Malawi, traditionally dependent on Western aid donors, will look for “new friends” in countries such as China and Russia, newly-elected President Peter Mutharika said at his inauguration on Monday.
The ceremony at a stadium in the commercial capital Blantyre was boycotted by outgoing president Joyce Banda, who was soundly beaten by Mutharika in disputed elections held on May 20.
Mutharika, who takes power in one of the world’s poorest countries where 40% of the budget comes from aid, said the donor nations were “welcome to stay here”.
Foreign policy would be based on what is best for Malawi, he said.
“We will continue with traditional relationships, but we are now looking for new friends in emerging economies such as Brazil, China, India, South Africa and Russia.”
Mutharika said he regretted Banda’s absence, saying she had “declined to come here and hand over power to me.
“I was looking forward to shaking her hand and burying the past. I have an olive branch in my hands.”
A spokesperson for Banda said: “She was not officially invited and her official presidential convoy was withdrawn early hours of Saturday as soon as it was announced that Peter Mutharika had won the presidency.
“It would have been difficult for the outgoing president to travel to Blantyre.”
Malawi’s President Peter Mutharika of the Democratic Progressive Party waves to supporters after he was sworn in in Blantyre on May 31 2014. (Pic: Reuters)
Treason charges Mutharika takes over despite facing treason charges for attempting to conceal the death in office two years ago of his brother, Bingu wa Mutharika, in an alleged bid to prevent Banda – then vice-president -from assuming power.
Those charges are likely to be dropped as Malawian presidents have immunity from prosecution while in office, and there has been speculation that Mutharika might now try to turn the tables on Banda and have her charged with corruption.
Banda had alleged anomalies in the election and sought to have the vote nullified.
Legal attempts to force a recount failed and the electoral commission declared Mutharika winner with 36.4% of the votes cast against Banda’s 20.2%.
Banda on Saturday congratulated Mutharika on his victory.
Africa needs a new feminism. A feminism that rises from the throats of ungovernable women, rolls down the backs of intellectually curious young men, and trickles down from every corner of government to reinvigorate the cultures of our continent, cultures that were greyed out by years of colonialism and the subsequent years of preoccupied capitalism. The feminism of Africa cannot be the same as the feminism of the West.
The cries of western feminists, seemingly weighed down by the apparent woes of suburban housewifery and the very troubling issue of beauty in the mainstream media, are swallowed up by the Atlantic Ocean before the old African woman even has time to tie a hungry grandchild to her back, or the new African woman can use her entry-level salary to take care of a mismatch of relatives who Did Not Have Her Opportunities.
My feminism cannot be the same as that of my western counterpart. As tempting as it may be to sidle up next to a fellow soft-breasted twenty-year-old and talk heatedly about what Beyonce’s ‘suggestive’ gyrating means for ‘respectability politics’, I am not yet there. As fun as it appears to be to park onto a social network and turn my woes into a trending topic, I must remember my place. For my place is not the same as that of a woman in a first-world country – no matter how identical our birthdays are, no matter how “universal” female suffering is. We are not the same.
So why should my feminism be the same?
I am an Africanist. A third generation independent African, my father and mother were born just a couple of years shy of their respective countries’ heated dash from the clutches of a tired Britain. My task is not a simple task – my debt to the continent has not been paid. But I am only one of the few that realises that we owe the continent more than it does us. And I will be damned if Africa loses another young, energetic, liberated mind to the lazy glamour of participating in western feminism’s weak assault on society.
Delegations of women from various Malian regions attend a rally against femal genital mutilations as they sit under a banner asking for the end of excision and forced marriage, on February 6 2014 in Bamako. (Pic: AFP)
African feminism has bigger fish to fry. Tasked with the burden of taking the blame for decades of societal degrade – alleged to be picking up where colonialism left off; the crumbs of African traditions are swept to the feet of the African feminist and she is expected not to accidentally crush them. When feminism or any allusion to gender equality is mentioned in a room full of traditionalists, self-proclaimed and otherwise, the voices shouting about the “un-Africanness” of a notion as simple as women’s rights are often all one can hear over the murmurs of those only beginning to find comfort in the idea.
But this cannot go on.
For all the other movements (like the pure socialism of African freedom fighters of the past) are dead and capitalism has swept up my generation of Africans into a sea of perpetual desire, too busy copying American consumerism to actively participate in the reshaping of the African political landscape. Many more are too busy simply trying to stay afloat with western debt-collectors chopping away at their sodden feet. They cannot express interest in feminism thought processes – especially if said thought processes seem to be limited to concerns common to first-world women only.
So Africa needs a new feminism, one that recognises that the young men of this continent, though allegedly protected by the warm veil of patriarchy, are as much at risk for poverty, disease and hunger as women are; one that recognises that after two or three generations of single-parent homes, young men have little to no idea of what it means to be a man and are left to grab blindly at caricatures of sexist male figures for guidance. Africa needs a feminism that sees that it is the last original attempt to take our cultures into our own hands and shape young men and women that can lead this place away from the greedy claws of ‘foreign investors’; away from the cement-like clutches of heads of state too old to care; away from the exploitative ideologies of fly-by-night politicians.
Africa needs a new feminism, because it’s our last hope.
Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 20-year-old Mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She blogs at siyandawrites.com. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites
A curious phenomenon has been recorded in some parts of Africa: people are becoming happier. The recent surge in happiness has even caught the attention of African leaders. At an April “expert consultation” in Cape Town hosted by the South African government, the African Union and Unicef, presentations were given which included an uplifting set of findings. In Zambia, there’s been a 45% increase in the amount of people who say they’re better off than 12 months ago; Ghana saw a 16% increase in the proportion of people answering “yes” to the question, “Are you happy with your life?” Malawi has seen a 20% increase in people who say they are “very happy” with their life, and in Kenya, there’s been a 6% increase on the Quality of Life index.
According to the impact evaluation work led by Unicef and partners, presented to around 40 African Union member states, people in some African countries are also eating better (Malawi and Zambia, for example, saw a 30% increase in food consumption while Ghana recorded a 10% decrease in the number of children missing a meal); are going to school more; are healthier (Liberia experienced a 20% increase in curative care seeking, Ghana had a 20% increase in health insurance coverage); are better nourished; and are transitioning to adulthood with greater success (Kenya saw reductions in early pregnancy and sexual debut, while South Africa saw a 63% decrease in teenage girls having sex with older men, and drug and alcohol consumption was less likely.)
The reason behind all this happiness, health and (delayed) sex, says Unicef, is simple: Thousands of people living in impoverished communities in these countries suddenly have more cash in their pockets. Some 20 countries across the continent have embraced what are known as a ‘social protection floors’. In essence, a growing number of national governments are deciding to support cash transfers to the poorest and most marginalised with no strings attached. The idea is that even a small amount of cash can tip the balance back in favour of a family, which might be struggling to survive. In countries where wages are often less than US$1 a day, cash transfers of as little as $12 a month, can have a profound impact. While traditional aid programmes continue to play a crucial role, it’s increasingly clear that it’s also very cost-effective to help governments disperse money.
Cash transfers to poor households Giving money to the poor in the developing world isn’t new. In the 1990s, Brazil began making “conditional” cash transfers to poor households where school-aged children were enrolled in school. However today, it is African governments who are leading the way in developing “home-grown” social protection programs designed to respond to their specific contexts and characteristics. That is, unconditional cash transfers which build on existing strong community structures and hence address economic as well as social inequality. Amid it all, rigorous evaluations have found that households receiving the cash do better. They eat better quality food, they can afford to buy livestock and their children go to school. These benefits defy notions that social protection is a hand-out. Conversely, rather than create dependency, or become a burden on budgets, cash transfers invest in the poor’s human capital, allowing people to generate even more income.
The list of African countries now using cash transfer policies is impressive. In Lesotho, the Child Grant programme is expected to cover 25 000 poor and vulnerable households, reaching 60 000 children, by 2014, more than doubling in two years. Zambia’s expansion of its Social Cash Transfer Programme is expected to reach 190 000 households, or 1 000 000 people, by the end of 2014. In Kenya, the government is planning to double the number of beneficiaries in its cash transfer programme. Senegal is doubling the number of beneficiary households in its programme with plans to reach 250 000 by 2017. In Ghana, the programme has expanded its reach from 1 650 households in 2008 to 71 000 in 2013. Plans for expansion are also underway in Mauritania, Mali, Malawi, Niger, and Zimbabwe, among others.
Unicef continues to advocate for social protection in Africa, supporting governments as they develop and strengthen social protection systems, and leading an innovative research initiative examining the impact of government-sponsored social cash transfer programs in sub-Saharan African countries: The Transfer Project.
Children Meanwhile, this Friday, on May 30, African social development ministers will meet at the African Union’s Addis Ababa headquarters to discuss how social protection programs can continue to benefit the continent’s children. The timing has never been more critical: Africa is going through a population boom and by 2050 one in three of the planet’s children will be African. During discussions we will argue that even low-income countries can afford to give money to the poor; indeed that they can’t afford not to. Social protection policies reduce inequity, help children, the communities they live in are transformed, and economies grow.
However, despite the growing popularity of the programmes, questions remain about how and in what contexts cash transfers are most appropriate and effective. Unicef hopes that lessons learned from the five-year Transfer Project will support national policy makers, who might otherwise be working in isolation, so that the benefits of giving money to the poor may continue to make Africans smile.
Natalia Winder Rossi is Unicef’s senior social policy specialist for Eastern and Southern Africa.
Earlier this week, I was in Twitter conversation with Dr Britney Cooper and others. Cooper and I were conflicted about US military intervention but hoping something good could come of President Obama getting involved in responding to the abduction. Others in the conversation cited recent instances where concern about women and girls was used as a pretext for military invasion. I noted that when President Bush invaded Afghanistan, it was an obvious sham because he and the conservatives backing the invasion were notorious for their opposition to policies for women’s rights, both domestically and internationally. Cooper cited the “the political dangers of US imperialism” and the “need [for] a moral schema that allows us to protect Black women and girls” concluding that “we must hold these things in tension”.
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light
He’s gotta be sure, he’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life, larger than life
US President Barack Obama. (Pic: Reuters)
I want to believe Obama is different. Isn’t he black enough, Kenyan enough, progressive enough? And I opposed US military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and Pakistan and Syria and Korea… but maybe it could be different this time. I could not accept that hundreds of young Nigerian girls could just be carted away. One leader of a Nigerian elders group spoke out against Nigeria’s own military inaction: “The free movement of the kidnappers in a huge convoy with their captives for two weeks…is unbelievable.”
I need a hero I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light
Obama has a black wife, black schoolgirl daughters, a Kenyan grandmother. Can’t we trust our Soul Brother commander-in-chief to rescue the damsels and not slip in Shell oil slicks? Isn’t it possible that the same US military with an epidemic history of rape problems could somehow be a rape solution in Africa?
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong, he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight
I should know better. I’m Puerto Rican, a daughter of the US’s eyesore present day colony since 1898. So before I could take a definitive position, I turned to my friend and trusted colleague, Kenyan poet and playwright Shailja Patel. She sent me this article from Compare Afrique, titled ‘Dear Americans, Your Hashtags Won’t #BringBackOurGirls. You Might Actually Be Making Things Worse‘. I could clearly see that my perspective had been skewed by a lifetime of conditioning to see the US as a potential rescuer. This, in spite of my opposition to all the military intervention in my lifetime, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq…
We progressives in the US, particularly those of African heritage, can be swayed by Obama’s public stances and record of improvement in various domestic social issues. However, progressive social policies at home do not correlate in any way with anti-colonial foreign policy.
Yet I had wanted to believe. I envisioned a Blaxploitation remake of Rambo that would bring Obama striding home against a backdrop of flames, fiery red bomb blast turning to smoke behind him, fainted schoolgirl limp in his arms (saved!). But I need to remember black girls will never be the Lois Lane of this tired movie. The story of black women and sexual violence has not been a tale of rescue. Ain’t nobody gonna spin the world backwards, restore our hymen, return the blood to the capillaries in an unlacerated vulva. Our story is of endurance, and survival, and healing.
To remix Audre Lorde: the coloniser’s army will never dismantle the legacy of the coloniser’s brutality. Perhaps all of us Afro diasporans in the US, hearing about the abduction and violence against African girls, wanted something other than silence, other than business as usual. We have nightmares of our own, from the recent outrage with R. Kelly’s Black Panties album, and the latest in-depth revelation of his one-man sexual violence crusade against black girls in US, we are desperate for someone in a position of influence to notice and intervene. We want someone powerful to #BringBackOurGirls. If only it were that simple.
“I and two other girls were close together [cooking], speaking softly, and we came up with a plan.” The girls told the gunmen they needed to relieve themselves…. “As soon as we were out of sight of the gunmen, we fled…” Eventually, the three stumbled across a group of Fulani herders, who rescued them.
The Fulani herders didn’t rescue them. Those girls rescued themselves when they decided to run. I claim Nigerian schoolgirls – scared teenagers who jump off buses, who stick together and plot escape while cooking for their captors, who stand up to and outwit grown men with AK-47s – as the heroes of this story.
I just hope that if one day one of them is in a position to be the first woman president of Nigeria, and proposes economic measures that would uplift her people – at the expense of US and multinational corporations – that whoever is president of the US doesn’t send the military in to assassinate her.
Aya de Leon (@ayadeleon) is on the faculty of the Afro Diaspora Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She writes, blogs, and tweets frequently about issues related to race, gender and colonisation at ayadeleon.wordpress.com. This post was first published on Rise Africa, a blog written by a group of individuals who seek to create an atmosphere that encourages conversation between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Connect with them on Twitter: @riseafrica
In the face of inadequate provision of power by the Sierra Leonean government, companies are stepping in to provide solar electricity systems that ordinary Sierra Leoneans can afford.
Since the 1980s Sierra Leone has been unable to reliably provide electricity to its citizens. Its capital Freetown, once dubbed “the world’s darkest city”, experiences daily power cuts. Outside the major cities the situation is far worse, with just one in 10 Sierra Leoneans having access to the national grid. That figure drops to 3% in rural areas, according to government and World Bank figures.
For now in much of the country it is only the privileged few who can afford to run costly and breakdown-prone diesel generators. Instead, for light, most people rely on kerosene lamps, candles or cheaply made battery powered plastic lights shipped in from China.
But in recent years the country has embarked on something of a solar revolution – at least for lighting and mobile phone charging. Main roads in the larger towns are now lit by solar streetlights. A Laos-based firm, Sunlabob Renewable Energy, is building 13 off-grid solar plants to supply lighting to universities and other community facilities.
Up to 60 health centres now get their lighting and power some electrical equipment thanks to “solar suitcases” installed by We Care Solar, who aim to reduce maternal mortality – Sierra Leone has the world’s highest maternal mortality ratio – by lighting hospitals and clinics. Meanwhile, in February Mulk Energy won a contract to construct a 6MW solar park in Freetown, which is set to be West Africa’s largest. It aims to provide electricity to hospitals, schools, and to 3 000 households by the end of 2014.
Solar energy still supplies a small fraction of Sierra Leone’s energy needs but the Advanced Science and Innovation Company, involved in setting up the solar park, hopes that in two years time one quarter of the country’s electricity can be supplied through renewable sources.
Indigo pay-as-you-go system But one particular project has found a way to make solar energy affordable to individual households using a pay-as-you go system. Azuri Technologies (who have partnered with rap musician Akon’s ‘Akon lighting Africa’ project) describes the product, Indigo, as “solar-as-a-service” and says it can cut energy bills by as much as 50%. To avoid the prohibitively high costs of buying the system outright, Indigo customers use scratchcards to buy it over time. They pay an initial US$12 to have the unit installed, and then 10 000 leones ($2.30) weekly for 18 months.
All those spoken to by IRIN said the Indigo lights were saving them a significant amount of money.
“Yes, we have been saving a lot,” said Aminatta, whose shop selling fabrics, a few rough cut diamonds and cigarettes remains open long after dark.
Aminatta uses an Indigo pay-as-you-go solar powered light to run her shop in Tombo village. (Pic: Tommy Trenchard/IRIN)
She was the first of 300 people in the fishing village of Tombo in western Sierra Leone to invest in the device. In five months her weekly payments will cease and her shop will be lit for free.
Mr Benga, also from Tombo, bought two. “Now my children can study here at night,” he told IRIN, pointing to a covered courtyard with a large Indigo LED light dangling against one wall. “I even gave one to my daughter to use in the dormitory at school.”
