In 2009, there were 10.7 million jobs, a number that increased by 42% to 15.2 million in 2015. On the face of it, the number of new jobs might look impressive, outstripping gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaging about 5% a year during the period. However, as can be seen, most new jobs were in the informal sector. While those in salaried formal employment increased by 28% from 2.0 million in 2009 to 2.6 million in 2015, the number of workers with informal jobs increased by 44% from 8.7 million to 12.6 million. By 2015, 83% of eligible workers were employed in the informal sector, an increase of two percentage points since 2009.

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1. African Development Bank, “The Middle of the Pyramid: Dynamics of the Middle Class in Africa”, 2011

2. The average exchange rate for 2015 was US$1:KSh98.2 (Central Bank of Kenya statistics). A rounded rate of US$1:KSh100 has been used throughout for guidance

3. Kenya National Bureau of Statistics Economic Survey 2016 p.76

4. CPI figures as at fiscal year end (March)

5. World Bank, “Kenya – Jobs for Youth”, Report No. 101685-KE, February 2016, p.8

Kwame Owino is chief executive officer of the Institute of Economic Affairs – Kenya; Ivory Ndekei is programme officer (regulation and competition) and Noah Wamalwa is assistant programme officer (public finance management) at the same institution.

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The post How Kenya is Failing to Create Decent Jobs – Kwame Owino appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

On Wednesday 28 June we were joined by three speakers to discuss the state of the media, land matters and the economy, ahead of the August 8th election.

Kwame Owino is chief executive officer of the Institute of Economic Affairs (Kenya).

Ambreena Manji is Professor of Land Law and Development at Cardiff University and former director of the British Institute in East Africa. She is the author of ARI Counterpoint ‘Whose land is it anyway: The failure of land law in Kenya‘

Denis Galava is a former Managing Editor of the Nation Media Group.

The event marked the launch of “How Kenya is failing to create decent jobs” by Kwame Owino, Ivory Ndekei and Noah Wamalwa”.

The interview with Denis Galava featured in the event is separately available here as well.

Podcast

The post The State of Kenya appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Dr Nic Cheeseman, associate professor of African politics, University of Oxford; author of Democracy in Africa: Successes, Failures, and the Struggle for Political Reform

• The Afro-pessimists: For Afro-pessimists, the regular holding of elections not only hides authoritarian regimes but provides them with a degree of international legitimacy. The most stable regimes in the world are where an authoritarian leader runs very tightly controlled elections. Afro-pessimists argue that democratic regimes are no better at representing women; that elections generate periodic violence; that the quality of civil liberties across the continent has declined as the number of multi-party systems has increased; and that there is no clear correlation between free elections and political freedoms.
• The Afro-positivists: Afro-positivists, on the other hand, argue that the holding of elections entrenches democratic traditions and values. They point to studies that show support for democracy is high amongst African citizens and that term limits are starting to bite. When respected once, term limits have never been subsequently rejected on the continent. Enforcing term limits also provides opportunities for the political opposition: when a ruling party fields a new candidate, rather than the incumbent, its chance of victory drops from 85% to 50%.
• Three Africas: There are three different camps of democratic development in Africa. The first is racing ahead. In countries like Benin, Senegal and Ghana democratic values have been consolidated over time with transfers of power, a trajectory that is likely to continue. The second is in a turbulent middle ground where low incentives to give up power have created an environment in which elections have often been conflictual and skewed in favour of the ruling party. Examples include Zimbabwe and Kenya. The third is stuck in an authoritarian backwater, ruled by military leaders in civilian clothes. In places like Rwanda and Ethiopia elections are used as a means of control and political legitimation. The trajectory of democracy on the continent is not one of convergence but of divergence.
• A role for the international community: Developing political institutions is an area where international actors can have a significant impact on democratisation. But geopolitics are also at play. Western powers provide unwavering support to regimes due to natural resources and security considerations, which in turn often undermine efforts to promote democracy. China’s arrival makes the politics more complicated, but the basic rules have not changed. Ultimately, outside processes can only do so much; domestic factors shape the success of democratisation.

Prof. Ibrahim Lipumba, former national chairman, Civic United Front (CUF); four-time presidential candidate in Tanzania

• One nation, two governments: The United Republic exhibits a significant contrast between mainland Tanzania and the Isles of Zanzibar. The mainland does not have a strong history of political opposition because of the principles espoused by the first president, Julius Nyerere. Until the introduction of multi-party politics in 1992, political competition was limited to the confines of the ruling party, Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM). Even after five elections, CCM continues to exert its dominance. In Zanzibar, political opposition has a long history that pre-dates independence. The most contentious elections took place in 1995, when the Civic United Front (CUF) emerged victorious only to see the decision reversed.
• Polls in Zanzibar: With a history of closely contested polls in Zanzibar, in 2010 an agreement was reached – and enshrined in the constitution – that parties securing more than 5% of the vote would be included in a government of national unity. This stipulation was designed to reduce electoral contestation and prevent violence. But in 2015 the chairman of the Zanzibar Electoral Commission unilaterally annulled the election results, despite lacking the legal mandate to do so. This occurred as CUF took half of the seats in the House of Representatives – and presented evidence of having won the presidential vote. Currently the Isles are without a functioning government. However, Professor Lipumba said “I remain optimistic regarding Tanzania’s democratic development; I believe we can reach a solution on Zanzibar”.
• Two terms: Term limits are a respected part of Tanzanian democracy. They are important because in a second term the president can push harder for political reforms, knowing he will not compete again. In 2015, the outgoing president, Jakaya Kikwete, tried to push for constitutional reforms. Even though political pressure eventually meant that he failed to hold a referendum on the Warioba draft constitution, he reopened a debate on the manner in which the nation is governed.
• Valuing democracy: Democracy is not a cultural imposition but a universal value. Africans prefer a democratic system of government. Democracy is so omnipresent that even coup-makers claim to carry out their actions to preserve democratic principles.

Vera Kwakofi, current affairs editor, BBC Africa

• The voice of citizens: The media can play a role in entrenching democratic principles. But in 2015 conventional media had to play “catch up” with the sentiments of people on the ground. WhatsApp is revolutionising politics in Africa. It has been transformed from a social tool to a political organising platform and a pseudo-medium for sharing news content. Because of its encryption it is harder to censor, meaning it has put the power of communication into the hands of citizens.
• Investigative journalism: The investigation into the judiciary in Ghana by Anas Aremeyaw Anas provides an inspiring example for the continent. Anas exposed wide-scale corruption in an institution that holds historic importance in Ghana, and which has always been seen as non-politicised. 20 judges have already been sacked and over 180 judges and court officials are still under investigation. The media should hold politicians to account, but journalists are not doing enough of this in Africa. More attention should be given to examining the institutions of state and interrogating how effective they are and what they are really doing.
• An African Fourth Estate: There is more at stake for local media than international media. Its primary role must be as educators – to explain the actions of actors, functions of government and processes of democracy as independently as possible. By detailing how the state works, local media can empower citizens to make informed choices. The international media should be observers of society and portray events to the rest of the world. However international media too often performs the function of local media. African media houses and journalists are better placed to understand local cultures and histories; however, the lack of a supportive environment prevents them from doing so.

 Event podcast:

Interview with Prof.Ibrahim Lipumba

Event Video

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Professor Ambreena Manji

• High hopes: Sustained political debate across Kenya culminated in the agreement of a new National Land Policy in 2009, and a progressive 2010 constitution – or katiba. The need for land reform had been widely acknowledged in the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Public Land, known after its chairman, Paul Ndung’u, and the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence, compiled by Judge Philip Waki. The adoption in April 2012 of the Land Registration Act, the Land Act, and National Land Commission Act should have marked the end of a process of activism; instead it heralded a new era of debate over accountability and impunity.
• Curious consensus: The drafting of these three bills provided citizens with little meaningful opportunity to express their views of impending changes. A consortium was established to promote debate on the contents of the draft bills, and provide a detailed commentary on legal issues, including the degree to which they were compatible with 2010 constitution. However, their passage through parliament was characterised by little debate or disagreement among legislators. This passivity amongst MPs was a disappointing outcome after a decade struggle over land policy.
• Rush to the finish: Kenya’s 2010 katiba required parliament to enact new land laws within 18 months of promulgation, which set 27 February 2012 as an artificial deadline. Only on 15 February 2012 did the National Assembly hear the first reading of the bills. The government printer only released drafts in time for consultation on 22 February. Neither the parliamentary committee nor civil society had the benefit of reading these documents before the meeting. On 9 March 2012, the National Assembly voted by two-thirds majority to delay the vote by 60 days.
• Complexities and contradictions: The draft bills failed to enact provisions of the Land and Environment chapter of the 2010 constitution; nor were they faithful to the National Land Policy. Many commentators questioned whether they met the test of constitutionality; others argued that the bills should be withdrawn and time allowed for their revision. As Yash Ghai noted at the time, the bills were “for the most part badly drafted, often copied from laws of other countries, often with internal inconsistencies or inconsistencies with other legislation… It is impossible for most Kenyans (including lawyers, other experts, ministers and parliamentarians) to understand the content of the bills (especially since, unlike the constitution, the drafting style is complex, convoluted, old fashioned). This effectively prevents the participation of the people in law making required by the constitution.”
• Flawed process: The decision to adhere to narrow timeframes led MPs to foreshorten debate, whether by accident or design. Space for deliberation was limited. Ironically, one part of the constitution was used to defeat another containing important principles about popular participation in law making. When the texts re-emerged on 16 April, only brief amendments were visible, rather than fundamental revision or redrafting. Nevertheless, all three bills reached committee stage and were approved.
• Civil society: Although the achievement of the National Land Policy and the Land and Environment of 2010 constitution were thanks to the efforts of civil society, activists were also partly responsible for the failure to translate these principles into new land laws. Kenyan civil society organisations attempted to position themselves as mediators between people and law, rather than wrest control of the debate from bureaucrats, recognise the political nature of the debate, and help realise the promise of popular participation in major policy changes.
• Predatory elites: The distrust of bureaucratic power over land is widespread among Kenyans. Successive presidents, and their land commissioners, have long exercised the allocation of public land in pursuit of political patronage and personal accumulation. New land legislation should have provided an opportunity to redress Kenya’s grossly skewed structure of land management and to curtail predatory land practices by the state. Regrettably, it culminated only in shallow redistribution of land, challenging bureaucratic power rather than the structure of land holding.
• The future: Land reform and constitutional promises have become intertwined in the minds of the Kenyan people. This has raised the stakes, and with it the risk that popular disillusionment with the new land laws becomes equated with the failure of the katiba itself to transform Kenya as promised.

Prof. Yash Ghai CBE FBA

• Ministry of Lands: Not many countries have such a ministry given how many land issues relate also to planning, infrastructure and agriculture; but in Kenya, this is the most coveted government department for those seeking enrichment. The current minister is suspended from office due to corruption allegations. The relationship between the Ministry of Lands and the National Land Commission remains poor.
• Community lands: Communal land rights remain contested, with the division of responsibility between national government and county governments unresolved. Where land ownership is based on traditional understandings of land rights, the whole community should be given a say over its alienation. Communal land rights were constitutionalised to prevent them from being grabbed; yet the national government appears determined to undermine efforts by the counties to reinforce such rights.
• Forest communities: Kenya still has a few forests, part of its environmental heritage. These are viewed as the next big target for land grabbing and illegal logging. Although the constitution assures forest communities that they can maintain their lifestyle, a tension exists between those living in traditional forest homelands and others seeking to preserve forests.
• Confiscation by government: Major infrastructure projects are taking place right across Kenya. Many involve the appropriation of land from local communities. This has not been sufficiently acknowledged by the government or in the media.
• Legacy of the struggle: On 12 September 2015, a moving ceremony was held in Nairobi where the British High Commissioner acknowledged the wrongs done to Mau Mau veterans. Litigation in the English courts was withdrawn in return for a financial settlement with the affected families and a memorial to those who died in the cause of freedom. Many of the 25,000 or more who joined Mau Mau fought for land only to find it confiscated while they were incarcerated. Veterans and their descendants remain landless.
• Kenya’s katiba: Despite a detailed programme for implementation, Kenya’s constitution has yet to deliver on all of its promises. The Commission for the Implementation of the Constitution was established with less authority than we recommended, but after only five years it remains too soon to tell whether it will achieve its objectives. Progress to date has been slow; however, the judiciary has improved despite pressure from the government.

Among the many interesting questions and points raised by a large audience, were those by Professor Catherine Boone (on community land legislation in the context of devolution, and the respective mandates of National Land Commission, the Ministry of Lands, and the Counties ); Sir Edward Clay, former British High Commissioner (on the desire to localise land allocations); Dr Richard Baines, (on the lessons which might be applied from devolution of the land registry in Mozambique); and Dr Pilar Domingo (on the role, capability and credibility of Kenyan courts to adjudicate disputes). Watch the video and listen to the audio to hear more.

Podcast:

Pictures:

The post Whose land is it anyway? The failure of land law reform in Kenya appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Dr. Jesse Salah Ovadia, Lecturer in International Political Economy, University of Newcastle; author of The Petro-Developmental State in Africa: Making Oil Work in Angola, Nigeria and the Gulf of Guinea:

• Oil and gas possess unique potential to leverage foreign investment in domestic industry. However, the benefits of extractives development need to be directed towards national development, rather than a small elite.
• Petro-developmental states must harness state capacity and invest revenues from oil and gas productively, but should also utilise local content policies to diversify the economy. Local content can anchor non-oil growth and economic transformation. The rebasing of Nigeria’s GDP last year highlighted the importance of domestic manufacturing and the service industry to the economy as a whole.
• Nigeria’s local content law is both one of the oldest and one of the strongest in terms of what it requires. Every country that has enacted legislation since has weaker regulations.
• The current downturn in the global oil price offers advantages for the development of local content. In Nigeria the depreciation of the naira has made local services cheaper for international investors. As long as oil extraction continues, so too do the benefits of local content.

Dr. Ernest Nwapa FNSE, Pioneer Executive Secretary, Nigerian Content Development & Monitoring Board (NCDMB):

• The discovery of oil distorted Nigeria’s economy, leading citizens to abandon productive sectors in search of easy profits from extractives. No value was added in country; crude was exported and gas was flared. Taxation and royalties were assumed to be sufficient benefits. There was little attempt by domestic businesses to provide materials or services to the hydrocarbon industry. International oil companies (IOCs) everywhere assumed they had no role to play in national economic development until producers established national oil companies (NOCs) to increase indigenous participation in the sector.
• President Obasanjo directed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to work with IOCs to enhance value addition. The NNPC reviewed programmes from Brazil and worked with a Norwegian agency to avoid disruption to operations while creating a transparent way of broadening participation in the industry. A decision was taken to legislate, but to avoid being too prescriptive. Between the genesis of local content policies in 2003 and the final legislation in 2010, the NNPC opened dialogue with IOCs, service companies and regulatory agencies.
• The NNPC began by collaborating with those possessing technology, funding and expertise; it was important to start by building trust, before moving to detailed discussions. Avoiding disruption and remaining globally competitive were two key priorities, but so were the need to ensure sustainability and demonstrate government commitment. Nigeria pushed for immediate benefits to communities affected by oil exploration. Oil exploration brings noise, pollution, and social challenges to parts of Nigeria; and when companies move on they often take electricity and employment opportunities with them.
• In five years, the NCDPM multiplied the number of Nigerians employed in the oil industry ten-fold. This was more than the country had been able to achieve in the previous 50 years. IOCs moved from operating out of hotel rooms to establishing offices and workshops in Nigeria.
• Enshrining a local content policy in legislation is important; but there is a risk of including too much in the laws, which prevents innovation. Equally, targets needed to be revisited. Strong political will and demonstrations of financial commitment are required from government to build confidence. Collaboration with IOCs should result in win-win situations. Nigeria was fortunate that any risk of losing investment was mitigated by a global movement toward adopting local content policies. The supply chain in Nigeria is now robust, with most large companies using local suppliers.

Patrick Obath, Executive Director, ASI Kenya Extractives Industry Development Programme:

• Kenya has much smaller oil and gas reserves than Nigeria, but nevertheless the discovery has resulted in high expectations. Kenya is currently establishing how best to harness income from sector, use oil to catalyse economic transformation, and ensure sustainability. The country is also in the process of devolving power from the national level to 47 county governments. Tensions between different tiers of government, and between counties, may make it difficult to leverage benefits at the local level.
• Communities where resources are located have experienced interventions by NGOs and others warning of a “resource curse”. The challenge is to manage popular expectations. Investors, government and communities are meeting to debate how the proceeds of investment should be shared. At this stage, the aim is to transform knowledge and skills in affected communities so that over the long-term local people can be properly involved in the exploitation of natural resources.
• The sharing of revenue is a political hot potato. There is a false expectation that the day drilling starts, there will be funds available to communities. County governments need to brace themselves for a delay of eight to ten years before they see any returns on the development of oil and gas reserves. Both the national government and the counties need to better understand the investment cycle and plan accordingly.

Isabelle Ramdoo, Deputy Head of Programme, Trade and Economic Transformation at the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM):

• Local content policies take different forms. There can be quantitative requirements, for example quotas based on numbers, or on value; or qualitative requirements, such as reporting and justification obligations, information sharing, and advertising of opportunities. The scale and provisions can vary widely, both in terms of how ‘local’ the policies seek to be and whether they deal with labour, procurement, joint venture and technology transfer.
• Local content is not an end in itself, but part of a comprehensive development package. Governments also need to consider incentives for both foreign and domestic investors. A major challenge remains linking the extractive sector to others in the economy.
• Even if legislation is well drafted, more than just regulation is required. NOCs must possess a sound understanding of the sector, and the procurement needs at different stages. The government should work to identify opportunities and gaps, finance shortages, and adjust policies to enable local and international companies to cooperate.
• Research and development and innovation are also important. Local content can provide an opportunity to address the technology gap. However, it remains difficult to catch up with international suppliers given the degree of competition in that sector. Collaboration and partnership are the core of successful local content policy.

The Q&A can be listened to here:

Pictures:

Full Podcast:

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By Ambreena Manji

• Land and the Constitution of Kenya (2010)
• The rise and rise of the rule of law
• Getting technical
• A grabbed land
• The costs of impunity
• Interconnected law and justice
• A challenge to the constitution
• Kenya’s new land laws: timeline
• Notes

Land issues have been the cause of much violent conflict throughout Kenya’s colonial and post-colonial history. In 2009, a National Land Policy was approved by parliament. The following year, land policy was embedded in a new constitution widely regarded as being radical – and potentially transformative. The culmination of a decade of often fierce debate and civil society activism, these events were described as “two significant achievements [that] have inserted the interests of ordinary Kenyans into this constitutional moment in a way that elections and constitutional ratification alone would not have”.²

The 2010 Constitution of Kenya addressed longstanding grievances over land, including the centralised, corrupt and inefficient system of administration identified in a series of reports of inquiry during the 2000s. Article 40 (1) sets out the principles governing land policy. These include equitable access; security of land rights; sustainable and productive management of land resources; transparent and cost effective administration; and elimination of gender discrimination in law, customs, and practice related to land and property. The process of translating these principles into law was widely seen as an opportunity to redress Kenya’s grossly skewed structure of land management and end predatory land practices by the state. It was one of the first, and certainly one of the most important, tests of the new constitution.

Despite the backdrop of optimism and anticipation, the drafting of the land law bills was characterised by undue haste, opacity and a lack of genuine consultation and debate. Indeed the final stage of the reform process can easily be interpreted as a last ditch attempt by certain parties to stymie it, subvert the intentions of the National Land Policy and renege on the promises of the constitution. The draft land bills were flawed, weak and seemed to be almost entirely disconnected from their guiding documents.

Parliamentarians failed to grasp the enormity, gravity and urgency of the task of land reform

In the run-up to the first and second reading of the bills in the National Assembly in February 2012, legal scholar Kithure Kindiki and others drew attention to incoherent drafting in the new laws; widespread borrowing of the provisions of other African countries without due attention to their relevance or suitability for Kenya; the failure to identify misconduct that the laws needed to address; inconsistencies between the National Land Policy and the constitution; and the failure to specify in detail the functions of devolved land administration bodies. The land research group in which I participated, Kituo cha Sheria, co-ordinated by the Katiba (Constitution) Institute, criticised the inscrutability of the drafts and the absence of any useful explanation of what policies were being implemented, or how. “This,” Yash Pal Ghai warned in a foreword to Kituo cha Sheria’s submission to the Parliamentary Committee on Land and Natural Resources, “effectively prevents the participation of the people in law making required by the constitution”.³

Parliament neglected to scrutinise or amend the land bills adequately and disregarded its obligation to heed the contents of the land and environment chapter of the constitution. Like many others, parliamentarians failed to grasp the enormity, gravity and urgency of the task of land reform. In April 2012, the assent of the Land Act, the Land Registration Act and the National Land Commission Act marked continuity with the past and the basic tenets of neoliberal land policy, for example by promoting land markets, providing for the individualisation of land tenure, and enshrining in law a presumption against customary tenure. A “technicist” approach and what is perceived as international best practice was prioritised over addressing political realities and local context.

The central concern of the laws is bureaucratic power and its control. While they did offer citizens some means to challenge bad administrative practices and so perhaps retain access to land, they did not embody the prescriptions of the constitution and National Land Policy. They were neither equitable nor transformative of land relations, nor was the “deep” redistribution envisaged by the constitution and National Land Policy upheld. This failure cannot be dismissed lightly. One expert commentator observed that “upon the outcomes of these deliberations may well hinge the future stability as well as the democratic quality of the Kenyan state”.⁴

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Land and the Constitution of Kenya (2010)

Article 40 (1) of the Constitution of Kenya sets out the principles governing land policy and provides that “Land in Kenya shall be held, used and managed in a manner that is equitable, efficient, productive and sustainable”.Article 61 (1) states that “All land in Kenya belongs to the people of Kenya collectively as a nation, as communities and as individuals”.Article 40 protects private property rights; 40 (6) states that “The rights under this article do not extend to any property that is found to have been unlawfully acquired”.Article 68 (a) provides that Parliament shall revise, consolidate, and rationalise existing land laws. Article 68 (c) specifies areas for future legislation, including legislation to prescribe minimum and maximum private land holding; to regulate the manner in which land may be converted from one category to another; to “protect, conserve and provide access to all public land”; to protect the dependents of deceased persons with interest in any land, including spouses in occupation; and to provide “for any other matter necessary” to effect the land and environment requirements of the Constitution.

Abridged from Manji, Ambreena, “The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012”, African Studies Review, Volume 57, Issue 1, April 2014, p.118

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The rise and rise of the rule of law

Kenya’s recent experience exemplifies critical shortcomings of land reform processes throughout East Africa. Since the 1990s international financial institutions, donors and governments have embraced law reform as a means to address a range of land issues, with varying degrees of sincerity and commitment. In essence, land reform has been land law reform.

This approach was prompted by a rediscovery of the role that law might play in development. The emphasis on law is not new. In the 1960s, the “law and development” movement held that law reform could promote economic development in newly independent countries. Interest subsequently waned due to scepticism as to the merits of this argument. The recent revival of law in development policymaking, and in particular the focus on the centrality of the rule of law to development, has had a major impact on how land issues have been addressed. Law has played a key role in what has been labelled “new wave land reform in an era of neo-liberalism”:⁵ land reform in East Africa has taken place in an “intellectual climate which rediscovered the importance of law as a major contributory factor in the international community’s support and pressure for land law reform within countries in the region”.⁶

In essence, land reform has been land law reform

The renewed prominence of law as a proposed solution to land problems has supported the representation of land as a tradeable asset that can be used to leverage loans. Secure formal property rights and developed land markets are considered a desirable goal of international and national land policy advocated by the World Bank and other multilateral and bilateral donors. Such legal constructs are portrayed as prerequisites for economic growth, poverty reduction and establishing the rule of law in developing countries. The formalisation and monetisation of land tenure have gone hand-in-hand as part of a “market-friendly” approach to land described by pre-eminent scholar, advocate and practitioner Patrick McAuslan in an important paper published in 2001 as “the globalisation of land markets”.⁷ The formalisation of land title and access to credit are now intricately connected in development policy prescriptions.

David Kennedy, currently faculty director of the Institute for Global Law at Harvard Law School, has argued that there is an unarticulated hope among law and development practitioners and academics that working within a strictly legal framework can substitute for, and thus avoid confrontation with, “perplexing political and economic choices”. This has placed “law, legal institution building, the techniques of legal policy-making and implementation – the ‘rule of law’ broadly conceived – front and centre”. It has excluded, rather than encouraged, contestation over economic and political choices; and the hope that law might substitute for contestation “encourages people to settle on the legal choices embedded in one legal regime as if they were the only alternative”. The rule of law, according to Kennedy, “promises…a domain of expertise, a program for action, which obscures the need for distributional choices or for clarity about how distributing things one way rather than another will, in fact, lead to development”.⁸

This observation helps us to understand why and how, over the past two decades, East African nations have felt compelled to reconsider land tenure regimes, adopt new land policies, enact new land laws and introduce programmes to ensure their implementation.

 

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Getting technical

The consequences of a legalistic approach to land reform are starkly evident in Kenya’s new land laws. First and foremost, it foreclosed debates about redistribution, prioritising land law reform as the most effective way to address land problems and so evading more difficult questions about who controls access to land and how a more just distribution might be achieved.

A further consequence of the weight accorded to law as a means to resolve land issues is that amongst lawyers, civil society groups and scholars, it expedited a retreat into a technicist approach that ignored the wider political context and therefore missed an important opportunity for bringing about positive change. A constant rebuff deployed during public meetings of the Parliamentary Committee on Land and Natural Resources (the “Land Committee”) in Kenya was that the new land laws were highly technical and complex. Land law is complex, but this mantra, and severe time limitations, often seemed to be aimed at suppressing genuine debate and citizen participation.

Rather than challenging the retreat into technical legal responses, civil society groups largely accepted – and to some extent reinforced – this practice by assuming the role of mediator between the law and the people. This was mistaken. As Patrick McAuslan asserted, “to move from policy formulation to drafting laws is not, as some people assume, to move from a debate on policy to one on legal technicalities”. The technical is highly political. When ideas of equity and fairness come to be precisely defined, perceived winners and losers emerge. Objections and obstructions quickly arise. “These are not,” McAuslan continued, “objections on ‘policy grounds’ but on technical legal grounds; a particular clause ‘wouldn’t work’; a certain provision is ‘unnecessary’; another goes too far or is ‘impracticable’”.⁹

Acute distrust of bureaucratic power over land issues is widespread among Kenyans

Acute distrust of bureaucratic power over land issues is widespread among Kenyans. The allocation of public land in pursuit of patronage and profit has long been practised by successive presidents and their land commissioners. Civil society needed to wrest control of the debate from bureaucrats if the “intensely redistributive potential”¹⁰ of the National Land Policy and the constitution were to be realised. Instead, activists were distracted and mollified by the technical obfuscation that tends to be part and parcel of land law reform – and which typically reinforces the status quo.

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A grabbed land

The deficiencies of undue confidence in strengthening the rule of law and technical fixes are abundantly clear in Kenya when one examines the history of “bureaucratic sabotage”¹¹ of land management and reform. The publication of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Illegal/ Irregular Allocation of Land in Kenya (2004), widely known as the Ndung’u report after its chairperson, confirmed what Kenyans already knew: that land corruption was systematic and widespread. The commission found that at least 200,000 illegal titles to public land had been created between 1962 and 2002, 96% of them in the period 1986-2002, during the presidency of Daniel arap Moi. The categories of public land affected include forests, national parks and game reserves, wetlands, research farms, roads, government offices, settlement schemes, state corporation land and trust land. The Ndung’u report also showed how the constitutional requirement for public land to be administered “in the public interest” was consistently perverted by Presidents Jomo Kenyatta and Moi, public officials, members of the judiciary, well-connected politicians and businesses.To take urban land as an illustration, the commission found evidence of widespread abuse of presidential discretion with regard to unalienated urban land, that is to say public land legally available for allocation to schools, playgrounds and hospitals for the public good. Both presidents allocated land appropriated from landowners despite having no legal power to do so. Furthermore, the Ndung’u report also confirmed that a number of land commissioners had made direct grants of government land without any authority from the president. Often, land had been quickly sold by grantees at very high prices to third parties without any adherence to the conditions laid down by letters of allotment, which only have the status of letters of offer and cannot be sold. Far from being restrained by the principle of public purpose, successive land commissioners and many local authorities completely disregarded it and sold land reserved exclusively for public purposes. Forged letters and documents were commonly used. Records at the Ministry of Lands and Settlements were found to have been deliberately destroyed.The “juicy findings”¹² – the “what” – of the Ndung’u report attracted a great deal of attention. With a few notable exceptions, less was written about its exhaustive detail on the “how”: exactly how the law was routinely subverted and so much public land illegally or irregularly allocated for personal gain or political reward. Far from upholding the rule of law, the legal profession played a central role in land corruption for personal benefit, as did other professions. This is one of the most significant issues raised by the Ndung’u report, if not the most significant.

The legal profession played a central role in land corruption for personal benefit, as did other professions

The conduct of many Kenyan lawyers stands in stark contrast to the role of the legal profession envisaged and supported by donors – that of promoting good governance and the rule of law. Internationally-sponsored rule of law programmes are supposed to promote and embed a strict distinction between the professions and politics. The information about systemic professional misconduct and illegality revealed by the Ndung’u report should have rung far louder alarm bells internationally. It provided valuable lessons about the hazards implicit in translating the aspirations and promises of the National Land Policy and the constitution into law. Instead, the complicity of lawyers in the illegal and irregular allocation of land has been largely overlooked. Professional bodies have chosen to ignore the conduct of members in facilitating land corruption. To date, despite the findings and recommendations of the Ndung’u report, no investigations of professionals’ involvement or disciplinary action have been initiated.

When the legal framework governing the administration of Kenya’s land was reviewed, a key test that should have been applied was whether proposed changes in the law would have prevented the illegal and irregular allocations on the vast scale identified by the Ndung’u Commission. But the drafting, enactment and aftermath of Kenya’s new laws has facilitated “business as usual” for professionals who, screened by international and state endorsement of the technicist approach to land law reform, have sustained corruption for decades.

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The costs of impunity

It is important to consider the consequences for ordinary citizens of land corruption going unpunished. The misallocation of public land instigates a process whereby something that should be available for the public good is transformed into private property. Kenyans are routinely deprived of their right to access to land for homes, schools, clinics, parks and cemeteries. For example, in one prominent case a questionable change of use enabled 18 acres in a suburb of Nairobi that had been reserved to build two state schools to be sold to a diplomatic mission. The schools were never built on this or any other site. In another, land reserved for the development of a public medical clinic and day nursery was, again through a questionable change of use, given over to the building of a shopping centre in an exclusive suburb of Nairobi.

The very real losses suffered by citizens through illegal dealings in land dwarf those of household name corruption scandals like Goldenberg and Anglo Leasing. Furthermore, they are augmented by abusing control of state corporations, a practice highlighted by the Ndung’u Commission: its report provided critical details about what happens in the aftermath of illegal or irregular land allocations. Ndung’u showed how those allocated land would move quickly to sell it, in many cases, to state corporations at hugely inflated prices. Pressured into making illegal purchases of public property, these institutions become “captive buyers of land from politically connected allotees”.¹³ In some cases, state corporations had also been the victims and not just the conduits for realising the profits of land grabbing – a further injustice.

The economic and social costs of widespread land corruption… will be borne by Kenyans for many years to come

The primary state corporation targeted to purchase stolen land, often at inflated prices, was the National Social Security Fund (NSSF), the Kenyan workers’ pension scheme whose purpose is to provide social protection against old age, death and incapacitating physical or mental disability. Although the full cost of the plundering of the NSSF has not been quantified, between 1990 and 1995 it spent Ksh.30 billion (about US$400 million) on the purchase of illegally acquired property. The NSSF’s assets may well be overvalued as a result of holding grabbed land, raising questions about its ongoing financial viability. The economic and social costs of widespread land corruption facilitated by the connivance of professionals and government servants will be borne by Kenyans for many years to come.

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Interconnected law and justice

Another deficiency exposed by the statutory reform of land law in Kenya, and elsewhere in East Africa, has been the failure to reflect that different areas of law are interconnected. When law is the favoured means to improve land governance, reform has tended to focus on land law at the expense of other legislation. Often, inheritance law, family law and mortgage law are neglected despite their critical role in determining access to land. The effects on women are especially detrimental. For example, it is often at the point of inheritance that women can claim access to land so addressing women’s land rights needs to involve reform of succession, family, and other related areas of law. This is a point I raised when Tanzania’s new land laws were being formulated in the late 1990s.¹⁴ If the interconnectedness of law is not acknowledged and addressed, when the state wishes to resist progressive measures in land law, such as provisions that allow women to co-own property with their spouses, it can use inheritance law or family law to stymie women’s claims.A further, critical shortcoming in the way land law reform has been carried out in Kenya and East Africa is the failure to incorporate the concept of justice and connect it to wider struggles for equality. In his book Land Law in Eastern Africa: Traditional or Transformative?, Patrick McAuslan sought to encourage academics to frame land problems in terms of fairness, equity, and justice. The reports of international and domestic policymakers rarely discuss justice in the context of land, preferring to depend on the technicist approach. McAuslan contrasted this with South African scholarship in which writing about the African National Congress’s land reform programme, the constitutional provisions on land, and the future of urban planning have applied a justice framework.Fortunately, Kenyan civil society groups have not emulated the widespread neglect of the theme of justice in land law reform by academics, policymakers and donors. The Kenya Land Alliance, Kenya Human Rights Commission and others have made concerted efforts to introduce ideas of justice and injustice to discussions about the politics of land and debates about the direction of land law reform. I would argue that their work has had a profound impact on the terms in which land is discussed in Kenya today. In the wake of the post-election violence in 2007-8, Kenya established a Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) with a mandate stretching back to 1963. Its report, released in May 2013, provides perhaps the best illustration of links between land issues and claims to justice being openly acknowledged. The words “historical land injustices” are used throughout, despite not appearing in the legislation creating the TJRC. This term is said to have “entered the Kenyan lexicon in the context of activism and agitation for constitutional reform and the establishment of transitional justice mechanisms aimed at addressing past human rights violations”.¹⁵

Policymakers rarely discuss justice in the context of land

The 2009 National Land Policy and Article 67(1)(e) of the 2010 Constitution of Kenya preceded the TJRC in asserting the connection between land and justice, and significantly influenced its approach. The former, in setting out a land policy framework in Chapter 3, calls for “equity” and, most importantly, for “transparency” in relation to land. The latter refers specifically to the need to address “historical land injustices”. So, while justice is still largely overlooked in the pronouncements of donors and policymakers on land issues, and in the work of most academics, the very many injustices connected with land are gaining increasing domestic attention. Civil society groups now consider unlawful evictions due to insecurity of tenure, misallocation of land by powerful governments, land grabbing by elites, the use of land as a patronage resource during elections and for ethnic mobilisation as questions of human rights, equity, and justice. This is a significant step forward.

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A challenge to the constitution

The Ndung’u report has proved to be a resource of immense value, despite the failure to implement its recommendations and enshrine them in Kenya’s new land laws. The National Land Policy and the land and environment chapter of the 2010 Constitution of Kenya were milestones of great importance. The efforts of donors to strengthen the rule of law played a part in enabling Kenyans to realise these achievements. But the disproportionate focus of donors, policymakers and academics on law, the omission of the theme of justice, and an overly-technical approach that ignores political realities are deficiencies in the common “global” approach to land reform glaringly highlighted during the drafting of Kenya’s new land laws. Instead of the redistributive, transformative land reform enshrined in the National Land Policy and constitution, Kenyans received incoherent land laws that threaten further to undermine the rule of law and to perpetuate the country’s long-running land corruption, conflict, injustices and inequalities.

Kenyans received incoherent land laws that threaten further to undermine the rule of law

The most obvious response of the Ministry of Lands (MoL) to the reduction in its powers contained in the National Land Commission Act 2012 has been to underfund the new National Land Commission (NLC). The NLC was handicapped from the outset by the poor drafting of the act that established it as a supposedly independent body responsible for the administration of land in Kenya. Wrangles between the MoL and NLC over their respective mandates, staffing and funding have consumed more time and energy than addressing the very real land problems facing the country, not least ongoing land grabbing. This constitutes an important reminder of the difficulties of wresting control over land from those long accustomed to using it as a patronage resource.

Kenya’s land issues are not unique. But the attempt at land reform and the new land laws are a real test of the hard-won 2010 constitution. The inclusion of land tenure matters in the constitution raised the stakes. If the new laws fail to mitigate historical injustices and curtail predatory practices, it will create further disillusionment among ordinary Kenyans and risks being perceived as a failure of the constitution itself.

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Kenya’s new land laws: timeline

May 2002
Publication of the Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Land Law Systems of Kenya (the “Njonjo Commission Report”).

December 2004
Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Illegal/ Irregular Allocation of Land 2004 (the “Ndung’u Commission Report”) presented to President Kibaki and released six months later, following widespread criticism of government’s failure to make it public.

October 2008
Publication of the Commission of Inquiry into Post-Election Violence following the December 2007 General Election (the “Waki Commission Report”).

3 December 2009
National Land Policy approved by parliament.

4 August 2010
Referendum on new constitution.

27 August 2010
Following approval by two-thirds of voters, new constitution promulgated.15 and 22 February 2012
Land Bill, Land Registration Bill and National Land Commission Bill receive first and second readings in the National Assembly. In the run-up to these readings academics, commentators and members of civil society attending consultative hearings struggle to find up-to-date versions of the bills.22 February 2012
Parliamentary Committee on Land and Natural Resources holds first consultative hearings with members of the public on the day the final draft bills are released by the government printer. Few attending, including committee members, had the opportunity to read the bills beforehand. Many groups state publicly that the bills fail to enact the land and environment chapter of the constitution, and call for complete withdrawal and revision of bills. Some point out that they would fail the test of constitutionality. Minister of Lands and Chair of the Committee on Land and natural Resources reject appeals on grounds that constitutional deadlines cannot be breached.9 March 2012
National Assembly approves by two-thirds majority an extra 60 days for wider consultation on the draft bills. Extension is supported by Constitution Oversight Committee, Legal Affairs Committee and Land Committee.19-23 March 2012
Members of the Land Committee undertake tour of Kenya’s 47 counties. Committee’s conduct of consultations widely criticised for “ineptitude” and “complacency”.
Late March – early April 2012
Land Committee convenes a retreat in Naivasha to discuss its findings, followed by one week “technical retreat” in Mombasa.

16 April 2012
Proposed amendments to land bills become available. Instead of the revision and redrafting widely called for, the amendments are brief. The most important changes on which commentators were unanimous, such as the need to detail the role and powers of the proposed national land Commission in relation to the Ministry of Lands, are left unaddressed.

26 April 2012
Largely unaltered land bills approved by Parliament.

27 April 2012
Land bills receive presidential assent and are enacted.

Abridged from Manji, Ambreena, “The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012”, African Studies Review, Vol.57, Issue 1, April 2014, pp.115-30

NOTES

1 Hornsby, Charles, Kenya: A History Since Independence, IB Tauris, London, 2012, p.787

2 Harbeson, John W., “Land and the Quest for a Democratic State in Kenya: Bringing Citizens Back In”, African Studies Review 55 (1), 2012, p.15

3 Manji, Ambreena, “The Politics of Land Reform in Kenya 2012”, African Studies Review 57 (1), April 2014, pp.120-1

4 Harbeson, John W., “Land and the Quest for a Democratic State in Kenya: Bringing Citizens Back In”, African Studies Review 55 (1), 2012 p.15

5 Bernstein, Henry, “Land reform: taking a long(er) view”, Journal of Agrarian Change 2, 2002, p.433

6 McAuslan, Patrick, Land Law Reform in Eastern Africa: Traditional or Transformative?, Routledge, London, 2013, p.2

7 McAuslan, Patrick, “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains, From India’s Coral Strand: The Globalisation of Land Markets and its Impact on National Land Law”, paper given at a conference at Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 2001

8 Kennedy, David, “Laws and Developments” in Hatchard, John and Perry-Kessaris, Amanda (eds.), Law and Development: Facing Complexity in the 21st Century, Cavendish, London, 2003, pp. 9-17 passim

9 McAuslan, Patrick, Bringing the Law Back In: Essays in Land, Law and Development, Ashgate, London, 2003, p.251

10 Sessional Paper No. 3 of 2009 on National Land Policy, Republic of Kenya, p.75

11 McAuslan, Patrick, Bringing the Law Back In: Essays in Land, Law and Development, Ashgate, London, 2003, p.348

12 Southall, Roger, “The Ndung’u Report: Land and Graft in Kenya”. Review of African Political Economy 32 (103), 2005, p.142

13 Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Illegal/Irregular Allocation of Land, Republic of Kenya, 2004, p.92

14 See Manji, Ambreena, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa, Zed Books, London, 2006

15 The Final Report of the TJRC, The Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission of Kenya, 2013

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The post Whose Land Is It Anyway? The failure of land law reform in Kenya – Ambreena Manji appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

The evening also included a round table discussion, “Does Africa Need Development Journalism?” with Aidan Hartley (author, foreign correspondent and film-maker), Maimouna Jallow (journalist and Senior Program Manager at the African Media Initiative), Michael R Meyer (founding Dean of the Graduate School of Media and Communications at the Aga Khan University) and Caroline Mutoko (presenter of Nairobi’s Kiss 100 FM radio station).

Listen to Edward’s introduction, the roundtable discussion and acceptance speeches:

Winning entries

The first prize of £3,000 was awarded to Nelson Chenga, second prize of £1,000 went to freelance journalist Issaka Adams, third prize of £500 went to Valentine Obara and Asha Jaffar received the Chairman Of The Judges’ Special Award. The winning entries can be read below:

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Nelson Chenga is the Senior Features Writer at Zimbabwe’s leading business weekly, The Financial Gazette. He has been a journalist for 24 years, working as a freelancer and for Zimbabwe’s biggest daily paper The Herald before joining The Financial Gazette. During this time he has specialised in developmental issues, in particular looking at the way in which environmental affairs impact on poorer communities.

Nelson’s First Prize Winning Article:

Funding Gone Down the Drain

In 2010 and 2011, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sponsored programmes in many of Zimbabwe’s marginal, drought-prone districts as it sought to assist vulnerable communal farmers improve agricultural production.

Through the Reviving Smallholder Farmers’ Marketing of Agricultural Products (RSF-MAP), which was implemented by the Catholic Relief Services (CRS/ZW) and a local partner, the Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT), USAID hoped, among other things, to address institutional economic factors that normally prevent vulnerable smallholder farmers from participating in lucrative markets where better returns for their crop and livestock sales can be realised.

RSF-MAP, part of USAID’s disaster risk reduction initiative in southern Africa, was born out of the general realisation that countries in the region perpetually face chronic droughts, floods, cyclones, food insecurity, disease outbreaks and complex humanitarian emergencies that often present serious challenges to vulnerable communities.

Using the value chain approach, the RSF-MAP programme hoped to link market-oriented production to targeted value chains such as horticulture, groundnuts and small livestock, to help increase income available to villagers for the procurement of food and other household necessities.

However, three years down the line, part of USAID’s US$1.1 million RSF-MAP grant that targeted approximately 30,000 families in Mudzi District in Mashonaland East province, has literally disappeared.

Three small livestock auction pens established in the district are fast being swallowed by the savannah countryside as inactivity undermines USAID’s small livestock auction pen programme. Thorny acacia shrubbery is thriving as all the established sites go unused and unmaintained.

When I happened upon one of the auction pens at Kapotesa in June 2012, journalistic instinct prompted me to take a picture of the fallen billboard at the project. The sight of the billboard with the background of the neatly constructed auction pens looked newsworthy. But newsdesk gatekeepers back in the capital Harare thought otherwise. I kept the picture anyway.

Two years later, I happened to pass by the same auction pens again and, lo and behold, the pens were now buried by bush. I took some more photos.

According to Mudzi District Council officials, all the auction pens established in the northeastern district bordering Mozambique have become “white elephants” because each time auctions have been organised, buyers have boycotted the sales preferring to engage directly with individual villagers selling livestock at bargain prices.

“There is very little we can do about these white elephants, because it’s difficult to force the buyers to come for the auctions where we hoped they would compete against each other for the benefit of the communities,” said one council official, who adamantly refused to be named for fear of recriminations. The government is very eager to portray its economic revival blueprint, the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation, as succeeding everywhere, despite the backdrop of a country grappling with an unrelenting economic crisis.

When the auction pens were established, it was hoped that Mudzi District Council would charge a 2 per cent auction levy to help it maintain the auction sites. Since not a single cent has been realised from the projects, the auction pens were left to crumble.

Another major obstacle to the project was that auctions were meant to take place on specific dates. Yet villagers face problems requiring money almost every other day, and thus they cannot wait until a set date to sell their livestock to solve a pressing matter.

While USAID and many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) sincerely pump billions of dollars into struggling economies, hoping to make a difference, communities that receive this assistance need to be fully consulted to make the most of such initiatives. The Mudzi small livestock auction pens are a typical example.

The initiative had ‒ and still has ‒ the potential to help secure more stable and potentially higher incomes for the poor and vulnerable communities of Mudzi. But with the communities lacking knowledge on how to utilise the auctions to their collective and individual benefit, sustainable development remains NGO mumbo jumbo.

Although all NGO initiatives in Zimbabwe are sanctioned by the government, there do not appear to be systems in place to help sustain them. After establishment, many programmes crumble soon after being handed over to communities simply because the sense of ownership and continuity is absent. When the Mudzi project was handed over, its operation remained the preserve of the council and the villagers’ traditional way of doing business remained intact. They were never informed how and when their livelihoods would be changed by the programme.

The failure of programmes in remote corners such as Mudzi might be non-events for USAID, an organisation that pumped US$900 million in humanitarian assistance into Zimbabwe between 2002 and 2008, as well as millions of dollars in other developmental programmes. But for poor and vulnerable communities, such failures are a painful reminder of their perpetual dependency on humanitarian assistance, as food insecurity and underdevelopment continue to haunt them day in, day out, simply because their mainstay of agriculture remains unsustainably poor and weak.

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Issaka Adams, 25, is a freelance journalist from Ghana who is currently studying at the Ghana Institute of Journalism. He hopes to enter a graduate programme in International Development and then specialise in International Development Journalism. “I want to use my journalistic works to transform and develop my country,” he explains.

Issaka’s Second Prize Winning Article

Emerging issues from Ghana’s oil exploration activities

Ghana discovered its offshore oil and gas Jubilee Field in 2007. By 2010, it had started pumping the first oil – a historic moment. Since then, oil has been produced in commercial quantities, and over the next 20 years it could earn up to US$20 billion in export revenue for the country. It is expected that this will present an opportunity for the growth of the country’s economy, reducing the poverty rate amongst the people living in the coastal towns where the exploration work is carried out.

Four years after entry into the oil business, critical issues have begun emerging from communities living close to where the exploration takes place. The sea provides a major source of employment for people living in the coastal towns. They fish to get their daily bread. But recently, their work has virtually halted as a result of the frequent washing ashore of dead whales.

Between August 2013 and August 2014, the carcasses of 22 whales appeared on the beaches of Ghana. Traditionally, in the coastal towns such an occurrence was seen as a sign of a bumper harvest of fish, and the local people celebrated and made merry. They buried the whale and gave it a befitting funeral, just like a human being. This was the practice in the olden days.

The number of dead whales recently has changed people’s ancient beliefs. They are now worried. Whenever a dead whale is washed ashore, they are out of business. They cannot undertake their daily work routines until the mammal has decomposed.

In Asanta, a small fishing village of about 2,000 inhabitants located in Ellembele District in the Western Region, more than seven dead whales have appeared. The chief fisherman of the village, Joseph Ebambay, explained in an interview that this development was unusual in the past and blamed it on the oil exploration in the area.

“I can say there is a change in the environment, because we are now having oil fields and oil companies running within our deep seas. So, you cannot deny the fact that, as we say, it may be because of the oil find. We may be thinking like that, we may be thinking because of the oil drilling some chemicals fell into the sea and maybe these whales … drink some of the water or whatever it is,” said Mr. Ebambay.

Not only the chief fisherman and his people in the village suspect the oil exploration. At the Department of Marine and Fisheries Sciences at the University of Ghana, Professor P. K. Ofori-Danson, a sea mammal expert, said in an interview, “the frequency of the occurrence of death is going higher. What new thing have we put there that made it go high? The sound waves inserted into the ocean floor during the exploration are 100 times the sound of a jet plane taking off. So, if you send strange waves to the sea bed, it interferes with [the whales’] echo-location and prevents them from moving, and they are likely to swim to the shallow area of the sea and eventually be washed ashore. So we suspect the oil drilling.”

The central government representative in the area is worried about the rate at which the dead mammals are being found. District Chief Executive Daniel Eshon said Ghana’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is not doing enough to help solve the problem, but declined to comment on whether oil exploration is responsible for the death of the mammals or not.

“It will interest you to know that if it happens, the EPA people will call and say try and solve this problem, because they think that as the assembly is there ‒ the assembly is the local government in this particular area ‒ so you have to oversee everything. So in this case, most of the time, they rely on me to solve these kinds of issues. But for them … [to] do this kind of post mortem and proper analysis to determine the cause of death of the whale, they will not come,” he said.

Before oil exploration began, an environmental impact assessment was done for the government by the companies involved. In the assessment, it was identified that the exploration could cause some potential threats to marine mammals. But the mitigation measures that were outlined to reduce these threats have not been properly reviewed by Ghana’s environmental authorities.

Friends of the Nation, an environmental issues NGO, has kept a close eye on the incidents and said in an interview that people in the area have reason to believe that the oil activities are responsible, since it was predicted that it could happen. But the environmental authorities have denied that the deaths of the mammals could be linked to oil extraction.

‘You must have evidence to say so; there has been speculation as to whether the oil activities might be responsible for this, [that] by generating seismic sounds that could disorientate the whales. But recent studies by the International Union for Conservation of Nature have shown that the evidence does not support it,’ maintains Carl Fiati, the EPA’s deputy director of natural resources, marine and costal environment.

Ghana’s environmental authorities are not making any concerted effort to uncover the mystery behind the deaths of the whales. Meanwhile, the migration period of the whales has just begun this year. From August till March they will be traversing Ghana’s waters, and probably more of them will be washed ashore, which will continue to disturb communities living along the coast.

Valentine Obara, works for Kenya’s Nation Media Group. Mr Obara specialises in reporting on rural developmental issues, in particular agriculture, environment and public health. In 2013 he was runner-up in the National Aids Control Council Red Ribbon Awards for a feature story highlighting concerns over the long-term availability of adequate anti-retroviral drugs in Kenya.

Valentine’s Third Prize Winning Article:

Agroforestry Offers Better Livelihood to Kenyan Community

While tilling his one-acre piece of land at Nyadenda village, Suba sub-county of Homa Bay County, Nelson Onunga recalls his childhood years when such hard work would pay off. “In those days, we used to receive enough rainfall and we would have a bumper harvest for two planting seasons in a year, but nowadays it is hard to plant for two seasons because of the changes in climate,” says Mr Onunga.

In his view, the situation has been deteriorating over the years since population growth pushed some members of the community to seek alternative ways of earning a living. Ultimately, the residents discovered that they could make a fortune from the production and subsequent sale of charcoal, hence the once thick forests in the hills surrounding the region became a casualty.

That was about 30 years ago. Now the community is faced by the ravages of environmental degradation. The lush hills of the region overlooking the clear waters of Lake Victoria, in the far south of former Nyanza Province, were rendered bare and exposed to soil erosion from the wanton felling of trees.

Unlike the majority of the Nilotic lakeside communities that largely depend on fishing for their livelihoods, the Suba are a farming community due to their Bantu origin. Therefore deforestation, which led to destruction of water catchment areas, caused a major setback to their means of living.

In a bid to reverse the damage, a novel initiative was set up in the region in 2008. Green Forest Social Investment Ltd (GFSI) was established to focus on commercial tree farming and processing, in a manner which encourages agroforestry and social entrepreneurship. “Everybody knows it’s important to plant trees, but if you’re poor then you will have other priorities than tree planting,” says Marco Venendaal, general manager of GFSI. “There needs to be a means to convince them to do so by making it a commercial practice.”

GFSI is involved in the production of charcoal, bio-fuel and bio-gas. The community is the main supplier of raw materials. The initiative also manufactures honey, and bee-keeping contributes positively to agroforestry. By the year 2011, more than a million trees had been planted on over 1,000 acres of land in the region, with local outgrowers being financed by the company in terms of farm inputs such as seedlings and bee hives.

Upon maturity, farmers “harvest” their trees, which are sold to the factory, which makes environmentally-friendly charcoal. “We do not cut down the entire tree, but carry out sustainable harvesting so that even as the farmers earn from what they collect, the tree is allowed to continue growing, because reclaiming the environment is one of our main concerns,” says Mr Venendaal.

The charcoal-making process also involves the use of modern technology which prevents carbon emissions during production. Robins Ontita, the factory manager, elaborates on how gases that could otherwise have been released into the atmosphere are trapped in tightly-sealed burning chambers and re-used to produce energy utilised in heating the wood. “Heating is only done once, after which the machine can transfer heat from one vessel to another. Thereafter, no more energy is required and in the process there is no gas emission into the environment,” he explains.

The end product is capable of producing more heat than normal charcoal; hence, less is required for fuel, which translates to a lower quantity of wood fuel required by consumers. “The technology is capable [of producing] 900 tonnes of charcoal per year, whereby three kilograms of wood produce one kilogram of charcoal. On the other hand, it takes about five times that same amount of wood to produce a kilo of charcoal using traditional methods,’ says Mr Ontita.

The honey production factory seeks to make good use of flowering trees such as Acacia xanthophloea, the fever tree. Other tree species grown include Markhamia lutea, wattle tree, croton, silky oak and cassod tree, which take between two and four years to mature.

Statistics from Kenya’s Ministry of Environment, Water and Natural Resources show that about 80 per cent of the population depend on wood fuel for domestic energy needs and for use in informal rural industries, such as brickmaking. This has been cited as the main driver of deforestation and land degradation in a country that is struggling to implement green economy policies and programmes.

According to a 2014 report commissioned by the United Nations Environment Programme, Kenya seeks to promote the maintenance of forest cover on at least 10 per cent of all agricultural land in a bid to mitigate the effects of climate change and global warming. “The addition of trees to farms offers an opportunity for farmers to increase farm productivity and diversify their incomes, and helps combat soil erosion and nutrient depletion by providing a more balanced agro-ecological profile,” the report states. It is currently estimated that Kenya’s forest cover stands at 6 per cent, against the constitutional target of 10 per cent.

Asha is a 22 year old writer and poet, studying at Moi University. Born and raised in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest informal slum, Asha writes about issues affecting people there. “The world is full of people writing negative stories about Kibera but I am putting up a hard fight,” she says. “I believe that being young is not a problem, the problem is being young and not doing anything.”

Asha’s Special Award Winning Article:

Failed Donor Aid

Ever been made to feel like you are not needed and belittled? That’s what is happening in every slum. In every place that the world is always trying to help. We are so busy helping and forget that at some time we need to stop and look. Are we bringing any change? In Kibera, there are more than 200 NGOs trying to bring change. I appreciate them all, but can they please end that right now! How many years have we had organisations trying to help and they end up not doing what they are supposed to?

There is something going on in the slums; we are not looking, but it happens every day.

Commercialisation. We are being commercialised or rather, in a more familiar term, being “helped”. We are used to meet the dreams of so many ambitious peeps. We are the “slummers” or better yet slum dwellers.

“Kibera is the second-largest slum in Africa/the world.” It depends where you are getting your statistics. This has become a cliché. I know, right? Kibera has been painted the dirtiest, scariest, most poverty-stricken place in the world, but I have a different story.

Kibera is one of the biggest slums in the world? Yeah, yeah, but have you been there? No? Yes? No, right! I thought so. You do not know. So, let me tell you about it. Kibera is filled with the most talented, most innovative, most skilled people in the world. But the world doesn’t want to see that, or rather the organisations feeding from it won’t see it. Why? Because it will not bring money to these poverty-stricken people. Sad stories sell, I hear. So, why not spread all the bad things about Kibera to the world and maybe we can get more donors?

All these organisations spread about Kibera want to help, or bring social change, but let’s look at it. How many years have we had these NGOs? Twenty years? Thirty years? And nothing has changed, right? Come on, look at the statistics. Kibera is getting worse, but we have people bringing in donors to help, sending proposals here and there all in the name of ending poverty. Kibera may be just a place people are using to fill their bank accounts, and a lot of organisations do not know the importance of involving people in their work. How do you end poverty without involving the poor people you are trying to help?

Involve people. That is what we need to do. The only way Kibera can stop being poverty-stricken is when the slum dwellers are allowed to control their own business. Leave the slum dwellers to do what they want with their place. Leave the duty of change to the oppressed.

The world is so busy entering into places and bringing in money, but not looking at the specifics of people living in those places. Ask people what they want and maybe the world will change in an instant. You involve people living in the place you want to change ‒ they know these places, and they know what can work and what cannot work. We need to stop imposing our rules and great ideas on people. It is not fair when people come to your house and tell you how to live your life.

It is easy to sign a proposal and release a large sum of money to help people, but I have lived in Kibera and I know that it is not fair when we have people who make decisions for us. Let us scrap the aid thing and let us do more with society. Involve people; ask them to come up with their own agendas and ideas. Maybe they are not living in poverty, as the world perceives; maybe they are not as dangerous and angry people as so many people may think. I, for one, am a talented woman who wants to see my myself getting involved in changing my society, not sitting and seeing people come to my home and coming up with proposals about how to change the slum I have lived in all my life.

It starts with organisations not imposing their ideas. Let the people feel powerful, not inferior. What do these organisations want to do? They want to help end poverty, but end up involving people who’ve never seen poverty in their lives.

The only way we can bring change is by letting the people do all the work and change their own societies. Change is inevitable, yeah, but change comes from inside, and I believe that the only way we can do that is by letting every person who needs help to help themselves. Change can be achieved that way.

This may sound a little harsh, but NGOs are not helping ‒ they bring more problems than solutions. I have to say that they should leave us alone. They should be replaced by dedicated community leaders. Let people change themselves.

Dear NGOs, you have failed us. Now we want to change our societies.

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The post Haller Prize for Development Journalism appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Edward Paice is Director of Africa Research Institute and the author of Tip & Run: The Untold Tragedy of the Great War in Africa (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007).

• Cat and mouse
• Imperial rivalries
• Tipperary mbali sana sana
• The butcher’s bill
• “There came a darkness”
• A forgotten conflict
• Notes

Mahiwa-Nyangao is certainly not listed among the better-known battles of World War I. Even people living close by these settlements on the B5 road, which runs inland from the southern Tanzanian port of Lindi to Masasi, are unaware of the fighting between British and German colonial troops that raged in their neighbourhood almost a century ago. Yet here, in dense bush, one of the most ferocious actions of the entire East Africa campaign of the Great War took place over four days in October 1917.

Casualties among the 5,000-strong British force – including three battalions from the Nigerian Brigade, three from the King’s African Rifles, and the Bharatpur Infantry and 30th Punjabis from India – were estimated at between one third and a half. The 16 companies of German Schutztruppen opposing them – about 2,000 men – sustained 25% casualties. Equally importantly at this stage of the campaign, when all hopes of resupply from Germany had evaporated, the German units expended nearly a million rounds of precious ammunition during the battle.

The combined casualties at Mahiwa-Nyangao were comparable to those of the bloodiest battle in the Anglo-South African, or “Boer”, War of 1899-1902. In addition to being recognised in contemporary military histories as “one of the greatest battles ever fought in Africa”,¹ Mahiwa-Nyangao also prompted the universal acknowledgement that “the courage displayed on both sides by the African soldier, be he Nigerian, King’s African Rifles, or German askari was remarkable”.²

Almost a year after Mahiwa-Nyangao, as the war entered its final phase, German and British forces clashed at Lioma and Pere Hills, to the east of Lake Nyasa in what is today Mozambique. For displays of outstanding courage 28 Distinguished Conduct Medals were awarded to askari of the King’s African Rifles. This was one sixth of the total number awarded to the regiment during the Great War in East Africa – for a single battle. The citations make hair-raising reading. Three British officers were also awarded the Distinguished Service Order. One of them remarked of the askari: “they do not know what fear means; they have won the war for us in East Africa”.³

Although the losses at Mahiwa-Nyangao, the costliest battle of the Great War in East Africa, do not compare with those of the battles at Verdun or the Somme, the campaign was neither minor nor insignificant. The death toll among combatants and civilians was colossal. The privation suffered by the populations of a theatre of war encompassing an area of 750,000 square miles – three times the size of the German Reich – was far worse than in all but a handful of areas of Europe traversed repeatedly by fighting. The financial cost to the Allies was comparable to that of the Anglo-South African War.

1st King’s African Rifles occupying Longido in German East Africa early in 1916

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Cat and mouse

The first shot fired by a British unit anywhere in the Great War was from the rifle of an African soldier – Regimental Sergeant-Major Alhaji Grunshi of the Gold Coast Regiment – as an Anglo-French force invaded the German colony of Togoland (today’s Togo) on 7 August 1914. The last German troops to surrender did so in Northern Rhodesia (today’s Zambia) on 25 November 1918, fully two weeks after the Armistice in Europe.

Togoland fell to an Anglo-French force after a fortnight, German South-West Africa was taken by South African troops in mid-1915 and German resistance to British, French and Belgian colonial troops in Cameroon finally ended in March 1916. But the Allies’ attempt to overcome German East Africa from the six neighbouring British, Belgian and Portuguese colonies – and German resistance – was of an altogether different magnitude.

About 150,000 Allied combatant troops were deployed against an enemy whose strength never exceeded 25,000

At the outbreak of war in Europe the prospect of small colonial defence forces of a few thousand African troops in each colony waging war against each other was as remote as the likelihood of the “main show” lasting beyond Christmas 1914. But over the next four years more than 125,000 British imperial and South African troops served in the East Africa campaign, Portugal sent 20,000 men in a number of expeditionary forces to Portuguese East Africa (today’s Mozambique) and Belgium threw 15,000 men of the Congolese Force Publique into the fray.

In all, about 150,000 Allied combatant troops were deployed against an enemy whose strength never exceeded 25,000. The total ration strength of British imperial forces – combatant and non-combatant – in the final phase of the war was still over 110,000 men, despite the fact that the headcount of the enemy they were by then pursuing through Portuguese East Africa, back into German East Africa and then into Northern Rhodesia had dwindled to a few thousand.

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Imperial rivalries

Improbable as it seemed to civilians and colonial authorities alike in Africa in August 1914, an imperial war on the continent – a final, bloody phase of the “Scramble for Africa” – had been considered a very real possibility by European leaders from the mid-1890s. In May 1896, Joseph Chamberlain, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, warned the House of Commons that such a conflict would be “one of the most serious wars that could possibly be waged…It would be a long war, a bitter war and a costly war…It would leave behind it the embers of a strife which I believe generations would hardly be long enough to extinguish.”

Three years after Chamberlain’s warning war did break out in Africa. Although it pitted Britain against the Boer republics of South Africa rather than a rival European power it was unmistakably imperialist in character and intent. Far from being the rapid and immediately profitable pushover envisaged by British hawks, the Anglo-South African war lasted two and a half years, involved the mobilisation of more than 400,000 British and colonial troops and left much of South Africa in ruins.

“In money and lives”, wrote the historian Thomas Pakenham, comparing the cost of the conflict to the Napoleonic Wars, “no British war since 1815 had been so prodigal.”⁴ The bill to the British Treasury was over £200m, £12bn in today’s money and ten times the value of the coveted output of the Transvaal gold mines in 1899. British casualties exceeded even those of the Crimean War half a century earlier; and the toll wrought on Afrikaner and African alike was immense.

None of Britain’s European rivals intervened in South Africa. But Germany, France and Russia roundly criticised the aggression, and incidents elsewhere in Africa exacerbated imperial tensions. In 1898, war between Britain and France over an incursion by the latter into the upper reaches of the Nile was only averted by the narrowest of margins. Belgium and Portugal were intensely suspicious – with good reason – that Britain, France and Germany meant to dispossess them of their vast African empires.

Many prominent and well-informed individuals even
believed that Africa was a prime cause of the whole conflict

Despite a period of Anglo-German entente in Africa immediately before the outbreak of war and a widespread belief in Africa that the palaver in Europe would not touch the continent, by the end of August 1914 the British government was planning military action against German ports and wireless stations in Africa and the creation of Mittelafrika, a “second Fatherland” straddling all of central Africa, had become a fundamental war aim of the German government.

The backdrop of three decades of imperial rivalry in Africa is crucial to understanding how the Great War came to be fought there as well as in Europe. Many prominent and well-informed individuals even believed that Africa was a prime cause of the whole conflict. At the Pan-African Conference in 1919, William DuBois, the African-American activist and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, declared that “in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see [because] in the Dark Continent are hidden the roots not simply of war today but of the menace of wars tomorrow”.⁵ In similar vein, Sir Harry Johnston, the African explorer and administrator, was convinced that “the Great War was more occasioned by conflicting colonial ambitions in Africa than by German and Austrian schemes in the Balkans and Asia Minor”.⁶

Although the importance of Africa to imperial rivals meant that the war may have shared the same roots as the conflict in Europe, the conduct of the campaign in East Africa could not have been more different. For the most part it was as mobile as trench warfare was static, but equally attritional.

 

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Tipperary mbali sana sana*

When 50,000 British, Indian, South African and Belgian troops advanced into German East Africa from the north and east in early 1916 they did so on a front 1,500 miles long – nearly three times the distance from Calais to Nice. In 1918, when the fighting had moved to Portuguese East Africa, the area of operations for just 12,000 British and German combatants was two-thirds the size of France. That year a column of two King’s African Rifles battalions marched 1,600 miles in seven months, forded 29 large rivers and fought 32 engagements. In July alone it covered 330 miles virtually without rations, subsisting on what could be foraged. When the officers and men were inspected at the end of their stint in the field they were described as resembling the victims of famine. Their experience of the hardships of war in East Africa was typical, not exceptional.

In the north-west Belgian troops commanded by Colonel Tombeur advance towards Tabora, capturing the town in September 1916

The war in East Africa, in the words of the quartermaster of the Cape Corps, a unit raised from South Africa’s “coloured” population, “involved having to fight nature in a mood that very few have experienced and will scarcely believe”.⁷ The accounts of many a British – and German – combatant in East Africa attest to the fact that “there is no form of warfare that requires so much inherent pluck in the individual as bush fighting”; and to the terrible loneliness which “tested the nerves of the bravest”.⁸ In 1917 an officer in the 40th Pathans who had fought on the Western Front wrote: “what wouldn’t one give for the food alone in France, for the clothing and equipment. For the climate, wet or fine”.⁹

Disease was a bigger killer of British troops than combat, exacerbated by the poor supply of inadequate rations and a scandalously deficient medical establishment. The troop return of the Gold Coast Regiment is instructive. By the time it returned to West Africa at the end of its service the regiment had sustained 50% casualties in a force 3,800-strong. Those killed in action numbered 215 whereas 270 had died from disease. The wounded totalled 725, those invalided by disease 567.

Keeping troops supplied with adequate food and within reach of rudimentary medical attention was virtually impossible. The supply line for General Northey’s troops in Northern Rhodesia extended back to Durban, via Portuguese East Africa – the longest supply line of any British force in the Great War. As the availability of livestock for transport proved incapable by mid-1916 of matching the depredations of disease, the onus fell on the only alternative – human porterage. The mathematics are sobering. For example, the distance from the railhead to Northey’s front was 450 miles. This meant that 16,500 carriers were required to transport a single ton of supplies – enough to feed 1,000 askari and their camp-followers for one day – for the simple reason that 14,000 of them were needed to carry food for the column while 2,500 carried the food for the troops.

In the first two years of the war service as a military carrier was voluntary, short-term and remunerated nearly as well as service as an askari in the King’s African Rifles. But as the theatre of war and number of troops expanded, carriers’ pay was cut to a pittance and recruitment became in effect by force. The seeds of one of the greatest tragedies of the Great War were sown.

*“It’s a long way to Tipperary”: King’s African Rifles marching song

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The butcher’s bill

The official death toll among British imperial troops who fought in East Africa was 11,189 – a mortality rate of 9%. Total casualties, including the wounded and missing, were a little over 22,000. But the troops required more than a million carriers to keep them in the field. No fewer than 95,000 carriers died, bringing the total official death toll of the British war effort to more than 105,000. Among African soldiers and military carriers recruited from British East Africa alone, today’s Kenya, more than 45,000 men lost their lives. This equated to about one in eight of the country’s total adult male population.

The true figures were undoubtedly much higher. As many a British official admitted, “the full tale of mortality among native carriers will never be told”.¹⁰ Even 105,000 deaths is a sobering figure. It equals the number of British soldiers killed in the carnage on the Somme between July and November 1916. It is more than 50% higher than the number of Australian or Canadian or Indian troops who gave their lives in the Great War – and whose sacrifice is much more widely recognised. Indeed the death toll alone in East Africa is comparable to the combined casualties – the dead and wounded – sustained by Indian troops in the Great War.

The troops required more than a million carriers to keep them in the field

The scale of the catastrophe which befell the men employed or impressed as carriers did not attract immediate attention in Europe or Africa, not least because the compilation of statistics was delayed by the many problems of demobilisation. Even when the details began to emerge in the summer of 1919 the Chief of the Colonial Division of the American delegation at the Paris Peace Conference speculated that “the number of native victims…may be too long to give to the world and Africa”.¹¹

There were many British combatants in East Africa who paid tribute to the carriers on whom they were utterly dependent for survival. General Northey declared that he “would award the palm of merit to the [carriers]”.¹² Colonial officials warned the military establishment in 1917 of the consequences of seeking to mobilise virtually every adult male in the entire theatre of war. But when the mortality rate became common knowledge in Whitehall it was deemed a “bloody tale” best ignored, or even suppressed, as Britain sought colonial prizes in Africa at the Paris Peace Conference. As one colonial official put it, in particularly arresting terms: the conduct of the campaign “only stopped short of a scandal because the people who suffered the most were the carriers – and after all, who cares about native carriers?”¹³

The logistical challenges – and the solution – were no different for German commanders. No fewer than 350,000 men, women and children undertook carrier “duty” and it is inconceivable that the death rate among them was lower than one in seven. In contrast to the practice in British colonies, no records were kept for the carriers and, with the exception of those permanently attached to German units, they were not paid.

To exclude dead carriers from the death toll of the Great War in East Africa, as has been the case for a century, is unacceptable. At best it fails to recognise that the campaign could not have been fought without them; at worst, it is tantamount to depicting them as somehow not human.

As for the financial cost, when the contributions of India, South Africa and Britain’s African colonies were included the bill, in the words of one senior colonial official, “approached, if it did not actually exceed that of the Boer War”.¹⁴

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“There came a darkness”

The brunt borne by East Africans during the conflict was not limited to carrier service. In German East Africa newly harvested crops were routinely requisitioned by German colonial troops without payment. In 1916, in central Ugogo district, the effects were exacerbated by poor rainfall and the following year brought a famine during which one fifth of the population died. All told, an estimated 300,000 civilians perished in German East Africa, Ruanda and Urundi as a direct consequence of the authorities’ conduct of the war, excluding those conscripted for carrier service. This was an even higher death toll than that inflicted by German colonial troops during the suppression of the Maji-Maji rebellion a decade earlier.

Although the peacetime administration was less dislocated in the British colonies and protectorates, sowing and harvesting were disrupted almost everywhere – by the weather if not by the absence of men on carrier service or fighting. Food price inflation, tax rises and increasingly repressive land and labour laws compounded the hardships. “People in South Africa tell me they are sick of hearing about the German East Africa campaign; I’m sure that these poor natives in East Africa are pretty sick of it too”,¹⁵ wrote an officer in the 5th South African Infantry in late 1917.

The worst calamity of all was saved for last. For the surviving troops and carriers on both sides, and for the civilian populations prostrated by four years of fighting, October 1918 – “Black October” – brought something worse than total war. The Spanish influenza epidemic spread far more rapidly along the wartime lines of supply and communication than it would otherwise have done. This new curse was so virulent that a man could simply drop dead while on a short walk.

The official influenza death toll for British East Africa was 160,000. But it is unlikely that fewer than 200,000 died – a far greater loss of life than that caused by the war itself and nearly a tenth of the total population of the country. By the time the epidemic was over 1.5-2 million had died in sub-Saharan Africa in a matter of months. It was the final, diabolical confirmation that the Great War in East Africa was above all a war against nature and a humanitarian disaster without parallel in the colonial era. One phrase was common to many oral histories of the time: “there came a darkness”.

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A forgotten conflict

A post-war booklet declared that “if there had been no war in Europe the campaigns in the German colonies [in Africa] would have compelled the interest of the whole world”.¹⁶ The point is a good one. Using any yardstick but the war in Europe, the scale and scope of the Great War in East Africa, in particular, was gargantuan. It produced cameos of extraordinary courage and preposterous improvisation on land, on sea and in the air to rival anything witnessed in the “main shows”. Comparison with the Anglo-South African War is arguably more appropriate than comparison with the “main show” of the Great War, the Western Front.

The fighting in East Africa – and its consequences – also put the highfalutin’ talk of the European powers of their so-called “civilising mission” in Africa, and imperialism itself, on trial. In so doing it exposed unremitting colonial ambitions to adegree of scrutiny unsurpassed since the beginning of the Scramble for Africa. As William DuBois lamented at the Pan-African Conference, “twenty centuries after Christ, black Africa, prostrate, raped and shamed, lies at the feet of the conquering Philistines of Europe”.

If there had been no war in Europe the campaigns in the German colonies [in Africa] would have compelled the interest of the whole world

In East Africa, the memorials and graveyards of the fallen attract little attention. Elsewhere Africa’s involvement in the Great War is all but forgotten. There is no askari or carrier monument in London. The best-known accounts of the war are fictional – C.S. Forester’s The African Queen, Wilbur Smith’s Shout at the Devil and William Boyd’s Booker Prize-nominated An Ice Cream War. If an episode is recalled at the mention of the conflict, it is usually of the thrilling adventure variety: Germany’s attempt to resupply the troops in East Africa by Zeppelin in 1917; the extraordinary British naval expedition to capture Lake Tanganyika; the thrills of the British operation to sink the German cruiser Königsberg in the Rufiji Delta in 1915; the determination and ingenious guerrilla tactics of the German commander, von Lettow-Vorbeck. Perhaps the disastrous British expeditionary force landing at Tanga in the first months of the war, a precursor of the disaster at the Dardanelles in 1915, might be vaguely familiar.

These episodes have their place. But they are corners of a much larger canvas. They should not be allowed to obfuscatethe reality of war to the detriment of the memory of those who fought and the suffering of the civilian population. The voices and memorials of the Great War in East Africa are predominantly European. But African combatants and carriers called upon to march twenty miles a day for months on end, in searing heat and torrential rain, subsisting on minimal rations and out of reach of medical resources, would have concurred with the sentiment expressed by one young British officer. In 1914 Lt Lewis had witnessed the slaughter of every single man in his half-battalion on the Western Front and had experienced the horrors of trench warfare. Sixteen months later, in a letter to his mother from the East African front, Lewis wrote: “I would rather be in France than here”.¹⁷

Left: Askari of 2/4 King’s African Rifles in Portuguese East Africa.
Right: M’Ithiria Mukaria, the oldest surviving veteran of the King’s African Rifles, in Isiolo (photographed by the author, February 2002)

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NOTES

1 Downes, W.D., With the Nigerians in German East Africa (Methuen, 1919), p.226

2 Haywood, A., and Clarke, F., The History of the Royal West African Frontier Force (Gale & Polden, 1964), p.235

3 Matson papers 5/14, p.159, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House

4 Pakenham, T., The Boer War (Abacus, 1992), p.572

5 DuBois, W.E.B., The African Roots of War, Mary Dunlop Maclean Memorial Fund Publication No.3 (1915), p.714

6 African World Annual, 1919, p.29

7 Difford, I., The Story of the First Battalion Cape Corps (privately published, Cape Town, 1920), p.93

8 Sheppard, S.H., “Some Notes on Tactics in the East African Campaign”, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, February 1942, pp. 138-9

9 Thornton papers, Imperial War Museum

10 Duff, H., “White Men’s Wars in Black Men’s Countries”, National Review, Vol. 84 (1925), p.909

11 See Steer, G.L., Judgement on German Africa (Hodder & Stoughton, 1939), p.262

12 Northey papers, Imperial War Museum

13 CO/820/17, The National Archives

14 Duff, op. cit.

15 Lt Rice in The Nongqai, November 1918, p.508

16 See Foreword, Through Swamp and Forest: The British Campaigns in Africa, (privately printed, undated)

17 Lewis papers, letter dated 15 April 1916, Imperial War Museum

Other resources

Edward Paice interviewed by James Naughtie on BBC Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme on 7 August 2014

Edward Paice guest speaker at King’s African Rifles dinner marking the centenary of the outbreak of World War I

The post How The Great War Razed East Africa – Edward Paice appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

Download the full Policy Voice

Urban and regional planning is under the spotlight in Kenya. The 2009 National Housing and Population Census forecast that the percentage of Kenyans living in urban settlements will increase from 32 percent to 54 percent by 2030. Residents of Nairobi await the details of a new city master plan. The devolution of power and allocation of central resources to the 47 county governments created by the 2010 constitution is under way – a process that requires integrated development plans to be in place.

In the post-independence era, urban planning was deployed as a tool for “modernisation” in Kenya. But in the 1980s and 1990s modernisation was supplanted by autocracy and straitened economic circumstances. In turn, planning became a means for securing control, exclusion and further enrichment of political and economic elites redolent of the colonial era.

Legislation based on outdated and inappropriate models such as the UK’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act was routinely used to carry out mass evictions and demolitions in informal settlements in Kenya. By the end of the 20th century, the planning profession had become irrelevant or discredited to all but its few beneficiaries.

In this timely Policy Voice, Professor Peter Ngau describes in detail how he and colleagues at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (DURP) at the University of Nairobi – and other institutions – have sought to revitalise the education and training that planners receive and encourage the adoption of more progressive approaches among planning professionals. Curricula reform, research and innovation, close links with other planning schools in Africa, and working partnerships with civil society organisations in informal settlements are the bedrock of the effort to ensure that Kenya’s future urban planners are equipped to manage rapid urban transformation.

The post For town and country: A new approach to urban planning in Kenya appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

By Mark Ashurst and Stephen Mbithi

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Listen to the podcast of “Why Africa can make it big in agriculture”

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A short walk from the Rwandan parliament, the Vision 2020 Snack Bar is a roadside eatery popular with Kigali’s office workers and taxi drivers. The café takes its name from Rwanda’s national development plan, drafted by the government of President Paul Kagame – a choice which belies more than mere patriotism. Food is critical to Africa’s prospects, and farming is the best hope for impoverished rural economies on which 70% of the continent’s poor depend. With more ambition, commercial agriculture would transform Africa’s balance of trade.

At a time of growing international concern about global food security, the example of Rwanda is instructive. For the first time in recent history, Rwanda produced as much food as it consumed in 2009. This is a formidable achievement – and, at times, controversial. Rwanda is Africa’s most densely populated country. Most smallholders occupy tiny plots of land, passed down and repeatedly sub-divided through the generations. In the land known as mille collines, or a thousand hills, their livelihood is freighted with larger significance. Ethnic categorisation of Hutus and Tutsis was made illegal in the wake of the genocide of 1994, but a vast majority of rural smallholders consider themselves to be Hutu. President Kagame’s administration knows that building food security for the rural population is the key to political stability, the foundation of Rwanda’s much admired recovery.

As in Rwanda, so too for much of Africa: improvements in agriculture are vital to the continent, and to the world. Worldwide, at least a billion people – one person in six – are hungry. By 2050, the global population is forecast to rise by a third. Africa’s population is forecast to double. Meanwhile, average cereal yields in Africa have shown no improvement since the 1960s – in contrast to steep rises in productivity throughout much of Asia. Over the same period, Africa has moved from being a net exporter to importing a quarter of its food. Rapid population growth, poor infrastructure and persistent under-investment have negated the benefits of new technology, improved seed varieties and growing international trade in food. In order to reverse this trend, new policies must unlock the potential for commercial agriculture.

The new fashion in development

Among donors, agriculture is once again the hot topic of international development. A gamut of international agencies – including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) chaired by former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan – have emphasised the need to improve productivity among African smallholders. But the policies devised by governments and donors imply a daunting lack of ambition. Worldwide, total production of food exceeds consumption. The know-how exists to keep pace with population growth, and the means to feed the planet are within reach – if only governments, and farmers, can find them.

A constant refrain among policymakers is that smallholders must become self-sufficient. “It is time for Africa to produce its own food and attain self-sufficiency in food production,” says Annan. Self-sufficiency is a reasonable goal, but as the key determinant of policy it is ambiguous – and timid. About two thirds of Africans depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, including a majority of those living below the poverty line. Many smallholders are, like city-dwellers, net purchasers of food. The rhetoric of self-sufficiency exhorts rural populations to grow more staple crops, rather than pressing for hard-headed policies to claim a larger share of the global trade in food.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Until agriculture is commercially viable, there will always be hunger in Africa[/quote]

While the mantra of self-sufficiency is often misguided, the underlying rationale for helping smallholders is sound. Higher productivity means a better harvest for farmers. Better harvests should mean lower – and less volatile – prices. New technology has made it possible substantially to improve soil fertility and to cultivate drought-resistant strains of staple crops. Improved storage and better management of national reserves can reduce waste – in 2009, more than 40% of Kenya’s grain harvest spoiled in store. For aid officials keen to support measures which will reduce poverty, investing in agriculture can seem a deceptively simple proposition. Good intentions aside, the stakes are far higher than the narrow agenda of poverty reduction.

Agriculture is Africa’s most neglected – and important – potential competitive advantage in the global economy. For as long as Asia is the engine of the world’s manufacturing, and western countries dominate the pharmaceutical industry, Africans will continue to import their pots and pans, medicines and cars. Yet Africa’s potential as a cost-effective producer of food for export remains largely untapped, in spite of available land, improved technology and the low cost of labour. Although commercialisation of agriculture is often controversial, the imperative of building profitable agriculture in Africa has been evaded.

Being competitive

The patterns of global trade in food are changing fast. In recent years even China, long admired for its determined pursuit of self-sufficiency in food, has become a net importer of maize. For better and for worse, globalised commercial agriculture is coming to Africa. The reflex response has often been to bemoan the ‘land grab’ by multinational food groups and investors from Asian and Arab states, when a more practical reaction would be to devise strategies for more African participation in a burgeoning international food trade. External demand brings the prospect of economic growth and improved rural incomes. Agriculture must be Africa’s answer to globalisation – for large industrial farms and smallholders alike.

Whether or not this can be achieved is, above all, a matter of making the right decisions in government and for business. First, policymakers must separate agricultural ambitions and investment – cleanly, and unambiguously – from other measures to reduce poverty among rural populations in Africa. Both are absolutely necessary, but the rhetoric of agricultural self-sufficiency is a recipe for confusion. Food security is not the same as self-sufficiency among smallholders. These are distinct ideas, but routinely conflated. For example, although Dubai is a desert, its wealth ensures a stable supply of imported food. In Africa, food security is contingent on greater economic efficiency, especially in agriculture. Africa needs food security, not self-sufficiency in food.

The lesson is that growing enough food to feed the family is not the best policy for every farmer – as many arguments for self-sufficiency can imply. National food security is a legitimate priority for governments, but not an end in itself. The bigger picture is just that – bigger. Global demand for food is a strategic opportunity to re-balance the iniquities of world trade in Africa’s favour. While policymakers are surely correct to expect that rural populations should benefit from agricultural growth, the pursuit of self-sufficiency is not an effective tool to reduce poverty. Until agriculture is commercially viable, there will always be hunger in Africa.

No African leader needs to be told that the fate of rural livelihoods may determine his or her own. Food shortages are the dominant public concern in many developing countries – even more so since 2008, when soaring prices for staple crops sparked riots in parts of Africa, Asia and South America. The subsequent easing in commodity prices is unlikely to be permanent. Yet while new investment has picked up, the record of spending by African states is mixed. In 2003, African leaders adopted a Comprehensive African Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP). Since then, only one country – Mali – has consistently met the CAADP target of spending 10 per cent of the national budget on agriculture.

A question of scale, and value

Being commercial means being competitive. In agriculture, commercial has become a short hand for ‘big’. Commercial farmers are generally assumed to be ‘largeholders’ – typically, the big estates in Egypt, Kenya, South Africa or Zimbabwe. This is wrong. In purely economic terms, medium-scale farms are the hardest pressed to generate returns on investment: they require mechanised farming, without scope for significant economies of scale. In contrast, smallholders who labour by hand can be competitive – provided they secure access to markets. Tens of thousands of smallholders, for example, can achieve massive economies of scale by coordinating their crops and harvests.

Plot size is a poor indicator of what is commercial or competitive. The proprietors of large-scale commercial farms often enjoy close ties to political elites, which bring a disproportionate share of state benefits such as subsidies, infrastructure or a favourable tax regime. While agri-business has become attractive to investors as a means to generate foreign exchange, smallholders often prove to be more diligent custodians of their land and ecology. In Kenya, smallholders have prospered in non-traditional markets by turning from staples to horticulture – a sector which has quadrupled in value since 1975. A better definition of ‘commercial’ would eschew any notion of size in favour of both being competitive and having access to markets.

Smallholders in particular must chart a difficult course between scale and value. In Rwanda, Vision 2020 includes a plan to agglomerate small plots into large, communally-owned rural ‘clusters’ to support intensive cultivation of staple crops. For others, a better strategy can be to diversify away from dependence on a single staple. In semi-arid areas of Zimbabwe, varieties of finger millet have proved more resistant to drought and better suited to long-term storage than maize. Foreign earnings from Kenyan flowers, fruit and vegetables in 2009 were about a billion US dollars, more than banking, tourism, telecoms or brewing.

The example of Kenya

Rural livelihoods around Mount Kenya have been transformed. While large commercial estates dominate production of roses, two thirds of Kenyan vegetables are grown by smallholders. Farmed by hand, with strict controls on the use of fertiliser and pesticides, smallholders’ green beans and sweet potato are premium crops – and of comparable quality to those cultivated by large-holders. Farmers typically earn six times more from horticulture than they would from growing maize. The extra money pays for school fees, medical care – and, of course, for food. For Kenyan vegetable growers, food security means money in the pocket of the farmer – not food in the granary.

A visitor driving from Nairobi towards Mount Kenya is struck first by the lush green of the landscape, in contrast to the dry red dust of the roads. The climate is favourable, but the ground requires extensive irrigation. A network of man-made canals, dating from the colonial period and extended in the 1980s, is maintained by financial contributions from local farmers who dig connecting ditches to their own plots. Smallholders supply weekly harvests to larger farms and businesses which package their crops for export. About 5% of horticultural output is exported, mostly to Europe, earning about 50% of the industry’s revenues.

Like any industry, the prospects for African horticulture depend on comparative advantage. Kenyan horticulture owes its success to a combination of location and organisation. Flowers, fruit and vegetables are perishable. In Africa, they are grown under the sun and farmed in the old-fashioned way – by hand. Sound infrastructure and regular flights to Kenya enable swift delivery to Europe, often in the holds of passenger aircraft – a fact ignored by European rivals who have campaigned, on dubious grounds, against the ‘carbon footprint’ of air-freighted fruit and vegetables.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Small farmers may be risk-averse but they are not hostile to innovation.[/quote]

Not all the factors which have enabled the spectacular growth of Kenyan horticulture are replicable, but many are an example to policymakers elsewhere. Smallholders coordinate production within local groups, which in turn are highly integrated with exporters. Approved seeds and other inputs often are supplied by the exporters. A framework of ‘Private Voluntary Standards’ devised by European retailers is carefully followed by growers. Kenyan farmers comply with the strict requirements of the Global Partnership for Good Agriculture Practice (GlobalG.A.P), the internationally approved private standard for agriculture. Kenya is the only African country with a local system of standards – Kenya GAP –accredited by GlobalG.A.P.

In defence of ‘directed’ agriculture

Most smallholders are risk-averse. Many are wary of collective ownership and non-traditional crops. None will be convinced by policy statements. In Rwanda, critics of President Kagame’s reforms caution that at least some aspects of policy are coercive. Local administrators employed by the government in Kigali are tasked with ‘zoning’ and ‘mono-cropping’ and the resettlement of rural populations in new village ‘clusters’. In recent years, Rwanda’s policy has prompted comparisons with Ujamaa, President Julius Nyerere’s policy of villagisation and collective agriculture in Tanzania in the 1970s.

The circumstances of 21st century Rwanda are substantially different from those of Tanzania after independence – a difference which is to some extent disguised by the familiar rhetoric of self-sufficiency. Food security in Rwanda is a substantial achievement by the government, rather than an organised private sector. In contrast, Ujamaa triggered successive food crises and deepening dependence on food aid. A more apposite comparison is East Asia. President Kagame’s variant of state-directed agriculture recalls the post-war management of infant industries in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, where government technocrats decided policy and controlled capital investment. In that sense, Rwanda demonstrates a new and updated form of ‘directed’ agriculture in Africa.

Where directed agriculture fails, the consequences can be catastrophic. In Rwanda, the danger of famine would be compounded by the political risks of resistance among rural populations. To secure their compliance, smallholders receive subsidised seed and fertiliser from the government, and the promise, eventually, of a stake in larger co-operatives. Small farmers may be risk-averse but, contrary to some assumptions, they are invariably not hostile to innovation. Although few will be convinced by a seminar, most will be persuaded by the example of a neighbour who has prospered. In Kigali, policymakers have kept a close eye on Mount Kenya.

On closer inspection, Kenyan horticulture shares many characteristics of ‘directed’ agriculture – whether in Rwanda, or elsewhere. An emphasis on ‘bulking’ and uniformity of production is common to both countries. Large exporters arrange distribution of the best seed varieties, fertiliser and other inputs via farmers’ groups. Instead of following government diktat, smallholders follow the stringent demands of the export market. Kenya’s horticulture farmers have prospered because they reliably produce high quality vegetables to meet the short inventory lead times of European supermarkets. The key difference is that, because horticulture is not a staple food, Kenya’s dynamic private sector operates without interference from the government.

An African answer to globalisation

The opportunities for African agriculture in world trade are real, and demonstrable. Where food security is precarious, state direction of staple crops is inevitable in order to build up a national grain reserve. That is a different priority from the emphasis on self-sufficiency that has become familiar from AGRA and other donor agencies. Self-sufficiency implies growing enough to feed yourself – that is, to grow food for your own family. It is not the same as national food security, which requires access to a stable supply of food. More importantly, it obscures the crucial principle that agriculture must be competitive in local, or international, markets.

Many African ministers, buoyed by a spate of new investment and expressions of solidarity from Beijing, are fond of citing China’s state-sponsored capitalism as an alternative to development models proposed by western donors. Yet China’s Green Revolution, launched in 1978, followed a more nuanced trajectory than many of the ideas recently touted for Africa. To achieve self-sufficiency in grain, Beijing shifted production from ‘people’s communes’ to household farms, and opened state-controlled agricultural markets to private trade. Self-sufficiency in food brought political stability as a foundation for industry and manufacturing.

[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]The root of poverty is lack of money – not a lack of food.[/quote]

A Chinese-style industrial revolution will not happen in Africa without reliable power, infrastructure and effective regional integration. But a genuine Green Revolution for Africa in the 21st century is within the bounds of possibility. Three decades on, rising prosperity in the populous economies of China and India has increased demand for production of resource-intensive meat, adding to pressure on finite reserves of land and water – and driving demand for cattle feed. The global trade in agriculture is both an opportunity and a threat. For Africa to maximise the benefits and minimise the risks, the overriding priority is to improve skills and know-how.

The prospects for African agriculture hinge on producing crops which others want to buy. The most productive investment will be in locations where farmers, large and small, are able to integrate their systems in response to market demand. Where the efficiency and low costs of smallholders can be combined with the market access and quality controls of largeholders and exporters, Africa’s farmers can create a dynamic and market-led industry. For policymakers, the key working principle is to remember that the root of poverty is lack of money – not a lack of food.

COUNTERPOINTS

The Counterpoints series presents a critical account of defining ideas, in and about Africa. The scope is broad, from international development policy to popular perceptions of the continent.

Counterpoints address ‘Big Picture’ questions, without the constraints of prevailing opinion and orthodoxy. The arguments are forward-looking but not speculative, informed by the present yet concerned with the future.

In publishing this series, Africa Research Institute hopes to foster competing ideas, discussion and debate. The views expressed in Counterpoints are those of the authors, and not necessarily those of Africa Research Institute.

The post Why Africa can make it big in agriculture – Mark Ashurst and Stephen Mbithi appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

In this highly personal and keenly argued commentary, James Gikunju Muuru makes the first detailed response by an African smallholder to the controversy over ‘food miles’. His account describes the serial feats of coordination, discipline, productivity and manual labour which make Kenyan horticulture competitive in global markets. For anyone who has ever asked how some of the poorest populations can reap the benefits of world trade, the example of James’s four-acre plot in the Mwea district of Central Province is a compelling reply.

The post Kenya’s Flying Vegetables: Small farmers and the ‘food miles’ debate appeared first on Africa Research Institute.

The post Nursing the Future: e-learning and clinical care, in Kenya appeared first on Africa Research Institute.