Category: Perspective

Classroom heroes in CAR

“We, the teachers, we try to make the violence and the war that we have experienced disappear,” says Nguinissara Rita, a primary school teacher at the St. Charles Louanga Missionary displacement site in Bangui, capital of Central African Republic.

It is almost an impossible task in a country in the grip of a humanitarian crisis that affects some 2.3-million children.

Nevertheless, Ms. Rita takes the challenge head-on. In the overcrowded mass of tents, people, bags and mattresses in this makeshift camp, the classroom serves many purposes: For her pupils, it is a form of protection against potential recruitment and abuse; for her, it is a place to help lay a foundation for reconciliation in a conflict with no end in sight.

“We teach forgiveness to our children because we need to forgive the others,” she explains.

Temporary learning spaces
The school year in the Central African Republic has been disrupted for the better part of two years, and since 2012 most schools have been closed. To help provide educational opportunities to children, Unicef has supported international and national partners in setting up about 118 temporary learning spaces, covering more than 20 displacement sites in Bangui and other areas affected by conflict. As a result, over 25 000 children are back in a learning environment.

These temporary spaces are meant to operate only until schools reopen. “In the meantime, at least these children, who are living in difficult circumstances in the displacement camps, will regain some sense of normalcy and routine in a safe environment,” says Celeste Staley, chief of education at Unicef Central African Republic.

(Supplied)
(Supplied)

There have been efforts to reopen schools, but the process is slow and full of challenges. Many schools have been looted and damaged in the conflict. And given the continued insecurity, getting teachers back into classrooms is extremely difficult. Additionally, staff salaries are in arrears, which discourages teachers from returning.

Rebuilding and strengthening
Unicef supports the education cluster, a group made up of the national Ministry of Education along with NGOs and UN agencies engaged in the education sector. The cluster supports coordination among partners, joint assessments, identification of funding opportunities and sharing of information.

To support the reopening of schools, Unicef is providing basic school materials, light school rehabilitation, teacher training, and catch-up classes for children who have missed several months of classes.

The cluster is working with the transitional government to rebuild and strengthen the education system, which even prior to the crisis was among the least developed in the world.

“We know that it will be difficult to rebuild what was already a broken education system,” says Judith Leveillee, Unicef deputy representative in the Central African Republic. “But we must do what we can to get children back to school. This is where they should be. They have already lost so much.”

Back at the Louanga displacement camp, an energetic and passionate Nguirissara is teaching her young pupils a song. “Maybe it is my destiny; I don’t know,” she says. “But teaching children is something I like doing – and this way I can help them and my country.”

Suzanne Beukes is communications officer at Unicef’s Africa Services Unit.

Urbanisation in Africa and the conflict that comes with it

African nations are experiencing substantial urbanisation at a rate like never before. A continent that was once characterised by its largely rural nature is now seeing diverse groups of people – ethnically, religiously, and socioeconomically – flood its urban centres, 50 of which have a population of one million or more.

People come to the city for a number of reasons – to escape civil conflicts in rural areas, to search for employment in an effort to better their lives and those of their extended families, or in response to environmental issues such as drought or famine. In Africa especially, circular migratory patterns exist as people oscillate between large urban centres (to have access to wealth and other resources such as food and aid) and their villages (to maintain familial bonds).

However, even with the circular nature of migratory patterns as it exists, urban centres continue to grow in Africa. Considering the high fertility rates across the board, the bulk of this growth is in fact not coming from migrants but from the offspring of current city dwellers. When you combine this growth together with the aforementioned migratory population, it is estimated that this continent, where approximately 40% of the population lives in cities, will be more than 60% urban by 2050.

Traffic on Agege Motor Road in Lagos. (Pic: AFP)
Traffic on Agege Motor Road in Lagos. (Pic: AFP)

In the 2014 publication Africa’s Urban Revolution by professors Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse, civic conflict – a phenomenon that occurs hand in hand with this kind of rapid urbanisation – is defined. It is the violent expression of grievances vis-à-vis the state or other actors. Essentially, civic conflict is the manifestation of marginalised civilians’ frustration on the state’s inability to do things such as provide adequate housing or transportation, reduce distresses such as traffic and pollution or provide other services including healthcare, education to the masses. Though this type of conflict is distinct from warfare, which commonly exists in rural areas, these conflicts exist and effect great numbers of city dwellers. With the urbanisation in Africa taking place at its current rate, these conflicts should not be ignored.

The misconception that urban growth is temporary, that it will dwindle as conflict in rural areas is solved, robs civilians of a chance to live comfortably within the cities that they occupy. When I travelled to Abuja in February, I was struck by the immense traffic around the national mosque on Friday evenings. In recent years, increasing Boko Haram attacks in the northern states of Nigeria, many people have come to the nation’s capital to be out of this harm’s way. The traffic associated with the expanding population of the city does not only occur during this holy time for those of Muslim faith, but during rush hour as people struggle to find or get to work. Of course, the Nigerian state should take the steps it must in order to oust the terrorist group driving people away from their homes and into the capital. However, it should not be assumed that if and when it does, the population of Abuja will decrease to a more manageable one. Abuja and other cities in Africa that are experiencing growth from similar factors must increase attention towards alleviating woes within the urban centre or frustration amongst those caught in traffic jams of increasing length or those who live in inadequate housing due to the jurisdiction’s reluctance to provide the growing population with such will increase and strain the relationship between those who live in cities and those people who generate the policies around them.

Africa’s urbanisation provides both a challenge and an opportunity. It is an opportunity for young people to introduce innovative ideas that will allow for diverse groups in urban centres to be able to equally access resources and infrastructure in a way that will not put pressure on the state. However, in order to do so, the state must recognise that city growth is long-term and facilitate this kind of innovation. A symbiotic relationship between the state, the city centres and the population must be developed that allows for the growth of cities to occur in an efficient way that is considerate of the many different types of people who occupy these spaces.  As cities continue to grow in Africa, which they will, it is important that city management and these kinds of symbiotic relationships are not neglected. If they are, these civic conflicts and the ugly violence that becomes of them are sure to grow as well.

Georges Ekwensi is a Nigerian American from New Jersey. He contributes to 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

Alarm as Uganda moves to criminalise deliberate HIV transmission

Activists in Uganda, where HIV prevalence is on the rise, have warned that new legislation criminalising deliberate transmission of the virus will further undermine efforts to stem the Aids epidemic and erode the rights of those living with HIV.

As well as setting out fines and jail terms of up to 10 years for those found guilty of “willful and intentional” transmission, the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Bill, passed by Parliament on May 8 and now awaiting presidential assent, also obliges pregnant women and their partners to take HIV tests, and in some circumstances empowers health workers to unilaterally disclose a patient’s positive status to an at-risk partner or household member. It also obliges parents to tell their children of their status.

“Despite years of engagement and labouring to explain the dangers on an HIV-specific criminal law, Parliament has refused to be advised. When experts on HIV research and management attempted to speak, [lawmakers] still failed to heed to the key concerns,” Dorah Kinconco Musinguzi, executive director of Uganda Network on Law, Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UgaNet), told IRIN.

“If we have not managed to test 67% of Ugandans for HIV without a law that punishes transmission, will this number improve when citizens know that more legal burdens are added to testing? The answer is no. Will their behaviour improve because of this fear? No. Will we have helped the HIV situation then? No. We shall have more people transmit HIV in ignorance of their status. Laws do little to change behaviour, instead it takes behaviour underground,” she said.

Over the past five years HIV prevalence in Uganda has risen from 6.4% to 7.3%.

“The evidence from the Ugandan Ministry of Health shows clearly – criminalisation of HIV doesn’t work. It drives people away from services and fuels discrimination and fear,” Asia Russell of the HIV advocacy organisation Health GAP, told IRIN.

(Pic: Mujahid Safodien / IRIN)
(Pic: Mujahid Safodien / IRIN)

Alex Ario, the national co-ordinator of the ministry’s AIDS Control Programme (ACP), said “the Bill may not be that useful in my view. It does not add value to the current efforts. Actually, with dwindling support from donor communities to ACP as it is now, we would rather divert efforts to lobby government of Uganda to put more money for HIV activities rather than legislating against people with HIV.”

“We need to redirect legislative reform, and law enforcement, towards addressing sexual and other forms of violence against women, and discrimination and other human rights violations against people living with HIV and people most at risk of exposure to HIV,” he said.

Russell added that in conjunction with the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which passed into law in February 2014, this new law could lead “a sex worker apprehended for sex work, who is transgender and HIV positive, [to] be sent to prison for life.”

UgaNet’s Musinguzi said: “This [Bill] will hurt the women we have been encouraging to come up to take an HIV test such that they can have HIV-free children. But in this case, they will be forced to disclose their results and should they fear, and not do it in time, that means that they are potential candidates for [prosecution under] the Bill…

“There is high likelihood that justice will not prevail for the HIV-positive [people] found in this situation because of the high levels of stigma and condemnation that we have seen the HIV-positive go through,” she added.

More than 150 000 people are becoming HIV-positive every year; 1.5-million Ugandans are HIV-positive, according to Uganda Aids Commission statistics.

The Bill also flies in the face of the “rights-based” approach to HIV embodied in the regional HIV/AIDS Act passed in April 2012 by the East African Legislative Assembly.

Those in favour… 
Meanwhile, some MPs have been defending the Bill.

“Every piece of legislation is to prevent mischief. The Bill is both [a] legal and moral thing. We want to reduce down HIV deliberate infections,” Medard Lubega Ssegona, opposition shadow minister for justice and constitutional affairs, told IRIN.

“The Bill will encourage more people to go and test for their good. It will compel two consenting adults to test before they engage to each other because of the sanctions of false disclosure,” he said, adding: “The deliberate infections have caused a lot of burden [on] our economy. The government spends a lot of money on treating and taking care of people who have [been] deliberately infected by people with bad hearts. This is going to stop.”

Olivia Kwagala Kabaale, a legislator from the ruling National Resistance Movement party, said: “The mandatory disclosure will help to protect those who take care of the HIV sick people. Some of these people don’t want to disclosure their status yet they pose a risk of transmission of the virus to others.”

Laws in Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania also criminalise deliberate HIV transmission, leaving Rwanda the only member of the East African Community not to do so.

The new Bill also establishes the legal framework for an HIV Trust Fund to finance local-level programmes using money generated by levies on bank transactions and savings interest, air tickets, beer, soft drinks and cigarettes, as well taxes on goods and services traded within Uganda.

“The Bill is creating [an] HIV trust fund which is going to help the government raise local funds to support the HIV programme. It’s a right time for us now as a country to mobilize our own resources to fight the epidemic. We have been depending on donor support for our HIV fight,” said Kabaale.

Who can speak for the African experience?

(Pic: Flickr / Brendan Biele)
(Pic: Flickr / Brendan Biele)

Last week, I read with interest an article by Simon Allison of the Johannesburg-based Daily Maverick, wherein he gave reasons why Zimbabwe’s long-time opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, should vacate office and make way for alternatives.

While I agreed with many of his points, it was his deconstruction of Tsvangirai’s character, which formed the main thesis of his analysis, that I found jarring.

“There was a time, not too long ago, when Morgan Tsvangirai personified everything that was good about Zimbabwe,” wrote Allison, adding descriptions of the leader as having once been incorruptible, tenacious, fearless; selfless in his pursuit of democracy for Zimbabwe’s people.

In reading this analysis, I felt – as I often do when I read content about Zimbabwe produced externally – dissonance with the narrative being presented to me.

Zimbabweans, I generally believe, have been cognisant of Tsvangirai’s political and personal shortcomings for a very long time, only ignoring them for the desperate want of political change. Therefore, to paint Tsvangirai as having once-upon-a-time cast stars in the eyes of Zimbabweans is inaccurate, at least to me.

But Allison’s is not the first case of inconsistency between high-level commentary and what ‘voices on the ground’ might articulate. And neither is it the last, as the trend favouring non-experiential knowledge, and theory, over the lived realities of those being spoken of continues to grow.

Recently, a heated exchange broke out online between two American social commentators on hip hop and rap, namely Elite Daily’s Doran Miller-Rosenberg and Rap Rehab’s Sebastien Elkouby. The former offered a sarcastic rebuttal of an Elkouby article in which he offered controversial ways to stop children being brainwashed by mainstream rap; Number 2 was to “Talk trash about every wack rapper you see or hear.”

Elkouby’s response to Miller-Rosenberg, a white American who has reported rap and various popular culture genres, was emotively charged to say the least.

“For many of us, hip hop culture saved our lives, or at the very least, gave it a purpose… Most of you are hip hop culture vultures on a safari of appropriation and exploitation. You take and give nothing back,” stated Elkouby, invalidating Miller-Rosenburg’s authority to speak on behalf of the culture by virtue of what Elkouby depicted as Miller-Rosenburg’s voyeuristic navigation of the genre.

The message clearly conveyed was that as a white man, Miller-Rosenburg had no authority to navigate the discussion given that hip hop and rap were birthed – and continue to grow – from the lived experience of blackness in a still racially oppressive America; an experience which, as Elkouby constructed it, was one Miller-Rosenburg would always be external to.

Telling the African story
In a TEDx talk last year, the late BBC newscaster Komla Dumor talked through the construction of authoritative knowledge – with his example focused on Africa – stating that while the idea of a haggis expert based at the University of Makerere might be laughable, the same is never true of an expert on Africa based in Washington, London or any space ‘other’ to Africa.

The appropriation of narratives is perhaps most often associated with race and historical privilege, but even the Afropolitanism movement has recently come in for criticism – by Africans – for  its perceived role in facilitating the appropriation and commercialisation of the continent’s narratives and artefacts through the hyphenation of ‘all things African’ with a touch of western  nuance.

While the Afropolitan might be a common sight in many parts of Europe and America, this ‘new African’ is not so often seen on the continent. So that the narratives of the African who does breakfast in Lagos, dinner in Paris, or who sips on fair trade coffee from Kenya while going through the complete works of Frantz Fanon at the airport departure lounge hardly resonate with the majority of Africans in Africa and abroad. Ironically, what is constructed as the alternative narrative to the dominant and macabre depictions of Africa becomes its own hegemonic and highly exclusionary representation of what a resurgent Africa – an Africa ‘on the rise’ – should look like.

Last year, Voices of Africa featured a piece in which Stephanie Kimou lamented her inability to find good African men upon recent return to the continent, having lived and studied in the US.

The combination of Kimou’s western historical context and sweeping generalisations about African men (“First, every African man wants a cook, like his mama”) led to debates – at least those that I was privy to – being less about the potential veracity of her views, and more about what authority she had to paint the continent’s men with one brushstroke as a recent returnee.

Additionally, the indictment of African men left many African women feeling judged for choosing to love them.

Pushback was, therefore, not necessarily founded upon disagreement with Kimou’s opinion; but largely upon doubts about her authority to speak as an ‘authentic’ African voice.

It may seem easy to dismiss the discourse of authenticity on the grounds of the internationalised lives most of us lead. Regardless of where we are, we eat, watch, listen to and wear imported products. But the fact remains that speaking on behalf of, especially where there is geographical, cultural or experiential removal, promotes feelings of emasculation in the person(s) being spoken of; especially where nuances about their experiences are omitted, and inconsistencies observed. And quite often, the response to such representations is defensive retaliation, even where this may be irrational.

Deconstructing privilege
The solution to these quandaries seems easy; that those spoken of should “begin to tell their own stories in their own ways”. But given that accepted opinion leaders often speak from powerful platforms and places with wide reach and validation, it remains difficult for alternative views – especially when expressed in spaces of low prominence – to gain traction.

Moreover, speaking against popular and dominant narratives often relegates the speaker to the margins where they are constructed as either being antagonistic for antagonism’s sake, or expressing counterproductive sentiments.  It therefore remains quite easy for the well-developed media machinery to silence – by omission – dissenting opinions and voices, or the alternative voices that it does not want to hear.

The answers to addressing this situation are complex and don’t lie in disengaging from inaccurate representations. Neither do they lie in engaging in angry undirected pushback. That is after all, the easiest way to invalidate an opinion.

In acknowledging and deconstructing privilege – who gets to speak, on behalf of who and why – we have to be realistic in our understanding of how hierarchies develop, gain credence and perpetuate.

With social media now facilitating conversations with institutions that might previously have seemed impenetrable, this at least provides some channels through which to register one’s opinion.  But of course, substantive change entails much more; the sharing of influential space and a greater willingness to welcome, and listen to, multiple alternatives and realities.

The question is: Is the world ready for this?

Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for womenHer Zimbabweand is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter

Bring back our girls and our country, President Jonathan

I watched the first lady of my country, Nigeria, shed tears for the abducted Chibok girls over two weeks after they went missing. I didn’t actually see the tears fall: she covered her face with a large tissue.

Her husband, President Goodluck Jonathan, went on a political rally in the northern city of Kano two days after the girls were abducted. The 2015 elections are, after all, only a year away. Issues such as addressing the nation over the schoolgirl abductions, and the bomb blast in Abuja days later, which killed 70 people, are obviously less pressing in nature.

Yet on national television last Sunday, the president promised Nigeria: “Wherever these girls are, we’ll surely get them out.” It’s amazing what a little international scrutiny will do. We have discovered the power of the hashtag over the last week. The simple, emphatic demand #BringBackOurGirls has moved across the Twitter timelines of the famous and the unknown, uniting Nigerian housewives and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Protests have spread from Abuja to Lagos, London and Washington; CNN, the BBC, al-Jazeera and other international media organisations have flocked to the protest sites, building momentum. And now Barack Obama has called for the world to act against Boko Haram, the terror organisation that kidnapped the girls.

Protesters hold signs during a demonstration on May 6 2014 outside the Nigerian embassy in Washington, DC. (Pic: AFP)
Protesters hold signs during a demonstration on May 6 2014 outside the Nigerian embassy in Washington, DC. (Pic: AFP)

And yet, as elated as I am over the overdue coverage this issue is finally receiving, I cannot help but wonder what comes next. When the girls are released, will they be returned to a country where they are not at risk of being abducted again? Will they be released to families that are safe from the threat of Boko Haram attacks? Will they come home to a Nigeria where the money meant for their education, their health and their future is not siphoned off into accounts around the globe?

Viewing the events surrounding the Chibok abductions, I am reminded of the Occupy Nigeria protest of January 2012, when thousands demonstrated over the sudden removal of a national petrol subsidy, causing fuel prices to double overnight. Like the #BringBackOurGirls movement, Occupy Nigeria migrated from Twitter through street protests to international coverage. The government was forced to the negotiation table. As the world looked on, causing our leaders to squirm, it was the time for us to call for the Nigeria we wanted, to demand transparency, education and better infrastructure.

But the negotiators were blinkered. They could ask for only one thing: a restoration of the subsidy. And when the petrol pump price was reduced, although not to former levels, it was as if a small victory had been won.

What victory, when our legislators were still the highest paid in the world? When our children were still some of the most illiterate in the world? When our youths suffered one of the highest levels of unemployment in the world? None of these issues had been addressed, not even when the world was watching and our government, unembarrassed by the plight of its citizens, was shamed under the vast lens of the international media.

We cannot let this opportunity pass a second time, for who knows what even greater tragedy will cause the world’s attention to return to Nigeria? Now is the time for us to widen our protest; now is the time to ask what country these girls will be returned to.

What happened to the trial of Senator Ali Ndume, alleged sponsor of Boko Haram insurgents? Why, despite the billions allocated to defence, are the insurgents reportedly better equipped than our soldiers? Why do Nigerian girls remain among the most uneducated in the world? Why has polio not been eradicated in Nigeria? Where is the $20bn that our central bank governor discovered was missing from our treasury this year? And, of course: where are our girls?

This Friday I will join hundreds of people in front of the Nigerian high commission in London to protest at the abduction of our girls and the abduction of our country. Mr President, it’s not too late for you to become the leader we elected you to be. Take your eyes off the 2015 elections and focus on the matter at hand. Bring back our girls. Bring back our money. Bring back our country.

Chibundu Onuzo for the Guardian