On Africa's Elephants, Black and White

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

07 October 18

AIROBI, Kenya – This dispatch was meant to be about saving the noble elephant. But after a hard look at Africa today, with an eye on the narrow worldview of ignoble pachyderms in America, the focus shifted to jackals and hyenas.

Consider Kenya, a once and future hope as a model for an enlightened dark continent. It throbs with potential. Young people with fresh ideas join an old guard in transforming it beyond recognition. Yet despite its outspoken courts and critics, it is shot through with corruption.

Those endangered black elephants are, in fact, making a comeback. Asian appetites for ivory are waning. Young Kenyans are taught to protect their wildlife heritage. The problem is white elephants, giant dubious schemes with ample opportunity for skimming off the top.

Plunder is old news in Africa. Since winds of change brought independence in the 1960s, uncounted billions in public funds have vanished into private pockets. Now, however, plunder is organized and obvious, an entrenched component of global geopolitics.

Kenya is hardly the worst case, but it illustrates clearly new winner-eat-all directions across sub-Saharan Africa.

Washington, thinking small, is slashing vital development aid in favor of private deals that enrich U.S. companies. That enables China, thinking big, to recolonize Africa, securing vast repositories of raw materials, minerals, oil, and arable land vital to its manifest destiny.

Western aid to Africa requires transparency and protection of human rights. China simply pays the price of admission, adding off-the-books incentives. At a summit in Beijing, Xi Jinping just pledged another $16 billion to Africa in grants and loans that put recipients in his debt.

Previous U.S. administrations helped journalists track hijacked aid, and the State Department weighed in if authorities got tough with them. Donald Trump changed that. His signature phrase, fake news, is a godsend to any government eager to muzzle its press.

“I’m following so many scandals I can’t keep track of them,” a skilled Kenyan investigative reporter told me. “You can’t follow the money when it’s cash stuffed in briefcases or if it disappears in mysterious shell companies and foreign bank accounts.”

She paused a moment, then laughed nervously. “You know, you’re going to get me fired.” In Kenya, that’s likely the worst that would happen. Elsewhere, jailed, or worse, is a distinct possibility. As a result, blatant unreported corruption gets ever more rampant.

For example: Multiple sources I trust confirmed an open secret in Kenya: a top-level politician is profiting hugely from a Chinese-funded $2.2 billion coal-fired power plant project near Lamu, an island jewel protected as a U.N. World Heritage site from where wooden dhows ply the Indian Ocean as they have for seven centuries. But one needs evidence to name him.

The project makes no sense. Kenya has pledged to use alternative energy and already produces more power than its needs. Consumers pay a levy for excess capacity. The coral reef off a paradise hideaway resort near Lamu was dredged so ships can bring coal from South Africa.

Experts warn of health risks and environmental calamity. For far less expense, Kenya could build smaller plants near urban and industrial centers without long transmission lines. General Electric, which committed to a $400 million investment, might back out after a shareholder revolt.

But the project suits China, with hundreds of decommissioned coal plants to export as it switches to greener energy sources at home. About 1,400 Chinese workers would build and run the plant. And the deal solidifies Beijing’s ties to top-level politicians who champion it.

Lawsuits by conservationists have stalled the project, but China is in no hurry. Its focus is on the next 100 years. Eventually, the plant is expected to power a huge new port along with a railway and oil pipeline from South Sudan, Uganda and Ethiopia.

If China can wait, hard-pressed African nations can’t. Money spent on future infrastructure – and graft skimmed off the top – is desperately needed now for schools, hospitals, housing and basic public works.

Lingering poverty feeds extremist terror by the Somalia-based Al-Shabaab, which killed 67 people and wounded 175 others at Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall in 2013. While cutting back economic aid, the Trump administration has increased U.S. military activity in the region.

China, spurred on by Trump’s bellicose rhetoric, added muscle to its economic presence. It is fast taking over Djibouti, once a sleepy mini-state on the Gulf of Aden with a French Foreign Legion outpost. The Americans built Camp Lemonnier in 2003. Last year, a Chinese naval base and runway opened eight miles away from 4,000 U.S. personnel.

The Pentagon-backed African Center for Strategic Studies reports that Djibouti owes China $1.5 billion. This year, the government broke its contract with a Dubai company to run its port. A state-owned Chinese contractor is taking over operations, which allows inspection of everything shipped into the strategic little state.

Overall, according to that report, China operates about 2,500 “development, civil works and construction” projects worth $94 billion in 51 African states. Most are built and operated by Chinese, with some political and economic advantage to China’s long-term plans.

The report did not estimate how much of that ended up – or would likely end up – in private pockets. In Kenya, among the most transparent of African states, educated guesses run to 20 percent. Looking back half a century, that reflects an avoidable tragedy.

I first visited Kenya in 1968, not long after Britain and France set their African colonies free. Although each started out with a functioning democracy and money in the bank, all badly needed help to educate new generations that could create nations beyond old tribal divides.

But Washington and Moscow, waging Cold War, squandered aid on grand schemes to woo allies, however authoritarian. Multinationals bribed governments for access to markets and resources. Rather than development, Africa got dissidents, rebels and, now, terrorists.

George W. Bush and Barack Obama retooled American aid, enlisting private companies that watch where the money goes. They deployed troops and intelligence officers, often out of sight, to help African states confront a rising tide of terrorism. Trump fixates on military solutions, ignoring the poverty that feeds the ranks of Al-Shabaab and other groups.

So, back to those pachyderms. When elephants fight, an old African proverb goes, the grass gets trampled. That’s true enough in the short term. But when too much grass gets trampled for too long, the big game goes, leaving the hyenas and jackals to scavenge.

Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

The Road to Progress Is Paved With Pain

By Rebecca Traister, The Cut

07 October 18

oday, as United States Senate Republicans, minus the vote of one Republican woman and with the help of one Democratic man, vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, we can see very clearly what is happening. They are shoring up the power of the minority in this country over its majority population, and in doing so, acting to subvert the founding promises — of democracy and representation — which have always been hollow, yet have been the notions to which that minority power has clung with dishonest reverence.

In gaining control of the Supreme Court that may last them generations, they will be able to reverse the progress that had been made, over centuries, by previous generations of angry protesters, loudmouths, and hysterics. A court cemented by the confirmation of an ill-tempered and elite Beach Week participant, a seemingly congenital perjurer and alleged perpetrator in at least two credible instances of assault, will likely work to dismantle workplace and collective bargaining protections, what’s left of affirmative action, abortion rights and perhaps access to birth control itself, and of course the promise of full enfranchisement — the true and most powerful tool of our theoretical democracy.

The behaviors of the past few weeks — the actual logistical efforts made by Republicans to discredit, disarm, and punish those who would impede their further accumulation of power — are the meta rehearsal of what they want to do on a grand legal and legislative scale: They want to ensure that minority rulers in this country, will never again have to “put up with” the objections made in loud voices — or take into consideration the popular yearning for dignity, respect, recognition and full participation that those voices might be channeling.

And the fact is, they have reason to fear those women and men who had come to try to halt their illegitimate and undemocratic attempts to bolster minority rule. After all, they wouldn’t have so much progress to reverse if that progress hadn’t been made in the first place by masses of people willing to yell and scream and sit and organize and run and devote entire lives to trying to make this country something better than it is — something closer to what it always claimed to be.

Even now, in this moment of terrible, long-term, consequentially chilling defeat, those who voiced their fury did something incredibly powerful: They made this all so visible; we can see it, write about it, show the world what just happened. Here was a view of the powerful, old white men — in power for so long that they can call up tape of how they dismissed and derided Anita Hill — and the white women, the “female assistants” and partisan handmaidens who are eager, perhaps avid, to help them in their pursuit of further suffocating authority. We heard and saw Turkos confronting Manchin, Jess Morales confronting Ted Cruz, and of course Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher demanding that Jeff Flake look them in their eyes. And then we watched all of those men vote for Kavanaugh.

To say that a beast of mass dissent has been waking up for a while — from Occupy and Black Lives Matter, through the women’s marches and teachers’ and fast food workers’ strikes happening in recent weeks — is no silver lining. This shouldn’t make us feel good. This should make us feel aware that the fight ahead is endless, and will be ugly, and that millions of us will not live long enough to see it succeed against attempts to quash it.

Friday, October 5, was the anniversary of the New York Times’ story on Harvey Weinstein’s history of sexual assault, making it the unofficial anniversary of #MeToo, a movement that is itself an extension of Tarana Burke’s 2006 Me Too movement to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of sexual assault, which was itself a form of resistance enabled by the testimony of Anita Hill, which itself was grounded in the legal cases asserting sexual harassment as a form of gender discrimination, brought by women of color in the 1970s and drawing their basis in civil rights law on racial discrimination, themselves precipitated by centuries of mass protest movements.

This road is winding, long, unjust and cruel. It is set up to make victories — legal, electoral, moral — few and far between. But it also shows us, sometimes in blinkingly small and incomplete instances, that those victories are sometimes possible. If they weren’t, these powerful men and their allies wouldn’t be so desperate to silence and stop the masses from exerting their will, their rights, and their humanity as somehow equal to the humanity of those who wield power over them.

On the same day that the we learned that Brett Kavanaugh would be confirmed to the Supreme Court, Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder for the death of Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old boy shot 16 times dead in 2014 as he was walking away from police officers. The poet Nate Marshall, in a piece at BuzzFeed noting the historic nature of this conviction — Van Dyke is the first Chicago police officer convicted of murder in more than 50 years — described how, while he wanted to “feel joy…vindication…righteous relief…[and] the satisfaction in knowing that the work of organizers, activists, artists, and so many everyday people across the city and country was not in vain, that there was restitution for the theft of a young man’s life,” what he mostly feels instead is sad, and aware that it “should not take the continued martyrdom of black people to expose the country’s moral bankruptcy.” And yet, Marshall went on, he retains some hope that “this verdict opens a small window through which we might reconsider, as a society, what justice looks like.”

This is the brutally hard, but morally crucial project ahead.