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SAP – SEASON TWO: Who is driving civil service reform in Uganda? The people or the IMF?

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Ugandans should be alarmed that issues settled in the 1990s are having to be revisited in 2018. By MARY SERUMAGA

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SAP - SEASON TWO: Who is driving civil service reform in Uganda? The people or the IMF?
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Two recent announcements made in Uganda recently create a sense of history repeating itself. The first, a plan to reduce the number of ministries, departments and agencies; 24 out of 29 agencies and authorities, regulating everything from road building to cotton and coffee development, will either be put back in parent ministries, merged with other authorities or abolished. Potential savings run to billions of shillings a year in salaries alone. The second edict followed a few weeks later; it was to freeze allowances payable to civil servants.

Both come against the background of broadening the tax base to increase revenue and are a repeat of similar measures under the Civil Service Reform Programme (CSRP) of 1992 to 1997. All three interventions are aimed at increasing resources available for loan servicing, service delivery and improving efficiency (in that order).

SAP II: Who are the drivers?

On the face of it, it looks as though the government is finally getting serious about improving service delivery. The president has been praised in offline and social media for these visionary interventions. Unfortunately, none of it is new. If anything, Ugandans should be alarmed that issues settled in the 1990s are having to be revisited in 2018. In 2018, as in 1992, the government is in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for bailout loans and it is the IMF driving the reforms.

Reduction of expenditure on administration is simply one conditionality of the new Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP II) as it was in SAP I. This should not be necessary in 2018, particularly because in the 1990s, the programme included a component called “Developing Establishment Control Mechanisms” that intended to keep the size and structure (i.e. the establishment) of the civil service affordable. Had those been effectively put in place, there would have been no crisis in the cost of the administration today.

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In the first SAP programme, there was an attempt to bring the public on board. Programme components were made public, and privatization – the most controversial aspect of the programme – even had a strategic communications office that branded and shared information about the programme through mass media and drama.

In contrast, in 2018, when the National Resistance Movement (NRM) has exhausted the goodwill and patience of many, SAP II is being rolled out by stealth. A meeting on increasing the tax base was recently invaded by an activist demanding to know why she as a citizen was not privy to the decision-making.

Apart from the three interventions announced, the rest of SAP II remains a mystery. The nature and size of the financial package sought (new loan, rolled-over old loan or capitalisation of interest etc.) and the conditionalities Uganda has signed up for in order to qualify remain a secret. In other words, Ugandans don’t know how broke they are and how much more debt they are taking on and for how long.

Given the recent unprecedented but inevitable challenge to the NRM’s monopoly of political power by the People Power movement, what is certain is that Uganda’s development partners (DPs) will prepare for a successor regime willing to continue to carry illegitimate debt. Put another way, lenders will not accept a repudiation of loans wasted or stolen by the current regime, but will lend more money to cover the bad debts. The transition to this regime is known by a code called Rule of Law. The laws in question are those governing the enforcement of exploitative agreements with corrupt leaders.

Apart from the three interventions announced, the rest of SAP II remains a mystery. The nature and size of the financial package sought (new loan, rolled-over old loan or capitalisation of interest etc.) and the conditionalities Uganda has signed up for in order to qualify remain a secret. In other words, Ugandans don’t know how broke they are and how much more debt they are taking on and for how long.

At the same time, opposition to the economic crimes of the NRM government and demands for structural change is called “hooliganism”. The privileged few to whom the NRM regime has channeled economic opportunities are working overtime to project the violence of the state (all victims were either shot or bludgeoned) on unarmed demonstrators and innocent bystanders.

In their reluctant statements on the atrocities of August 2018, the UK and European Union called for the government and its victims – civil society – “to cooperate to ensure that the events that had caused suffering to Ugandan citizens and damaged the country’s global image were addressed swiftly and transparently with full respect for the Rule of Law”. The implication is that somehow the victims contributed to the attack.

All of this is underpinned by militarising public order. Repressive public order laws were first used to try and suffocate the independence movements of the 1940s and 50s. In the 21st century they are being implemented by a military trained and equipped to maim and kill supporters of the People Power movement. It seems civil disobedience as a means of political expression is not a privilege to be enjoyed by dollar-a-day people whose immunisation and ARVs are gifts from foreign governments.

This will be denied, of course. It will be pointed out that the United States withdrew support from the deadly Special Forces Command (SFC). But they didn’t uninstall the capacity for state terror. They withdrew after having created a killing machine.

The huge amounts spent on immunisation and ARVs will be given as evidence of goodwill. However, most people understand that the primary purpose of immunisation of livestock is not to change the outcome for the livestock (it will still be butchered) but to ensure that the farmer gets maximum economic benefit from it.

Nevertheless, the fall of the regime is a real possibility and its attempts to cling to power by increasing repression makes even tacit support by development partners increasingly untenable. Because repudiation of illegitimate debt is more likely to be successful following a Compaoré–style exit, all hands are on deck to frustrate the People Power movement that has the potential to bring it about sooner rather than later.

Alternative candidates to People Power are already positioning themselves for nomination as the leaders most likely to maintain the economic status quo. Their language of “conciliation” between the government and its victims and calls for Yoweri Museveni to casually apologise and announce a retirement plan minimise the latter’s culpability and indicate that should they take office, Museveni and his regime would not be held accountable for either economic crimes or the latest sustained wave of assaults, wounding and murder. They are playing for time while the new formation is crafted.

The risk is that by enabling Museveni’s government to continue the pretence of being in control of the economy, DPs are keeping Uganda in a holding pattern until they are ready to airdrop their preferred candidate in time for the 2021 elections. Those negotiations will be happening in background mode around about now.

Recent evidence of a concrete policy of impunity in exchange for continuity can be found in the DPs’ selective application of the law governing the type of international corruption that has brought Uganda’s economy to its knees. The decision not to charge Cheikh Gadio under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is, according to defence lawyer Robert Precht, “in part a political move – the US government wants to maintain good diplomatic relations with [its ally] Senegal.” The United States also wants to maintain diplomatic relations with Uganda, one of the two countries involved, and has declined to charge the Ugandan recipients of the bribes either.

The international media can be expected to continue doing its part by pitching for candidates on the basis of their “sophistication”, work and travel experience and general dining-at-Davos capabilities.

Meanwhile, SAP edition II announcements are being disguised as the head of state’s own initiatives. In a letter instructing his cabinet to reduce the number of agencies, Museveni asked, “Why have an agency when you have a department of government dealing with the same area of responsibility?” He conveniently forgot that these agencies were entities of his own creation in his system of patronage.

Agencies critical to Uganda’s economic health have suffered from the appointment of unqualified personnel, such as Jolly Kaguhangire, who with a certificate in secretarial work became an Assistant Commissioner in the Uganda Revenue Authority before moving up to be Executive Director of the Uganda Investment Authority. She was ousted only after staff, smothered by her relatives, petitioned the Ombudsman regarding her alleged “high level tribalism, mismanagement, corruption, favouritism [….]” In another example, Jolly Sabune, the permanent managing director of the Cotton Development Organisation, who failed in her mandate to add value to raw cotton, donated UGX500 million ($130,000) to political supporters of the regime and another UGX20 million (over $5,000 at today’s lower rates) of state funds to her brother’s wedding fund.

Meanwhile, SAP edition II announcements are being disguised as the head of state’s own initiatives. In a letter instructing his cabinet to reduce the number of agencies, Museveni asked, “Why have an agency when you have a department of government dealing with the same area of responsibility?” He conveniently forgot that these agencies were entities of his own creation in his system of patronage.

The proposed removal of over 100 government ministries and agencies is a re-run of the “downsizing” of the civil service in 1991/2. It was part of the SAP component called “Optimising the Size and the Structure of the Civil Service” that resulted in merged ministries, retrenchment and voluntary retirement. Mergers between ministries reduced the number of ministries from 38 to 22, and the staff complement was reduced by about half.

The new rightsized civil service was to benefit from pay rises on the smaller, more affordable payroll. Salary surveys of the private sector were done and comparable jobs in the civil service measured against them. It was decided that the gap would be closed by gradual salary enhancement. In preparation, allowances were to be monetised, i.e. allowances were to be abolished and replaced with a cash equivalent. Instead of a house, a public servant was entitled to a house allowance that he or she could use to rent a house or buy one on mortgage. Government houses were sold, with the sitting public servants given priority.

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Other allowances, such as cars, were meant to be withdrawn and public servants’ salaries increased to a level allowing them to buy and insure their own personal vehicles on easy credit terms. Credit agencies supplied the numbers necessary to calculate a new pay scale.

Government pool cars were auctioned. (Pool cars were those available to a group of entitled staff for work purposes but which were usually monopolised by senior civil servants. In addition to those assigned to them, they commandeered the rest to ferry their children around and take relatives to and from hospital etc.)

Difficulties in implementation surfaced early on. There was a lack of commitment to the efficiency principle on which CSRP was built. The size of the government began to balloon. The number of ministries rose from 22 in 1997 to 75 today, plus the 29 agencies. The Ministry of Finance was detached from the Ministry of Planning and Economic Development before being merged again. Several of the statutory bodies slated for reabsorption in parent ministries have been cited for financial mismanagement in a number of Auditor General reports, meaning the expected efficiencies did not materialise.

There were two types of allowances: duty facilitating (needed to carry out the work e.g. transport for school inspectors) and remunerative (perks that went with the status of the job). The push-back against abolishing duty facilitating allowances was justified and successful but other allowances began to be reinstated. Ministers who had benefitted from the car purchase scheme became entitled to each subsequent scheme. The car ownership schemes themselves were very generous to the beneficiaries and a burden to the taxpayer.

Pool cars made a comeback and budget item 1010 (transport) reaffirmed its position as one of the most used and most frequently over-spent budget items. The unintended consequence of CSRP on transport was that civil servants at the top of the pay scale received higher salaries and subsidised vehicles yet continued to have access to pool cars fuelled and maintained by the state.

Salary enhancement did materialise for the most senior public servants as well as specialist staff. Doctors and the judiciary received considerable increases although their pay still remained well below private sector levels.

More specialised agencies and authorities were set up over the years with salaries at par with, if not greater than, private sector salary structures. While the agencies with their private-sector level salaries drained the Treasury, corruption in them outstripped levels in the traditional civil service. The Uganda National Roads Authority, the Uganda Revenue Authority, the Cotton Development Organisation, the National Environment Management Authority, and the new National Identification and Registration Authority are cases in point.

Teachers, on the other hand, are so numerous that salary enhancement for them was deemed impossible at the time. Years later, secondary school teachers were given a boost while primary school teachers’ pay remained below what is considered a living wage. However, the removal of ghost teachers from the payroll gave hope that genuine teachers would eventually receive meaningful salaries from the savings. The number of teachers’ strikes since then indicates that this has not been the case. At the time of writing, teachers in one district are on strike after a seven-month delay in their pay.

What went wrong? A number of things. First, the divestment procedure itself featured in numerous financial scandals. The accounts of the privatisation programme have never been published.

Privatisation was expected to reduce the amount the government was paying in subsidies to inefficient parastatals, such as the Uganda Electricity Board (UEB), thus freeing up revenue for service delivery. Since UEB was divested, however, subsidies to the electricity distribution company, Umeme, have been described as astronomical in Parliament and in fact exceed pre-privatisation levels in this sector.

The sale of other assets, such as government houses and vehicles, was similarly disappointing. In the meantime, health units, such as Kalisizo Hospital, are only able to attract 20 percent of the staff required. A mandatory transfer to such places is seen as equivalent to being homeless, there being no accommodation considered suitable by qualified personnel. For this reason, many newly refurbished rural health centres remained unused for lack of personnel.

Privatisation was expected to reduce the amount the government was paying in subsidies to inefficient parastatals, such as the Uganda Electricity Board (UEB), thus freeing up revenue for service delivery. Since UEB was divested, however, subsidies to the electricity distribution company, Umeme, have been described as astronomical in Parliament and in fact exceed pre-privatisation levels in this sector.

There are insufficient funds for salary enhancement and service delivery generally. Cash management on such a tight budget requires a degree of fiscal discipline that is impossible to maintain in a system of patronage.

Concluding his assessment of the CSRP of 1989–2001, Dr. Yasin Olum states:

“very little has so far been achieved due to the socio-economic and political state in which the country is in today. Issues such as public accountability, competence, and corruption are still high on the agenda. These and issues related to physical infrastructure have equally to be addressed.”

Since then, as documented by this writer in 2016, unsuccessful parts of the programme were re-done with poor results and high price tags. It is unfortunate, but World Bank internal assessments have falsified some reports to disguise failures and justify further lending.

The saga continues in 2018 with a new programme to repeat financial management capacity – building in local government, UgIFT (Uganda Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers Programme), has been approved at a total cost of US$787.59 million in 2017. So far the World Bank has approved US$200 million. No wonder SAP must now go undercover.

The People Power movement gaining momentum in Uganda to fight the impact of these injustices is being vigorously fought by the NRM and its beneficiaries. The government is undermining resistance with a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, urban artisans, drivers and other workers and “ghetto youths” (of whom between 60 and 80 per cent are unemployed) who are the prime movers in the movement are being appeased with cash handouts. For instance, the first batch of traders along Entebbe Highway received a total of UGX180 million ($47,000) and a truck. Youths in Kamwokya, in the constituency of R. Kyagulanyi, the leader of the People Power movement, were given UGX100 million (over $26,000) to share. The following week, taxi operators and market vendors in the central business district received or were promised UGX3 billion ($800,000). During the six stops he made in the CBD, the president chided the traders for voting against the NRM in three mayoral elections and promised to take care of their financial needs from then on. Naturally, Ugandans outside central urban areas are beginning to demand a share in the bonanza.

The second prong is the militarisation of public order in anticipation of resistance to further economic outrages. A fourth announcement launched the ongoing nationwide recruitment drive of 24,000 youths for local defence units (LDUs). To understand the magnitude of this militia, compare it to the traditional Uganda Police Force establishment of 30,000.

LDUs are normally civilian patrols recruited by their neighbourhoods to carry out neighbourhood watch type tasks. However, the current drive has been launched and is being carried out by the military. According to Dr Kizza Besigye, the recruitment is a covert reinforcement of the Special Forces Command to be used to quell growing civil unrest. A creation of the NRM and the US government, the SFC has been responsible for most of the state brutality seen in recent years. It was established in the colonial era when Zanzibaris and Sudanese were used to subdue what became Uganda, that atrocities are more effectively carried out by people foreign to the area in which they are committed.

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Dr Besigye’s suspicion is borne out by the fact that it is the military carrying out the recruitment exercise and not civilian local councils. It was the army commander who announced the arrangements. New LDU members will be paid UGX200,000 per month as compared to the UGX10,000 per month their civilian bosses, the chairmen of local defence councils, are entitled to. The new LDUs will cost a total of US$20 million a year.

Note also that the military, parliament and some agencies have not been paid for two months although the funds were released by the Ministry of Finance. Like the cash handouts to urban dwellers, expenditure on the new militia was not provided for in the budget.

Public planning, public audits and People Power

Looking forward, the Ugandan public can avoid repeating the errors of the past by demystifying public finance altogether. The people of Uganda can and must take charge of decisions on whether or not to enter into further debt. And it must be the people who decide what is an acceptable level of service delivery.

The service delivery cycle – budget planning-implemention-audit – can only be diligently overseen by those it is meant to serve. What the public is unaware of is that an Auditor General can only cover so much ground and so audits are done selectively. Targets for audits are picked according to the materiality (relative size) of the budget item in question, meaning that average-sized accounts can be plundered or wasted in a serial fashion as long as they are not caught by the auditor’s net. The relatively new value-for-money audits are separate from annual audits and occur as and when the Auditor General deems them fit or when ordered by parliament.

Looking forward, the Ugandan public can avoid repeating the errors of the past by demystifying public finance altogether. The people of Uganda can and must take charge of decisions on whether or not to enter into further debt. And it must be the people who decide what is an acceptable level of service delivery.

Parliament (to which the Auditor General reports) has been so compromised that it is no longer feasible to leave public financial management oversight exclusively to it. Elected representatives are becoming clients of the Executive as was seen when they received cash for votes, most recently to defeat opposition to the mobile money tax. Furthermore, some recently-dropped members of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee were alleged to have sat on reports implicating officials in major financial scandals for the benefit of the perpetrators.

Monitoring the quality and quantity (value-for-money) of services also needs to be devolved. For example, Service Delivery Surveys (SDSs) introduced in the late 1990s were an intervention that seemed to have promise. The idea was that government departments would survey public perception of their service delivery and respond appropriately. Not being overly enthusiastic about monitoring themselves, it is no surprise that allowances for the survey personnel and other logistics are often not available. SDSs have not caught on as a regular part of the budget cycle.

Legislation for public audits would allow end-users of public services, citizens who have intimate knowledge of a particular government entity, to carry out their own audits where they suspect they are receiving inadequate value for money. It is such people-driven initiatives that will bring fundamental change to the quality of life of ordinary Ugandans.

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Mary Serumaga is a Ugandan essayist, graduated in Law from King's College, London, and attained an Msc in Intelligent Management Systems from the Southbank. Her work in civil service reform in East Africa lead to an interest in the nature of public service in Africa and the political influences under which it is delivered.

Politics

Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems

In Nigeria’s recent election cycle, many citizens looked to Peter Obi for change. But the country needs people-led social transformation, not saviors.

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Nigeria: A Messiah Will Not Fix Country’s Problems
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On February 25, Nigerians once again took to the polls with a determination that their votes could change the fate of a country in deep despair. For the seventh time since a civilian dispensation began in 1999, Nigerians hoped that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would conduct a free, fair, and credible election. This hope was reinvigorated by the emergence of technology that would ensure, purportedly, a transparent process. Yet, once again, voters had their dreams crushed with an election marred by violence, ballot box snatching, forged results and, of course, voter intimidation and buying. In the days that followed, despite mounting evidence of irregularities and international outcry, INEC declared Bola Ahmed Tinubu, of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the winner of the presidential poll. The continuation of a gerontocratic oligarchy was solidified.

Although media attention focused on a young class of voters and the uniqueness of this historical moment, a deeper analysis is necessary. If nothing else, this election provided an opportunity to examine the shifting landscape of Nigeria’s elite electoral politics, and the increasingly complex voting patterns of citizens, while understanding these voters are increasingly a minority—less than 30 percent of the registered voters (about one-tenth of the population) cast their vote.

The dizzying rise of Peter Obi as a “third force” candidate over the last nine months was largely due to a movement of emergent and middle-class youth, the so-called “Obidients,” who used technology to galvanize a youthful base to push forward their candidate. That the Obidient movement was formed, ironically, off the back of the EndSARS movement, is in many ways a direct contradiction. The generation that was “leaderless” now suddenly had a leader. The rate at which young people chose this candidate still gives me whiplash. But there was no shaking their convictions. Obi was their candidate, and no one could shake their belief that a new Nigeria would be formed under his presidency, despite the evidence that he was directly endorsed by the same ruling class that has led to the country’s demise.

Obi is not a revolutionary, a social welfarist, nor even pro labor, but he became the savior many youth were looking for to “rescue” Nigeria. Ironically, the millions of youth that fought the EndSARS battle, and named themselves the leaderless soro soke (“speak up” in Yoruba) generation, did not seek elective office themselves. Rather, many put their eggs in Obi’s basket in supporting an older, veteran politician whose clean cut and soft demeanor led to his near deification. Other EndSARS activists, including Omoyele Sowore, were mocked for running in the election and were seen as not experienced enough for the job. In the end Sowore  performed abysmally at the polls, despite his demonstrated commitment to Nigerian youth and human rights record and involvement in the EndSARS protests (Sowore’s African Action Congress polled only 14,608 votes, faring worse than in the 2019 election).

This absolute faith in Obi was demonstrated when his followers patiently waited for five days after the election to hear from him. Instead of sending them into the streets, he advised them to wait for him to challenge the electoral irregularities in the courts. Why did a leaderless generation need a hero?

The contradictions in the EndSARS ideology and the Obidient campaign will be tested in the years ahead. After the Lekki massacre on October 20, 2020 brought the massive street protests of the EndSARS movement to an abrupt halt, many of the sites of protests shut down completely and groups that were loosely organized dismantled into relative silence for almost two years. In fact, there was little indication that EndSARS would evolve into a mass political movement until Peter Obi emerged on the scene in May 2022. The first- and second anniversaries of the Lekki massacre were marked by smaller protests in Lagos and a few other cities, which paled in comparison to the numbers at the 2020  protests. Still, efforts to free many of the prisoners arrested during EndSARS are proving difficult, with some protesters and victims still in jail today. There was no direction, no cohesiveness, and no willingness to move forward at that point. But in May 2022, seemingly out of nowhere, things began to shift. A candidate emerged that many EndSARS protesters seemed to think would be the savior.

Understanding the youth divide

While often lumped into a sum, the category of “youth” is not a single class of people. When Obi was said to carry the youth vote he actually only carried the vote of a particular category of young people, an emergent middle and professional class, who were also some of the most vocal in the EndSARS movement. However, if we are to use the discredited election geography as a proxy for representation, it is clear that this demographic is both well defined and narrow. Major urban areas like Lagos and Abuja pulled towards Obi, as did a few Eastern states. The North Central states including Plateau and Benue asserted their own identity by aligning with Obi, perhaps in a rejection of the Northern Muslim tickets of the Peoples Democratic Party (with whom Atiku Abubaker ran) and the APC.

The 2023 election also forces us to re-examine the dynamics of class, ethnic and religious divides and the deepening malaise of the poor and their disengagement with politics. What is clear from this election, like many before, is that Nigeria has yet to come of age as a democracy; indeed, the conditions for democracy simply do not exist. It is also quite evident that the Nigerian elite are adept at changing the political game to suit the mood of the Nigerian people. Electoral malpractices have shifted over time in response to the increasing pressure of civil society for accountable elections. Strong civil society advocacy from organizations focused on accountability and transparency in government have pushed against electoral practices. While these practices continue, there are significant shifts from previous elections where vote buying was brazen. However, it begs the historical questions: has Nigeria ever had a truly free and fair election, and is the process with which democracy is regenerated through the ballot the path for emancipatory politics? These questions become more relevant as the numbers of voters continue to dwindle, with the 2023 election having the lowest turnout in Nigeria’s electoral history, despite the social media propaganda around the youth vote and the turning tide of discontent that was predicted to shape the election.

Lessons from history

The fact that young people were surprised by the events on February 25 may be indicative of youthful exuberance or a startling lack of knowledge of history. The idea that a ruling class, who had brought the EndSARS struggle to a bloody end, would somehow deliver a free and fair election, needs more critical scrutiny. For those that remember the history of the June 12, 1993 elections—annulled after the popular rise of MKO Abiola—the election is no surprise. But for young people deprived of history education, which has been removed from Nigeria’s curriculum for the past 30 years, the knowledge may be limited. When a young person says they have never seen an election like this, they also cannot be faulted, as many young voters were voting for the first time. Given that many youth seem to underestimate the long history of elections and electoral fraud, the question of intergenerational knowledge and of a public history that seems to be absent from electoral discourse cannot be ignored. It is also hard to fault young voters, in a  land where there is no hope, and whatever hope is sought after can be found in the marketplace.

Many of the young organizers were adept at reading their constituencies and mobilizing their bases, but some of the elephants in the room were ignored. One of these elephants, of course, was the deep geographic and ethno-religious and class divisions between the North and the South. This is evident in the voting patterns in the North West and North East where Obi’s campaign did not make a dent. Though Obi ran with a vice president from the North, the majority of votes in Northern zones were divided between PDP, APC and New Nigeria People’s Party while two of the North Central states, Plateau and Nasarawa, went to Obi’s Labor party. Kano, the largest voting population in the country went to Rabiu Kwankwaso’s NNPP, an outlier who was ignored to the peril of opposition parties (Kwankwaso was the former governor of Kano).

Obi’s campaign also focused on the emergent middle class youth, as well as appealing to religious sentiments through churches on a Christian ticket and ethnic sentiments appealing to his Ibo base in the South East, where he swept states with more than 90 percent of the vote. The North is largely made up of the rural poor with poverty rates as high as 87 percent and literacy rates among young women in Zamfara state as low as 16 percent. Tracking Obi’s victories, most of the states where he won had lower poverty rates and higher literacy rates; states like Delta and Lagos have the lowest poverty counts in the country. While Obi used poverty statistics to bolster his campaign, his proposed austerity measures and cuts in government spending do not align with the massive government investments that would be needed to lift Nigerians out of poverty. While the jury is still out on the reasons for low voter turnout, deepening poverty and the limited access to cash invariably impacted poor voters.

Historically, Nigeria’s presidency has swung between the North and the South, between Muslims and Christians, and this delicate balance was disrupted on all sides. In 2013, an alliance between the Southern Action Congress (AC), the Northern All Nigeria’s People’s Party (ANPP), and Congressive People’s Alliance (CPC) to produce the Action People’s Congress (APC) was able to remove the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) who had dominated the political scene. Another important historical note is that of the legacy of Biafra that lives on, as an Igbo man has never taken the helm of the Presidency since the Civil War. While Obi ran on the promise of a united youth vote, the lingering ethnic and religious sentiments demonstrate the need for his campaign to have created a stronger alliance with the North and the rural and urban poor.

The failure of the youth vote is also a failure of the left

The other factor that we must examine is the failure of the left to articulate and bring into public critique the neoliberal model that all the candidates fully endorsed. Many young Nigerians believe if Nigeria works, it will work for everyone, and that “good governance” is the answer to the myriad problems the country faces. The politics of disorder and the intentionality of chaos are often overlooked in favor of the “corrupt leader” indictment. The left was divided between the Labor Party, whose presidential flag bearer ran on a neoliberal rather than pro worker or socialist platform, and the African Action Congress, who ran on a socialist manifesto, but failed to capture the imaginations of young people or win them over to socialist politics and ideology. In seeking to disrupt the two party power block, young Nigerians took less notice of the lack of difference between the three front running parties, and chose to select the lesser of three evils, based on credentials and the idea that Obi was “the best man for the job.” In fact, the Nigerian youth on the campaign trail emphasized experience in government as a criteria for a good candidate, over and above fresh ideas.

The left also failed to garner the EndSARS movement and channel it into a political force. The emergent youth middle class, not the workers and the working poor, continued to carry the message of liberal rather than revolutionary politics. Unfortunately, just as the gunning down of Nigerian protesters caught young people off guard in October 2020, so too the massive rigging of this election. However, there is no cohesive movement to fight the fraud of this election. The partisan protests and separate court cases by the Labor Party and PDP, demonstrate that the disgruntled candidates are fighting for themselves, rather than as a single voice to call out electoral fraud and the rerun of the election. The fact that there is acceptance of the National Assembly election outcomes and not the presidential election, points to the seeking of selective justice, which may eventually result in the complete disenfranchisement of the Nigerian people.

At this time we must seek answers to our current dilemma within history, the history that we so often want to jettison for the euphoria or overwhelming devastation of the moment. The question for the youth will now be, which way forward? Will we continue to rely on the old guard, the gerontocratic oligarchy that has terrorized Nigerians under the guise of different political parties for the past 24 years? Or will we drop all expectations and pursue the revolution that is sorely needed? Will young people once again rise to be a revolutionary vanguard that works with millions of working poor to form a truly pro-people, pro-poor party that has ordinary Nigerians as actual participants in a virbrant democracy from the local to the federal levels, not just during election time but every day?  Will the middle class Nigerian youth be willing to commit class suicide to fight alongside the poor to smash the existing oligarchy and gerontocracy and snatch our collective destiny back?

It is a time for truth telling, for examining our own shortcomings. As young people, as the left, and as civil society, we have relied too long on the oppressors for our own liberation.

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.

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Politics

Africa in the New World Disorder

The war in Ukraine indicates a new world disorder, where great powers fight for primacy and Africa continues to be exploited.

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Africa in the New World Disorder
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There are some of us in Africa who believe that we should not invest any serious thinking in the war in Ukraine as it is one of the “European tribal wars.” The logic of that belief is that in Africa we have too many of our own problems to invest energy and effort in European problems. The trouble of being African in the present world order, however, is that all problems and wars end up African in effect if not in form. In the sense in which one who knows it feels it, every war in the world is an African war because Africans have, for the longest time, felt and known wars that are not of their creation. The African condition itself can be understood as a daily experience of war.

Over centuries Africa has been structured and positioned to be on the receiving end of all world problems. As such, Africa is not only the storied cradle of mankind, but also the cemetery of the human condition where every human and world problem comes to kill and to die as well. The worst of the human condition and human experiences tend to find final expression in Africa. It is for that reason that Julius Nyerere once opined that the Devil’s Headquarters must be in Africa because everything that might go wrong actually goes wrong in the continent.As the world tiptoes precariously from the COVID-19 pandemic, at the same time it seems to be tottering irreversibly towards a nuclear World War III. The countries of the world that have the power and the privilege to stop the war pretend to be unable to do so. Even some powerful and privileged Western thinkers are beating the drums of war. For instance, Slavoj Zizek, considered “the most dangerous philosopher in the West,” wrote for The Guardian in June 2022 to say: “pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine,” and “the least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do that we need a stronger NATO.” Western philosophers, not just soldiers and their generals, are demanding stronger armies and bigger weapons to wage bigger wars. In Ukraine, the conflict is proving too important to be left to the soldiers, the generals and the politicians. In that assertion Zizek speaks from the Euro-American political and military ego, whose fantasy is a humiliating total defeat of Russia in Ukraine. Zizek, the “dangerous philosopher” takes his place as a spokesperson for war and large-scale violence, agitating from a comfortable university office far away from the horrors of Bakhmut.

United States President, Joe Biden, spoke from the same egopolitics of war before the Business Roundtable CEO Quarterly Meeting on March 21 last year: “And now is a time when things are shifting… there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it.  And we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.” Clearly, an “end of history” fantasy of another unipolar world led by the US and its NATO allies has possessed Western powers that are prepared to pump money, weapons and de-uniformed soldiers into Ukraine to support the besieged country to the “last Ukrainian.” During a surprise visit to Kyiv on the eve of the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Biden hawkishly said the US will support Ukraine in fighting “as long as it takes,” dismissing diplomatic alternatives. Suggestions for a negotiated settlement in Ukraine that have come from influential figures, such as Henry Kissinger on the right and Noam Chomsky on the left, have been dismissed with the sleight of the left hand, and this is as Ukraine is literally being bombed to dustAfrican countries that have for years been theaters of colonial invasions, proxy wars, sponsored military coups, and regime changes can only see themselves in Ukraine. What Ukraine is going through is a typical African experience taking place in Europe and the first victims are Europeans this time.

Being Africans in Africa, at the least, should equip us with the eyes to see the war in Ukraine for what it is, a war driven by a Euro-American will to power, a spirited desire for world dominion against the Russian fear of NATO encirclement and containment, and nostalgia about a great Soviet empireIt is a war of desires and fears from which the belligerents will not back off. The envisaged “new world order” can only be another “world disorder” for an Africa that has for so long been in the periphery of economic, political, and military world affairs.

Destined for war: The Thucydides trap

Well before the war, the Singaporean diplomat and scholar Kishore Mahbubani described how the “world has turned a corner” and why “the West has lost it” in trying to maintain its economic and political dominion by any means necessary and some means unnecessary. Power is shifting under the feet of a young and fragile Euro-American empire that will not lose power peacefully, hence the spirited desire to force another unipolar world without China and Russia as powersTaiwan and Ukraine are the chosen sites where the Euro-American establishment is prepared to militarily confront its threatening rivals. That “from AD 1 to 1820, the two largest economies were always those of China and India” and that “only in that period did Europe take off followed by America” is little understood. That the Euro-American empire has not been the first and it will not be the last empire is little understood by the champions of the “new world order” that Francis Fukuyama, in 1989, mistakenly declared as “the end of history and the last man;” a world ruled by the West, led by the US  and its European allies had arrived and was here to stay in Fukuyama’s enchanting prophecy. Ensuing history, 9/11 amongst other catastrophic events, and the present war in Ukraine, were to prove Fukuyama’s dream a horrific nightmare. Mahbubani predicts that the short-lived rise and power of the Euro-American Empire has “come to a natural end, and that is happening now.” It seems to be happening expensively if the costs in human life, to the climate and in big dollars are to be counted.

In the struggle of major world powers for dominion of the globe Ukraine is reduced to a burnt offering. While, on the one hand, we have a terrified Euro-American empire fearing a humiliating return to oblivion and powerlessness, on the other hand we have the reality of an angry China and Russia, carrying the burden of many decades of geopolitical humiliation. Such corners of the world as Africa become the proverbial grass that suffers when elephants fight. The scramble to reduce Africa to a sphere of influence for this and that power is a spectacle to behold and the very definition of the new world disorder; a damaged and asymmetrical shape of the world where the weaker other is dispensable and disposable.

In its form and content, this new world disorder is ghastly to ponder, not only for Africa, but also for the rest of the world. Graham Allison pondered it in 2015 and came up with the alarming observation that “war between the US and China is more likely than recognised at the moment” because the two powerful countries have fallen into the Thucydides Trap. The ancient Greek historian, Thucydides, described the trap when he narrated how avoiding war becomes next to impossible when a ruling power is confronted by a rival rising power that threatens its dominion. Thucydides witnessed how the growing power and prosperity of Athens threatened Sparta in ancient Greece,  driving the two powers to warThe political and historical climate between China and the US captures the charged political temperatures that punctuated the relations between an entitled and proud Sparta confronted with the growth and anger of a frightening Athens. The proverbial chips were down.

For the US and China to escape the Thucydides Trap that is luring both superpowers to war, “tremendous effort” is required of both parties and their allies. The effort is mainly in mustering the emotional stamina to see and to know that the world is going to be a shared place where there must never be one center of power; that political, economic and military diversity is natural, and the world must be a decolonial pentecostal place where those of different identities, and competing interests can share power and space, is the beginning of the political wisdom that can guarantee peace. President Xi Jinping of China seems to have read Allison’s warning about the Thucydides Trap that envelops China and the US because on a visit to Seattle he was recorded saying: “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might make such traps for themselves.” The world is sinking deeper into new disorder and violence because rival powers cannot resist the Thucydides Trap and keep repeating “strategic miscalculations” based on their will to power and desire for global dominion.

The problem with China (the Athens of our present case) that troubles the US as the Sparta of the moment is that, as Allison observes, “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.” The problem with world powers, past and present, seems to be that they cannot live with difference. In fact, political, economic and cultural differences are quickly turned from competition to conflict, from opposition to total enmity. How to translate antagonism to agonism, and to move from being enemies to being respectful adversaries that can exist among each other in a conflictual but shared world is a small lesson that seems to elude big powers, whose egopolitics drives their geopolitics into a kind of militarized lunacy. One would be forgiven, for instance, to think that playground toys are being spoken of when presidents of powerful countries talk about monstrous weapons to be deployed in Ukraine. Observing from Africa one can hazard the view that big powers might be small and slow learners, after all. The death-drive of the superpowers is perpetuated by the desire to force other countries, including other powers, to be “more like us” when they are formidably determined to be themselves. To break out of the Thucydides Trap and avoid war, for instance, the US has to generate and sustain enough emotional stamina to live with the strong truth that China is a 5,000-year-old civilization with close to 1.5 billion people and in its recent rise is only returning to glory and not coming from the blue sky. And that the world has to be shared with China and other powers, and countries. China, and allies, would also not have learnt well from  many years of decline if they dreamt and worked for a world under their sole dominion.

Any fantasy of one world ruled from one mighty center of power is exactly that, a fantasy that might be pursued at the dear cost of a World War. Away from that fantasy, the future world will be politically pentecostal, not a paradise but a perpetually in the making and incomplete world where human, national, cultural, political and religious differences will be normal. From Africa that future world is thinkable and world powers should be investing thought and action in that and not in new monstrous weapons and military might.

Africa in the new world disorder

The symptoms are spectacular and everywhere to be seen. It can be the Namibian President, Hage Geingob, on live television having to shout at a German politician, Norbet Lammert, for complaining about the growing Chinese population in Namibia. Geingob asks why Germans land in Namibia on a “red carpet” and do “what they want” but it becomes a huge  problem for the West when the Chinese are seen in Namibia. That Namibia should not be reduced into a theater of contestation between the West and China because it is a sovereign country was Geingob’s plea to the German politician. It can be President Emmanuel Macron of France, in May 2021, asking President Paul Kagame of Rwanda for forgiveness for France’s role in the genocide of 1994—the bottom line being that African conflicts and genocides bear European footprints and fingerprints. Africa is reduced to the West’s crime scene, from slavery to colonialism and from colonialism to present coloniality. 

Coloniality is brought to life with, for instance, the US Republican lawmakers launching a bill “opposing the Republic of South Africa’s hosting of military exercises with the People’s Republic of China and the Russian Federation and calling on the Biden administration to conduct a thorough review of the US-South Africa relationship.” Africa as an object that does not have the agency to act for itself but is acted upon in the new world disorder, is real. It is Africa as a child in the world system that must be protected from other relationships and that must be told who to relate with and who not to relate with. It is also Africa as an owned thing that must be protected from rival owners. Behind the myth of African independence and liberation is the reality of Africa as a “sphere of influence,” about which world powers are still scrambling for control and ownership, including Russia and China. When in January 2018, Donald Trump referred to African countries as “all these shithole countries,” he meant that Africa still metaphorized the toilet of the world order, where disposable waste and dispensable people were to be found. Looking at the world disorder from Africa is a troubling view from the toilet of world affairs.

Looking at the world disorder from Africa with African eyes and sensibility makes it obvious that it is Africa that should be against war and for a decolonial, multipolar world order where differences are legitimated, not criminalized; where economic competition, political opposition, and rivalry are democratized from antagonism to agonism; and where political opponents are adversaries that are not necessarily blood enemies that must work on eliminating each other to the “last man.” Such a world order may be liberating in that both fears and desires of nations may play out in a political climate where might is not necessarily right. From long experiences of being the dominated and exploited other of the world, Africa should expectedly be the first to demand such a world. 

World powers need to be persuaded or to pressure themselves to understand what Mahbubani prescribes as a future world order that is against war, and liberating in that it is minimalist, multilateral, and Machiavellian. Minimalist, in that major countries should minimize thinking and act like other countries are minors that should be changed into their own image. Multilateral in the sense that world institutions, such as the United Nations, must be pentecostal sites where differences, fears and desires of all countries are moderated and democratized. Machiavellian in that world powers, no matter how mighty they believe they are, must adapt to the change to the order of things and live with the truth that they will not enjoy world dominion alone, in perpetuity. The world must be a shared place that naturalizes and normalizes political, economic, cultural, and human diversity.

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.

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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya

The violence plaguing the North Rift region in Kenya is complex, as it is caused by a multiplicity of factors

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Understanding the Crisis in Northern Kenya
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On the 14th of February 2023, Kenya held a national prayer day in accordance with our government’s habit of holding ‘prayers’ when certain stressors reach an unbearable level on a national scale. Currently, there are many factors triggering national stressors, and one of them is a complex security issue loosely termed “banditry”, for which our government has no viable solution. So, we pray, declaring war on our people, instead of reflecting on and addressing the root causes of the crisis.

Over the years, these theatrics, which reflect the inadequacy of the government’s policies in dealing with our challenges, have occurred in different forms including ‘prayer breakfasts’, ‘national prayers’, ‘crusades’, and other forms of supplication. And while these functions are met with a wide spectrum of reactions ranging from approval to derision, depending on people’s spiritual or political leanings, it is crucial for us as citizens to realize that as much as these may be expressions of faith at our leaders’ personal level, at the political level they are basically ‘time-outs’ or pressure release valves. Where one has a strategy, time-outs create room for the implementation of plan ‘B’ or ‘C’. However, in the absence of a strategy, time-outs are called in the vain hope that the adversary or adversity at hand will somehow lose momentum.

There is more to the “banditry” phenomenon than meets the eye

There have been violent conflicts of many kinds in northern Kenya for many decades, some driven by terrorism, ethnic animosity, resource conflict, cattle rustling and other factors. Since 2017, however, many Kenyans have had greater awareness of the fact that the violence in northern Kenya isn’t just mere disorder; people have come to terms that there are definite geographical, economic and social patterns to, and causes of, the violence. The ongoing sporadic skirmishes of violence and cattle rustling in the North Rift area are exacerbating the difficulties that the communities there are already facing as a result of a debilitating drought. Most tragically, the violence in the region has led to the death of 16 security personnel and over 100 civilians in 6 months, a period largely overlapping with the first 5 months of H.E. President William Ruto’s time as the president. Sadly, over the years, Kenya had become largely inured to this slow-burning war due to its long duration and the boorish mentality that made the majority of us see certain parts of the country and pastoralists as somewhat ‘backward’ or ‘lesser’ beings. The most harmful effect of this attitude has been the inability or unwillingness of Kenyans to understand the root of this problem.

Things came to a head on the 11th of February 2023 when a group of security personnel on patrol were ambushed on the Lodwar-Kitale highway resulting in the death of 3 officers and the loss of guns, ammunition and patrol vehicles. This daylight highway attack was a huge affront to the authorities, resulting in instant opprobrium from citizens all over the country who wonder why our much-vaunted security agencies still couldn’t subdue these “bandits” after all these years.

Such attacks were turning into exasperating feelings of déjà vu because we see the same places, roughly the same seasonal conditions, the same kind of weapons, and even the same meaningless terminology and knee-jerk government reactions time and again. In every other part of Kenya, when laws are broken, they are investigated and addressed all along the chain from perpetrators, enablers, participants and beneficiaries. Most of the time, cases are brought to logical conclusions, but not in this case. Why?

Insights into the depth of this particular problem came from a very knowledgeable (if unexpected) source. The Governor of Trans-Nzoia County, Mr George Natembeya, came out at the National Prayer Day with a hard-hitting statement, asking the President not to let people around him “shield” him from the realities on the ground concerning the “banditry” in the North Rift areas. He went on to detail the woes of the security personnel working in the area, claiming that they were being sent into a veritable war zone without adequate allowances, equipment and even food supplies. I was personally taken aback because the previous operation took place when Mr Natembeya was the Rift Valley Regional Coordinator (RC), a position he held until last year when he resigned to run for a political office. Ironically, the office of RC is a very senior position in the executive arm of the Kenya Government that placed Mr Natembeya in direct charge of deploying the security personnel who suffered the same deplorable working conditions he was now lamenting about.  In a show of cognitive dissonance that is so typical of Kenyans, the Governor was widely praised for his ‘straight talk’ and honesty in ‘speaking truth to power’. Obviously buoyed by this newfound adulation, he went on to hold a press conference where he robustly advocated military involvement in the operation against bandits, firmly stating that the civilian security apparatus (where he spent the majority of his career before moving into politics) is inadequate to protect Kenyans. This advocacy was worrisome because the use of the loose term ‘banditry’ betrays a lack of knowledge of the identity or objectives of the adversaries.

The first major cause for alarm was the haughty ‘pre-devolution’ tone with which Mr Natembeya pronounced himself on the deployment of the military. He proceeded to even give recommendations on the orders that need to be issued, stating that they should be instructed to “decimate” the bandits. This is a startlingly cavalier term when used by a senior public servant in reference to citizens who haven’t been positively identified in any way. It is a term that could be useful in the primitive theatre of war, where opponents are positively identified by uniforms, positions or other means, but sustainable solutions to the security problems in the North Rift region invariably require more sophisticated approaches that would ensure that innocent citizens are protected and not “decimated” alongside. It would have been much easier for us ‘spectators’ to dismiss these statements as hot air emitted by someone who failed in his earlier responsibilities, but we lost that option when the government moved with speed to implement these external ‘instructions’.

The main cause of a complex issue

The violence plaguing the North Rift region in Kenya is complex, as it is caused by a multiplicity of factors. If it was simple, it would have been solved a long time ago through any of the heavy-handed responses deployed by successive governments against it. My work as a conservationist has given me unique insights into one aspect of it which seems to have been ignored by many.

Northern Kenya has a roughly 5-year drought cycle, and 2017 was a drought year. As a consequence, pastoralists moved south into Laikipia county in search of pasture. They invaded private ranches and provoked an inevitable state response, which resulted in the death of many ranchers, pastoralists, security personnel, and hundreds of livestock.

I headed a team of consultants tasked by an indigenous rights NGO to study Marsabit, Isiolo, Laikipia, and Samburu counties in a research project aimed at uncovering the dynamics and drivers of the southward transhumance and the resultant conflicts. We collected data from hundreds of respondents, including ranchers, pastoralists, government personnel and NGO practitioners. Three things stood out in our findings. The first was the sheer distances covered by the pastoralists with their animals, and the second was the fact that almost all the (government-designated) livestock movement routes have been blocked by private landowners. The most compelling finding, however, was that a vast majority of the pastoralists were from homelands that were now ‘wildlife conservancies’ controlled by the Northern Rangelands Trust (NRT),( -a conservation NGO. The pastoralists had lost access to their dry-season grazing areas.

After completing our fieldwork and analysis, we planned and held a validation workshop in Nanyuki on the 14th of June 2017. The findings of our report presented at the workshop resonated well with the community members who attended the workshop, some of whom provided us with further insights into the crisis. Our views on NRT were also ‘validated’ by a dramatic moment when my presentation was interrupted by their Laikipia county director, Mr Richard Kasoo, who literally screamed at me to stop vilifying NRT and had to be ejected from the room by the elders present. The top NRT management later called a more cordial meeting at a Nanyuki hotel, asking me as the team leader to expunge certain items from the report, which they felt portrayed them in a ‘negative light’. Much to their chagrin, I declined to do so, out of respect for my team and our respondents. This entire experience was a cameo of what ails us in this arena. Man-made stressors are routinely met with deafening silence and frantic inactivity until we invariably take ‘ruthless’ steps to ‘decimate’ the people we should have engaged before the fighting broke out. As such, those of us who observed the violent resource conflict in 2017 know that it wasn’t brought to an end by any human intervention. The drought ended, the rains came, and people who were fighting simply went back home.

These findings and my views have since been shared with several senior state officials and several non-state actors as well (including the protagonists), but have been invariably met with deafening silence and frantic inactivity. This is not to suggest that this is the only set of causes because the bloodletting certainly predates wildlife conservancies, which only started around 2004. Ethnic animosities that exist in this and other parts of Kenya are realities that we must factor in. The displacement and loss of access to resources also eliminated a lot of the geographical space that typically limited contact and conflict between some communities, resulting in more frequent flare-ups. However, the negative impact of conservation practices on the communities’ ways of life is definitely one of the easier drivers to deal with, so it is difficult to imagine that anyone is dealing with the more intractable and socio-politically fractious ones.

Most notably, the alacrity with which government authorities have embraced the advice of a former RC with a less-than-stellar record to handle a crisis is a worrying indication of not having a plan. One doesn’t need to be an expert to know that militaries aren’t trained to investigate, arrest or prosecute, so we could be courting numerous extrajudicial killings. The Interior Minister speaking in January, added his voice to the frightening miasma, saying that the Government will be ‘ruthless and brutal’ in this operation. We don’t seem to have had a plan for what we are doing now, so it cannot be easy to envision any plan for managing the inevitable fallout of such violence either. We are at war with ourselves in pitch darkness, struggling to finish ‘the other’ before dawn because the light of day might reveal who we really are.

This article was first published by The Pan African Review.

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