The 3 games in the USA - Africa summit:

America playing catch up with the Orient; Obama playing legacy politricks; and Africa playing host

Last week President Obama hosted Africa’s crème de la crème in Washington at the ‘US-Africa summit’. This was by all means a good thing and deserves a round of applause. However, it is imperative that Africans put this meeting into context and reflect on its efficacy.

Ask yourself: who decided the timing and schedule of the US – Africa summit? Who decided the venue? Who elected who to invite and who to alienate? Who determined the agenda?

Symbiosis or clever lopsidedness?
This summit came at a point in time when both the USA and Africa need one another.  Maybe USA needed Africa more. To claw back on Chinese influence in Africa after a lost decade fighting terror in the middle-East, to reassert US hegemony and ‘big-brotherdom’, to tap into Africa natural resources and to increase trade and investment in the region.

Trade: - Over the past decade, US-Africa trade declined substantially when some of US arch rivals and Africa’s trading partners like the European Union, China and Japan expanded their portfolio of trade and investment in the continent. Notably, EU-Africa trade expanded to an all-time high of about US$200 billion in 2013. Chinese – Africa trade likewise increased exponentially from just about US$10 billion in 2000 to US$ 170 billion in 2013 (largely exports to Africa - 70%). Meanwhile big brother USA’s trade that stood at US$80 billion (US$ 40 billion imports from Africa due to AGOA and US$ 20 billion exports to Africa) in 2011 declined to US$ 60 billion (US$ 40 imports from Africa and US$ 20 billion exports to Africa) in 2013. It is important to note that even the small portfolio of trade with Africa (US$ 20 billion exports) was very crucial for American jobs – supporting over 100,000 jobs. Therefore for America, this summit could not have been for a better reason than to explore and expand export opportunities for American goods and services in Africa.

 For Africa, this summit came at a time when the continent was ripe with opportunity and required strategic partnerships for trade, investment and for combating some of the ills that have perennially hamstrung economic, social and political progress in the continent like terrorism and violent conflict. It’s important to note that Africa’s trade with the rest of the globe accounts for only about 2%. Yet Africa is home to 14% of the global population; has an increasing middleclass population which will expand to 100 million by the end of 2015 and has consumer spending projected to increase to 80% by 2020.  This means market, that the continent could bargain with or leverage for intra-Africa trade. Moreover, African countries are prospecting or already exploiting and commercialising substantive natural resources, oil and gas, in Ghana, Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and South Sudan for example. African countries have also made considerable progress in regional integration and cooperation. The East African community for example was one of the fastest growing regional blocks in 2013. All this is evidence to the economic and political opportunities that Africa is realising that require strategic partnership and cooperation (multilateral or bilateral) like with the USA.

Just a playing ground or real prospects?

Africa is now undoubtedly a pot of gold, and a beehive of economic and political activity that could be a tipping point in global political economy. How the super powers like China and USA handle Africa could mean great opportunities or their greatest undoing. Could Africa be merely the amphitheatre for deep seated political and economic wrangles between the West and the Orient? Are African leaders alive to this reality? How could Africans exploit this for the best interest of the continent? These are difficult questions that require reflection amongst Africans.

Nonetheless, three possible good things that I hoped the summit could herald. Maybe Africans should check with their Presidents and entourage if any of these came through:  

·         Increasing USA Africa trade and investment through a strengthen and extended AGOA.  

·      Enhancing trade competitiveness in Africa: - African countries can exploit partnerships with USA to speed up progress towards meeting the Bali agreements on trade facilitation for example. This could also pave the way for useful Public Private Partnerships under AGOA that enhance competitiveness. Such links could also help build the capacity of private sector in African countries to promote investment in key sectors like energy, agriculture and other trade related infrastructure.

·   Africa US cooperation could also support and deepen regional integration in many of Africa’s mushrooming regional blocks like the EAC, ECOWAS, SADC, and COMESA. US partnership in Trade Mark East Africa is a good example of how strategic cooperation could facilitate integration.

Tricky partnerships

Nonetheless, the flipside is that this manner of cooperation or partnerships between the USA and Africa could as well have been detrimental to Africa or yield dismal returns. The summit itself could just have been another of the many conferences of ‘nothing’ that have been witnessed in the past. The agreements and pronouncements made also risk benefiting the USA more, judging by the lopsidedness of the conduct of the meeting.

However, one thing poses a greater threat to possibilities of a favourable outcome both for the USA and African countries. Both the USA and African (as individual states and as AU) appear to be ill prepared for the outcomes of the conference. Why? The US is not the only country that has noticed that potential opportunities in Africa. China has, and adapted quickly, fronting innovative modalities for development financing (that some African countries are warming up to), pursuing fewer restrictions on credit/loans and assistance strategies. The USA on the other hand is stuck in idealist modalities for development cooperation. Further, while China is actively and aggressively engaging Africa in all corners, US infrastructure for economic diplomacy in Africa appears lame and ill suited to succeed. China currently has over 150 commercial attaches in different corners of Africa while the US department for commerce has presence in just about four countries in the continent each of which supported by no more than two officers.

Africa on the other hand has failed to determine a common political-economic agenda and framework for haggling with potential partners in the international arena. The continent (AU) was unable to meaningfully influence the conduct of the summit in terms of setting the agenda, agreeing the modalities for engagement and so on. However, it is fair to note that some regional blocks like the East African Community met ahead of the summit in Nairobi and compromised to front some of the EAC’s infrastructure projects like Lamu Port Southern Sudan-Ethiopia Transport (LAPSSET) Corridor project as a block instead of individual bilateral engagements. In fact the architecture of the summit was in such a way that it couldn’t allow serious bilateral or even multilateral dialogue for substantive action.

Legacy politricks?

The question that cannot escape being asked is that about the timing of the summit. Why did the Obama administration choose 2014 to host this meeting? Why so late in the course of his tenure? Was Africa ever seriously on his agenda? Was this Obama’s clever way of making peace with his clearly underwhelmed kins? Is this summit for Obama’s memoirs? Every US president has had something to take home to the books in their sunset days. Bill Clinton penned the Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA), that though not been fully exploited was something both for Africa and for the Democrat. George Bush, despite the bad name took the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to his memoirs as one of the greatest initiatives for Africa. PEPFAR was very successful in supporting programming and interventions for combating HIV/AIDS. So, when all is said and done, was this Obama’s legacy card for Africa?

Beyond selfies, cowboy boots and statesons, what?

In summary, when all the picture ops are exploited, when all the dinning and winning on White house south lawn are done; when all the interviews with CNN and curtains drawn o the US-Africa summit, what have African leaders brought back home? Beyond selfies, cowboy boots and Stetsons; what should they have returned to Africa with? May be three things:

·     Extension and strengthening of the Africa Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA) beyond its expiry date in 2016. Strengthen the Act and encourage African countries to fully exploit the opportunities it offers. There are some countries that exported very little to the USA despite the provisions of AGOA.

·     A road map to a US-Africa trade and investment treaty: - The leaders could have laid the ground work for a bold move towards ratifying a treaty of partnerships (not necessarily of equals as many African leaders demand). They could have left Washington with a framework of action towards actualising this in the future.

·     From aid to partnerships: - This summit should have ignited the departure from more of aid or Official Development Assistance (ODA) or Humanitarian Assistance towards more of meaningful and inclusive partnerships for development financing, for combating terrorism and violent conflict, and addressing food insecurity and disasters like Ebola and HIV/AIDS. 

You do the math; sum up the expense of summoning 50 heads of state to the US for some 72 hrs and the returns. Check the bag of goodies that your ‘leader’ brought back home. Was it worth the hype? Are the prospects real?

What shall we eat? - Return Smart Sweet Sorghum!

Yesterday I attended a round table on food security with the theme – ‘What shall we eat?’ This was facilitated by the East African on the sides of the launch of Kenya’s 3^rd Agriculture Sector Development strategy graced by very important people – Government ministers and big private sector names. Folks went on and on with fancy stuff about eradicating subsistence agriculture and replacing it with Agribusiness to address food deficits in the country. I had a million questions to ask – poor thing the moderator could not spot my short self. So on my way back home, pretty distraught, stuck in Nairobi traffic I wondered why these guys were so out of touch with reality. However one thought kept bugging me. It was the thought of this crop that supplies food, fodder and fiber;  thrives in erratic climatic conditions, has the capacity to provide steady income to poor rural subsistence farmers, and can be harnessed to produce commercial alcohol and safe bio-fuels. I pictured this era of droughts, famines, unemployment, perennial food insecurity and saw policy makers racing to grab this crop. I saw ordinary poor people staring at the spectre of death from hunger actively investing in this crop even without government intervention, just for the sheer theoretical sense that it made. Yet this was just but a figment of fiction in my imagination. In reality this crop is SORGHUM.  Despite overwhelming evidence, it has not seen commensurate investment in its production, consumption and commercial utilization as compared to other peer cereal crops. So today I decided to tell a story - a SORGHUM story!

Anthropological evidence traces sorghum back to 8000BC Africa around western Ethiopia and Chad. It later spread to India, the Middle East and further to the Far East by around 400AD and only arrived in America (today the largest producer) in 1800s. Sorghum was then widely cultivated and consumed as a staple food; utilized in brewing beer, making bread and porridge. Domestically, it was used as fuel, thatch, fencing, housing construction and largely as fodder. Sorghum was a wonder crop; a self repellent to predatory birds, with high nutritional value and high net energy balance. It was a critical diet accessible and known to poor subsistence farmers in semi arid tropics for its resilience and ability to survive erratic weather conditions - (Sorghum matures in only 4 months and requiring just about 4000m³ per hectare - compared to corn that requires 8000m³).  

   

The corn-ish take over:

Well that was until the 1500AD ‘Colombian exchange’ as described by historian Alfred Crosby in reference to the epic importation of corn into Africa facilitated by the transatlantic trade. That exchange would mark the beginning of a massive cereal takeover. No one would have imagined at that point in time that corn would come to colonize the African farm, supplant historical African food grains (like sorghum and millet) and practically hold the African farmer and consumer hostage as the staple (not to do without food). It is however the dawn of commercialized production of corn that dealt the greatest blow to sorghum; suddenly the production and consumption of sorghum products that dated back many centuries stopped, beer brewed from sorghum was replaced with corn, and so was the case with porridge and bread. The reasoning then was that maize was a superior crop both nutritionally and commercially.  Today 16 out of the 23 countries in the world with the highest percentage consumption of maize are African. In Southern Africa, over 50% of total calorific consumption is drawn from corn. Besides colonizing the African plate, maize did colonize the African mind as well. In Malawi, corn is referred to as ‘Chimango cha makola’ meaning maize of the ancestors. Corn has become so entrenched and subdued other cereals to the extent that native Malawians thought it was actually a native crop passed on by their ancestors. 

Sorghum was downgraded mainly based on its palatability (the tannin in sorghum produces a less preferred bitter taste). Attitudes changed so much so that households that had for long cultivated and consumed sorghum turned to corn. Those that continued to cultivate sorghum were stigmatized and considered poor. In rural Africa, a social stratification emerged that categorized those that consumed only maize as “well to do” (at the highest level of society), those that mixed maize and sorghum flour as “middle class” and those who consumed pure sorghum or millet as “poor” households. This further entrenched the stigma against sorghum and created a production disincentive. Today sorghum occupies less than 25% of arable land across Africa, and globally it is number five among the largest cereal crops after wheat, rice, maize and barley.

Climate Change:

And then came climate change. This brought with it new realities in the battle between corn and other traditional African cereals. Alas, the reliable rainfall that corn so heavily depended on is no longer predictable. Moreover soil productivity has declined as a result of over production, poor land management and conservation practices and attendant toxicities.  The result has been a desperate lot of African farmers left with an over-hyped crop with limited resilience to prevailing weather conditions against a background of neglected and underdeveloped alternative cereal crops. Today maize production is largely fluctuating and unpredictable. This has contributed to significant deficits in food production, high food prices, hunger and desperation (especially among the chronically poor).

Take Kenya for example, government policy has focused more on maize production giving lesser attention to alternative cereals.  The production of corn is significantly higher than sorghum and millet despite its highly erratic productivity. Folks have continued to invest in it and neglected the others anyway. Research and development, capacity and infrastructure towards sorghum have continued to lag behind other crops. Little has been done to educate farmers and to provide incentives to increase its production. Limited resources have been invested in improving its production, utilization, demand and marketing.

The return of Smart Sweet Sorghum:

Nonetheless people are gradually reverting to sorghum and in the most unusual places. In the past 2 decades, the area under sorghum cultivation has expanded, in fact almost doubled though production has not increased (still at 800Kg/ha on average). In urban areas, starred hotels today serve brown chapattis, millet/sorghum ugali/pap, and sorghum porridge. In addition, medical conditions are driving people away from maize to the good old smart sorghum for its nutritional content! Sorghum has also gained commercial significance in the malt and beer brewing industry where the private sector is increasingly contracting and facilitating farmers to produce sorghum commercially as a raw-material. The Nigerian brewing industry now consumes over 152,000 metric tonnes of sorghum annually. In East Africa, alcohol and beverage companies are providing incentives and subsidies to local populations to produce sorghum which is now a substitute for molasses in ethanol production. This is largely because the extract in the stalks of sorghum and the brown midrib produce high quality ethanol which is cheaper and more sustainable – compared molasses from sugarcane. New developments have capitalized on harnessing clean bio-energy from sorghum, which if effectively produced would provide a cheaper and cleaner alternative to fossil oil fuels. Sorghum is increasingly being harnessed to produce clean bio-fuels that could effectively help reduce foreign oil import costs, reduce green house gas emissions and mitigate the effects of other fuel sources on pollution and global warming. Indeed some of the billions of dollars paid to overseas oil producers can be effectively diverted to invest in and benefit poor rural communities producing sorghum based bio-fuels.

To cut my long story short. The evidence is overwhelming. You obviously do not need to be a rocket scientist to figure out how much Africa needs this crop. The loathing of subsistence agriculture helped by such delusional policies of transforming over a whole population of sedentary subsistence farmers into Agri-businessmen and women just won’t give us food. Isn’t it time governments stepped up agricultural policy and action towards reintroducing and revamping the productivity of this crop?

Where art thou oh African Philanthropist?

‘In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself said: It is more blessed to give than to receive’ (Acts 20:35 NIV)

Last Night as I skimmed through the OECD Credit Reporting System (CRS), I noticed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation actually features on the dataset as a key donor reporting well over $2.9 billion worth of foreign aid to developing nations and $0.75 billion worth of commitments to Sub-Sahara Africa between 2009 and 2010. Well it is common knowledge that private entities and foundations financed by the world’s rich and renowned philanthropists today contribute a significant proportion of development assistance channelled to countries commonly referred to in aid parlance as the Highly Indebted Poor Countries. The list doesn’t end with the Gates foundation, a lot more other generous rich men and women have extended their generosity and committed significant proportions of their wealth to supporting organizations and initiatives that work to reduce human suffering, restore human dignity, alleviate and mitigate the effects of poverty.

But that’s not the reason I woke up early this morning to do this post: certainly not. I came across this list of the richest men and women of the African continent published by the Forbes magazine and I was honestly flabbergasted! Men, don’t we have rich people down here! I mean men and women who have earned their wealth out of legitimate mercantile ventures (I elect to down play the plethora of others, probably way richer than the ones on Forbes, whose wealth is of dubious cradles). I mean the likes of Aliko Dangote ($11.2 billion), Nigeria; Mohamed Al Amoudi ($12.5 billion), Ethiopia/Saudi; Mike Adenuga ($4.3 billion), Nigeria; Nassef and Naquib Sawiri (over $8.2 billion), Egypt; Patrice Motsepe ($2.7 billion), South Africa Miloud Chaabi ($2.9 billion), Morocco and so on. These guys are billionaires in their own right, making it in this continent of perceived squalor, ineptitude and misery.

The question that lurked in my mind as I read through this list was why Africa’s richest have failed the philanthropy test? Why haven’t these honourable men of the African soil found it prudent and befitting to share a small steady proportion of this share of the African cake with the desperate folks engulfed in poverty and deprivation in Sub Sahara? How comes other men and women elsewhere have felt the pinch, the pain and suffering of fellow Africans a lot more than we do us African Moguls, billionaires? How comes it doesn’t disturb you honourable vanguards of my decent that people miles away from the villages of Pampaida, N/Nigera; Malehice, Mozambique; Marsabit, Kenya; Mai Chaka, Ethiopia; Candele, Angola, come all the way to feed our starving folks, treat our sickling children, clothe our women and shelter our families. How shameful?

Do a small quick math – take Aliko Dangote for example, ranked 76^th richest being on earth, with an empire worth over $11 billion USD in 2011. This is four times the total GDP of the republic of Burundi, 30% that of Kenya, twice Nigeria’s 2011 federal budget and 55 times Nigeria’s health sector budget in the same year. Dangote’s pre-tax turnover in 2010 was well over $100 million dollars: just slightly about 8% of this profit margin is equivalent to the $0.8 billion required for the Nigeria Federal government to beat the target of committing at least 15% of total government revenue for health sector spending set in Abuja by Africa heads of states in 2000. Likewise Mohamed Al Amoudi is ranked 63^rd wealthiest man (also richest black man). His business empire worth $12.5 billion in 2011 was 15% total GDP of the five East African countries and equivalent to South Sudan’s average GDP between 2008 and 2010.  

I am by no means claiming even vaguely that there haven’t been philanthropic gestures from noble individuals around Africa; NO. In fact there have been anecdotes of evidence showing significant contributions (albeit irregular, unpredictable and devoid of focus) to health, education and cultural sectors, most visibly sport. Dangote through the Dangote Foundation has reportedly supported education and health service delivery systems and provided humanitarian assistance to victims of natural disasters and post-election and religious crises in Nigeria, Al Amoudi likewise has supported breast cancer research and HIV/AIDS interventions, notably the International Conference on AIDS and STIs (ICASA). However, I am posing these questions because I thought well to do Africans could logically identify a lot more with the poverty in Africa than anyone else; and I thought as well that they could be a lot more challenged and incentivised to give than those from other continents. I believe what is forthcoming from Africa’s tycoons is far too little considering the proportion of Africa’s resources that sustains their wealth. And whenever they give, that which is forthcoming has invariably been unpredictable, not properly organised and never harmonised with state structures and systems that factor in aid in country resource baskets and expenditures.  

Free market privileges notwithstanding, I think it has reached the point where the same manner of activism and a commensurate measure of pressure that has been put on rich countries and capitalists to support poverty and developmental initiatives needs to assume the direction of Africa’s home grown tycoons. Their wealth reflects continued consumption of significant chunks of Africa’s resources and they must thus do the honourable thing ... start GIVING: giving a little more, transparently and regularly. Motsepe’s mines are obviously depleting a considerable amount of South Africa’s mineral deposits; Dangote’s cement empire is definitely exhausting West Africa’s rich limestone fields, Al Amoudi’s oil ventures sure have their share of destruction on Africa’s environment and natural resources, Adenuga’s telecom business has so far cashed in on West Africa’s purchasing population and Uhuru Kenyatta is of course holding on to humongous tracks of land that multitudes of Kenyans could do with.  If anything, isn’t that what legacy is all about, playing a part in making the world a better place for all of us.  

The big names in global philanthropy, the likes of J.D Rockefeller Jnr, Bill Gates, George Soros and other consistent foundations that continue to deliver funding for development projects in Africa like the Levi Strauss, Hewllet, Ford foundations have well structured and organized modalities for delivering portions of their wealth as development assistance. This is well aligned with state structures and could be streamlined to compliment and supplement government budgets and developmental objectives. That is obviously lacking in Africa; the few who have attempted to institutionalise their giving are unpredictable, irregular and lack the transparency that is requisite for aid effectiveness. Most of the resource flows from Africa’s moguls have been expended in financing sport and culture related ventures and pursuing political expediency.  Al Amoudi for example has handsomely sponsored the Council for East and Central Africa Football Associations (CECAFA), Dangote hugely funding former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo’s political campaigns as well as incumbent Goodluck Jonathan who even awarded him one of Nigeria’s highest ranks of nobility; Mike Adenuga’s Glocom has equally funded music competitions across West Africa.  Otherwise, a lot of news about these billionaires is normally about their luxurious indulgences that ridicule the continent. The $45 million bombardier XRS private jet that Dangote got himself on his 53^rd birthday in 2011 for example was equivalent to 80% of all aid disbursements for education sector spending in South Sudan in the same year.

My message to the Forbes 10 African Billionaires to watch - messrs:  Manu Chandaria (Kenya), Phuthuma Nhleko (South Africa), Naushad Merali (Kenya), Tokyo Sexwale (South Africa), Harold Pupkewitz (Namibia), Said Salim Bakhresa (Tanzania), Gilbert Chagoury (Nigeria), Antonio Oladeinde Fernandez (Nigeria), Kase Lawal (Nigeria) and Isabel Dos Santos (Angola) - when your pockets eventually cross the billionaire mark, remember that as much as the liberal market economy today rewards and privileges hard working individuals with huge perks (in the form of profits and comfort) ... it doesn’t preclude and relieve the rest of us African folk from our share of the continents wealth. Find it within you as a matter of obligation and morality to share the spoil. And while you are at it, care to be more predictable and transparent. Foreign philanthropy has succeed somewhat and so must African philanthropy.

IN ANY CASE EVEN GOD DEMANDS OF US TO BE KIND

#Someone Tell CNN

#SomeoneTellCNN has been trending in Kenya for more than 12 hours now. Well this was a demand by Kenya's ‘twittosphere’ who agree that CNN was inept and out-rightly unfair to the Kenyan nation on its reporting of the grenade explosions that occurred at Country Bus Station in downtown Nairobi in the evening of Saturday 10^th March 2012 for a formal apology from CNN.

Frankly, I live in Nairobi and was less than 5 miles away from the site of the grenade explosion that CNN referred to in this erroneous ‘news scoop’ and there are two things; a fact and the other a falsehood that I’d like anyone who reads this post to appreciate.

Fact: - Three hand grenades were thrown out of a moving car that exploded and killed three instantly, another three succumbed to injuries at the Kenyatta National Hospital and 68 others sustained injuries from the explosion.

Fiction: - David McKenzie’s allusion that a wave of VIOLENCE had revisited Kenya

This is the typical case of unfair bad reporting of events that happen in Africa by international media: An obviously exaggerated and blown out of proportion account of a grenade attack that the government of Kenya is investigating and already linked to the infamous rogue Somali militia – Al Shabab. Listen folks at CNN, get it from me, KENYA IS PEACEFUL, there is no VIOLENCE as portrayed by David McKenzie yesterday. What happened was an isolated case that obviously didn’t warrant the amount of publicity that was granted by CNN. If I worked for CNN, I would have reported to you how a desperate cornered militia group attempted to disturb peace in Nairobi and how Kenya is dealing with it; how the rest of the country is largely serene despite the attacks. Or better still I would report to you the milestones that Kenyan athletes were accomplishing  in Istanbul, Turkey at the IAAF indoor games at the moment of the explosion.   

As he went ahead to deny having used the word VIOLENCE on air during the live broadcast, the banner screaming ‘VIOLENCE IN KENYA’ that accompanied it betrayed his alibi and irked the millions of Kenyans on twitter. It spoke volumes to the huge audience he was targeting. With all due respect David McKenzie and CNN succeed in unearthing the dark moments in the history of Kenya that we’ve struggled to deal with, a portrait that has cost us fortunes in economic terms and a priceless image of peace that we will forever owe our future generations. Whoever is aware of the violence that rocked Kenya in 2007/2008 after disputed elections definitely had a memory refresher that is hard to undo! 

Though Kenyans on twitter have boldly posited their dissatisfaction and demanded an apology from CNN (follow this link for a transcript http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56VuSrYSSWE) I think an apology cannot be the ultimate. Am trying to soberly argue with whoever is responsible for editing news at CNN: could you please develop the habit of doing a lot more serious background work before you hurry to grab a 'news scoop' and make fools of yourselves.  I am not a trained journalist but I keep wondering: Why is it so difficult to be objective and truthful about what is reported about happenings in Africa? Yes, Africa has her share of challenges: poverty, bad governance, violence etc but what kills Africa most today is the bad IMAGE and bad publicity every African state has got to deal with. This out-rightly irresponsible and contemptuous trend in reporting African affairs must stop.

Come on folks, we are struggling to market Africa here. We are trying to attract investment and people for tourism. This pessimistic countenance sure makes things much harder. Stop portraying Africa as the home of EVIL, SQUALOR and all manner of negatives. Image is very integral for the African Renaissance and so as much as David MacKenzie might have offered a half hearted 136 character apology to Kenyans on twitter, the bad image he conveyed to billions of CNN audience can obviously not be reversed. The damage is done.  It will cost loads more to change the perception of the Swiss couple that was making travel arrangements to come to Kenya for holiday; to regain the confidence of the Chinese businessman who was finalising portfolio preparations and correspondence ahead of an investment meet in Kenya and of course much more to win the will of the Canadian student that was winding up preparations to travel to Kenya for a months long research.

No amount of apology on CNN can possibly cure that. 

Listen Mr. African 'STATESMAN': Rants of a Troubled Pan-Africanist

OK listen AU, IGAD, EAC, NEPAD and all other multilateral African institutions and ‘statesmen’ who’ve perfected the art of perennially ranting and whining about ‘Western Imperialism’. I am talking as a Pan-Africanist disturbed by the ingenuity, ineptitude and slack of many a folk in the exclusive club of African leadership. 

Listen, an intergovernmental, inter-agency summit is underway in London, United Kingdom as I write. It’s the Somalia Conference convened by British Prime Minister David Cameron and his allies to address the troubles and restoration of Somalia. I know you are probably there already - INVITED, and must have carried elaborate delegations with you. Invited to participate? Invited to provide quorum? Or maybe just to be placated? Maybe to be arm twisted like you traditionally have been. Don’t you find it uneasy, disturbing or just funny that you are invited by a foreign entity, the same ‘Western Imperialists’ that you detest so much to deliberate on an endemic African predicament, a shameful scar on the Emblem of Africanism that is squarely on your mandate? Aren’t you a tad bit disturbed by your always sluggish, last-man response to matters of African welfare?

I listened pensively to presidential speeches at the recently concluded AU summit in Addis Ababa: African leaders whining, distraught and disenfranchised, faulting the West, NATO for their role in the destabilization of an African flagship country – Libya. But come to think of it, beyond that barrage of rhetoric, emotions and the display of flaring tempers orchestrated by the likes of Zimbabwean ‘statesman’ Robert Mugabe, What did you do about Libya? How much seriousness did you commit to standing with an African state? How much resources or even time did you devote to rescuing Libya? After how long did you act? Anyway, I guess my questions could be indeed irrelevant for a people who can’t even agree on a stable AU leadership, a people clearly disillusioned and oblivious of their mandate.

How shameful it is that you just get invited to an assembly of this calibre. How humbling it is that you will merely sign the resolutions but without the muscle and space to take centre stage in their execution. How I wish this would have been a partnership at the least, a joint caucus of an African multilateral institution with the western allies OR at best an African initiative strategized and executed by Africans drawing in international allies. As it is, I guess you haven’t mustered any serious leverage in these deliberations and you won’t be able to bargain and argue more aptly for Somalia, the Horn of Africa, and Africa. God forbid you might be participating effectively as rubberstamp ink, in a premeditated process of ratifying already engineered English/Western judgements on the prospects for Somalia.

Isn’t it time you cut the rhetoric and got more proactive, more strategic and more creative in sorting out the challenges bedevilling our beautiful troubled continent? Isn’t it time such big African economies like Nigeria, South Africa as well as promising ones like Ghana, Botswana rolled up their sleeves and contributed more in terms of resources, time and delved into the murky waters of African Unity like their counterparts in Asia, Europe and South America do? 


For as long as you proceed with the prevailing ambivalence about these imperatives, you continue to sell out Africa – Cut the rhetoric folks; get down to work!