Is the Nigerian ‘revolution’ over? Was it just a brief moment in our history when everyone came together believing that this time things would be different? Or has there been a permanent shift in consciousness? Emmanuel Iduma likens Nigeria’s 14-day revolt to a dream from which we awoke and returned to normalcy.

‘The horizon of your dream was of a better life, a different form of existence, a tangible and measurable difference. You saw that the debate about fuel subsidy removal was the opportunity to dream of change, because this was a protest above all protests, because this protest seemed naturally logical. But you forgot that in dreaming one does not feel; the night happens so fast, and very soon you are awake.’

Nigerians may well have woken up and it may appear that it’s business as usual but people do not experience such an outpouring of solidarity and power and remain unchanged. The apathy barrier has been broken and yes there has been a ‘shift in consciousness’ – how deep and how lasting remains to be seen. The momentum was lost when on 13 Friday, when the labour movement called for a two-day weekend break to ‘recuperate’. It would have been better if the NLC had just said we needed time to negotiate than lead people to believe this was only the beginning rather than the end. It was hardly a surprise to learn by Monday that the unions had sold out after a N100 fuel price was agreed with the government. Threats by PENGASSAN to shut down oil production and thereby bring the government to its knees turned out to be merely hot air. On his blog Notes from Atlanta, Farooq A Kperogi speaks for many when he comments on the NLC sellout.

‘Then Nigeria’s thoroughly compromised labour movement hijacked the revolt, lulled the people into a false sense of solidarity and finally extinguished the revolutionary fire that was burning down the foundations of Nigeria’s ruling elite….The Nigerian Labor Congress and the Trade Union Congress didn’t join the mass protests until at least three days after the fact. They were obviously drafted by President Jonathan and his agents to help contain, and if possible snuff out, the conflagration that was going to consume them. From the very start, I privately expressed concerns that the Nigerian Labor Congress would infiltrate and dilute the people’s revolt.’

© Nairaland.com

Exactly one week after the protests ended, Boko Haram struck once again. This time it was a bombing carnage in Kano which left between 180 and 250 people dead and hundreds injured [exact figures differ and the number of dead continues to rise]. The sheer bloodbath and impunity with which Boko Haram continues to bomb northern Nigeria almost on a daily basis has left the country traumatised. Only 48 hours after the Kano bomb, the group attacked towns in Bauchi state and as I write there is news of yet another bomb blast in Kano.
With nearly 1000 people dead since 2009, Nigerians continue to speculate about who exactly are Boko Haram and how they are able to continue killing so freely. There is consensus that they are a disparate group with many heads; they do have support both in government and in their communities; the bombing campaigns have been in response to the murder of their leader Mohammed Yusuf and other members of the sect in 2009. It must be noted that this was almost two years before Jonathan became president.

Olly Owen expands on these factors in African Arguments but also reminds us that there is, like in the Niger Delta, ‘a persistent trajectory of under development and misgovernance’ in the region. I would add there is a similar danger of reductionism whereby in this case the sect is simply labeled ‘radical Islamists’ without considering their origins or the material context in which they have flourished.

‘Media speculation, which pointed fingers at former Governor Ali Modu Sherrif as the ‘father’ of Boko Haram, seems to have been wide off the mark, (devout Islamists and his brand of politics stayed far apart) but it is fair to say that the administration, and others like it in the region created the conditions for the spread of extremism by fostering thuggish, winner-takes-all corrupt politics at the same time completely neglecting basic services and education…

‘Religious scholars such as sect leader Mohammed Yusuf preached a pro-poor message which was admired even by some Christians in the city, and gave more concrete help, such as micro-credit, to their own followers. Neither is it surprising that the movement exhibits a marked antipathy to the state – it is after all born in a region which has seen previous millennial Islamic risings such as the 1980s Maitatsine movement, and in which evading the state through border-crossing, smuggling and migration around the Lake Chad borderlands is a virtual way of life for many.’

© Nairaland.com

President Goodluck Jonathan’s failure to act following the Christmas Day bombings left Nigerians feeling he was either cowered by those Boko Haram elements he claims have infiltrated his government or he is just plain incompetent or possibly both. He has finally raised one eye and woken up to the urgency of the situation by ordering the Inspector General of police [IG] and all deputy generals to resign immediately and for an urgent reorganization of the police. The question still remains why it has taken him so long, particularly following the escape of the only suspect in the Christmas Day bombings when over 100 police guarding the prisoner did nothing. The new IG, MD Abubakar [former Plateau state commissioner of police] has a dubious history including being described as a ‘religious fanatic’ by the Niki Tobi panel. Not exactly great start to a ‘new’ police force. Blogger Yomzie explains:

‘This same MD Abubakar was indicted for complicity in the gruesome killing of Dr Shola Omoshola and was recommended for the sack by the Oputa panel. Also, the Justice Niki Tobi panel on the Jos 2001 crisis has recommended the retirement of Assistant Inspector-General of Police (AIG), Zone 5, Muhammed Abubakar. Abubakar was Plateau State Commissioner of Police during the crisis.’

The Nigerian police force is possibly the most corrupt and violent institution in the country, one which has played a major role in terrorising local communities in the Niger Delta, the north and other parts of the country. They have carried out extra-judicial killings, torture, rape and forced prostitution in the Niger Delta and there is no reason to believe they act differently elsewhere in the country. Owen suggests a ‘quiet revolution’ to create a new model of community policing rather than ‘the anti-terror police, increasing paramilitarism, or increasingly expensive high-tech gadgets. It is these ground-level tactics which can help detect crime and extremism, gather intelligence and build partnership and confidence with the public.’

I would also suggest police drawn from local communities and who might have some vested interest in building a trustworthy relationship with the community.

The sense that the government is fearful is supported by statements by two northern politicians who have called for Boko Haram to be given amnesty. Naija Pundit.

‘The Speaker of the House of Representative, Aminu Tambuwal, has urged the Federal Government to forgive the members of the Boko Haram Islamic Sect and grant them amnesty. ‘Forgive them, bring them to the table and discuss with them to see how to end these problems.’ ’About a month ago, Buba Galadima, the National Secretary of the Muhammadu Buhari-led Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) had told the same BBC that the FG was underestimating the support that Boko Haram had within the population…Buba Galadima had reasoned in that interview thus: ‘Why didn’t the president crush the Niger Deltans? That’s a questions a lot of people in this part of the country are asking. Instead they are being rewarded for the economic destruction they brought Nigeria. Why can’t the same be true for Boko Haram? The people are sympathetic to certain principles and ideas,’ he told the BBC. If people feel they are being denied anything or an injustice is being meted out to them then there is a likelihood that they will take the law into their own hands and help themselves.’

I cannot imagine that the majority of Nigerians would agree to an amnesty for Boko Haram even if it were possible, which I very much doubt. Too much blood has been shed and the repercussions for the country go far beyond the bombings to the whole national project that is ‘One Nigeria’. Nigerian social media crews are at pains to counter the international media’s insistence that the Boko Haram attacks are part of a religious war between Christians and Muslims. I completely support this position. But if we scratch below the surface we find that tensions between religions and ethnic nationalities do exist and cannot be swept under the carpet. Religious fanaticism is becoming endemic in both faiths. The country is drowning in God from all directions but maybe the practice of religion is the one unifying force!

Tensions remain between the Niger Delta and the rest of the country. The region has been largely absent from the protests. On the contrary the loudest voices and by far the most disturbing, have come from some activists and ex-militants who issued a statement on Saturday 14 January calling for all Niger Deltans to protect Goodluck Jonanthan and to return home. The statement by the Niger Delta Occupy the Niger Delta [NDOND] was essentially a preamble to secession. It is not clear what precipitated the statement signed by AnnKio Briggs who in December, and as late as the day before, had expressed doubts about the validity of the fuel subsidy removal. She had also insisted that if it was removed it should be conditional. She described the subsidy as ‘The mother of corruption’, which is pretty accurate.

‘The subsidy itself is the mother of corruption. I’m in support of its removal but there are grounds for taking this position. One of them is that Nigerians will not pay a kobo more than they can afford to pay for petrol. Second, there must be an open investigation into how such fraud was perpetrated in the name of subsidy. It is now very clear that something fraudulent was going on. How is it that Nigeria started paying subsidy in 2006 to three companies but by 2011 there were 77 companies collecting subsidy? So, there has to be a public enquiry and these companies must tell Nigerians how they qualified for the subsidy they received. Third, the government must tell Nigerians the issues about our refineries. Why is it that we have four refineries and none is working? People who were interested in setting up refineries across the geo-political zones in the country were not allowed. What is the problem when people can illegally, as they call it, refine crude in a very crude manner and still bring out petrol to sell? This is my position and that of the organisation I represent, Agape Birthright’. [Sunday Sun December 18, 2011. ‘Reps are anti-people – Annkio Briggs’, By Daniel Alabrah]

So it was with horror and disappointment that I read the NDOND statement which could end up undermining years of struggle in the Niger Delta. Although it appears to be a minority viewpoint it is the voice which is being heard above all else. For example, the article supposedly published by the ex-militant group, MEND [there is no way to verify who is behind the site] ‘Can This Government Do the Job’ has not been reported.

‘Nigeria is literally falling to pieces under the watch and stewardship of President Jonathan. And these are not the words of a detractor or an enemy…it would appear that the Nigerian government under President Jonathan has completely lost control of the situation in the country and can no longer guarantee the security of life and property of innocent and law-abiding Nigerians. For murderers to plan and successfully drop 20 bombs, including grenades, in Nigeria’s second largest city, leading to the death of more than 200 people, and the government and its machinery did not pick up any hint of its coming in any way at all to save this country the horror, scandal and embarrassment that befell it last Friday is, to say the least, quite scary. Even during the 1967-1970 Nigerian civil war, I cannot remember anywhere 20 bombs and grenades dropped on a single city in one day. Boko Haram continues to get stronger, more sophisticated and more ambitious by the day while the federal government continues to look weaker, smaller and more pusillanimous.’

Back to the mass action, much has been tweeted about the absence of women in the Nigerian protests which runs contrary to the history of women’s resistance in the country. But on Monday this changed as hundreds of Kaduna women came together in an action against the eviction by the Nigerian Air Force from their ancestral home.

‘The women were carrying placards with inscriptions in Hausa such as, ‘ Bamu da gida sai Titi’ (meaning, our only shelter left is the highway). The women were also protesting the physical assault on one of them by soldiers who were drafted to control the women. An incident that nearly broke into a security operation between the youths, the husbands of the women who were standing by and the security men drafted to the area. The incident, which increased anxiety in the town, led to the complete blockage of exit and entrance of traffic to Kaduna town for over three hours. It, however, took the combined efforts of the police, the military, government officials and community leaders to calm the nerves of the protesting women who had insisted on remaining on the highway as the only shelter left for them to occupy. Narrating their grievances, the leader of the women, Mrs. Monica Musa who spoke to newsmen, said several years back the Air Force had evicted them from Ungwan Waziri, a village were the graves of their great grandparents lay, without any compensation. ‘We had to move to this present location in 1984. They followed us again in 2008, and destroyed our houses and farmlands.’’

© http://bikyamasr.com

Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the 25 January uprisings in Egypt. The day before, the Egyptian Twittersphere reported that jailed blogger Maikel Nabil had finally been released.

‘Yet 10 months of Maikal’s life have been wasted. He should never have been arrested in the first place. His criminal record must now be expunged and he must be compensated for his ordeal,’ she continued. ‘Throughout his trial the Egyptian authorities have behaved with a total lack of respect for his rights. At times they seemed to toy with his life, allowing his health to deteriorate so badly that many feared for his life.’ Jailed blogger Nabil, considered by most to be Egypt’s first prisoner of conscience after being jailed by the military junta early last year, was freed on Tuesday, his brother Mark wrote on Twitter.’

© A P

All roads lead to Tahrir in ‘Happy Revolutionary Day’, Egyptian Chronicles writes of the hope and courage which has sustained one year of continuous protest.

‘The big achievement of this revolution is that it brought hope back to the Egyptians and reminded them that they have got a voice the whole world will listen to. May Allah bless the souls of the martyrs as well the lives of the injured. May Allah bless the Egyptian people even those who think that the revolution was a bad thing.’

© Pambazuka Press

This was a revolution in which we all participated even if it was just through watching TV reports or following blogs and Twitter – we were all inspired and deep down wished for it to succeed. In this it brought hope to millions of people around the world. As we celebrate a year of African Awakenings inspired by the courageous act of one young man, Mohammed Bouazizi, I can’t help but feel something important is missing. After one year we still have not managed to create a sense of cross border solidarity. It is as if we are all so absorbed in our own uprisings that we are not taking the opportunity to share and support our actions with others. On one level I understand this – revolutions are hard work. Everyone must be physically and mentally exhausted and really even in Egypt and Tunisia the work has only just begun. But I hope at some point during the next 12 months activists are able to reach beyond their borders if only to touch and say hello.

Mahala, Thursday, January 26th, 2012 by Christopher McMichael

This Friday communities around the Cape will march from Athlone stadium to Rondebosch commons for a three day ‘occupation’. The aim is a public space to discuss solutions to a range of issues: housing, rent arrears, evictions, political corruption and the ongoing segregation in the city.

The chosen site is loaded with historical symbolism. Used once as a military camp by colonial authorities, it was racially integrated before the mass erasures of the Group Areas act. Now a public space in name only, fenced off and unapproachable. The community groups that have chosen the commons are asserting the right to reclaim public space in a city that, even more so than the rest of the country, is deeply segregated by race and class.

Despite using the Occupy name, the initiative predates events in the US. And contrary to the idea that this is about disaffected middle class hipsters looking for something to do on the weekend, it is driven by civic groups and backyarder associations from some of the poorest areas on the peninsula.

Even if the commons is a pseudo-public space (for now) it remains a site where ordinary people are constitutionally guaranteed the right to gather and talk. But the City of Cape Town has behaved like other urban authorities throughout the country when dealing with political gatherings of this nature. Firstly, despite being given ample notification of the event, city officials refused authorization. Ignoring the Regulations of Gathering events which puts the onus of consultation with organizers on state officials, mayoral representatives axed an arranged meeting because some of the community delegates were “15 to 30 minutes late’’.

This petulant refusal to do their job was accompanied by attempts at pre-emptive criminalization. Completing her Darth Vader-like transformation from firebrand activist to Empress Zille’s chief flunkey, Patricia de Lille has claimed the commons occupation is a prelude to a land invasion.

At a City Council meeting this week she called the occupation an “apparent” invasion whose “agents of destruction will not be allowed to succeed.”

The subtext is come the weekend these “cowards” will be met with arrests and an officially authorized clampdown. So much then for an “inclusive” and “caring” Mother City.

This has been accompanied by scaremongering that protestors are planning to destroy the local environment. The “Friend of Rhondebosch Commons” have called for calm: “While the intention of the organisers may be construed as confrontational, we are appealing to community members to act with restraint and let the City of Cape Town, SAPS and other role players deal with the situation.” Of course, the call to act with restraint begs the question of what kind of vigilante tactics the “Rosebank Neighbourhood Watch” have been up to?

In fact it is the local government (and possibly a white upper middle class neighbourhood watch) who are being confrontational. The organisers have even invited De Lille to attend the Summit but it now seems most likely that what was intended as a peaceful protest will be met with a police clampdown. Alas this reaction will once again be construed as the DA resorting to type and falling back into its tested pattern of appealing to its mostly white, privileged electorate. Invoking fearmongering claims about “land invasions” as subliminal code for the swart gevaar. Behind this draconian and hysterical response is the fear that public space will be used to highlight the fact that Cape Town is still one of the most unequal cities in the world, seated at the foot of one the most unequal countries in the world.

We need experiments, such as the Summit, to drag these issues of race and class into the public sphere. Without it South Africa will continue to replicate draconian state tactics and re-elect bullshit politicians who pander to people’s worst prejudices.

As events of the last year, from Egypt to the woefully under-reported Occupy Nigeria, demonstrate we are living at a time of profound contestation of the hollowing out of public life. It is at the level of urban space where economic elites and their willing political “stakeholders” are being challenged. The real “occupation” doesn’t occur at events like the Summit, it is in the texture of everyday life. Occupation by a bellicose political culture of fear, occupation by a decrepit and morally bankrupt economic system, occupation by overbearing security systems and occupation by a consumer culture that bombards us with inescapable imagery of the desirable.
City of Cape Town trying to ban poor people from the commons

Jared Sacks, Cape Argus

For months, communities from all over Cape Town have been planning a
three day People’s Land, Housing and Jobs Summit at one of Cape Town’s
huge open pieces of unused land. This summit is set to take place this
weekend from the 27th until the 29th of January.

Yet, even though community representatives sent in their notification
of intention to gather on the Rondebosch Common and have complied with
all legislation governing the right to march, the City of Cape Town is
attempting to ban the march and summit altogether.

Claiming the commons

This Common is a symbolic public space with a notable history. The
Khoisan indigenous people who lived in the area used the entire Cape
Peninsula as a common – an inclusive space not owned by anyone and
held in trust by local inhabitants to be used for everyone’s benefit
symbiotically with nature. Khoisan culture understood the importance
of sharing, using only what one needs, and protecting one’s
environment.

After the space was colonised, it was first used as a military camp
and sections of the Common later became a vibrant racially integrated
community much like the famed District Six. As more and more of the
Common was enclosed for housing and other types of developments, about
40 hectares remained. However, it was no longer an authentic commons
as people of colour were removed to comply with the Group Areas Act
and were not able to return until after 1994.

The Rondebosch Common, therefore, became a pseudo-commons. It was open
and accessible to the wealthy and mostly white population of the area
but unapproachable for the black poor who remained in distant and
overcrowded townships.

For this reason locating the the summit at Rondebosch Common has
special symbolic significance for many of the participants. It
represents an immediate assertion of equality within one of the most
unequal cities in the world. By taking back the commons, thousands of
poor and working-class people, together with many middle-class allies,
are saying that they no longer want to live in a city which remains
segregated under the shadow of Hoerikwaggo (more recently known as
Table Mountain), where some live in huge mansions while others live in
10×10 meter shacks, where some are paid millions and others spend
their whole lives underemployed.

If the commons is for all in name only, then it does not exist. Thus,
the Take Back the Commons movement aims to liberate public spaces such
as Rondebosch Common. It must be for all to use and enjoy, not only
for a privileged few to hoard.

The true purpose of the summit

Despite scaremongering by opponents of the summit, the ‘occupation’ of
Rondebosch Common is not a land invasion by poor and homeless
communities set on destroying endangered fynbos. No one is currently
planning to build informal dwellings on the Common (although I do
believe such an action would be justified given the obscene
segregation of Cape Town’s neighbourhoods).

Instead, participants are planing on gathering together for a number
of general assemblies, group teach-ins, and self-led discussion groups
whose aims are to eventually plan further actions with participating
communities. All this will be done with the utmost respect to the
environmental conditions on the Common.

The goal is to leave the summit with a better idea of how to achieve
the redistribution of land, the building of decent and well located
housing, the creation of full employment, and the ending of oppression
in our society. Through a three day liberation of the Common, we will
make a collective effort to build a space where all are welcome and
treated with dignity and respect; a space that mirrors our aspirations
for a new world.

A politician and the commons

When Patricia de Lille was beginning her political career after years
as a trade union leader, she supported the famous Freedom Park land
occupation in Mitchell’s Plain. Since that time, de Lille has migrated
from the Pan-Africanist Congress to forming the Independent Democrats
and now on to the Democratic Alliance.

Ironically, since she assumed the mayorship of the City of Cape Town,
she has become just as disparaging of land occupations as her
predecessors aggressively attacking all informal forms of land
redistribution and house building.

This week, however, de Lille finally fell fully in line with the DA’s
authoritarian right-wing agenda: the criminalisation of the poor. It
was reported in the People’s Post that de Lille supported City
official’s attempts to ban the People’s Land, Housing and Jobs Summit
from taking place on Rondebosch Common despite repeated invitations by
organisers to attend the event.

Patricia de Lille’s reasoning was that this public park was the
‘private property’ of the City. It was also madeknown that at a City
Council meeting, it was resolved that if the symbolic occupation whent
ahead the City would authorise police to clamp down hard on the
occupation of the Rondebosch Commons and that warrants would be issued
for the arrest of the event organisers.

Illegal banning of gatherings

Based on Section 17 of our Constitution and the Regulation of
Gatherings Act, we can conclude that the City is attempting to
illegally ban the three day event on public land. Their excuse was
based on technicalities: organisers arrived “between 15 and 30 minutes
late” for their meeting with officials and organisers insisted on
having all nine elected representatives present in the meeting as
opposed to four.

However, legislation clearly states that it is the responsibility of
the City, not the organisers, to ensure that such a meeting takes
place. Furthermore, the Gatherings Act says that the gathering cannot
be prohibited except as a measure of last resort and only after such a
meeting has taken place between the government and the organisers.

Even though there have been repeated requests to reschedule the
meeting, the City has refused to engage with the organisers. As such,
the City of Cape Town is acting in contravention of South African
legislation.

Resisting the commons

What is so threatening about communities’ plan to Take Back the
Commons on the 27th of January? Why would the City undermine the law,
authorise draconian measures against protesters and even  issue
warrants against organisers?

It seems most likely that the real reason de Lille has weighed into
the fray to prevent the march and summit from taking place is that it
threatens to put the real issues facing poor communities at the
forefront of the socio-political debate.

For the first time in decades, the Occupy Wall Street movement is
placing inequality and class at the centre of American politics. Here
in South Africa the rebellion of the poor has been raging for the last
decade within in townships and shack settlements. Yet, for the first
time since 1994, the take over of Rondebosch Common threatens to put
ongoing racial segregation, the urgent need for land redistribution
and the popular opposition to the privatisation of public space right
smack in the face of Cape Town’s politics.

This is threatening for any DA or ANC politician as it means that they
can no longer expect the poor to merely tolerate the politicised
delivery of substandard public services within their ghettos. It means
that the poor are demanding the radical restructuring of Cape Town’s
socio-political landscape and taking their demand into the space of
elite power.

If I was a politician, I too would also be afraid of what might happen
when taking Rondebosch Common morphs into taking back all the commons.

There are times when something outrageous happens, such as the illegal arrest of 150-200 Congolese in Yeoville (Johannesburg january 21-22), that persons of conscience are not sure that they got the information correctly. In the land that invented apartheid, could it be that something more pernicious than apartheid is being born? This is being written with many questions in mind, but also fully conscious that, given the whole history of Africa, over the past 500 years, knowing what happened during that history requires something that challenges one’s conscience to rise to the level of the outrages that have been inflicted collectively, systematically, with greater and greater impunity to humanity on the continent of its birth. Enough is enough says this conscience.

In fidelity to humanity
Keeping it free from insanity
Rooted in solidarity
Never forgetting the fragility
Of conscience, Memory,
Herstory, history, humanity
Shall rise eternity
As its horizon
And for that reason, always remember the preamble and article 1 of te Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the UN General Assembly in 1948 :

From the preamble :
Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

From Article 1:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

1. This is being addressed to all those who are concerned about the present state of humanity anywhere, but especially on the African Continent. It is also addressed with greater urgency to those who can do something toward healing the bodies and spirits of those who have been violated (and continue to be violated) in their bodies, their spirits. This continuing suffering directly and indirectly linked to the legacies that have dehumanized the African Continent must cease.

2. This is being addressed to those whose functions at any level, financial, economic, educational, juridical, cultural religious, political, medical, social, directly and/or indirectly impact the lives of those who continue to be dehumanized simply because they refuse to submit to dehumanization as practiced under the various misleading banners of “humanitarian interventionism” in their charitable and/or militarized forms.

3. This is being addressed especially to those who have wielded, for centuries, political power with impunity because the returns were too high to let go. This kind of political power has reproduced itself in various guises. This kind of power has been so overwhelming that morality, ethics disappeared and became just words. During these centuries, Africa saw slavery come and go. It was abolished, in a manner. It was followed by the partition of Africa into colonies. The physical and mental borders created by colonialism came to an end, in a manner, with independence. Now globalization has followed the continuation of colonization and apartheid on a planetary scale.

4. Did Africa as a whole ever built a collective memorial to those bodies and spirits that, against the odds, maintained the conscience of humanity? How come that when consciences, anywhere in Africa and beyond, follow what is called for in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, by revolting against injustice, political and financial highway robbery, in short, how come such revolt of consciences get punished as if following the conscience of humanity has become a crime, especially when it happens in Africa?

5. Is this a sign that there is now humanity of the rich and humanity of the poor? The latter being put in place through humanitarian wars, through courts which are meant to bring peace in those places that are now being colonized by the new form of expanding the murderous legacies of slavery, colonial rule, apartheid?

6. Could all of this be happening precisely because those transitions from slavery, colonialism, apartheid were never dealt with properly, i.e. in the spirit of Mâât, in the spirit of always aiming for justice and truth. Could it be that on the continent where Mâât was invented, there are now forces being harnessed to liquidate all those who are trying to follow what their conscience tell them to do?

7. Could it be that the forces that managed to get away with impunity through those transitions that were not attended in the spirit of Mâât, have decided that they shall always achieve impunity regardless of the crimes they continue to commit in the name of things that mean one thing for the rich and another thing for the poor?

8. Is it not possible for South Africans in any position of political, cultural, legal, religious, social, educational, moral and/or ethical authority to remember that, years ago, under apartheid, there were Congolese and people all over the world who risked their lives, whose conscience revolted against the injustices and untruth, so that humanity could be healed. Is it not possible for these South Africans to rise in solidarity, not just for the Congolese, but also for all Africans who are now being bludgeoned to physical and psychic death so that globalization may triumph and, just like it happened under slavery, colonialism and apartheid, get away with impunity, once again?

9. Raising questions must lead one to stop, think and invent new possibilities, see other ways of achieving the maintenance of one humanity, through peace, justice, truth. Is it not time to stop the insanity that began with Atlantic and Oriental slavery; an insanity that has led, non-stop, to the creation of weapons that are obliterating, little by little, humanity in an instant; an insanity which through repeated impunity for crimes against humanity has continued unabated. Is it not time to encourage those who are outraged by injustice, barbarous acts against their own country to rise up to their conscience as they learned from the lessons of Patrice Emery Lumumba and the African heroines and heroes who gave their lives so that humanity can be healed forever, on the continent of its birth. Only thus shall civilization leads one away from the growing barbarism being witnessed today.

Lisette Talate died the other day.  I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation living midway between Africa and Asia in the Indian Ocean. The camera panned across thriving villages, a church, a school, a hospital, set in a phenomenon of natural beauty and peace. Lisette remembers the producer saying to her and her teenage friends, “Keep smiling girls!”

Sitting in her kitchen in Mauritius many years later, she said, “I didn’t have to be told to smile. I was a happy child, because my roots were deep in the islands, my paradise.  My great-grandmother was born there; I made six children there. That’s why they couldn’t legally throw us out of our own homes; they had to terrify us into leaving or force us out. At first, they tried to starve us. The food ships stopped arriving [then] they spread rumours we would be bombed, then they turned on our dogs.”

In the early 1960s, the Labour government of Harold Wilson secretly agreed to a demand from Washington that the Chagos archipelago, a British colony, be “swept” and “sanitised” of its 2,500 inhabitants so that a military base could be built on the principal island, Diego Garcia.  “They knew we were inseparable from our pets,” said Lizette, “When the American soldiers arrived to build the base, they backed their big trucks against the brick shed where we prepared the coconuts; hundreds of our dogs had been rounded up and imprisoned there.  Then they gassed them through tubes from the trucks’ exhausts. You could hear them crying.”

Lisette and her family and hundreds of islanders were forced on to a rusting steamer bound for Mauritius, a distance of 2,500 miles. They were made to sleep in the hold on a cargo of fertiliser: bird shit.  The weather was rough; everyone was ill; two women miscarried. Dumped on the docks at Port Louis, Lizette’s youngest children, Jollice, and Regis, died within a week of each other. “They died of sadness,” she said. “They had heard all the talk and seen the horror of what had happened to the dogs. They knew they were leaving their home forever. The doctor in Mauritius said he could not treat sadness.”

This act of mass kidnapping was carried out in high secrecy. In one official file, under the heading, “Maintaining the fiction”, the Foreign Office legal adviser exhorts his colleagues to cover their actions by “re-classifying” the population as “floating” and to “make up the rules as we go along”. Article 7 of the statute of the International Criminal Court says the “deportation or forcible transfer of population” is a crime against humanity. That Britain had committed such a crime — in exchange for a $14million discount off an American Polaris nuclear submarine – was not on the agenda of a group of British “defence” correspondents flown to the Chagos by the Ministry of Defence when the US base was completed. “There is nothing in our files,” said a ministry official, “about inhabitants or an evacuation.”

Today, Diego Garcia is crucial to America’s and Britain’s war on democracy. The heaviest bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan was launched from its vast airstrips, beyond which the islanders’ abandoned cemetery and church stand like archaeological ruins. The terraced garden where Lisette laughed for the camera is now a fortress housing the “bunker-busting” bombs carried by bat-shaped B-2 aircraft to targets in two continents; an attack on Iran will start here. As if to complete the emblem of rampant, criminal power, the CIA added a Guantanamo-style prison for its “rendition” victims and called it Camp Justice.

What was done to Lisette’s paradise has an urgent and universal meaning, for it represents the violent, ruthless nature of a whole system behind its democratic facade, and the scale of our own indoctrination to its messianic assumptions, described by Harold Pinter as a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” Longer and bloodier than any war since 1945, waged with demonic weapons and a gangsterism dressed as economic policy and sometimes known as globalisation, the war on democracy is unmentionable in western elite circles. As Pinter wrote, “it never happened even while it was happening”. Last July, American historian William Blum published his “updated summary of the record of US foreign policy”. Since the Second World War, the US has:

- Attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of them democratically-elected.

- Attempted to suppress a populist or national movement in 20 countries.

- Grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries.

- Dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries.

- Attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.

In total, the United States has carried out one or more of these actions in 69 countries. In almost all cases, Britain has been a collaborator. The “enemy” changes in name – from communism to Islamism — but mostly it is the rise of democracy independent of western power or a society occupying strategically useful territory, deemed expendable, like the Chagos Islands.

The sheer scale of suffering, let alone criminality, is little known in the west, despite the presence of the world’s most advanced communications, nominally freest journalism and most admired academy.  That the most numerous victims of terrorism – western terrorism – are Muslims is unsayable, if it is known. That half a million Iraqi infants died in the 1990s as a result of the embargo imposed by Britain and America is of no interest. That extreme jihadism, which led to 9/11, was nurtured as a weapon of western policy (“Operation Cyclone”) is known to specialists but otherwise suppressed.

While popular culture in Britain and America immerses the Second World War in an ethical bath for the victors, the holocausts arising from Anglo-American dominance of resource-rich regions are consigned to oblivion. Under the Indonesian tyrant Suharto, anointed “our man” by Thatcher, more than a million people were slaughtered. Described by the CIA as “the worst mass murder of the second half of the 20th century”, the estimate does not include a third of the population of East Timor who were starved or murdered with western connivance, British fighter-bombers and machine guns.

These true stories are told in declassified files in the Public Record Office, yet represent an entire dimension of politics and the exercise of power excluded from public consideration. This has been achieved by a regime of un-coercive information control, from the evangelical mantra of consumer advertising to sound-bites on BBC news and now the ephemera of social media.

It is as if writers as watchdogs are extinct, or in thrall to a sociopathic zeitgeist, convinced they are too clever to be duped. Witness the stampede of sycophants eager to deify Christopher Hitchens, a war lover who longed to be allowed to justify the crimes of rapacious power. “For almost the first time in two centuries”, wrote Terry Eagleton, “there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life”. No Orwell warns that we do not need to live in a totalitarian society to be corrupted by totalitarianism. No Shelley speaks for the poor, no Blake proffers a vision, no Wilde reminds us that “disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue”. And grievously no Pinter rages at the war machine, as in American Football:

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things…
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust…

Into shards of fucking dust go all the lives blown there by Barack Obama, the Hopey Changey of western violence. Whenever one of Obama’s drones wipes out an entire family in a faraway tribal region of Pakistan, or Somalia, or Yemen, the American controllers in front of their computer-game screens type in “Bugsplat”. Obama likes drones and has joked about them with journalists. One of his first actions as president was to order a wave of Predator drone attacks on Pakistan that killed 74 people. He has since killed thousands, mostly civilians; drones fire Hellfire missiles that suck the air out of the lungs of children and leave body parts festooned across scrubland.

Remember the tear-stained headlines when Brand Obama was elected: “momentous, spine-tingling”: the Guardian. “The American future,” wrote Simon Schama, “is all vision, numinous, unformed, light-headed …”  The San Francisco Chronicle’s columnist saw a spiritual “lightworker [who can] usher in a new way of being on the planet”. Beyond the drivel, as the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg had predicted, a military coup was taking place in Washington, and Obama was their man. Having seduced the anti-war movement into virtual silence, he has given America’s corrupt military officer class unprecedented powers of state and engagement. These include the prospect of wars in Africa and opportunities for provocations against China, America’s largest creditor and new “enemy” in Asia.  Under Obama, the old source of official paranoia Russia, has been encircled with ballistic missiles and the Russian opposition infiltrated. Military and CIA assassination teams have been assigned to 120 countries; long planned attacks on Syria and Iran beckon a world war. Israel, the exemplar of US violence and lawlessness by proxy, has just received its annual pocket money of $3bn together with Obama’s permission to steal more Palestinian land.

Obama’s most “historic” achievement is to bring the war on democracy home to America. On New Year’s Eve, he signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the Pentagon the legal right to kidnap both foreigners and US citizens and indefinitely detain, interrogate and torture, or even kill them. They need only “associate” with those “belligerent” to the United States.  There will be no protection of law, no trial, no legal representation. This is the first explicit legislation to abolish habeus corpus (the right to due process of law) and effectively repeal the Bill of Rights of 1789.

On 5 January, in an extraordinary speech at the Pentagon, Obama said the military would not only be ready to “secure territory and populations” overseas but to fight in the “homeland” and provide “support to the civil authorities”. In other words, US troops will be deployed on the streets of American cities when the inevitable civil unrest takes hold.

America is now a land of epidemic poverty and barbaric prisons: the consequence of a “market” extremism which, under Obama, has prompted the transfer of $14 trillion in public money to criminal enterprises in Wall Street. The victims are mostly young jobless, homeless, incarcerated African-Americans, betrayed by the first black president. The historic corollary of a perpetual war state, this is not fascism, not yet, but neither is it democracy in any recognisable form, regardless of the placebo politics that will consume the news until November. The presidential campaign, says the Washington Post, will “feature a clash of philosophies rooted in distinctly different views of the economy”. This is patently false. The circumscribed task of journalism on both sides of the Atlantic is to create the pretence of political choice where there is none.

The same shadow is across Britain and much of Europe where  social democracy, an article of faith two generations ago, has fallen to the central bank dictators. In David Cameron’s “big society”, the theft of 84bn pounds in jobs and services even exceeds the amount of tax “legally” avoid by piratical corporations. Blame rests not with the far right, but a cowardly liberal political culture that has allowed this to happen, which, wrote Hywel Williams in the wake of the attacks on 9/11, “can itself be a form of self righteous fanaticism”. Tony Blair is one such fanatic. In its managerial indifference to the freedoms that it claims to hold dear, bourgeois Blairite Britain has created a surveillance state with 3,000 new criminal offences and laws: more than for the whole of the previous century. The police clearly believe they have an impunity to kill.  At the demand of the CIA, cases like that of Binyam Mohamed, an innocent British resident tortured and then held for five years in Guantanamo Bay, will be dealt with in secret courts in Britain “in order to protect the intelligence agencies” – the torturers.

This invisible state allowed the Blair government to fight the Chagos islanders as they rose from their despair in exile and demanded justice in the streets of Port Louis and London.  “Only when you take direct action, face to face, even break laws, are you ever noticed,” said Lisette. “And the smaller you are, the greater your example to others.” Such an eloquent answer to those who still ask, “What can I do?”

I last saw Lisette’s tiny figure standing in driving rain alongside her comrades outside the Houses of Parliament. What struck me was the enduring courage of their resistance. It is this refusal to give up that rotten power fears, above all, knowing it is the seed beneath the snow.

Students for Social Justice Statement on the arrest and assault of Ayanda Kota

We, the Students for Social Justice condemn in the strongest possible terms the vicious police attack on our friend and comrade Ayanda Kota of the Unemployed People’s Movement, which occurred on Thursday the 12^th of January 2012. Ayanda Kota was assaulted in barbaric and cowardly fashion in front of his 6 year old son at the Grahamstown police station by Constable Zulu and several other officers.

Ayanda had voluntarily gone to the station after having been accused of the theft of a book lent to him by a Rhodes University academic. The charge of theft is unfounded and part of a private vendetta against comrade Ayanda Kota. Having been informed of the charges, Ayanda acted in good faith by offering to replace the book in question, which he had misplaced.

Sadly it has become all too predictable for police, often on the behest of the ruling party, to violently attack activists perceived to be a threat. We have seen this behavior when the police murdered Andries Tatane before the eyes of the nation. We have seen this behavior in Durban, when the ANC led an attack against Abahlali basemjondolo members in the Kennedy Road Settlement.

We have seen this behavior when ANCYL members attacked Democratic Left Front and UPM activists (including Ayanda) at the international day of climate action during COP 17. We have seen this behavior when Rehad Desai was assaulted in front of Zuma. We have seen this behavior when the police arrested Ayanda Kota and three other UPM members on spurious charges last year. The police continue to disrespect the laws surrounding political protest, laws they are constitutionally bound to protect. They act as little more than the municipalities’ private enforcers and the agents of Capital.

We remember General Cele’s call of “shoot to kill”. SSJ has also observed the manner in which the police have been re-militarized under the pretext of the World Cup and have noted that it was only a matter of time until this violence was directed against dissenters in this country.

The vast sums of money spent on turning a civilian police force into a highly aggressive military cadre could have gone towards a public works program, creating thousands of jobs for the unemployed of South Africa. Instead, the ANC seems more concerned with destroying dissent than dealing with the root problems of crime: poverty, chronic unemployment, disempowerment and dehumanization.

After the centenary celebrations of the ANC, it is shocking to us how the ruling party has forgotten so quickly what it was like to be persecuted by the state. In a sad twist, the ruling party has taken up the monstrous legacy which the likes of DF Malan left in terms of dealing with dissidents in this country.

Clearly there is a ongoing pattern in which dissent is either criminalized or met with illegal extrajudicial violence in South Africa, both the ANC and the official opposition, the DA, act in uncharacteristic concert towards grassroots dissent, as comrades from Blikkiesdorp and Hangberg can testify. Members of SSJ have personally witnessed threats of violence directed towards Ayanda Kota on more than one occasion.

It has become common practice for the Makana municipality to accuse Ayanda of being an agent of an unnamed reactionary third force, the bogeyman with which all organic dissent is linked to. This is part of a long running attempt to silence the UPM, a leaked document obtained by SSJ last year showed that the local ANC branch had drawn up detailed plans to undermine the UPM and Ayanda’s credibility and reputation. Ayanda has been under police surveillance and subject to regular harassment.

If only the same amount of energy was directed towards the huge problems facing working class residents of Grahamstown. With over 70% unemployment, little or no infrastructure in the townships, 10s of millions of rands unaccounted for and the inhuman use of the ‘bucket system”, it seems that the ruling party would rather focus its energy on harassing, maligning, and assaulting those who bring these problems to light, rather than solve them.

We call on the police to investigate this assault and punish those responsible. We call on the municipality and the ANC to condemn this violence in the strongest possible terms. We call on all those who believe in democracy to denounce this criminal action. We call upon the Rhodes academic to drop her personal crusade against Ayanda.

Most importantly, we call on the SAPS and the ANC to turn back from this brutal policy of intimidation, coercion, and outright violence and respect our constitutional right to protest the inequalities of our current society. Sadly we suspect that the ruling party and the Grahamstown municipality will attempt to hide this incident and prosecute Ayanda for threatening their comfortable position of power. Until that position of power is toppled, our calls will continue to echo through the streets, despite them being met with the truncheon.

Note:

Ayanda Kota is expected to appear in the Grahamstown Magistrate’s court tomorrow morning at 9. Incredibly the police have now charged him with assaulting them.

Statement issued by Benjamin Fogel, Students for Social Justice, January 13 2012

On Monday 9 January, the first day of the Nigerian nationwide indefinite strike, my fellow blogger, Emmanuel Iduma, wrote a post ‘See, The Nigerian Revolution Has Begun’. Emmanuel is a young man, a writer, modest and maybe a little shy. Sometimes there is hesitancy about his writing, as if he is not quite sure whether the stone he steps on will bear his weight or if his foot slips he will maintain his balance. But the important thing is, he never fails to take that step.

‘See, The Nigerian Revolution Has Began’ is an eloquent, assured statement of a young Nigerian at the point of a new beginning. Behind him lies years of scorn, thievery, greed, opportunism, political thuggery, untold violence, scammers, the occasional great football team and some of the world’s most innovative and accomplished musicians.

‘The revolution has begun. I am part of it. Do not be fooled that it begins and ends with placards, strikes, Twitter hashtags. I am certainly wiser than that. Yes, I will keep hashtagging, placarding, striking, until I am convinced that I have been de-stereotyped. Until I am convinced that I am not a matterless blur in the narrative of my country.’

Yes, we can play football and we can make music and dance! But now we can also make revolutions, or can we?

For me, well I am older, though not necessarily wiser, and most definitely less optimistic. It’s day nine of Nigeria’s uprising and the sheer energy, rapidness and velocity of hundreds of voices seconds apart on Twitter is exhausting. So reading anything that is at least one paragraph or more is sheer relief. I have noted two types of writing on the uprising. Those that stick to the superficial and easy summations repeated from similar commentary on Tunisia and Egypt and those that try to look deeper and raise questions relevant to the geopolitical entity called Nigeria. I am not a historian of revolutions, but since when were revolutions not predominantly acted by young people with a few elders thrown in for good measure? Hardly an original observation. My intention here is to attempt to provide a summary of what has taken place to date and to raise questions by bringing together some of the facts and analysis.

The fuel subsidy is the spark that lit the fire but this was never simply about the fuel subsidy. The fuel subsidy is a vicious tax on Nigerians, the majority who are neither materially nor emotionally able to cope with this burden. The facts are Nigeria earns millions of dollars from the sale of crude oil. The oil is exported and then, because our refineries are in a constant state of disrepair, it is necessary for us to import refined petrol. A cabal of independent marketers has been given licenses to import this petrol. They lie, they cheat, they steal and for this they are subsidized and now we all have to pay the price of their actions. Added to this are the billions of dollars wasted and stolen by government officials and politicians leading a country for 50 years incapable of refining it’s own oil. Included in this wastage is the obscene personal expenditure of politicians who we learn do not even have to buy their own food! For a breakdown on the cost of maintaining political officers in 2010, $8.3 billion [against $7.4 billion allocated for capital projects of which only half was spent] see Sahara Reporters.

Going into the fourth day, the strike remains steadfast and so far to everyone’s relief and possibly surprise, the labour movement has not capitulated despite rumours of the offer of huge bribes. In what I consider to be one of the most encouraging and significant acts of the uprising, the oil workers union PENGASSAN has declared their support for the indefinite strike and ordered all production platforms to be on alert for a complete shutdown, adding that:

‘All Nigerians should please note that the fuel subsidy issue is only a tip of the iceberg amidst a plethora of issues needing urgent redress.
‘We hereby call on all Nigerians not to be weary, but keep faith in the collective will of the people to liberate us from this miss-rule.’

One of the main narratives around the protest is ‘unity’. Nigerians of all religions and ethnicities coming together. We have been repeatedly shown a photo [favoured by the international media] of a group of Muslims praying protected in the rear by their Christian comrades. Although Abuja and Lagos have been the epicenters, protests have taken place, throughout the South West and in some of the major northern states – Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi and Niger State and to a much lesser extent in isolated parts of the Niger Delta. Nigeria is a militarised state and has been for most of its existence. Militarisation creates a culture of violence as a solution whether by the state or by citizens. With the government employing it’s typical militarist response of ‘shoot on sight’ and some states declaring curfews, there is a real possibility of sustained violence. The next step will be for the government to declare a state of emergency across the country and use this as an excuse to deploy the army against Nigerian people. To date some 25 people have been killed by the police with hundreds injured, including in violent attacks by the police in Kano where Muslims and Christians had come together to protest. In Minna, Niger State protestors went on a rampage burning offices of the state governor and other buildings and one police officer has been killed. Stories are emerging of protestors being paid to support the government’s position, others being paid by anti-government elites and or ex-politicians to protest against the government.

Against the backdrop of the protests and unity in ethnicity and religion are a series of more sinister and potentially destructive events taking place. The increasingly bold presence of Boko Haram, who after the despicable bombing of churches on Christmas day continue to kill and injure with impunity. Following a New Year ultimatum for all Christians to leave the north within three days, at least 12 people have been killed by the group. Two other significant Boko Haram related events have taken place in the past week. The first was a statement by President Goodluck Jonathan that his government and security forces had been infiltrated by Boko Haram. The second, a video broadcast on the 10th January by the leader of the sect, Imam Abubakar Shekau, dressed in the usual terrorist gear, fatigues, and surrounded by weaponry. He proceeded with a rant against the President and Christians blaming them for all the ills befallen to Muslims – a strange thing to say as they have probably killed as many Muslims as Christians. According to an AP report, Shekau was said to ‘hint at having far more support than the authorities believe’.

There has always been questions as to who Boko Haram really are and a belief that they do have support from some northern elite. If Jonathan’s statement is to be believed then it is within the realms of possibility to consider that the end game is to bring down his presidency. In short, a coup by any other name. Not necessarily a military coup but a coup nonetheless. However we cannot dismiss the fact that Jonathan chose the moment of an uprising to reveal this information. Is he trying to win sympathy or to warn us of more sinister possibilities? We know that northerners are leaving the southeast and southerners leaving the north. One cannot help but note the similarities to 1966/67 and the events which led to the civil war. Three esteemed Nigerian writers, Professor Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and J P Clark issued a joint statement in which they warned Nigerians of the possibility of another civil war. In a BBC interview, Soyinka reiterated that scenario including a comment which supports Jonathan’s statement on Boko Haram infiltrators….

‘There are people in power in certain parts of the country, leaders, who quite genuinely and authoritatively hate and cannot tolerate any religion outside their own.

‘When you combine that with the ambitions of a number of people who believe they are divinely endowed to rule the country and who… believe that their religion is above whatever else binds the entire nation together, and somehow the power appears to slip from their hands, then they resort to the most extreme measures.’

Another question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily is why there have been relatively few protests and strike actions, apart from in Warri and Sapele, in the Niger Delta and Igbo states. Although Jonathan is from Baylesa State, it’s not as if the Niger Deltans are any more supportive of the fuel subsidy removal than the rest of the country. As of Wednesday, Port Harcourt was still on strike although there had been no rallies since day one. In other parts of Rivers State, namely Ogoniland, there have been rallies in support of the strike. In Yenagoa, the Baylesa state capital, workers had tried to march on the first day but police managed to disrupt and eventually prevent any meaningful presence. In other parts of the East there has been relatively little protest or strike action. One explanation given for the lack of participation was provided by environmental activist, Fidelis Allen. Quoting a fellow Ogoni activist, he writes:

‘Labour has been bought. They have compromised. As civil society in Rivers State we thought we could work with labour, but they have compromised in Rivers State. How can you be having a protest and you just sluggishly walk in? There is lack of seriousness. It is so glaring’. Cracks between the civil society and the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress over strategies in current struggles against fuel price increase arising from the removal of oil subsidy are already being noticed. Lagos, Kaduna, Abuja and so on had huge a turn-out of protesters, but the same story cannot be told of Port Harcourt, Rivers State, where presently, the NLC and TUC are being accused of compromising.’

To summarise, the feeling is that at least in Bayelsa and Rivers State, the NLC and TUC had been bought off by the state and federal governments. Allen also makes the point that removal of fuel subsidy is not the same as a rise in prices and that if handled differently (as I mentioned earlier) then maybe these actions would not have been necessary.

Complicating the situation in the Niger Delta, the powerful and long established Ijaw Youth Council whose stronghold is in Bayelsa State has yet to make a formal statement on the removal of the fuel subsidy or the national strike. The IYC was formed in the town of Kaiama [Kaiama Delcaration] 1998 during Olusegun Obasanjo’s presidency in the post-Abacha period. It was a period of intense militarisation of the core Delta states which saw the destruction of Odi Town by the Nigerian Army, the ransacking of Kaiama and other attacks against civilians in Yenagoa, Warri, Isoko to name a few. The IYC action, however, conflicts with statements from other Delta youths such as The Niger Delta Youth Coalition who not only supported on strikes but threatened to disrupt oil production.

‘What we are saying is no to fuel subsidy removal. The reason why we are saying no to fuel subsidy is that Nigerians were not part of this decision. The economy is bad. We were paying N1,000.00 for transportation from Warri to our villages in the creek but now we are paying N10,000.00. You cannot say removal of fuel subsidy is to help the poor and it is the poor people that are suffering it………..We are giving President Jonathan a 24 hours ultimatum to reverse the pump price to N65 and failure to do so, we will go back to our communities and when we go back to our communities, we will ensure that all the oil installations in the creek are made not to work.’
Interestingly, one of the founding IYC members and director of Social Action Nigeria, Issac Osukoa expressed what he believed to be the disappointment and disgust Niger Deltans have for Jonathan. However, other activists I have spoken to recently have not been willing to be this critical.

‘Many Nigerians believed that Goodluck Jonathan was a different breed from the backward cabal that has held Nigeria hostage for the better part of the last 51 years. They thought that because he is a native of the Niger Delta with very minimal historical ties to what was referred to as the Hausa-Fulani oligarchy, he represents a refreshing change from the past. They saw a meek-looking and educated man and felt that maybe he is the change that Nigeria needs. Well, Goodluck Jonathan has proven to Nigeria that he is not the change the country needs. In fact, Jonathan is the worst President that the ruling class has ever foisted on Nigeria.

‘Exactly! The man has shown that he is clueless. He has shown that he lacks the capacity to address the very serious challenges confronting the country. And what is even worse is that he does not care. He does not care for the people of Nigeria. He does not care for the progress of Nigeria. He has the mentality of a Local Government caretaker committee chairman.’

Another group which has so far failed to enter the equation are the ex-militants from the various branches of MEND and the NVF many of whom are closely aligned to President Jonathan, the state governors and influential oil marketers. The hierarchy within the militants is itself at odds with the rank and file, many of who feel abandoned and betrayed. Unable to return to their homes where they are either feared or seen as outcasts and unable to find jobs despite the training they have been given, they remain disillusioned young men and women.

To summarise, what is becoming clear is that the Occupy Movement as it stands lacks any real socioeconomic or gender analysis (not surprising in what are essentially male spaces). There has been no discussion on the impact of massive rise in prices on women and children; the protests themselves in as much as what happens beyond gatherings and placards, there are issues such as sexism, homophobia and witch hunting of women and girls. It is not clear whether any women’s organisations are formally taking part in the protests or have representatives within the unions though a few prominent women have joined the protests and/or spoken out in support, but hardly a movement of women! Lesley Agams raised a number of these points on Twitter including the question as to whether women ‘involved are merely supporting a male agenda’.

It is worth remembering that Nigeria has a rich history of protests. Much of that history has come from women and there is much to learn in terms of bringing together protest and education. Interestingly, it has been in the east where large groups of women are visibly protesting. Women in Enugu and Edo took separate but very different actions. The former by gathering to pray in a church and the latter, elderly Edo women bearing their breasts as a sign of protest.

Nor has there been any discussion on the massive disparities between the rich and the poor. The new young aspiring upper class entrepreneurs, NGOs executives, celebrities and artistes have been at the forefront of organisng the Occupy Movement and the working and unemployed masses have joined together. In Lagos tensions are already beginning to appear between on the one hand local ‘area boys’, Lagosians and ‘their’ musicians and on the other, ‘Occupy’ protestors many from more affluent parts of the city. Will the elites of the movement be able to maintain control? What happens if the fuel subsidy decision is reversed, will they be able to move towards a more coherent debate around issues such as corruption, governance, social and economic justice and will social media activism be sufficient to make this happen?

The question of unity is complex. I believe the majority of the country is behind not just the strikes but the Occupy Nigeria movement which seeks to seriously challenge the status quo and once and for all end the rule by kleptocracy. However there are other small but extremely powerful interest groups working for and against the government: Boko Haram and whoever is behind them; Jonathan and possibly some of the ex-Niger Delta militants; Senators and Governors who fear loss of their power and wealth; the trade union movement particularly the oil workers – how trustworthy are they? – the independent oil marketers or cabal. And of course there is the religious factor, the cozy relationship between an all-powerful state and a powerful highly influential set of religious institutions.

Nigeria is about oil and nothing but oil. Let us not forget the multinational oil companies already facing huge losses and a complete shutdown of the sector has yet to happen. Finally at the end of this oil trajectory, the US and other importers of Nigerian crude?

On December 2, 2011, the Malian parliament passed a Family Code, which threatens to set back women’s rights in Mali quite considerably. In 2009 the Parliament had passed a fairly progressive law, which didn’t quite bring women and men to equal status, but was a major step in that direction. Conservative, mostly religious, forces swung into action. The President quickly rejected the law, and sent it back to Parliament, where it has sat for two years. The new bill declares women’s legal obligation to obey and serve their husbands, as well as the husbands’ singular leadership, or dominion, over the household and all within it.

Many argue that such terms violate the national Constitution, specifically in the articles where it codifies the meaning of Malian nationhood as an independent, democratic, sovereign, secular republic.

Women of Mali were immediately, and continue to be, indignant. More than indignant, they are indignées. They are organizing the Malian Spring.

The `world’ knows and often recognizes the labor and leadership of Malian women. Women like singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara, currently setting the world ablaze, and the even-better known singer Mariam Doumbia, who with her partner Amadou Bagayoko, continue to welcome the world to Mali and to set the dance floors on fire.

Militant and feminist women singers like Oumou Sangaré join younger defiant women singers such as Khaira Arby. Fiercely feminist women writers such as Oumou Ahmar Cissé have been writing, and organizing, for the rights and autonomous spaces of women and girls, while visual artists, like photographer Fatoumata Diabaté, continue to document and interpret the worlds of social relations, and in so doing awaken the art world to a new kid on the block.

Meanwhile, women like Fatoumata Dembel Diarra, First Vice-President of the International Criminal Court; and Cissé Mariam Kaidama Sidibé, current Prime Minister of Mali and the first woman PM of the country, have kept on keeping on, breaking new ground, shattering old glass ceilings.

This a short list, an incomplete list, of Malian women who have been identified, in the last year, as `women to watch’, women to follow. And they are on the move.

Some twenty organizations started a petition, NON AU NOUVEAU CODE DES PERSONNES ET DE LA FAMILLE DU MALI  ADOPTÉ LE 2 DÉCEMBRE 2011! It begins: “Indignons-nous face au nouveau Code des personnes et de la famille, qui vient d’être adopté en seconde lecture par l’Assemblée Nationale, le 2 décembre 2011.” That opening has two senses. First, we are indignant, or outraged, at the new Code. Second, and more to the point, we are the indignants, les indignées, and we are fomenting indignation.

Women’s organizations like WILDAF Mali, Women in Law and Development in Africa, have been pulling women, and men, together into various formations to inform and to organize. On December 31, they pulled together representatives from over twenty organizations to think through the intricacies of the new bill and of the new moment, to strategize and to begin to implement counter-strategies. And they are on the move.

This is what Malian women do. They organize. They don’t wait. Some have suggested, “For more than 10 years, women in Mali have been waiting for the adoption of a Family law to protect their fundamental rights.”

The women of Mali have not been waiting. They have been organizing, and now … they are les indignées du Mali, and their battle cry is direct: “Indignons-nous!” That phrase means Spring is coming to Mali. Indignons-nous!

Dan Moshenberg, dmoshenberg@gmail.com

In 2010 the world watched in horror as the Gulf of Mexico filled with 5m barrels of oil from an undersea leak caused by the careless handling of equipment on the part of BP and its partner Halliburton. Shocking images of uncontrolled spillage erupting from the ocean floor travelled around the world for weeks, sparking a media frenzy, a range of stern governmental responses and a huge amount of public outrage. BP has spent millions on the clean-up and millions more on a public relations campaign, all in an effort to repair the damage it caused to the Gulf but also to its image and, perhaps more importantly for BP, to its share price.

Last month, on the other side of the Atlantic, the oil giant Royal Dutch Shell’s operation caused from 1m to 2m gallons of oil to spill into the ocean off the coast of Nigeria, also as the result of an industrial accident. It was the worst spill in Nigeria in 13 years in a part of that country where the oil and gas industry has been despoiling the environment for more than 50 years, on a scale that dwarfs the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico by a wide margin. Shell claims it has completely cleaned up the mess, but villages counterclaim the oil has been washing up on their coastline. The world’s media seem to be uninterested in checking the facts.

You may wonder where the outrage against Shell is? To say that it is nonexistent except for a few responses from the environmental community would be an understatement. The simple fact is that Shell and its “sisters” in the West African oil patches are rarely scrutinised except in the most egregious cases – which this one surely is – and the world seems to simply expect that the people of Nigeria should live with these sorts of occurrences because they unfortunately lack the political and media clout to do otherwise.

In any other region of the world the behaviour of the companies involved would result in major sanctions and criminal prosecutions. Hundreds of square miles of sensitive coastal wetlands have been poisoned, perhaps forever. Fishing areas have been turned into toxic waste zones. Village life has been grotesquely refashioned as a result of flaring gas fumes and pipelines that sometimes run through people’s homes. Disease, birth-defects and chronic illnesses are all part and parcel of an unregulated industry that operates outside the range of global media but with the full complicity of the Nigerian government that wants nothing whatsoever to upset its unctuous cash-cow.

A recent report on the Ogoniland region conducted over a period of 14 months by a team from the United Nations environmental programme suggests that it would take upwards of 30 years to clean up the Niger Delta, with an initial price tag of more than $1bn. However, it is unclear whether Shell or the Nigerian government will put one dollar towards this effort without continuous international pressure.

In 1995, Shell was implicated in the government-sanctioned death by hanging of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa who led one of the first and best organised campaigns against the oil giant and its irresponsible behaviour in the Delta, as well as its corrupt practices in its dealing with the Nigerian government. As a result of the outcry that followed the death of Saro-Wiwa, Shell stopped production in the Ogoniland region, but it still maintains – rather poorly, in fact – a large pipeline and storage infrastructure, which are the cause of a continuous stream of oil flowing into the waters surrounding hundreds of desperately poor communities. While Shell claims that most of these spills come from sabotage attacks, the fact is that it does little policing and almost no effort is expended on clean-ups.

This is a circumstance that would simply be impossible in a country with the slightest bit of rule of law or the decency to look after its most vulnerable citizens. Nigeria has been reeling from a series of terrorist attacks on Christian churches, which certainly did capture the world’s media attention over the Christmas weekend. However, in the case of this latest oil spill and the hundreds of others that have destroyed the lives of tens of thousands of people, the global media have had very little to say.

Unlike BP’s share prices, which plummeted in 2010 after the spill, Shell’s have barely had a hiccup. Chalk it up to the difficulty of reporting from such a remote region or chalk it up to racism. Whatever you want to call it, it is a disgrace but also a call to action to anyone who cares about fairness and the health of our planet.

ON Wednesday, America’s detention camp at Guantánamo Bay will have been open for 10 years. For seven of them, I was held there without explanation or charge. During that time my daughters grew up without me. They were toddlers when I was imprisoned, and were never allowed to visit or speak to me by phone. Most of their letters were returned as “undeliverable,” and the few that I received were so thoroughly and thoughtlessly censored that their messages of love and support were lost.

Some American politicians say that people at Guantánamo are terrorists, but I have never been a terrorist. Had I been brought before a court when I was seized, my children’s lives would not have been torn apart, and my family would not have been thrown into poverty. It was only after the United States Supreme Court ordered the government to defend its actions before a federal judge that I was finally able to clear my name and be with them again.

I left Algeria in 1990 to work abroad. In 1997 my family and I moved to Bosnia and Herzegovina at the request of my employer, the Red Crescent Society of the United Arab Emirates. I served in the Sarajevo office as director of humanitarian aid for children who had lost relatives to violence during the Balkan conflicts. In 1998, I became a Bosnian citizen. We had a good life, but all of that changed after 9/11.

When I arrived at work on the morning of Oct. 19, 2001, an intelligence officer was waiting for me. He asked me to accompany him to answer questions. I did so, voluntarily — but afterward I was told that I could not go home. The United States had demanded that local authorities arrest me and five other men. News reports at the time said the United States believed that I was plotting to blow up its embassy in Sarajevo. I had never — for a second — considered this.

The fact that the United States had made a mistake was clear from the beginning. Bosnia’s highest court investigated the American claim, found that there was no evidence against me and ordered my release. But instead, the moment I was released American agents seized me and the five others. We were tied up like animals and flown to Guantánamo, the American naval base in Cuba. I arrived on Jan. 20, 2002.

I still had faith in American justice. I believed my captors would quickly realize their mistake and let me go. But when I would not give the interrogators the answers they wanted — how could I, when I had done nothing wrong? — they became more and more brutal. I was kept awake for many days straight. I was forced to remain in painful positions for hours at a time. These are things I do not want to write about; I want only to forget.

I went on a hunger strike for two years because no one would tell me why I was being imprisoned. Twice each day my captors would shove a tube up my nose, down my throat and into my stomach so they could pour food into me. It was excruciating, but I was innocent and so I kept up my protest.

In 2008, my demand for a fair legal process went all the way to America’s highest court. In a decision that bears my name, the Supreme Court declared that “the laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.” It ruled that prisoners like me, no matter how serious the accusations, have a right to a day in court. The Supreme Court recognized a basic truth: the government makes mistakes. And the court said that because “the consequence of error may be detention of persons for the duration of hostilities that may last a generation or more, this is a risk too significant to ignore.”

Five months later, Judge Richard J. Leon, of the Federal District Court in Washington, reviewed all of the reasons offered to justify my imprisonment, including secret information I never saw or heard. The government abandoned its claim of an embassy bomb plot just before the judge could hear it. After the hearing, he ordered the government to free me and four other men who had been arrested in Bosnia.

I will never forget sitting with the four other men in a squalid room at Guantánamo, listening over a fuzzy speaker as Judge Leon read his decision in a Washington courtroom. He implored the government not to appeal his ruling, because “seven years of waiting for our legal system to give them an answer to a question so important is, in my judgment, more than plenty.” I was freed, at last, on May 15, 2009.

Today, I live in Provence with my wife and children. France has given us a home, and a new start. I have experienced the pleasure of reacquainting myself with my daughters and, in August 2010, the joy of welcoming a new son, Yousef. I am learning to drive, attending vocational training and rebuilding my life. I hope to work again serving others, but so far the fact that I spent seven and a half years as a Guantánamo prisoner has meant that only a few human rights organizations have seriously considered hiring me. I do not like to think of Guantánamo. The memories are filled with pain. But I share my story because 171 men remain there. Among them is Belkacem Bensayah, who was seized in Bosnia and sent to Guantánamo with me.

About 90 prisoners have been cleared for transfer out of Guantánamo. Some of them are from countries like Syria or China — where they would face torture if sent home — or Yemen, which the United States considers unstable. And so they sit as captives, with no end in sight — not because they are dangerous, not because they attacked America, but because the stigma of Guantánamo means they have no place to go, and America will not give a home to even one of them.

I’m told that my Supreme Court case is now read in law schools. Perhaps one day that will give me satisfaction, but so long as Guantánamo stays open and innocent men remain there, my thoughts will be with those left behind in that place of suffering and injustice.

Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Our movement has been approached by Mr. Velile Ben Mafani. He informed us that tomorrow he will throw three stones, one white, one black, and one red, through the window of the High Court in Grahamstown. He will tie a letter stating his demands around the stones.

Mr Mafani was born in a shack settlement in Coega, just outside Port Elizabeth two days after Christmas in 1953. His parents worked on nearby farms, bought and sold produce from the farms and his mother worked in kitchens. The apartheid system did not want black people living in their own places in the cities and in the 1970s they were threatened with forced removal to the Ciskei Bantustan which was a human dumping ground. Mr Mafani formed an organisation called ‘Operation Go Nowhere’ and they organised against the forced removal. But Piet Koornhof pressured them and their struggle was defeated. On the 15^th of April 1979 the police and the bulldozers came. Mr Mafani was the first to be put inside a police van. The door was closed. He couldn’t see anything but he heard the screams as the shacks were destroyed and were people loaded up on to trucks like animals to be dumped in the Ciskei. People were told that there was a Court Order from the Hight Court in Grahamstown ordering their eviction. They were shown the paper but they were not allowed to read it.

Three thousand people from Coega were dumped in Glenmore, near Peddie. Today it is more than two hours by car from Coega. They lost their work, their cattle and their homes. They lost everything. Soon after their arrival in Glenmore 140 people, mainly children and old people, died. There were no funeral parlours and they couldn’t afford coffins so the dead were just wrapped in blankets and buried on the banks of the Fish River.

Since then Mr Mafani has never stopped challenging and struggling for justice. When democracy came he had high hopes that the new government would be willing to work with the people that have been forcibly removed from Coega to find a solution that would restore their dignity. Nothing was happening despite all his letters so in 1996 he want to the Legal Resources Centre for help. In 1997 he lodged a land claim. He has written letters to all kinds of people. He is approached the media for help. He has approached the premier, the Special Investigations Unit, the Public Protector and the SAPS. He has knocked on every door. He has many files with letters, affidavits, medical records, court records and all kinds of documents. He has a dvd that tells the story. But none of his efforts yielded any fruit.

In May 2004 he came to Grahamstown and threw three stones through the window of the High Court, the same High Court that ordered the Coega eviction in 1979. One was white to symbolise freedom, one was red to symbolise the people that died in Glenmore and were buried in blankets on the banks of the Fish River and one was black to symbolise that he will never accept being forced to live in a dark place. He was arrested on a charge of malicious damage to property and kept in the Waainek Prison in Grahamstown from 23 May till 2 September 2004. He was released without being sentenced after it was said by Dr. Dwyer that he ‘was mentally retarded and wouldn’t understand the charges’. Later Dr. Dwyer wrote a letter saying that after getting the background he realised that Mr. Mafani was not mentally ill and that he was fit to stand trail. Mr Mafani understands the charges perfectly well. The only thing that he doesn’t understand is why his community are still being treated like rubbish after democracy.

When we heard this story we were reminded of how Frantz Fanon resigned from the mental hospital in Algeria saying that it was the system, colonialism, and not his patients that were insane. It was this realisation that made him become a revolutionary fighting to destroy colonialism. It is the system, the madness of the system, a madness that continued from apartheid and into democracy, a madness that treats human beings like rubbish, that drove Mr Mafani to throw three stones through the window of the Grahamstown High Court in 2004.

He did it again in 2007 and again in 2008. Both times he was arrested, charged, found guilty and given a suspended sentence of five years. In 2008 his lawyer said that he must knock on the right door which was the Equality Court. He started the process but then the Premier intervened and said that the case was out of the jurisdiction of the Grahamstown court and so it must be moved to Peddie. He used his own money to start the process again in Peddie. He heard nothing for 5 months, then 8 months and then the case was just stopped without an explanation.

Tomorrow, at ten o’clock, he will do it again. He says that he has exhausted all the avenues that the system provides for people wishing to raise issues with the government without success. He says that he won’t run away after he has thrown the stones through the window. He will just stand there and wait for the police to come. He says that this problem is depressing him in his heart and that he can’t spend the last years of life writing letters that bring no result.

His demands are that:

 1. The people evicted from Coega be allowed to return.

2. The government exhumes the bodies of the 140 people buried in blankets on the banks of the Fish River and gives them a dignified burial.

Mr Mafani says that Glenmore is a civic prison. He says that it is suitable for cows that stay thin and graze but that neither he nor any of the other people that were dumped there are cows and it is a terrible place for human beings. There has been huge development in Coega. More than a billion rand has been spent on development there. There is a new port and factories. Mr Mafani insists that the people forcibly removed from Coega in 1979 have a right to return to Coega, to live there and to work there. The ruling party are trying to isolate Mr Mafani in Glenmore. They are trying to isolate him and are calling him names. But his courage is not failing. He says that this is a struggle that he will follow till his last breath.

Under apartheid forced removals turned people and communities into rubbish to be dumped in far away places. Today poor people are still being forcibly removed from farms and cities. People and communities are still being turned into rubbish. As the UPM we are, together with our comrades in other movements like Abahlali baseMjondolo, the Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Landless People’s Movement and the Rural Network, determined to demand that the dignity of all people in South Africa is recognised. There must be justice for all past injustices and people must never again be treated like rubbish. As Abahlali baseMjondolo say everyone must count and everyone must count equally.

The UPM is willing to support the Glenmore community in their struggle and we are willing to raise this issue with our comrades in Students for Social Justice.

If any journalists are interested in this story Mr Mafani has detailed documentation of his long struggle for justice for the people evicted from Coega in 1979.

 Mr Mafani can be contacted via: 078 625 6462