb of Eastleigh. It claimed four lives and maimed at least 40 others. A day earlier, twin bomb blasts rocked the northern town of Wajir, killing one and injuring three others.
But perhaps some of the biggest attacks since Westgate were carried out more recently, further away, on the Kenyan coast. In July, unknown gunmen opened fire at marketplaces in the coastal villages of Hindi and Gamba. As with the mall attack, the gunmen began shooting at market goers indiscriminately. Both attacks claimed 29 lives. Earlier, in June, gun battles raged in Lamu, a resort town, and a number of buildings were set alight. That attack killed 48.
The Somali extremist group, Al-Shabaab, has taken responsibility for each of those attacks. After Kenyan armed forces, supporting a weak UN-backed Somali force, began pursuing the Al Qaeda-linked militants in southern Somalia three years ago, the group has vowed to fight back.
“Kenya’s operations in Somalia are something of a black box,” says Parselelo Kantai, East Africa Editor for The Africa Report, who’s been following the region’s insecurity.
“Because no independent reports have revealed what is going on, Al-Shabaab’s claims of atrocities being committed there by the KDF [Kenya Defense Forces] cannot be ignored&#8230; that’s the reason Al-Shabaab have given for attacking Kenya.”
In May, the group officially announced their war against Kenya.
Beyond the human cost, Hicks’ image of the woman and children tells another story. The abandoned coffee shop, where the family spent hours hiding, is still abandoned today. The economic cost to business owners within the mall was catastrophic. Many lost everything because they did not have the right insurance policy. Even the mall’s owners lost out, despite their insurance pay outs. Until the mall reopens, its owners will lose around $4.5 million every year.
Also, scores of mall employees lost their jobs because of the attack. The mall’s grocery store, Nakumatt, lost three employees during the shootings and its 150-strong staff was made redundant. A new store in another part of the city may rehire some of them.
It has been a year since Westgate and the aftermath is a difficult reality for its survivors. Life for many in Kenya will never be the same again. But if you look closer at the Hicks photograph with the terrified family on the cafe floor, you’ll see that some hope still lingers.

A Picture Of Fear  That Still Lingers

The KK 11, Zambia’s team of yesteryear, was so aptly named after our great leader, the father of our nation, Kenneth Kaunda. The name came with great power and strength. It was almost like a weapon we could use when we ran into battle on the pitch.
The first time I heard of the KK 11 was on the radio. I remember it like it was yesterday. In 1974, on an evening when Zambia was playing in its first Africa Cup of Nations final, the high pitched voice of commentator Dennis Liwewe streamed through the wireless safely secured in the corner of the house. I followed the match between the KK 11 and the Leopards of Zaire intensely. Liwewe shouted the names that still ring in my mind today as two great sides battled for the honor to be African kings in the finals in Egypt. I still remember the stadium name being belted out in loud voice, ‘El Nasser in Cairo!’
My memory of this day is still clear as Mulamba Ndaye scored for Zaire, followed by Brighton Sinyangwe and Simon Kaodi Kaushi equalizing for Zambia to take the match to a replay.
There were other great names. Names that have remained etched in our history, such as Dick Chama, Dickson Makwaza, Edwin Mbaso, Boniface Simutowe, Jani Simlambo, Bernard Chanda, Brighton Sinyangwe and Emmanuel Mwape.
That team covered every blade of grass as they battled from box to box, ran from man to man and dug deep into their energy reserves in search of victory. Their determination forced the match into a 2-2 draw against a highly rated and favored Zaire side. This forced a replay which saw Zaire winning and qualifying for the 1974 World Cup in Germany. Nevertheless, that Zambian team epitomized pride and commitment. They were a collective force, a powerful team full of big names that made them a powerhouse.
A few years later, I was privileged to watch them at Dag Hammarskjöld stadium in Ndola. They were playing Zaire again, this time in a qualifier. It was the first match I watched live in a stadium and the epic battle remains one of the most unforgettable events in my life. I was with my late dad and my late elder brother, Benjamin, when Zambia savoured a 2-1 victory, courtesy of goals by Richard Stephenson and Peter Mhango.
We were able to see many matches because my dad was a member of the executive committee of the Football Association of Zambia. He used to take us to a lot of stadiums while we were growing up and we could play football all day in local grounds.
From merely following the team in the newspapers and watching them in training, I came to admire and respect this mighty group of men. Imagine then how I felt as a 19-year-old when I was first called up to join the KK 11 in 1982. I was immensely proud to wear the Zambian shirt and have the chance to feature in tense battles before capacity crowds, playing alongside the greats of my time.
President Kaunda came to almost all the games. I was in awe the first time I met him. I remember his trademark white handkerchief, his presence, his height and his strong handshake. He would come to the stadium in his impressive motorcade just as the game was about to start. We would line up and shake his hand, which motivated us to go out and do our best. Then he would ask the referees for the match ball and he would charismatically and stylishly kick the ball around with his right leg, much to the delight of the crowd.
When I first heard that we were going to State House for a luncheon I was totally mesmerized. Me, a 20-year-old from Mufulira, going to State House? It was 1984 and we had just returned from Uganda after winning the East and Central Africa Challenge Cup. The KK 11 was invited to dine with the president. I remember using the cutlery and crockery with state insignia emblazoned on them. We all looked forward to that and it inspired us to keep winning.
It was the first of many dinners and luncheons hosted by Kaunda. But, what was most memorable of Kaunda was not the state banquets, it was that he attended the matches, he ate with us and in those interactions, he shared a lot with us. In his humility he inspired us and his call to the team was to play with dignity and honor and for the people.
Kaunda always told us that we had to go out on the pitch to die a little for mother Zambia. He galvanized us and garnered a lot of support for the team.
That culture of hard work, sacrifice and dedication to duty has carried on with the Chipolopolo; we never forget what is now our tradition.
This new generation also had an encounter with Kaunda when in 2012, during the greatest moment of Zambian football, President Michael Sata sent him to join the team in Gabon for the final of the Africa Cup of Nations which we won.
It was meaningful for Kaunda to have been there on that great night in Libreville. He was emotional and he used his traditional white handkerchief to wipe away his tears of joy. The culmination of his dedication to football came full circle on this historical day.
The new generation of players coming through the ranks will find the same values, messages and encouragement as they go on to play for Chipolopolo. Kaunda left an indelible mark in our footballing history. He taught us about pride and nationalism, he taught us to be humble yet proud, he taught us One Nation, One Zambia. We will be eternally grateful for his part in our footballing history.

The President That  Taught Us To Die A Little

The say, never put all your eggs in one basket. Tim Tebeila never does. This mining magnate is well on his way as a multimillionaire thanks to the many baskets of Sekoko Holdings.
The new egg is Mint Electronics, which is set to launch South Africa’s first smartphone and tablet, called Mint.
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It’s a new and bold venture for one of the determined veterans of the post-1994 South African economy. His dream is simply to build a new Anglo American and it hasn’t been easy.
Tebeila started off with Sekoko Resources, mining coal, iron ore and platinum. He then started Tebcon Developers, which is now managed by his wife, building hospitals, schools and houses in townships across the country.
Tebeila is born of struggle, the third of seven children to a laborer in the remote village of Sekhukhune, in the Limpopo province. He walked barefoot through the mountains to school, 15 kilometers each way. He sold apples on the streets for a living.
Post 1994, he was an insurance broker before becoming an entrepreneur. In 2013, he founded one of South Africa’s first fully licensed black-owned insurance companies, Reliance Life.
Then came electronics. Earlier this year, Tebeila announced the launch of Mint Electronics. It is a subsidiary of Sekoko Holdings which acquired a 75% stake of CZ Electronics, a factory in Boksburg, 52 kilometers east of Johannesburg.
CZ Electronics, established in 2002, used to make equipment in South Africa for France’s Alcatel Lucent on behalf of Telkom and other clients. The company builds circuit boards for television brands like Sinotec.
Tebeila says Android 5-inch smartphones and 10.1-inch tablets will be designed, developed and manufactured in South Africa for the mass market. He claims this will be the first tablet with a USB port.
“The smartphones and tablets will be sold through major retailers, operator stores and our branded shops. The branded shops will launch in all major malls,” says Segran Pillay, chief executive of CZ Electronics.
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Tebeila adds that the tablets will be available in both the seven-inch and the 10-inch screen sizes.
“My target with this tablet is that every school learner in South Africa should have one,” he says.
Tebeila hopes the devices will be on shelves in about 11 Mint Electronics branded stores and in other existing mobile shops.
With manufacturing already underway in Boksburg, Tebeila plans to franchise Mint Electronics by the end of 2015. The businessman hopes to roll out manufacturing plants and sell across the continent.
But this man is known for wanting to turn Sekoko Resources into Anglo American. It was difficult.
Tebeila didn’t want to buy other companies, but he wanted to get the mining rights and develop this company on his own. He was turned down 10 times, but never gave up.
It was a dream almost stillborn. Mining rights proved a nightmare.
When he eventually got them, he needed R1.5 million ($145,000) for exploration and struck on the idea of gathering money from people who lived in the villages near where he grew up.
An old blind woman was one of the first to shuffle into Tebeila’s offices on a winter’s day, handing over R15,000 ($1,450) in cash – her life savings.
When all the money was put together, he paid R600,000 ($58,000) to a firm of geological consultants and R900,000 ($87,000) to drillers to explore for coal at Soutpansberg.
A few weeks later, he found out that the consulting firm, which had been riven by strife, had dissolved almost overnight and the geologist had fled to Australia with the exploration report.
He had lost money, paperwork and information which had consumed his meagre capital. But because he was hands-on during the exploration, he knew the laboratory that was used by the consultants and the people who worked there. The lab was able to salvage two pages of the exploration data for Tebeila. It contained all the drilling information. And other experts were able to finish the rest.
Coal mining was to be the foundation for his $28-million fortune.
In April 2005, the government granted Tebeila a license for Soutpansberg, which was estimated to hold 200 million tons of metallurgical coal under 11 farms, covering 8,000 hectares, near Musina on his home soil of Limpopo.
“Coal of Africa made me an offer to purchase 74% of the assets for R70 million ($6.7 million). They also pledged to spend R100 million ($9.6 million) to take the project to a bankable feasibility study,” says Tebeila.
This was the biggest deal he ever had closed on a cellphone while driving. Two years later, they offered him R20 million ($1.9 million) for the remaining 26% and gave him the capital to finance the Waterberg Colliery. It will mine up to 15 million tons of coal a year by 2019.
Sekoko Resources will supply Eskom with about 10 million tons of coal from Waterburg.
Eskom is building Kusile and Medupi power stations in the Limpopo and Mpumalanga provinces, while producing around 35,000MW of electricity, twice that of Nigeria, to ease the power shortages in South Africa.
“By September, we will be done with signing the agreement that will allow us to start with operations early next year. Our feasibility study has also allowed us to create an environment for our export market. Part of the coal will be going to export and part of it will go to Eskom,” he says.
Tebeila says plans are still on track for Sekoko Resources to reach a turnover of R10 billion ($1 billion) a year by 2019.
This turned his life around to what Sekoko Resources is today.
But like many other multimillionaire entrepreneurs, philanthropy is close to his heart. Tebeila gives away portions of his fortune through a foundation in his name. His latest charity project, coinciding with the winter season in South Africa, is giving tracksuits to school children.
“If you don’t give, you won’t make more money. Africans must give more,” Tebeila says.
While driving in the back of a car to see the newly acquired CZ Electronics and Mint Electronics factory in Boksburg, Tebeila turns to me sharing another dream of building a bakery.
“I like bread,” he says.
And therein lies the whim of an entrepreneur. The man who is always on the move, who sees opportunities when others do not, or in Tebeila’s case, pick up another egg and put it in another basket.

The Multi-Millionaire  In The Mirror

When you walk in a maize field in Solwezi, Zambia, it’s difficult to tell where the wilderness ends and the crops begin; you could get lost in the canopy of weeds choking the corn. Lifetimes are spent bending and sweating to coax the crops from this dusty land. There is not much maize to show for it. The farmers of Solwezi often struggle.
A man who walks through these fields every day wants to change all this. Guy Hammond is an unusual face to find in Solwezi. What’s more unusual is Hammond is here to tell farmers to forget plough and fertilizer; a bit like telling a bird to forget the sky.
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Hammond fits the part of a farmer from Africa. His khaki shirt is a shade lighter than his pants. White socks peek from his worn black leather boots. His skin is as tanned as the leather.
It’s even stranger to hear how he landed up in Zambia. Hammond is part of Africa’s wandering tribe of Zimbabwean farmers. He grew tobacco in Zimbabwe until he lost his farm to the government in 2002. Forced out, he moved to the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo for First Quantum Minerals as a shift supervisor. His path led him to Solwezi, one of the fastest growing towns in Africa, once a tiny village on the northern borders of Zambia and 16 kilometers from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Now Hammond works for Kansanshi mine, run by First Quantum Minerals, teaching farmers to abandon the way of farming he was taught as a child. It’s called conservation farming and Hammond wants to change the ways Zambians farm.
“We are now going into our fifth season. The program has taken local average yields from just over one ton per hectare to four tons per hectare. But some of the best farmers on our scheme have consistent yields of about eight tons per hectare,” says Hammond.
It’s an eye-opening experience to walk through crops surrounded by knee-high grass, an acacia tree and an anthill the size of a house. The two fields side by side tell a story.  On the one side Hammond has a conservation crop; the other he’s planted with fertilizer.  The conservation side is as big as the anthill whereas the fertilizer isn’t.
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“In the nineties, Brian Oldreive, a farmer in Zimbabwe, came to believe that modern farming was the root of the problem. He was working on a farm that was failing. Crop yields were poor. No one could work out why the soil was losing its qualities. But the family was buying more and more fertilizer and spending millions on expensive machinery,” he says.
Oldreive, being a religious man, turned failing land into bountiful fields like something out of the bible. What’s more he did it without fertilizer or a plough. Instead, he covered the seeds with mulch made from dried grass and waited for the rains; the way God intended, says Hammond.
“I knew of Oldreive when I was farming as he was writing a lot of [then] controversial articles in the various agriculture magazines about this new method of farming. Everybody thought he was mad. I never learned conservation farming as a child in Zimbabwe. I only learned it in 2009 when I attended Brian’s conservation farming course in Harare after having farmed conventionally for 14 years. I was converted in three days,” says Hammond.
“Oldreive looked back in history and found that modern farming as we know it is a man-made disaster. He found that the plough was the chief culprit. The plough basically inverts the soil, all the organisms that work in the soil on the top, which are anabolic and does all your compost decay and eating of the leaves, and then you are burying them and killing them. And those organisms that are under the soil are being exposed to sunlight and oxygen,” he says.
Oldreive doubled his yield and cut his production costs by 66%. Now this has been brought to Solwezi, says Hammond.
“Conservation farming has taken off like a rocket. People are taking a look at their friend’s crops on the program and asking ‘how the hell did your get your crops so beautiful?’ We now have 1,800 farmers on the program,” says Bruce Lewis, the head of CSR at Kansanshi.
Hammond also wants Zambian farmers to abandon slash and burn farming, which is burning fields to clear crops for the next year’s growth. It damages the soil and worsens global warming.
“Every year, one billion hectares of Africa goes up in smoke. We are also contributing in our own way in Africa to global warming. It’s not just China and industrialized nations that smog our atmosphere, it’s actually the peasant who has been doing what he has been doing for thousands of years,” says Hammond.
Traditionally, across Africa, inputs are notoriously late. The Zambian government delivered its fertilizer to farmers in February, 90 days late. For a farmer this spells disaster.
“Maize is a 110-day crop so you’ve missed a whole season by delivering fertilizer in February; it’s a waste of money. The whole idea is to teach farmers to farm without using farming inputs. That’s the most expensive thing and the thing that cuts the most profit out… With conservation farming, the only input cost is the seed itself… This is why these schemes fail. With all the best intentions, it’s just poor delivery that costs the government millions,” says Hammond.
It’s not only fertilizer and farming machinery companies that will take a knock if conservation farming picks up, companies involved in supplying insecticides will also suffer. Conservation farming naturally kills bugs by rotating the yearly crop.
“You are breaking the life cycle of any insect. By rotating the crop that insect doesn’t have time to breed. You are also increasing your soil content because different plants have different soil contents. Maize needs a lot of zinc; soy beans don’t require any. You are regenerating your soil. You’ll need less and less fertilizer and insecticides by creating natural compost.”
When the world’s population hits nine billion in 2050, there will more people eating food than can be grown, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. The agriculture industry has many mouths to feed and a mountain of problems to climb. These are the issues that have made the rest of the world turn to Africa, a continent rich with untouched arable land but producing merely 2% of the world’s food.
“Africa is basically the last natural resource that hasn’t been fully developed for agriculture and urbanization in the world. China has already destroyed 27% of their arable land with industrial waste. Their population is expanding and they have no land. So they are climbing into Africa, lapping up every piece of arable land for their population. It’s not just China, it’s also the Islamic belt and yet Africans, sitting on all these resources, are the poorest people in the world with the most land. We can’t even feed ourselves,” says Hammond.
Hammond may be far from home but it hasn’t left him. Among the maize, he admits to testing a yield of tobacco. He even built a smoke house next to the anthill. The problem is Zambia isn’t a tobacco country but could soon be a nation of better maize growers.

Waiting For The Rains And God

Peter Mutharika may have won and Joyce Banda may have been booted, but it was a confusing election in Malawi.
The former British colony that was governed by the late dictator Hastings Kamuzu Banda for 33 years held its first tripartite polls on May 20.
Incumbent president Banda, Mutharika of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Lazarus Chakwera of the Malawi Congress Party (MCP) and Atupele Muluzi of the United Democratic Front (UDF) were the leading candidates.
<div id="attachment_2889" style="width: 212px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2889" class="size-medium wp-image-2889" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/000_Par7896107-202x300.jpg" alt="" width="202" height="300" />Malawi&#8217;s new President Arthur Peter Mutharika waves at people who gathered to witness his official inauguration as President at the Kamuzu stadium in Blantyre on June 2, 2014. Malawi, traditionally dependent on Western aid donors, will look for &#8220;new friends&#8221; in countries such as China and Russia, newly elected President Peter Mutharika said at his inauguration today. AFP PHOTO / AMOS GUMULIRA</div>
More than a week later, Mutharika was announced as the country’s new leader amid allegations of rigging and manipulation.
Some of the anomalies are striking, such as a 38,000-strong constituency producing more than 184,000 ballots.
The results showed Banda beaten into third place by Chakwera.
Banda ordered the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC) to stop the tallying of votes saying the electoral process had been marred but her call was reversed by the high court.
Tapera Kapuya, a political analyst with the African Democracy Forum, says there is a need to bolster independent institutions.
“There is a need to strengthen institutional capacity of electoral bodies to independently conduct and manage democratic elections,” Kapuya tells CNBC Africa.com.
“What we are seeing in Malawi is unfortunate given the advances the country has made in its democratic development. This election, if not managed properly, might see the country regress into conflict.”
Mutharika is the younger brother of president Bingu wa Mutharika who died in office in 2012.
The 74-year-old law professor takes the leadership of Malawi facing treason charges for attempting to conceal his brother’s death in an alleged bid to prevent Banda &#8211; then vice-president &#8211; from assuming power.
As a former foreign minister and his brother’s right-hand man, he was also a leading member of an administration widely blamed for bringing the small southern African country’s economy to its knees through years of mismanagement.
Dewa Mavhinga, a senior researcher at the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, says the country’s young democracy is facing a major test after previously demonstrating such maturity.
“The good thing about the Malawi elections is that the pre-election and voting period were fairly peaceful and without violence or other human rights abuses. Vote counting and the post-election period is now a litmus test of the maturity of Malawi’s democracy,” he says.
Mutharika reportedly agreed to a vote recount after heated exchanges with the MEC. He argued that the security of the ballot boxes was questionable.
According to the MEC’s Emmanuel Chimkwita-Phiri, 42 stations were to be audited and manual counting was conducted.
The votes may have been cast but the battle for democracy lies ahead.

Freedom Or Fraud?

Gert Grobler should have retired a while ago. He is over the age, and served with distinction as South Africa’s ambassador in Spain and then Japan, prestigious appointments. Trading Tokyo’s opulence for the tarnish of Antananarivo is not considered an attractive offer.
But when Grobler was due to retire, the powers that be asked him to stay on to resolve the problematic politics of Madagascar.
“What could I do? They asked me to help,” he says, when I ask how the glitzy residence in Tokyo compares with the poverty of ‘Tana, as Madagascar’s capital is known.
Madagascan politics are fraught. The incumbent president was there because of a coup, unrecognized by South Africa, who hosted the ‘real’ president, Marc Ravalomanana, at considerable expense to taxpayers for four years.
South Africa has major mining and tourism interests in the large island state of Madagascar, a state which has been loyal to France, has been riddled with corruption, and has been run by proxy presidents whose strings are pulled by puppet masters in the five major families.
As it turned out, the elections held this January &#8211; after banning both the incumbent president and the real president from standing &#8211; resulted in the election of President Hery Rajaonarimampianina, not exactly South Africa’s choice.
It was a relatively free and fair election, so South Africa supported the outcome and Grobler had to try to exert South Africa’s influence, against fierce French rivalry.
Many ambassadors are lazy, and as many are useless. Grobler works hard. So it came about that Rajaonarimampianina, on his visit to South Africa in May for President Jacob Zuma’s inauguration, enjoyed a slew of high-level important meetings, from the Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA) to a private lunch at Werksmans Attorneys, a lunch I chaired.
The new president outlined his tasks, explained his attitude to the return of former President Ravalomanana, and came across as a good guy intent on ridding his country of corruption, being his own man not answerable to the five families, and having a serious grasp of his island’s finances, treasury, business opportunities and threats.
A short, friendly man, he speaks fluent French and Malagasy and is eloquent in English, only resorting to an interpreter once or twice.
He plays tennis and follows soccer, has five children, been married twice, and was the Minister of Finance under the coup administration.
“Madagascar is the land of opportunity,” he says at the lunch. A cliché, yet I believe him.
“We are creating an environment that is good for investment. On the energy front there is huge potential for solar energy, but we need capital and a return on investment.”
Asked questions on air travel, the cost of which is a sore point for tourists, he says, “We have open skies and I invite your South African companies to come to develop tourism.”
His biggest challenge?
“To eradicate the extreme poverty in Madagascar. That’s number one. Then to bring jobs is a first aim, and to create different services in education.”
Poverty, jobs, education. Good priorities.
In the interview, he suggests investment in agriculture is tops in business opportunities, then mining, tourism and renewable energy.
“We have ports, roads, airports, so you can move freely in Madagascar, but infrastructure is still a problem.”
Pretty new in the job, is he a new broom sweeping clean?
“We are in the beginning of my mandate,” he admits disarmingly. “This transition is important. A new president brings a new framework and authority to fight corruption and it is important to set up a new kind of democracy in Madagascar.”
Presumably one that doesn’t rely on patronage from the five almost-royal families or from big business or the military?
The big question is what will he do about the exiled former president, Ravalomanana?
“His return will be better if it can happen in a peaceful and fair environment. I am not sure if it is there [yet]. This is not the time for it but I am sure it can happen.”
“Ravalomanana is a patriotic person and wants the best for the country. He has a problem with justice and we have to find a solution to that before he returns.”
After being ousted in a coup, Ravalomanana was tried in absentia for ordering his troops to fire on protestors. The court sentenced him, also in absentia, in what the whole world saw as a kangaroo court decision. But the decision is still binding, although the new president probably has some legal leeway to have it rescinded.
“If I say he must stay for a while in South Africa it is a transitional thing. He also has real tax he must pay from the past and to be fair to the citizens it is the rule of law, everyone has to pay his duty. He has a debt in that and he has to pay or at least he has to come to a negotiation to settle this debt.
“The Malagasy courts are sovereign over the criminal charges. He has accepted the decisions of the court of a formal government. If he wants to be amnestied he must apply.”
But what about France’s influence?
“France is our historical partner. France has its place. But I’m not sure it has an influence on my politics. The voice of France is always listened to. But the world is now globalized.”
One of Rajaonarimampianina’s major priorities is to curb the illegal export of rosewood.
“That was my first challenge. To fight for the authority of the state and fight the illegal traffic of rosewood, gold, indigenous animals, turtles and all the endemics.”
Rajaonarimampianina has a Master’s in Economics from the University of Quebec and a Diploma of Certified Accounting. He was on the Board of Accounting of Canada. He started his own accounting firm in ‘Tana in 1995, and was then proposed in 2009 by the private sector to serve their interests as Finance Minister in the coup government.
Being president is a step up but one that Rajaonarimampianina relishes.
“I do it with pride, joy and conviction.”
The new president is a far cry from the person he replaced. Coup leader Andry Rajoelina was popularly known as a failed disc jockey, doing the bidding of a puppet master of one of the five families.
Rajaonarimampianina brings technical knowledge, university degrees in finance and a more appealing personality to the job.
It will be difficult to drag the island up from the depths to which it has descended. He may just be the man to do it. Certainly everyone in Africa wishes him and his country the very best.
As for Gert, he’ll still be there for a while.
“You get old, but you try to help where you can,” he says.

The Accountant Turned President

Terrorism in Africa did not begin on September 11, 2001. It began in Sudan in the 1990s, where Osama bin Laden operated and where an attack against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was organized.
Three years later, in 1998, Al Qaeda cells blew up the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam.
In retaliation for these attacks, the United States (US), in addition to an attack in Afghanistan, bombed a chemical plant in Sudan, claiming that it was producing elements for chemical weapons for Al Qaeda.
From the time of these attacks, US policy in Somalia became preoccupied with searching for, capturing, and killing the perpetrators of those attacks who were believed to have taken refuge there.
<div id="attachment_2882" style="width: 310px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-2882" class="size-medium wp-image-2882" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/000_Par7496840-300x221.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="221" />A picture taken from a video distributed to Nigerian journalists in the country&#8217;s north in recent days through intermediaries and obtained by AFP on March 5, 2013 reportedly shows Abubakar Shekau (C), the suspected leader of Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram, flanked by six armed and hooded fighters in an undisclosed place. The suspected leader of Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram denies any ceasefire deal with the government in a video obtained today. Abubakar Shekau makes no mention of kidnappings in the video, including last month&#8217;s abduction of seven members of a French family. Boko Haram was blamed for the kidnapping that occurred just over the Nigerian border in Cameroon. RESTRICTED TO EDITORIAL USE &#8211; MANDATORY CREDIT &#8220;AFP PHOTO / BOKO HARAM&#8221; &#8211; NO MARKETING NO ADVERTISING CAMPAIGNS &#8211; DISTRIBUTED AS A SERVICE TO CLIENTS</div>
The seeds of later US policy and all that has followed in Somalia were planted then.
Yet the vast majority of conflict and terrorist activity in Africa is not linked to international sponsorship or any vast conspiracy against the West.
The Lords Resistance Army in Uganda, the various militia in eastern Congo, the militants in the Niger Delta, the extremist sects in Kenya, Nigeria, and elsewhere are the principal security threats to the African population.
Africa is no more immune to the threats from terrorism than any other continent.
Its combination of relatively weak states, ethnic and religious diversity and sometimes discrimination, its poverty, and in many places its ungoverned space all lend Africa a significant susceptibility to the growth of radical and sometimes internationally connected movements that employ terrorism.
Some of these are aimed specifically at African governments, for example, the radical Islamic Boko Haram in Nigeria or the Mombasa Republican Council in Kenya.
These groups pose serious security challenges to key countries and potentially even a threat to the continent’s new success.
The biggest story in Africa south of the Sahara over the past few years hasn’t been plague, famine or war but the emergence of the world’s poorest continent as one of its fastest growing – thanks to factors that include fresh investment, economic reform, the spread of new technology, higher prices for commodity exports and generally greater political stability.
Nigeria and Kenya, the most important economies in West and East Africa respectively, are pillars of the change in Africa as well as having the largest and most easily accessible markets for foreigners.
Both now face growing battles with Islamist groups; Kenya throwing troops into neighboring Somalia in pursuit of Al-Shabaab fighters, Nigeria struggling with bombings and shootings by its home-grown Boko Haram sect.
Kenyan forces pushed into southern Somalia to drive back Al Qaeda-linked militants, blamed by Nairobi for a string of border incursions and kidnappings, including the abductions of foreign tourists from coastal resorts which have damaged one of Kenya’s most important industries.
Al-Shabaab has in return called for all-out war on Kenya and ‘huge blasts’ by its unknown number of supporters there. Grenade attacks, that have seen many killed and several wounded, jangled nerves in Nairobi, where more than 200 people died in an Al Qaeda bombing of the US embassy in 1998.
Killings by Nigeria’s Boko Haram sect &#8211; whose name means Western education is sinful &#8211; had been largely confined to a remote corner of the semi-desert northeast and ignored by much of the country until bombings struck the capital Abuja, killing hundreds. A suicide car bombing on the United Nations headquarters in August killed 24 people.
Boko Haram is now by far the biggest security headache for President Goodluck Jonathan in Africa’s most populous nation – which, if estimates of population and the Muslim-Christian balance are to be believed, might have more Muslims than any country in the Middle East.
While Islam in Africa has traditionally co-existed comfortably with other religions, more heavily populated Muslim regions are often relatively marginalized economically and politically. This leaves plenty of ground for radicalism to sprout.
Getting sucked into a foreign war against a Somali enemy, which drove out Ethiopia’s far more experienced army in 2009, is just what Kenya doesn’t need at a time when it is already in the doldrums due to drought, soaring inflation and a plummeting currency.
It is not only the cost in lives and money that count.
Counterinsurgency wars – even in regions distant from the main centers of business – can harm foreign investor sentiment starting to warm to Africa. They drain resources that might better be used improving infrastructure or education and lead to a greater role for security establishments at the heart of power and policy making, rarely a recipe for success in post-independence Africa.
Beyond the biggest countries, poorer neighbors may be at greater risk. A flood of weapons across the Sahara desert from Libya’s civil war – as well as hundreds of thousands of now unemployed former migrant workers – could further destabilize West Africa’s Sahel countries, already prey to kidnappings and attacks by Al Qaeda’s regional offshoot.
The challenge in combating terrorism in Africa is balancing a legitimate program of security improvements with a continuing and sustained attack on poor governance, poverty, and deprivation of human rights.
Getting the balance right is particularly acute because the democracies in Africa are fragile, and any crackdown on terrorist activity has to be carried out with great sensitivity to the historic grievances of marginalized groups, the incipient struggle for human rights, and the relatively weak civilian oversight of the military and security institutions.
Overall, optimism remains strong. Businesses compare Africa with China and India in past decades and eye a market of a billion consumers with money to spend on more than just basic survival.
Whether or not the threat of Islamist militant groups can be contained to the margins, the extra strain could certainly be felt in a continent where many have only recently seen good reason to believe in a better future.

Be Afraid

Good things happen. Bad things happen. Ugly stuff also happens. That’s life. Life inside Nigeria today has become a sour mix of the bad and ugly overshadowing the good.
The mind-boggling scale of the latest ugly incident was a daring assault on the conscience and sensibilities of Africa’s largest nation by population. It was a bold question mark on the quality of governance in Nigeria. In the dead of night, on April 14, 276 teenage girls were abducted from their boarding school, the Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State in north-eastern Nigeria.
As of going to press, well over a month after the abductions, most of the girls were yet to regain their freedom. About 40 have reportedly escaped.
The anti-establishment Islamist Boko Haram sect claimed responsibility for the dastardly act. In a video released to the media, the leader of the sect, Abubakar Shekau, vowed to sell the girls in the market and marry them off if his cohorts are not released from prison.
For days after the girls’ disappearance, Nigeria’s civil society, military and political elites were engulfed in a blame game. Propaganda was the order of the day, as it took nearly three weeks after the abductions before President Goodluck Jonathan issued a statement. The Nigerian leader’s credibility has suffered massive global and domestic erosion, says Opeyemi Agbaje, a public affairs commentator.
“His administration was left looking callous, insensitive and detached from reality.”
The outrage and protests from all corners of the world have been overwhelming for the Nigerian authorities.
“Facts are that regardless of afterthoughts that we are now being served by federal government, the institutional response to the fate of the girls was indifference,” says Oby Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank’s Africa division and former education minister in Nigeria.
Ezekwesili has been the most vocal member of the political cognoscenti leading the protests from the frontlines.
“It was only after our social media campaign migrated to street marches &#8211; Chibok women on April 29 and #BringBackOurGirls on the 30th – that we saw motion. Our pressure on the federal government to act… seems to irritate government,” Ezekwesili says.
Nigeria was the top item on global news bulletins for most of April and May – sharing the top spot with the coverage of the South Korean ferry mishap and the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media platforms were abuzz with the #BringBackOurGirls and #ChibokGirls campaigns. The hash tags recorded over one million retweets within a couple of days in May.
On the ground, Bring Back Our Girls solidarity rallies were held in cities across the world, calling on the Nigerian authorities to fish out the girls from the Sambisa forests where they were purportedly being held captive by the militants.
A game reserve once renowned for its wildlife, the 60,000 square kilometer Sambisa forest, straddles parts of north-eastern Nigeria, bordering Chad and Niger. Sambisa village itself is flanked on the east by Gwozo town &#8211; another notorious hide out for Boko Haram insurgents &#8211; and the Mandara Mountains which form a natural barrier between Nigeria and Cameroon.
The online and offline protests galvanized international interest in Nigeria, transforming what was a local war against terror into a global crusade. Amnesty International and UNICEF backed the campaigns. Presidents, politicians, statesmen (and women) and celebrities including United States (US) first lady Michelle Obama and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, while musicians Wyclef Jean and Chris Brown also added their voice to the campaign. Actors Sean Penn, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake and Bradley Cooper also threw their weight behind the campaign with the hashtag: #RealMenDontBuyGirls.
The tragedy of Chibok has been a public relations nightmare for Africa’s recently crowned largest economy. It was a bad time to be dealing with a militant gang with possible links to Al Qaeda-friendly groups in Mali, Niger, Chad and Cameroon. Abuja had been eagerly preparing to host the world’s most influential business and political leaders at the 24th World Economic Forum on Africa in May. The forum was meant to be Nigeria’s coming out party. It was however overshadowed by the global angst.
“This is not the time for us to fight or play blame games, because this is really what the terrorists want, they want us to be divided… but if we stand together and fight this together, then terror will lose… world leaders have shown through their massive attendance at this forum that they we will not allow terrorists to dictate our agenda,” finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala told reporters on the sidelines of the forum.
Government instructed schools as well as public and private offices in Abuja to close shop during the forum. Foreigners attending therefore saw a different country. They saw a near empty, sober Abuja devoid of its usual political tension, cosmopolitan communities and light traffic.
“Hosting the forum was part of a campaign to open the Nigerian economy to investors… By shutting down Abuja, the president has succeeded in telling the global community that Nigeria is not a good place to do business; that government can cripple their investments at will and without any care in this world,” Kenneth Ugbechie, publisher of the Nigeria Political Economist magazine wrote.
The United Nations (UN), African Union and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) have condemned the Chibok incident, urging Nigerian authorities to rescue the girls alive. Analysts say that the government must also begin to revamp the local and national ecosystem responsible for breeding insurgency – the dire social and economic conditions prevalent in most parts of northern Nigeria. Leading nations including the US, Britain, France and China have also offered to help the Nigerian government with security intelligence and technological support.
Beyond the urge to keep impressing upon international investors to look beyond Nigeria’s economic and political pains, it is clear that insurgent activities have had a negative impact on the country’s image and reputation. Amnesty International say that Boko Haram is responsible for more than 1,500 deaths in Nigeria this year alone.
The UN estimates that 300,000 people have been displaced by the militant group’s activities since May, 2009 when the extremist beast first bared its fangs.
<h4>Politics of Doubt and Disbelief</h4>
Former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo believes that ambivalence and the political shenanigans of the Nigerian state is responsible for the inability of the authorities to react with alacrity to the kidnapping of the Chibok girls. In a television appearance, he said President Goodluck Jonathan had not truly believed that the girls had been abducted, hence his hesitation to order a rescue operation. 
“The president did not believe that those girls were abducted for almost 18 days,” Obasanjo said. 
“If the president got the information within 12 hours of the act and he reacted immediately, I believe those girls would have been rescued within 24 hours, maximum 48 hours. The president had doubts; ‘Is this true or is it a ploy by some people who don’t want me to be president again?’ I don’t believe he has performed to the expectations of many Nigerians, not just me.”

The Shame Of The Bad And Ugly

By mid-June, as FORBES AFRICA went to press, there was no sign of an end to the longest mining strike in South African history. For five months, Lonim, Implats and Angloplats – which produces 40% of the world’s platinum – lay idle at a cost of more than $2 billion to the economy.
New mining minister Ngoako Ramatlhodi tried to heal the rift in his first few days in office, but fresh talks fizzled out inside two weeks.
May proved a month of tragedy, farce and scorn in the platinum belt of South Africa. Tragedy as 4,000 hungry women and children of miners turned up for 500 food parcels; farce because of Lonmin’s clumsy attempt to end the strike and scorn from most of the miners.
Lonmin issued an ultimatum for miners to report for duty on May 14 and offered to charter buses. Instead, more than 4,000 Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (Amcu) members gathered at the nearby Wonderkop Stadium, carrying traditional weapons.
Lonmin claims a few slipped past the strikers to work, but police say there were none.
Regardless, Amcu president Joseph Mathunjwa gave assurances to the traditional weapon wielding miners that their jobs were safe in the protracted strike. He accused Lonmin management of undermining the union by talking directly to employees.
“We have the law on our side. The employers have breached the recognition agreement signed between them and Amcu, the majority union in the platinum sector… Don’t allow them to instigate you to the point you do unlawful things,” Mathunjwa warned.
He rubbished allegations his members were responsible for the attacks on the non-striking miners around Rustenburg. Four people died, several others suffered stab wounds.
Mathunjwa further warned that the police deployment to the platinum belt could lead to another Marikana massacre. In August 2012, at least 34 Amcu protesters were shot dead by police in Marikana.
“If the strike is protected and lawful, why is the government deploying police. To do what?” asks Mathunjwa.
“We are so close to Canaan, there’s no way we are returning to Egypt,” says Jimmy Gama, the union’s national treasurer.
A few kilometers from the stadium, where Mathunjwa left in a fleet of luxury vehicles, the central business district of Marikana painted a gloomy and desperate picture. Many businesses have closed since the miners downed tools on January 23.
On May 19, Lonmin management called journalists to their headquarters in Melrose Arch, Johannesburg, they looked and sounded desperate.
“We are asking who is benefitting from the strike. Are the rising incidents of violence not making the strike dysfunctional?” says Lonmin CEO, Ben Magara.
On May 20, platinum bosses and the union met again at the Labor Court in Johannesburg, stripped to the waist and ready to fight each other over whether employers should directly communicate with their employees or not.
Despite the presiding judge, Hilary Rabkin-Naicker, managing to get the two parties back to the negotiating table, no agreement was reached after a week.
“Reaching an affordable and sustainable agreement with Amcu would be in all of our interests, and that remains our preference. We remain committed to on-going dialogue with Amcu and other stakeholders to find a way to end the strike. The companies welcome the intervention of the Labor Court,” says a statement from Lonmin management before the wage impasse.

Sad Days Of Tragedy, Farce  And Scorn

Dinesh Patel had a solid plan: go to the United States (US), play professional golf and win a PGA tournament. His dream took shape when he earned a sport scholarship to study at Florida State University. When he got there he realized that it was going to be tough.
“It’s incredibly competitive and I don’t think that I was good enough, to be honest. But I also don’t think that I wanted it badly enough&#8230; Those guys are good, they work so hard and they were willing to sacrifice so much more than I was willing to sacrifice,” he says.
Patel, the son of a doctor and teacher from Durban, South Africa, decided to focus on his business studies but flirted with the idea of a career in the music business. In his final years at university, he worked as a campus label representative for Warner Brothers’ Electro Records.
“You throw parties and you get access to all the new music and you basically build these artists on a street level.”
When it came down to a career, Patel followed the money. His first job was in Atlanta where he worked as a senior consultant for Deloitte.
“On the day I joined, I think I knew that this wasn’t for me. But it was a great training ground because you learn so much about reading financial statements and understanding the mechanics of business.”
Two years later, he worked as a banker, at the peak of the financial crisis, for Goldman Sachs in New York.
It was here that Patel came across the innovative virtual canteen, Seamless. Patel made use of Seamless to order food on the nights he worked late in the office. The company initially focused on corporates but when they branched out, catering for everyone, business boomed. The concept of Seamless remained at the back of Patel’s mind and resurfaced years later.
After 10 years in the US, Patel returned to South Africa. He had many job offers and pursued his own business ventures but struggled to find his feet.
Through it all, he kept hearing his parent’s voice ringing in his head.
“Dinesh, first you wanted to be a golfer, now you’re not a golfer, then you wanted to be an accountant, now you’re not an to accountant, then you wanted to be a trader, now you’re not a trader, then you wanted to be an actor, well now you’re not an actor. What do you want? Can you just stick to something?”
Tired and on the brink of giving up, Patel experienced his epiphany. It came while he was lounging on his parent’s couch, in Cape Town, and the conversation was about dinner. It came down to two options: chicken from Nando’s or pizza from Panarottis.
“That’s when I immediately thought ‘there must be more options, if we had Seamless here it would be so good.’”
That night, Patel dashed out to meet Joseph Okleberry, who would become an investor. He had relocated from the US to South Africa to work as an internet strategist for Naspers. Okleberry brought his expertise of the web to the table.
Their conversation went something like this: “Joe you used Seamless, I used Seamless. Do you think something like this would work in South Africa?”
Okleberry was keen on the idea and the two men spent the rest of the evening drawing up the plan for OrderIn – an online food ordering service. It would partner with companies that offered delivery and customers would pay restaurant prices. In return, OrderIn would charge restaurants 8%.
Patel spent the next three months researching. He sent a proposal to Jason Finger, the founder of Seamless in the US, who jumped in.
“Jason brought in his development team from Seamless so we had all of their experience to build OrderIn from scratch. We used their experience and avoided some of the mistakes they had made. It was fascinating to see what a website that does a quarter million orders a day looks like,” says Patel.
Hennie Booysen, who worked for Skype in London and is also a co-founder of Groupon, joined the team as a co-founder. He brought his expertise in the e-commerce space.
With the help from an investor at Naspers and a hedge fund in New York, OrderIn secured the capital.
Patel formed a team of five who worked on the website for eight months, from a house in Camps Bay in Cape Town. As the launch neared, there were nerves.
Then the first order rang in.
“Everyone freaked out! We were like ‘oh my gosh there’s actually an order,’” says Patel.
The customer, who was working late at Investec, had a craving for sushi. Everything was running as planned. The order appeared on the OrderIn system, the machine at the sushi bar had printed the receipt and the customer received notification that the order would take 45 minutes. There was only one problem; the sushi bar had no delivery man.
“I raced from my house to the restaurant, picked up the food and dropped it off at the customer,” says Patel.
The guy told Patel, dressed casually, that he didn’t look like a delivery guy. Patel spun the story that as the first customer he received a special delivery from the founder and CEO.
Although OrderIn has had its fair share of hiccups, it has not deterred them. By next year, they would have signed 650 restaurants.
Patel says many overlook the cost of staff, maintaining a website and customer service when calculating profits.
“A lot of guys coming into the market are pricing themselves very cheaply, one to three percent. But the reality of it is that’s not a sustainable business model.”
When it comes to business, the 32-year-old founder and CEO of OrderIn doesn’t worry much, as he relies on the expertise of his team.
“I’m always the stupidest guy in the room. My investors and our team are so much smarter than me, that makes running a business so much easier.”
From sportsman to banker and now online food, Patel is happy he kept moving forward.
“I’ve always had this hustle. I want to do something on my own; I want to create something… When you are in a large corporate environment you don’t feel like you’re in control and as an entrepreneur, I think you want to feel like you are in control. You want to feel like you’ve got a say in your destiny.”
So, if at first you don’t succeed, try everything, try anything but try, try and try again.

Category: Sometime in Africa

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