This piece by the always excellent Chris McGreal in today's Guardian explains why the resignation of Thabo Mbeki is long overdue. Like many though, I fear it will take more than a change of leader for South Africa to escape its current predicament. The country is a perfect example of how economic growth can do absolutely nothing for society, if its fruits are not widely distributed.
I have a new piece over at Comment is Free, looking at the situation with land reform in South Africa.
The nice people at the Guardian cut the original version (it was a bit long). For anyone interested, here it is.
The longer version makes mention of the fact that, unlike most countries, South Africa has been levying a partial tax on land values for many years; a practice that has now been outlawed.
A rather confused piece, I thought, by Richard Dowden, director of the Royal African Society in yesterday's Independent. He argues that there will be no genocide in Kenya, because the Kenyan situation is quite different from that of Rwanda in 1994 when up to a million people were murdered in four months. Instead of explaining the differences (which are considerable), he ends up highlighting the similarities between the two countries' situations.
Rwanda was, and Kenya is, a product of a flawed modern political system being imposed on a society where tribal allegiances still figure prominently in consciousness of many people. Not because people are innately tribal in a way that westerners are not, but because the colonial and post-colonial history of each country has seen one group assuming power over, and restricting the economic opportunities of, others.
The Rwandan genocide was a political act, planned and commanded from the highest levels of government. Kenya's current violence may not be a result of explicit instructions from senior political figures (although the murder yesterday of opposition politician Mugabe Were looks to be more than a random killing), and it has certainly not been planned in advance (in Rwanda hundreds of thousands of machetes were imported from China in the year before the genocide) but the warning signs are there, which is why every possible effort must be made to avert a further escalation in the violence.
Dowden may be right to argue that whatever happens in Kenya it will not be genocide, but we should hardly draw comfort from this. Unless the violence can be brought to a rapid end, many thousand could die, to add to those already being displaced.
The only solution is to hold new elections under the supervision of an international body (perhaps the African Union). A date should be set some months ahead to allow for proper organisation of an election which produces a legitimate and unchallengeable result. It is hard to envisage any other solution while President Kibaki remains in power on such a dubious mandate.
Dowden concludes by saying:
This is going to be horrific and puts Kenya and the entire East African region at risk of economic collapse.
Although a stolen election was the catalyst, surely it's the perception of economic injustice among certain ethnic groups and the total disregard for those perceptions among politicians that underlie this conflict. And that's inevitable given the level of cultural development in Africa, and the overly competitive, scarcity-based western economic model under which all Africans are now forced to live.
