Politics
BAD AID: Sexual abuse in the aid industry and what can be done about it
In February 2015, residents of Gilgil, a small town halfway between Naivasha and Nakuru in Kenya’s scenic Rift Valley – which was once known for its “Happy Valley” set – were stunned to learn that Simon Harris, a respected middle-aged British charity worker who had been living in the town since the 1990s, had been sentenced to jail for sexually abusing street children. A court in Birmingham in the UK had sentenced Harris to 17 years in prison for indecent sexual assault and for possessing indecent images of children.
According to an article by Nation reporter Pauline Kairu, few people in Gilgil suspected Harris of being a paedophile because he had gained a reputation as “the kind mzungu social worker who crusaded for the education of the less privileged”. This is also probably why the townspeople did not question his motives when he took street children to his house for “a warm bath” and a “hot meal”.
Two of the street children interviewed by the Nation reporter said that nights in Harris’ house “usually featured naked boys wrapped in towels, smoking bhang, cigarettes and binging on alcoholic beverages.” These binges almost always ended with Harris sexually abusing the boys. “After the bath, he would smell you and tell you ever so cheerfully, ‘You smell so good, I could eat you,” recalled Dom (not his real name). Many of the boys endured the abuse because “not coming to his house meant sleeping in town on a veranda, cold and hungry”. The judge who presided over Harris’ case stated that his victims had been degraded and used and that “the mental scars will almost certainly never heal”.
This shocking case forced the UK government to screen British nationals seeking to work in Kenya and elsewhere, especially in fields that give them easy access to children (such as teaching and charity work), and to prevent those who have been implicated in the sexual abuse of children in the UK from obtaining jobs abroad. (The UK is one of the few governments that has taken active steps to prevent child sexual abuse and exploitation by its nationals living outside the country.)
According to an article by Nation reporter Pauline Kairu, few people in Gilgil suspected Harris of being a paedophile because he had gained a reputation as “the kind mzungu social worker who crusaded for the education of the less privileged”. This is also probably why the townspeople did not question his motives when he took street children to his house for “a warm bath” and a “hot meal”.
Until the rise of the #MeToo movement – spurred by sexual harassment charges against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein – and revelations this year that senior Oxfam staff based in Haiti had sexually exploited local women and girls, the issue of sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation was not taken seriously by the humanitarian/aid industry. Now that the Oxfam scandal has become so huge, other aid organisations have also been forced to address the issue.
However, while international humanitarian NGOs, such as Oxfam, have been forced to examine practices that allow sexual harassment, abuse and exploitation to flourish within their organisations, the United Nations has been reluctant to even admit to such practices. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has reiterated the world body’s “zero tolerance” for sexual abuse, but has not ordered any of the UN’s agencies to conduct reviews on how they handle such cases, nor has he promised to bring the culprits to book.
“Boys will be boys”
The sexual abuse of children and women by UN peacekeepers has been reported in several countries recovering from civil war or natural disaster but hardly any of the perpetrators have been brought to justice either by their own countries or by the UN. Andrew MacLeod, a former UN official who now advocates for stiff penalties for aid workers implicated in the rape of women and children through his organisation Hear Their Cries, estimates that there have been over 60,000 rapes committed by UN personnel, including peacekeepers, in the last decade and that the organisation harbours some 3,000 paedophiles. (These numbers, however, are hard to verify as the UN does not compile such statistics, and even if does come across such cases, it is not likely to make them public.)
A report published by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in 2007 admitted that “the dangerous combination of thousands of relatively well-paid young men posted overseas in environments where the rule of law and other societal constraints are often absent…has allowed the sexual abuse and/or exploitation of local populations”. Tina Tinde, an international aid worker from Norway, told France 24 recently that often cases of rape or sexual exploitation by peacekeepers are overlooked on the pretext that “boys will be boys”.
The UN says it does not have the mandate to arrest or prosecute errant peacekeepers and that such cases should be referred to the countries that provide the peacekeepers. But even this principle is not adhered to. One of the most disturbing cases to emerge recently was that of Anders Kompass, the director of field operations at the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, who in 2014 was suspended after he informed the French government about the sexual abuse of children by French peacekeepers in the Central African Republic. Kompass endured months of frustration and eventually resigned from the UN, “disappointed and full of sadness” as the UN’s senior managers continued to blame him for tarnishing the organisation’s reputation, instead of addressing the issue and providing the victims with assistance. Narrating his experience to IRIN News, Kompass said that he had seen a lot of horror and brutality during his career at the UN but reading about “an eight-year-old boy describing in detail his sexual abuse by the peacekeepers meant to protect him is the kind of account I wish I’d never had to read.” He said that his experience had strengthened his conviction that UN staffers who act ethically will inevitably suffer negative consequences.
Andrew MacLeod, a former UN official who now advocates for stiff penalties for aid workers implicated in the rape of women and children, estimates that there have been over 60,000 rapes committed by UN personnel in the last decade and that the organisation harbours some 3,000 paedophiles.
Lori Handrahan, who once served as a gender expert at the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, says that when she reported a “food-for-sex” scandal at a refugee camp on the Chad-Darfur border, she was told by a senior UNHCR official to shut up. When she refused to do so, and especially after her story about how female refugees in the camp were being sexually exploited was published, she was warned that she would never work for UNHCR again.
In most countries where there are UN peacekeeping missions, the vast majority of the refugee or internally displaced populations comprise women and children – the most vulnerable group in any society. These are the people who are most likely to be sexually abused or exploited. The internally displaced boys in the Central African Republic who were sexually abused by the French peacekeepers were often given food or money in exchange for sexual favours. These kinds of “transactional” sexual relationships thrive in impoverished or war-torn regions. A Save the Children report on Liberia, for instance, showed that many Liberian girls believed that they had to have sex with UN or NGO staff before they could be given food. Naomi Tulay-Solanke, who runs an NGO in Liberia called Community Healthcare Initiative, says she is not surprised by revelations of sexual abuse and exploitation by aid workers. “Aid workers have been in my country for decades. This kind of thing happens everyday,” she told Bright magazine.
People working for aid/humanitarian organisations sexually exploit people because they can. The Oxfam director in Haiti, Roland van Hauwermeiren, used his privileged position to procure sex from women whose lives had been devastated by the January 2010 earthquake. Women and children in poor countries destroyed by war or other disasters are vulnerable to sexual abuse or exploitation because they are more likely than men to have direct contact with humanitarian organisations – they are usually the ones who stand in line for rations and other types of aid during a crisis and who are often targeted for medical and other interventions aimed at women and children. For this reason, as Macleod points out, humanitarian organisations attract a disproportionate number of “predatory paedophiles” or opportunistic rapists.
A culture of misogyny and racism
In an email interview, Handrahan, who is also the author of Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape, a book that looks at the impact of child abuse and pornography, told me that sexual abuse and exploitation of vulnerable populations by UN officials and aid workers continues because “the humanitarian sector, as whole, has cultivated a culture of misogyny and racism against employees and beneficiary populations” and “is still, largely, about white men enjoying power”. She says that white men in powerful positions within humanitarian organisations view sexual exploitation as their “right” or a “perk” that comes with working in hardship areas. She believes that this culture will only change if more women are hired in senior positions within these organisations.
Of course, not all aid workers implicated in sexual abuse or exploitation have been white men; an Associated Press investigation in Haiti found that the majority of UN peacekeepers involved in a child sex ring were from Sri Lanka. And many of the perpetrators of rape and child abuse in other troubled parts of the world have been from the so-called developing world. The thing to remember is who holds the power in the donor-recipient or peacekeeper-affected population relationship – and who holds the guns.
In an email interview, Handrahan, who is also the author of Epidemic: America’s Trade in Child Rape, told me that sexual abuse and exploitation of vulnerable populations by UN officials and aid workers continues because “the humanitarian sector, as whole, has cultivated a culture of misogyny and racism against employees and beneficiary populations” and “is still, largely, about white men enjoying power”.
We must also accept that the aid creates dependency, which distorts the donor-recipient or saviour-victim relationship. As Firoze Manji wrote in the January 2015 edition of the New African, “for saviours to exist, there must be those in need of saving – saviours require victims – and turning other humans into victims is therefore a fundamental requirement of the saviour complex.” Saviours, he says, “cannot thrive where people retake control of their destinies, assert their dignity and humanity, create the structures for self-determination, organise to make collective decisions, take pride in their own countries, and seek neither aid nor charity.”
Many proponents of aid argue that by highlighting cases of sexual exploitation and abuse within the aid industry, it becomes much more difficult for humanitarian organisations to carry out their work because these revelations undermine the important work they do in alleviating human suffering.
On the other hand, those who question the benefits of aid argue that it is just another form of colonialism that is instrumental in perpetuating poverty and underdevelopment, especially in Africa. As Maina Mwangi, a Kenyan investment banker put it, aid, by its very nature, is a “blunt instrument” as it removes responsibility for wealth creation and development from Africa’s leadership to donors, which enables the African political class to “eat” with impunity. Similarly, the Tanzanian scholar Issa Shivji has referred to aid a form of neocolonialism that wrests power and responsibility from African states and their leaders and into the hands of NGOs and foreign donors. Indeed, even the British diplomat Robert Cooper admitted once that Western aid is “soft power” – an essential component of extending Europe’s influence in countries it once colonised, or “a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values”. Donor agencies and the charities and humanitarian organisations that they fund are the instruments through which such “soft power” is exerted.
Like colonialism, foreign aid has the net effect of disempowering and infantilising “the natives” and their leaders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the international emergency relief and humanitarian sectors, which usually gain prominence during famines and other disasters. When an international humanitarian organisation flies in to distribute food to starving people or to provide tents to people fleeing a civil war, it allows these people’s governments to abdicate their responsibility towards their own citizens. As Alex de Waal notes, “The process of internationalisation is the key to the appropriation of power by international institutions and the retreat from domestic accountability.”
The “internationalisation” of famine relief started in earnest during the Biafran famine in Nigeria in 1968. International relief agencies began mushrooming then and by 1984, when the musician Bob Geldof initiated his Band Aid, famine relief had virtually become an industry. Today famine relief is a big industry. The UN’s appeal for donations during the 2011 famine in Somalia, for example, managed to raise $1.4 billion within just one month of the appeal. A lot of this money went right back to where it came from. Much of the food aid for Somalia was purchased from the United States and was transported on US-flagged ships. (A large proportion of this food was alleged to have been stolen by local militias, a claim that was refuted the UN’s World Food Programme, but which suggested that there was a thriving aid-based black market economy in Somalia.)
What needs to be done
Thanks to the #MeToo movement and the Times newspaper’s revelations about Oxfam staff members’ peccadillos in Haiti, there is now greater interest in addressing the issues of sexual harassment within aid organisations and sexual abuse and exploitation by aid workers. The UK’s international development secretary, Penny Mordaunt, has threatened to withdraw funding from aid organisations that do not take sexual harassment or abuse seriously. The UK is also among those countries whose police and anti-crime authorities actively pursue and prosecute UK citizens who sexually abuse children abroad, as was in the Harris case.
Like colonialism, foreign aid has the net effect of disempowering and infantilising “the natives” and their leaders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the international emergency relief and humanitarian sectors, which usually gain prominence during famines and other disasters.
However, such harassment, exploitation and abuse is likely to continue at that bastion of impunity, the United Nations. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has promised to look into the matter and has even instituted a “confidential helpline” for victims of sexual harassment. However, I can confidently say from personal experience that this policy is unlikely to yield results, especially if the person being accused of harassment or other types of wrongdoing is a senior UN official. Any UN staff member who reports the misconduct of a senior UN official usually faces swift retaliation.
More importantly, as long as UN officials enjoy immunity from prosecution and as long as the UN’s internal justice system continues to fail whistleblowers, such abuse is likely to continue. (The UN Charter accords UN officials immunity from prosecution – a privilege that is not even accorded to ambassadors, who can be tried in their own countries, if not in the country where they are stationed, if they are implicated in illegal or criminal activities. Guterres’ office recently tweeted that UN staff members’ immunity would be waived in child abuse cases, but we are yet to see if this will materialise.)
The UN has to overhaul its internal justice system and put in place external, independent mechanisms that are more transparent and accountable – and which do not victimise whistleblowers. As Peter Gallo, a former investigator at the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services, says, nothing will change until there is real accountability at the UN “and that will never happen unless and until there is a truly independent and separate agency established that is not part of the UN secretariat but reports directly – and separately – to member states.”
Current and former female UN employees have reported a flawed internal justice and grievance system that is stacked against the victims. One of these women told the UK’s Guardian newspaper that she was raped by a senior UN staff member while working in a remote location but did not obtain justice despite medical evidence and witness testimonies.
More importantly, as long as UN officials enjoy immunity from prosecution and as long as the UN’s internal justice system continues to fail whistleblowers, such abuse is likely to continue.
When in 2005 the UN established an Ethics Office, UN staff members believed that they could report criminal or unethical behaviour confidentially without being punished. However, the UN Ethics Office has proved to be a channel through which wrongdoing is covered up. Very few UN staff members who have approached this office for help have obtained justice; on the contrary, many have been forced to resign or have been fired.
Meanwhile, the perpetrators are given unlimited freedom to do as they please. In 2015, a UN official who was accused of sexual harassment was even allowed to interview the woman who made the compliant against him. (This happened to me as well when I worked at the UN’s city agency, UN-Habitat. The panel selected to interview me consisted almost entirely of proxies of people I had accused of wrongdoing. Needless to say, I didn’t get the job.) As Handrahan asks: “How can the UN end suffering of vulnerable populations when female employees navigate hostile environments just by showing up for work, let alone when they attempt to raise issues of sexual abuse and exploitation by UN staff?”
The UN’s highly hierarchical, male-dominated and secretive environment also makes it difficult for women to report sexual harassment or other kinds of wrongdoing. One internal survey at UNAIDS found that about 40 women had experienced sexual harassment but only two had reported it. The fear of losing their jobs or enduring other forms of retaliation prevent women from coming forward, especially if the accused is a senior official, and particularly if he has the authority to renew – or not renew – their contracts. Meanwhile, few, if any, of these sexual predators lose their jobs or are demoted or reprimanded for their actions.
Furthermore, those who are tasked with reporting sexual abuse and other kinds of wrongdoing do not do so because they believe that their reports will reflect badly on their careers and impact their upward mobility within the organisation. Craig Sanders, the UNHCR official who told Handrahan to keep quiet, feared that exposure of the “food-for-sex” scandal could “ruin his career”. (It didn’t; Sanders is now the Deputy Director in the Division of Programme Support and Management at UNHCR’s headquarters in Geneva.)
A disgruntled American aid worker in Kosovo told David Reiff, the author of A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis, that UN officials believe that a critical report on the UN or on its activities will jeopardise their careers. “And that’s much more unlikely if your reports to UN headquarters say everything is fine than if they are critical. It may not be fine; in fact, it may all be going to hell in a handbasket. But if you value your career chances, you’d better have an awfully good reason to ring the alarm, and above all be damn sure the bad news isn’t going to piss off…major donors, and in turn make your bosses furious with you,” she explained.
The UN’s highly hierarchical, male-dominated and secretive environment also makes it difficult for women to report sexual harassment or other kinds of wrongdoing. One internal survey at UNAIDS found that about 40 women had experienced sexual harassment but only two had reported it.
Thanks to the Oxfam scandal, more mainstream media organisations have started to take aid agencies, including the UN, to task, which was not so before, probably because critics of the aid industry are usually associated with conservative right-wing groups. Even the so-called liberal media have realised that sexual abuse of vulnerable populations by aid workers is an offence that they can no longer ignore, and that this kind of abuse actually undermines the good work that many of these organisations claim to be doing. More exposure in the mainstream media of sexual abuse and exploitation by UN employees and aid workers might just force these agencies to take the issue more seriously.
Many proposals have been made to curb these crimes, including stiffer penalties for the perpetrators and stronger screening systems to prevent paedophiles from getting jobs in the aid sector. But given the stifling bureaucracy at the UN and at most international aid organisations – and their propensity to cover up scandals that make them look bad – perhaps the most effective strategy would be for donors to withdraw funding from any organisation where sexual harassment, exploitation or abuse has been reported and has not been dealt with adequately. There is no bigger incentive in the aid industry to change things than the threat of dwindling resources due to donor disgust.
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Politics
‘Crush and Grind Them Like Lice’: Harare Old Guard Feeling Threatened
With the launch of the Citizens Coalition for Change, Zimbabwe’s political landscape has undergone a significant shift, with a younger activist generation increasingly impatient with the unfulfilled promises of liberation.
On the 26th of February 2022, Zimbabwe’s Vice President delivered a chilling threat to the opposition. In a speech the “retired” army general Constantino Chiwenga, the chief architect of the November of 2017 putsch that removed Robert Mugabe, threatened that the opposition will be “crushed and ground on a rock like lice”. The General claimed that the ruling party was a “Goliath”; the Biblical imagery of the diminutive David “slaying” the giant Goliath was entirely lost on the Vice President. Here are his words:
“Down with CCC. You see when you crush lice with a rock, you put it on a flat stone and then you grind it to the extent that even flies will not eat it… But we are as big as Goliath we will see it [the opposition] when the time comes”.
The following day violent mayhem broke out in Kwekwe, the very town where the fiery speech was made. By the time the chaos ended, the opposition reported that 16 of their supporters had been hospitalised and it was recorded that a young man was sadistically speared to death. The supporters of the ruling party had taken the threat to “crush” and “grind” the opposition seriously. Details emerged—from the police—that the suspects were from the ruling party and had tried to hide in a property owned by a former minister of intelligence.
The launch of the Citizens Coalition for Change (CCC) has galvanised the opposition. Going by the youthful excitement at the rallies, the violence flaring against its supporters, and the way the police has been clamping down on CCC rallies, the ruling elites have realised they face a serious political threat from what has been called the “yellow” movement.
Exit Mugabe and Tsvangirai: Shifts in opposition and ruling class politics
The death of opposition leader and former prime minister Morgan Tsvangirai in February 2018 came in the wake of the November 2017 coup and other significant political events that followed. The death was a big blow to the opposition; there had been no succession planning, which was rendered more complex by the existence of three vice presidents deputising Tsvangirai. The MDC Alliance succession debacle set in motion a tumultuous contest that splintered the opposition. Court applications followed, and the ruling elites took an active interest. When the court battles ended, the judiciary ensured a “win” for the faction favoured by the ruling class. That faction was formally recognised in parliament, given party assets and provided with financial resources by the Treasury that were meant for the opposition.
As for the ruling party, there has been a shift in the political contests along factional lines, accentuated following the death of Robert Gabriel Mugabe in September of 2019. There is high suspicion that the 2017 coup plotters (generals and commanders) now want their proverbial “pound of flesh”—the presidency. With the presidency as the bull fighter’s prize, the factions are now lining up either behind the president or the behind generals and this is cascading through the ruling party structures. The historical faction known as G40 (Generation 40) that hovered around the then first lady has been practically shut out of political power, with its anchors remaining holed up outside the country. Remnants of the G40 faction in Zimbabwe have been side-lined, with some of them subjected to the endless grind of court processes to ensure they keep their heads down.
Yet another element has emerged, that of a president who feels besieged and is re-building the party and executive positions in the image of his regional ethnic block, bringing into the matrix a potent powder keg waiting to explode in the future.
The ruling party has gone further to entice Morgan Tsvangirai’s political orphans in order to decimate the leadership ranks of the opposition. Patronage is generously dished out: an ambassadorial appointment here, a gender commissioner position there, a seat on the board of a state parastatal…, and so on. These appointments come with extreme state largesse—cars, drivers, state security, free fuel, housing, pensions and the list goes on. The patronage also includes lucrative gold mining claims and farms running into hundreds of acres that come with free agricultural inputs. The former opposition stalwarts must be “re-habilitated” by being taught “patriotism” at a Bolshevik-like ideological school and then paraded at rallies as defectors to ZANU-PF.
Yet another element has emerged, that of a president who feels besieged and is re-building the party and executive positions in the image of his regional ethnic block.
As these political shifts take place and the opposition divorces itself from the succession mess, there are also changes in Zimbabwe’s economy and this has a direct impact on the trajectory of politics in the country.
Transformed political economy: Informality, diaspora and agrarian change
From about the end of the 1990s and stretching into the subsequent two decades up to 2022, Zimbabwe’s political economy has shifted significantly. Firstly, the fast-track land reform of the early 2000s altered land ownership from white settler “commercial” farmers to include more black people. The white-settler class power was removed as a factor in politics and in its place is a very unstable system of tenure for thousands of black farmers that have been married to the state for tenure security and stability.
Secondly, the follow-on effect of the land reform meant that Zimbabwe’s industrial base was altered, and this has resulted in a highly informalized economy or what others have called the “rubble”. An informal economy is now the new normal across the board for ordinary citizens and this has weakened organized labour as a voice in political contests. In 2020, the World Bank estimated extreme poverty at 49 per cent; this is infusing a sense of urgency for political change and is putting pressure on the political elites in Harare.
Thirdly, the exodus of Zimbabwe’s younger population into the diaspora has introduced another factor into the political matrix. According to official figures, the diaspora transferred about US$1.4 billion in 2021 alone, but this figure doesn’t capture remittances that are moved into Zimbabwe informally; the figure is much higher. The diaspora has actually used its cash to have a political voice, often via the opposition or independent “citizen initiatives”. It is proving to be a significant player in the political matrix to the extent that Nelson Chamisa has appointed a Secretary for Diaspora Affairs. For its part, the ruling party has blocked the diaspora vote.
Fourth, the national political economy has been “captured” by an unproductive crony class to the extent that researchers have estimated that as much as half of Zimbabwe’s GDP is being pilfered:
“It is estimated that Zimbabwe may lose up to half the value of its annual GDP of $21.4bn due to corrupt economic activity that, even if not directly the work of the cartels featured in the report, is the result of their suffocation of honest economic activity through collusion, price fixing and monopolies. Ironically, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has been a public critic of illicit financial transfers, is identified by the report as one of the cartel bosses whose patronage and protection keeps cartels operating.”
Fifthly, and often under-researched, is the substantial role of China across Zimbabwe’s political economy as Harare’s political elites have shifted to Beijing for a closer alliance. This has paid handsomely for China which has almost unrestrained access to Zimbabwe’s natural resources, and the political elites are “comrades in business” with—mostly—Chinese state corporations; China’s influence is pervasive and evident across the country. Put together, the factors above mean that the political economy structure has changed significantly and it is within this landscape that the Citizens Coalition for Change—dubbed the “yellow movement” — that has been launched by the opposition will have to operate and organise.
‘Yellow Movement’: Re-articulating the future beyond the ‘Harare Bubble’?
Since its launch, the opposition movement has swept into the CCC’s ranks the younger demographic of activists together with some solid veterans who survived the brutal years of Robert Mugabe’s terror. Zimbabwe’s median age is reported to be about 18 years of age; if these young people can register, turn out to vote and defend their vote, there is a whirlwind coming for the old nationalists in Harare.
Some within the ruling party have noticed this reality, with a former minister and ruling party member stating that “Nelson Chamisa is gaining popularity because the ZANU PF old guard is fighting its own young men and women”. This admission is consistent with the words of Temba Mliswa, another “independent” member of parliament and a former leading activist in the ruling party, who stated that:
“The generational approach is like you trying to stop a wave of water with your open hands. You cannot ignore it. It’s a generational issue. You cannot ignore it. You need to look at it. You need to study it… There is no young person in ZANU PF who is as vibrant as Chamisa, who is as charismatic as Nelson Chamisa. Chamisa is going to go straight for ED (President Emmerson Mnangagwa)… There is no gate preventing this.’
These admissions are an indication that the CCC movement poses a serious threat to the ruling party. But beyond the contest of politics, of ideas, of policy platforms, the “yellow movement” will have to divorce itself from the “Harare Bubble”. The ruling nationalists polished a rigid centralised political system inherited from settler-colonialism, and have used this to build a crony network of robbery based in the capital city while impoverishing other regions. But they are not alone in this; even the opposition has often overlooked the fact that “all politics is local” and it has also created a “Harare Bubble” of yesterday’s heroes and gatekeepers who, armed with undynamic analyses, continue to cast their shadows into the arena long after their expiry date.
“Nelson Chamisa is gaining popularity because the ZANU PF old guard is fighting its own young men and women”.
The yellow movement will have to go local and divorce itself from the parochial legacy of previously progressive platforms that have now been cornered by an elite who have become careerist, corrupt, inward-looking and, like civil warlords, only loyal to imported 10-year-old whisky bottles and their kitambis—their visibly ballooning stomachs.
Yet there is no ignoring it; Zimbabwe’s youth have been emboldened by political change in Zambia and Malawi, and by the rise of younger leaders in South Africa. The winds are blowing heavily against the status quo. In the 2023 general election, the ruling nationalists will face a more tactful, daring and politically solid Nelson Chamisa who has strategically pushed back against “elite pacts”. Added to his eloquence, his speeches are getting more structured, substantially more polished, and he is projecting the CCC movement as a capable alternative government. With the indelible footprints of Morgan Tsvangirai in the background, the next general election, in 2023, will be an existential contest for Harare’s old nationalists—they are facing their Waterloo.
Politics
The Dictatorship of the Church
From the enormously influential megachurches of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa to smaller ‘startups,’ the church in Zimbabwe has frightening, nearly despotic authority.
In Zimbabwe, the most powerful dictatorship is not the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party. Despite the party’s 40 year history of ruthlessly cracking down on opposition parties, sowing fear into the minds of the country’s political aspirants, despite the party’s overseeing of catastrophic policies such as the failed land reform, and despite the precarious position of the social landscape of the country today, neither former president Robert Mugabe, nor the current president Emmerson Mnangagwa, nor any of their associates pose as significant an existential threat to Zimbabweans as the most influential dictatorship at play in the country: the church.The church has frightening, near despotic authority which it uses to wield the balance of human rights within its palms. It wields authority from enormously influential megachurches like those of Walter Magaya and Emmanuel Makandiwa, to the smaller startup churches that operate from the depths of the highest-density suburbs of the metropolitan provinces of Bulawayo and Harare. Modern day totalitarian regimes brandish the power of the military over their subjects. In the same way, the church wields the threat of eternal damnation against those who fail to follow its commands. With the advent of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, for example, Emmanuel Makandiwa vocally declared that the vaccine was the biblical “mark of the beast.” In line with the promises of the book of Revelations, he declared that receiving it would damn one to eternal punishment.
Additionally, in just the same way that dictators stifle discourse through the control of the media, the church suppresses change by controlling the political landscape and making themselves indispensable stakeholders in electoral periods. The impact of this is enormous: since independence, there has been no meaningful political discourse on human rights questions. These questions include same-sex marriage and the right to access abortions as well as other reproductive health services. The church’s role in this situation has been to lead an onslaught of attacks on any institution, political or not, that dares to bring such questions for public consideration. But importantly, only through such consideration can policy substantively change. When people enter into conversation, they gain the opportunity to find middle grounds for their seemingly irreconcilable positions. Such middle-grounds may be the difference between life and death for many disadvantaged groups in Zimbabwe and across the world at large. The influence of the church impedes any attempt at locating this middle ground.
Additionally, because the church influences so many Zimbabweans, political actors do not dare oppose the church’s declarations. They fear being condemned and losing the support of their electorate. The church rarely faces criticism for its positions. It is not held accountable for the sentiments its leaders express by virtue of the veil of righteousness protecting it.
Furthermore, and uniquely so, the church serves the function of propping up the ZANU-PF party. The ZANU-PF mainly holds conservative ideals. These ideals align with those of the traditionalist Zimbabwean church. In short, the church in Zimbabwe stands as a hurdle to the crucial regime change necessary to bring the country to success. With a crucial election slated for the coming months, this hurdle looms more threatening than at any other time in the country’s history.
The impact of the church’s dictatorship on humans is immeasurable. Queer people, for example, are enormously vulnerable to violence and othering from their communities. They are also particularly vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases and infections due to the absence of healthcare for them. The church meets the attempts of organizations such as the Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe to push for protection with cries that often devolve into scapegoating. These cries from the church reference moral decadence, a supposed decline in family values, and in the worst of cases, mental illness.
Similarly, the church meets civil society’s attempts at codifying and protecting sexual and reproductive rights with vehement disapproval. In 2021, for example, 22 civil society organizations petitioned Parliament to lower the consent age for accessing sexual and reproductive health services. Critics of the petition described it as “deeply antithetical to the public morality of Zimbabwe” that is grounded in “good old cultural and Christian values.”
Reporting on its consultations with religious leaders, a Parliamentary Portfolio Committee tasked with considering this petition described Christianity as “the solution” to the problem posed by the petition. This Committee viewed the petition as a gateway to issues such as “child exploitation … rights without responsibility … and spiritual bondages.” The petition disappeared into the annals of parliamentary bureaucracy. A year later, the Constitutional Court unanimously voted to increase the age of consent to 18.
A more horrifying instance of this unholy alliance between the church and the state in Zimbabwe is a recently unearthed money laundering scheme that has occurred under the watchful eye of the government. Under the stewardship of self-proclaimed Prophet Uebert Angel, the Ambassador-at-Large for the Government of Zimbabwe, millions of dollars were laundered by the Zimbabwean government. Here, as revealed by Al Jazeera in a four-part docuseries, Ambassador Angel served as a middleman for the government, facilitating the laundering of millions of dollars and the smuggling of scores of refined gold bars to the United Arab Emirates. He did this using his plenipotentiary ambassadorial status to vault through loopholes in the government’s security systems.
Importantly, Prophet Angel was appointed in 2021 as part of a frenetic series of ambassadorial appointments. President Mnangagwa handed out these appointments to specifically high-profile church leaders known for their glamorous lifestyle and their preaching of the prosperity gospel. Through these appointments, Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government earned itself a permanent stamp of approval from the church and access to a multi-million member base of voting Christians in the country. Mnangagwa’s gained access to freedom from accountability arising from the power of the endorsements by “men-of-God,” one of whom’s prophetic realm includes predicting English Premier League (EPL) football scores and guessing the color of congregants’ undergarments.
In exchange, Prophet Angel has earned himself a decently large sum of money. He has also earned the same freedom from critique and accountability as Zimbabwe’s government. To date, there is no evidence of Angel ever having faced any consequences for his action. The most popular response is simple: the majority of the Christian community chooses either to defend him or to turn a blind eye to his sins. The Christian community’s response to Prophet Angel’s actions, and to the role of the church in abortion and LGBTQ discourse is predictable. The community also responds simply to similar instances when the church acts as a dialogical actor and absolves itself of accountability and critique
Amidst all this, it is easy to denounce the church as a failed actor. However, the church’s political presence has not been exclusively negative. The Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace, for example, was the first organization to formally acknowledge Gukurahundi, a genocide that happened between 1982 and 1987 and killed thousands of Ndebele people. The Commission did this through a detailed report documenting what it termed as disturbances in the western regions of the country. Doing so sparked essential conversations about accountability and culpability over this forgotten genocide in Zimbabwe.
Similarly, the Zimbabwe Bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission has been involved in data collection that is sparking discourse about violence and human rights abuses in Zimbabwe. In doing so, the Commission is challenging Zimbabweans to think more critically about what constructive politics can look like in the country. Such work is hugely instrumental in driving social justice work forward in the country. What uniquely identifies the church’s involvement in both of these issues, however, is that neither touches on matters of Christian dogma. Instead, the Commission responds to general questions about the future of both God and Zimbabwe’s people in ways that make it easy for the church to enter into conversation with a critical and informed lens.
The conclusion from this is simple: if Zimbabwe is to shift into more progressive, dialogical politics, the church’s role must change with it. It is unlikely that the church will ever be a wholly apolitical actor in any country. However, the political integration of the church into the politics of Zimbabwe must be a full one. It must be led by the enhanced accountability of Zimbabwean religious leaders. In the same way that other political actors are taken to task over their opinions, the church must be held accountable for its rhetoric in the political space.
A growing population has, thus far, been involved in driving this shift. Social media has taken on a central role in this. For example, social media platforms such as Twitter thoroughly criticized megachurch pastor Emmanuel Makandiwa for his sentiments regarding vaccinations. This and other factors led him to backtrack on his expressed views on inoculation. However, social media is not as available in rural areas. There, the influence of the religion is stronger than elsewhere in the country. Therefore investments must be made in educating people about the roles of the church and the confines of its authority. This will be instrumental in giving people the courage to cut against the very rough grain of religious dogma. Presently, few such educational opportunities exist. To spark this much-needed change, it will be useful to have incentivizing opportunities for dialogue in religious sects.
More than anything else, the people for whom and through whom the church exists must drive any shift in the church’s role. The people of Tunisia stripped President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of his authority during the Jasmine Revolution of January 2011. The women of Iran continue to tear at the walls that surround the extremist Islamic Republic. In just the same way, the people of Zimbabwe have the power to disrobe the church of the veil of righteousness that protects it from criticism and accountability.
In anticipation of the upcoming election, the critical issues emerging necessitate this excoriation even more. This will open up political spaces for Zimbabweans to consider a wider pool of contentious issues when they take to the polls in a few months. Above all, the people of Zimbabwe must start viewing the church for what it is: an institution, just like any other, with vested interests in the country’s affairs. As with any other institution, we must begin to challenge, question, and criticize the church for its own good and for the good of the people of Zimbabwe.
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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.
Politics
Pattern of Life and Death: Camp Simba and the US War on Terror
The US has become addicted to private military contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability” in the so-called war on terror.
Though it claimed the lives of three Americans, not 2,403, some liken the January 2020 al-Shabaab attack at Manda Bay, Kenya, to Pearl Harbour. The US would go on to unleash massive airstrikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia.
“We Americans hate being caught out,” a spy-plane pilot and contractor recently told me. “We should have killed them before they even planned it.”
Both the Manda Bay and Pearl Harbour attacks revealed the vulnerability of US personnel and forces. One brought the US into the Second World War. The other has brought Kenya into the global–and seemingly endless–War on Terror.
Months before launching the assault, members of the Al Qaeda-linked faction bivouacked in mangrove swamp and scrubland along this stretch of the northeast Kenyan coast. Unseen, they observed the base and Magagoni airfield. The airfield was poorly secured to begin with. They managed not to trip the sensors and made their way past the guard towers and the “kill zone” without being noticed.
At 5.20 a.m. on 5 January, pilots and contractors for L3Harris Technologies, which conducts airborne intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) for the Pentagon, were about to take off from the airfield in a Beechcraft King Air b350. The twin engine plane was laden with sensors, cameras, and other high tech video equipment. Seeing thermal images of what they thought were hyenas scurrying across the runway, the pilots eased back on the engines. By the time they realized that a force of committed, disciplined and well-armed al-Shabaab fighters had breached Magagoni’s perimeter, past the guard towers, it was too late.
Simultaneously, a mile away, other al-Shabaab fighters attacked Camp Simba, an annex to Manda Bay where US forces and contractors are housed. Al-Shabaab fired into the camp to distract personnel and delay the US response to the targeted attack at the airfield.
Back at the Magagoni airfield, al-Shabaab fighters launched a rocket-propelled grenade at the King Air. “They took it right in the schnauzer,” an aircraft mechanic at Camp Simba who survived the attack recently recalled to me. Hit in the nose, the plane burst into flames. Pilots Bruce Triplett, 64, and Dustin Harrison, 47, both contractors employed by L3Harris, died instantly. The L3Harris contractor working the surveillance and reconnaissance equipment aft managed to crawl out, badly burned. US Army Specialist Henry J Mayfield, 23, who was in a truck clearing the tarmac, was also killed.
The attack on Camp Simba was not the first al-Shabaab action carried out in Kenya. But it was the first in the country to target US personnel. And it was wildly successful.
AFRICOM initially reported that six contractor-operated civilian aircraft had been damaged. However, drone footage released by al-Shabaab’s media wing showed that within a few minutes, the fighters had destroyed six surveillance aircraft, medical evacuation helicopters on the ground, several vehicles, and a fuel storage area. US and Kenyan forces engaged al-Shabaab for “several hours”.
Included in the destroyed aircraft was a secretive US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) military de Havilland Dash-8 twin-engine turboprop configured for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. A report released by United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) in March 2022 acknowledges that the attackers “achieved a degree of success in their plan.”
Teams working for another air-surveillance company survived the attack because their aircraft were in the air, preparing to land at Magagoni. Seeing what was happening on the ground, the crew diverted to Mombasa and subsequently to Entebbe, Uganda, where they stayed for months while Manda Bay underwent measures for force protection.
I had the chance to meet some of the contractors from that ISR flight. Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu, the coastal town where I live. On one recent afternoon, they commandeered a bar’s sound system, replacing Kenyan easy listening with boisterous Southern rock from the States.
Sweet home Alabama!
An ISR operator and I struck up an acquaintance. Black-eyed, thickly built, he’s also a self-confessed borderline sociopath. My own guess would be more an on-the-spectrum disorder. Formerly an operator with Delta Force, he was a “door kicker” and would often—in counter-terror parlance—“fix and finish” terror suspects. Abundant ink on his solid arms immortalizes scenes of battle from Iraq and Afghanistan. In his fifties, with a puffy white beard, he’s now an ISR contractor, an “eye in the sky”. His workday is spent “finding and fixing” targets for the Pentagon.
Occasionally, these guys—some call themselves paramilitary contractors—escape Camp Simba to hang out at various watering holes in and around Lamu.
He tells me about his missions—ten hours in a King Air, most of that time above Somalia, draped over cameras and video equipment. He gathers sensitive data for “pattern of life” analysis. He tells me that on the morning of the attack he was in the King Air about to land at the Magagoni airstrip.
We talked about a lot of things but when I probed him about “pattern of life” intel, the ISR operator told me not a lot except that al-Shabaab had been observing Camp Simba and the airstrip for a pattern of life study.
What I could learn online is that a pattern of life study is the documentation of the habits of an individual subject or of the population of an area. Generally done without the consent of the subject, it is carried out for purposes including security, profit, scientific research, regular censuses, and traffic analysis. So, pattern-of-life analysis is a fancy term for spying on people en masse. Seemingly boring.
Less so as applied to the forever war on terror. The operator pointed out the irony of how the mile or so of scrubland between the base and the Indian Ocean coastline had been crawling with militant spies in the months preceding the attack at Camp Simba. Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”
ISR and Pattern of Life are inextricably linked
King Airs perform specialized missions; the planes are equipped with cameras and communications equipment suitable for military surveillance. Radar systems gaze through foliage, rain, darkness, dust storms or atmospheric haze to provide real time, high quality tactical ground imagery anytime it is needed, day or night. What my operator acquaintance collects goes to the Pentagon where it is analysed to determine whether anything observed is “actionable”. In many instances, action that proceeds includes airstrikes. But as a private military contractor ISR operator cannot “pull the trigger”.
In the six weeks following the attack at Magagoni and Camp Simba, AFRICOM launched 13 airstrikes against al-Shabaab’s network. That was a high share of the total of 42 carried out in 2020.
Airstrikes spiked under the Trump administration, totalling more than 275 reported, compared with 60 over the eight years of the Barack Obama administration. It is no great mystery that the Manda Bay-Magagoni attack occurred during Trump’s time in office.
Typically, the ISR specialist says, his job is to find an al-Shabaab suspect and study his daily behaviours—his “pattern of life.”
Several al-Shabaab leaders behind the attack are believed to have been killed in such airstrikes. The US first launched airstrikes against al-Shabab in Somalia in 2007 and increased them in 2016, according to data collected and analysed by UK-based non-profit Airwars.
Controversy arises from the fact that, as precise as these strikes are thought to be, there are always civilian casualties.
“The US uses pattern of life, in part, to identify ways to reduce the risk of innocent civilian casualties (CIVCAS) (when/where are targets by themselves or with family) whereas obviously Shabaab does not distinguish as such and uses it for different purposes,” a Department of Defense official familiar with the matter of drone operations told me.
The Biden administration resumed airstrikes in Somalia in August 2021. AFRICOM claimed it killed 13 al-Shabaab militants and that no civilians were killed.
According to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, Mustaf ‘Ato is a senior Amniyat official responsible for coordinating and conducting al-Shabaab attacks in Somalia and Kenya and has helped plan attacks on Kenyan targets and US military compounds in Kenya. It is not clear, however, if this target has been fixed and killed.
A few days after the second anniversary of the Manda Bay attack, the US offered a US$10 million bounty.
The American public know very little about private military contractors. Yet the US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”. “Americans don’t care about contractors coming home in body bags,” says Sean McFate, a defense and national security analyst.
These airstrikes, targeted with the help of the operators and pilots in the King Airs flying out of Magagoni, would furnish a strong motive for al-Shabaab’s move on 5 January 2020.
The Pentagon carried out 15 air strikes in 2022 on the al-Qaeda-linked group, according to the Long War Journal tracker. Africom said the strikes killed at least 107 al-Shabaab fighters. There are no armed drones as such based at Camp Simba but armed gray-coloured single-engine Pilatus aircraft called Draco (Latin for “Dragon”) are sometimes used to kill targets in Somalia, a well-placed source told me.
The US has become addicted to contractors mainly because they provide “plausible deniability”.
The contractor I got to know somewhat brushes off the why of the attack. It is all too contextual for public consumption, and probably part of army indoctrination not to encourage meaningful discussion. He had, however, made the dry observation about the al-Shabaab affiliates out in the bush near the airfield, doing “pattern of life” reconnaissance.
The strike on Magagoni was closely timed and fully coordinated. And it appears that the primary aim was to take out ISR planes and their crews. It was private contractors, not US soldiers, in those planes. I pointed out to the operator that those targets would serve al-Shabaab’s aims both of vengeance and deterrence or prevention. His response: “Who cares why they attacked us? Al-Shabaab are booger-eaters.”
With that he cranks up the sound, singing along off-key:
And this bird, you cannot change
Lord help me, I can’t change….
Won’t you fly high, free bird, yeah.
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