Africa

Tuesday

Peter Hoskin

Gaddafi’s lethal sort of madness

If Muammar al-Gaddafi weren’t still in charge of a country, then his speech for Libyan State TV would have been straight-up hilarious. There he was, all spittle-flecked bombast, rattling on and on about the “bunch of rats and cats” who are trying to depose him, and blaming their actions on, erm, hallucinogenic drugs. “We Libyans have resisted the US and Britain in the past,” he said, “and will not surrender.” He also, predictably, mentioned Israel. It was like some living caricature of a mad dictator. As it is, though, we ought to dwell on some of the more ominous aspects of Gaddafi’s address. He is not standing down, he said

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

A Wind of Change down Arab Street?

I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the events in Egypt and Tunisia – but, as I say in my News of the World column (£) today, the citizens of the Arab world all too often have a choice between a Bad Guy and a Worse Guy. Egypt looks like its choice is between the status quo, the Muslim Brotherhood or a military coup. This is not a 1989-style revolution, there is no Arabic equivalent of Scorpions singing Wind of Change. Successful revolutions normally have a well-organised alternative government, with a clear route towards democracy. Where is the Egyptian Lech Walesa, or the Tunisian Vaclav Havel? Many, especially on

Sunday

Daniel Korski

South Sudan set for difficult independence

Today, voters in the southern part of Sudan head to the polls in a referendum which will determine whether they should form their own state or remain part of Sudan, Africa’s largest country. Secession – the most likely outcome of the referendum, and called for in the 2005 peace agreement that ended 21 years of civil war between the country’s north and south – would mean that the government in Khartoum could lose not only territory, but also over 80 percent of the revenues it receives from oil exportation, as most of the oil is located in the would-be state of South Sudan. As a result, many fear that bloodshed

Thursday

Daniel Korski

In Cote D’Ivoire, New Year may bring a new Africa

The situation in Cote D’Ivoire is heating up. It has the potential either to herald a new future for West Africa, based on democracy, regional cooperation and a rejection of ethnic mobilisation; or to showcase the continent’s violent and undemocratic past. Hitherto there have been signposts pointing in both directions. On the one hand, Laurent Gbagbo is clinging on to presidential power, after having been in office for ten years on a questionable mandate. Willing to politicise the army and exploit ethnic differences, his strategy is straight out of the continent’s “big man” playbook of politics. On the other hand, Alassane Ouattara, the country’s rightful leader, has refrained from using

Tuesday

Daniel Korski

DfID’s role put to the test

At a speech to the Royal Defence Academy earlier in the year, Andrew Mitchell outlined the costs of overseas conflict to Britain and offered a number of lessons for the future. The most important, he argued, was the need to help prevent wars before they start, starting with being “better at identifying the potential for conflict.” The Cabinet’s only ex-soldier, Mitchell has seen up close the cost of conflict, burns with anger about the Rwandan genocide and knows that development funds will forever be wasted if people are mired in violent conflict. The thesis he has brought to DfID – that there can be no development in conditions of conflict

Thursday

Sam Bowman

International aid should be abolished

The Comprehensive Spending Review was a step in the right direction, but I agree with Philip Booth and others when they say that there should be far more cuts down the line. But the biggest mistake was the announcement that the Department for International Development’s (DfID) budget will be increased by 37 percent by 2015. It undermines the narrative that the country will be suffering the cuts together and shows a tone-deafness in cutting spending at home while increasing it abroad. But worse, it exacerbates the problem that development aid does an immense amount of harm to the developing world, and this spending increase will only make things worse. Over

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Adventures in Charity: Bono Edition

I dare say it makes one a bad person to be amused by this: ONE gives only a pittance in direct charitable support to its causes — something Borochoff said the average donor might not realize. The Bono nonprofit took in $14,993,873 in public donations in 2008, the latest year for which tax records are available. Of that, $184,732 was distributed to three charities, according to the IRS filing. Meanwhile, more than $8 million was spent on executive and employee salaries. Like many others then, I guess that makes me a bad person. A spokeswoman for Bono’s “charity” ONE Campaign explained all: ONE  “does advocacy work, not charity work.” True

Saturday

Patrick Marnham

Amid the encircling gloom

Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. Africa is the setting for several of V. S. Naipaul’s finest fictional stories — In a Free State, A Bend in the River, Half a Life. And there is a pattern to the themes in the African works: fear, post-colonial disintegration, isolation, approaching catastrophe, a sense of being trapped in a way of life that is hovering on the borders of savagery. It is an unforgettable vision, but it remains that of an outsider. In The Masque of Africa, Naipaul goes deeper; this is

Saturday

Andro Linklater

Tried and tested

In June 1964, when Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage against the apartheid government of South Africa, he was, as photographs reveal, a burly, blackhaired man, with a handsome, pugnacious grin. By the time he was released in 1990, his hair was grey and his features gaunt. But his first speech as a free man described the same ideal of a democratic, multiracial South Africa that he had presented in his final address before being sentenced — ‘an ideal I hope to live for, but if needs be, an ideal for which I am prepared to die’. That imprisonment should neither have broken nor embittered

Saturday

Simon Courtauld

Cherchez la femme

The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The 22nd Earl of Erroll, Military Secretary in Kenya in the early part of the second world war, was described by two of his fellow peers of the realm as ‘a stoat — one of the great pouncers of all time’ and ‘a dreadful shit who really needed killing’. The deed was duly done one night in 1941: Erroll’s body was

Saturday

David Blackburn

The relevance of politics

This morning’s papers share a unifying theme: the failure of political leadership to secure a deal at Copenhagen. Now, I applaud politicians for not succombing to enormous pressure and making a series of pledges that would risk grinding the world’s poor ever deeper into the dirt. For those who take a different view, it is not that politicians have failed, but that high politics is an irrelevance, a vanity. I know Coffee Housers loathe her opinions, but Polly Toynbee is at her polemical best today. She writes: ‘Politics is being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The writing is on the wall. The leadership required within and between each

Monday

Giles Foden

Sideshow on the lake

During the night of 9 February 1916, two men were sitting on opposing shores of Lake Tanganyika. The longest lake in the world, it at that time divided German East Africa from the Belgian Congo. One of the men was Herr Kapitänleutnant Gustav von Zimmer, the other was an eccentric British navy officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson. The following morning, Zimmer would launch the Graf von Götzen, a large vessel which floats to this day on the waters of the lake. Spicer-Simson takes a starring role in my narrative non-fiction book, Mimi and Toutou Go Forth (2004). The history of the two British motor launches, Mimi and Toutou, and their vainglorious,

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Debating Aids

Is it legitimate to discuss the strength of the link between HIV and Aids? It’s one of these hugely emotive subjects, with a fairly strong and vociferous lobby saying that any open discussion is deplorable and tantamount to Aids denialism. Whenever any debate hits this level, I get deeply suspicious. Which is why the below clip – from a documentary which The Spectator Events division is screening next week, called House of Numbers – aroused my interest. The film picked up awards at various American film festivals, but has since been denounced as backing Aids denialism. Yet the footage shows Luc Montagnier – who won a Nobel prize last year

Tuesday

Alex Massie

The Good Gordon Brown

Marbury is quite right. The Prime Minister’s advisers must wonder what they have to do to get this Gordon Brown appearing on your TV screen. Now, there are a few things one could say about the content of Brown’s Ted Talk in Oxford but that’s a post for another time. But in general, this is good stuff: fluent, passionate, witty (yes, really) and so on. Above all, freed from the tedium and trivia and trauma of life at Westminster you see a different and relaxed big-picture Gordon. It’s almost enough to make one wonder what might have happened if only Gordon weren’t quite so bad at politics… Anyway, this is

Monday

Alex Massie

The 3% Solution & the Case for More, Not Fewer, Foreign Workers

So the Tories have announced their new international development policy. Apparently it’s going to be “results-based” and fit for a “post-bureaucratic age” (this latter being, mind you, the kind of phrase coined by bureaucrats). Iain Dale likes the sound of it and so does Tory Bear. I’m sure there are plenty of good ideas lurking in the new paper, but I’m also pretty sure that there’s not much sign of the Tories moving towards a truly radical approach to international development: open borders. Actually, it’s not quite open borders, more a question of creating a worldwide guest-worker programme. Harvard’s Lant Pritchett is perhaps the leading proponent of this sort of

Wednesday

Michela Wrong

When hopes were high

Dons don’t usually appear to much advantage in fiction. For those who follow African affairs, these are not happy times. Once regarded as passé, the military coup is enjoying something of a come- back. Men formerly hailed as Renaissance leaders seem bent on being crowned presidents-for-life. From Sudan to Kenya, Somalia to Zimbabwe, carefully negotiated peace deals and coalition governments have either already foundered or quiver on the brink of collapse. So this book possesses a terrible poignancy. The years it covers — a time when black nationalists in the territories that went on to become today’s Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia campaigned to shrug off white rule — are still

Wednesday

Justin Cartwright

Zuluboy is here

South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country since Apartheid, by R. W. Johnson After the Party: Corruption and the ANC, by Andrew Feinstein I am writing this in Cape Town on the very day that Jacob Zuma is exonerated of all charges of corruption, racketeering and money-laundering — not by a judge, but by an ANC-appointed acting Director of the National Prosecuting Authority. This man defended his decision by claiming that there had been an abuse of due process when the head of the Scorpions anti-corruption unit was recorded by the National Intelligence Agency talking with ANC high-ups, including Thabo Mbeki, about the timing of Zuma’s prosecution. This abuse

Saturday

Anthony Daniels

Whistling in the dark | 21 March 2009

It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, by Michela Wrong Once, when I was crossing Mali by bus, it took three days to go 100 yards. This was not because of the condition of the road, but because three sets of officials — the army, the police and the douaniers — insisted upon extracting their pound of flesh from the passengers (except for me), and would not let them go until they had duly paid up. The passengers took it all with a good-humoured resignation that both surprised and moved me. Perhaps their resignation derived from an understanding that, had the boot been upon the other

Wednesday

Michela Wrong

Killing with kindness

When I wrote a regular column on Africa for this magazine’s left-wing rival, I was always intrigued by the contrast in responses to any sceptical article on aid. ‘This reactionary bigot is clearly happy for millions of Africans to starve,’ pretty much summed up the fury of white readers at having their Oxfam direct debits questioned. ‘No, she’s right!’ replied my defenders. ‘These corrupt, thieving governments should be cut off without a penny.’ Those ones always came from Africans. The assumption that foreign aid is an unalloyed good runs so deep in the guilt- ridden, post-colonial West, people are often shocked to discover that many Africans, far from showing appropriate

Friday

Alex Massie

Global Crisis Deepens

Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister recognises that these are perilous times. Women wearing mini-skirts, he says, are a danger to public safety, responsible for all manner of traffic accidents. What’s wrong with a miniskirt? You can cause an accident because some of our people are weak mentally.” He continued arguing that, “if you find a naked person you begin to concentrate on the make-up of that person and yet you are driving.” According to Foreign Policy: The BBC notes that [Mr] Buturo is seeking to rid Uganda of its many vices, and inappropriate dress is just one of the many indecent items that appear on the minister’s list. Among others