Africa :Crisis in Cote d'Ivoire: What Impact on Women?

By Massan d'Almeida,

On  28 November 2010, Côte d’Ivoire held a second round of presidential elections, following a first round, which took place in October 2010 after several postponements. Fourteen candidates participated in the first round, and Alassane Ouattara and Laurent Gbagbo, the two candidates who garnered the most votes, made it to the second round of the polls. Gbagbo is the incumbent president. After the elections, the Independent Electoral Commission declared Ouattara the winner, but these results were invalidated by the Ivorian Constitutional Court which declared his rival, Gbagbo, the president-elect of Côte d’Ivoire.

This precipitated a crisis in the country. Gbagbo ‘refused to yield to international pressure and withdraw from his position’ in favour of Ouattara, who was recognised by the entire international community.

Mata Coulibaly and Honorine Sadia Vehi Toure, the two women’s rights advocates whom we interviewed, explained how the population is experiencing this situation: ‘We are going through a crisis and this is very difficult. There is tension in the country. Our days are filled with uncertainty because at any moment, a strike can be called,’ said Coulibaly. Toure added: ‘this is a real crisis and we are under tremendous stress. We do not know what tomorrow will bring. The social situation is deteriorating day by day. So it is highly stressful and frustrating.’

The political crisis in Côte d’Ivoire has had major diplomatic, financial, economic and social repercussions on the population, including on women and the organisations that defend their rights.

Gbagbo’s refusal to step down has prompted several international organizations, including the United Nations, the European Union, the African Union and the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) to take punitive measures against him, his family and close friends, and the state.

IMPACT OF THE CRISIS ON THE DAILY LIVES OF IVORIANS

The economic cost of Côte d’Ivoire’s conflict between 2002 and 2007 was severe: the gross domestic product (GDP) per person dropped by 15 per cent between 2000 and 2006 and poverty consequently increased. Côte d’Ivoire’s rank in the Human Development Index (HDI) dropped from 154 in 1999 to 166 in 2007, and later rose to 149 in 2010. Before the post-electoral crisis, the economic outlook for Côte d’Ivoire seemed to have improved, with a growth of 3.8 per cent in 2009 and optimistic forecasts for an increase of revenue from cocoa and petroleum exports.

The current crisis aggravates a rather precarious situation and has accentuated the impoverishment of the population. It has had a serious impact on the daily lives of Ivorian households, causing prices of essential products to rise sharply and encouraging speculation. As Toure emphasised: ‘Market prices have soared so much that some essential products such as oil, sugar, meat and onions are difficult to obtain. This is a real hardship for households. Before the crisis, many female-headed households could only afford one meal a day, so one can only imagine how much more difficult it is now for those families. Everyone is suffering.’

Coulibaly added: ‘Life seems to go in slow motion. Prices have soared. For example, sometimes there is a shortage of natural gas. A quantity of coal that previously cost CFAF100 now costs CFAF200. A kilo of ‘oignon dur’* has increased from CFAF450 to CFAF1,000 while onions from Niamey have increased from CFAF600 to CFAF1,500, and a kilo of beetroots from CFAF1,900 to CFAF3,000. These examples illustrate the impact of this crisis on the shopping basket and this price increase has a tangible impact on the living conditions of Ivorians. Salaries remain the same although prices are surging. This situation forces women to economize more in order to feed their families. Regardless of whether it is a woman or man who is the head of household, everyone has similar difficulties to overcome.’ Sophie confirmed that some food prices have doubled, while those of other products, such as oil, have tripled. She said that it is extremely difficult for middle-income households to feed themselves because everything has become so expensive.

The situation is no different in other cities and towns in the country. Coulibaly stated: ‘The current crisis has affected the whole Ivorian territory. In Korhogo in the north, Bouaké in the centre of the country, and Man and Duokoué in the west, food prices have almost doubled. The population is tired and is growing poorer every day. In addition, the private sector is threatened with redundancies, which could lead to famine for parts of the population. We have just learned that with the closure of the Abidjan and San Pedro ports, we will run out of gas in a few days. Côte d’Ivoire exports all its products. Another concern is that HIV/AIDS patients are no longer provided with anti-retroviral drugs and this has resulted in a proliferation of the disease and the aggravation of existing cases.’

Toure paints a similar picture of the situation, stating: ‘Impoverishment is felt by everyone throughout the territory. Before the elections, the country had not yet unified and therefore in the central, northern and western areas, the living conditions were already poor. The south was not spared, but it suffered to a lesser degree. But now I can assure you that now no area is better than another. Whether it be towns, villages, urban or rural areas, it is the same unbearable situation all over.’

VIOLENCE, RIGHTS AND SECURITY VIOLATIONS OF HUMAN RIGHTS ADVOCATES

After the first, relatively peaceful round of elections at the end of October 2010, reports of violence and abuse in different regions of the country began to emerge. These incidents indicated a serious deterioration of the general human rights situation and are a reminder of the atrocities committed during the last decade. African, European and American human rights organisations, in particular Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Amnesty International, have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the situation.

The United Nations Human Rights Council held a special session on Côte d’Ivoire in Geneva on 23 December 2010, during which the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a speech and the High Commissioner on Human Rights Navi Pillay strongly condemned the human rights violations committed in Côte d’Ivoire. The Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has also voiced its concerns about the situation.

Most of the violence reported to date is carried out during night raids led by the security forces and other groups in the neighbourhoods of Abidjan that are considered to be predominantly populated by Ouattara’s supporters. Human rights organisations have noted a series of kidnappings under similar circumstances. The victims of these kidnappings were declared missing or were found dead. Coulibaly confirmed this stating: ‘Acquaintances of ours have been kidnapped.’ According to Sophie, these are ‘raids that are violent, ethnic-based and politically motivated, targeted against individuals or groups of people whose neighbours have informed on them. The perpetrators are mercenaries who are paid to commit these murders.’

According to independent sources, human rights and women’s rights activists are living in a state of constant anxiety with respect to their safety. An experienced civil society advocate, who requested to remain anonymous, told IRIN: ‘I have been in hiding ever since being threatened over two weeks ago. Sometimes, it looks as though the situation is about to calm down. This is often the impression in the daytime, but one never knows what will happen once night falls.’ Toure confirmed: ‘We are working within a context of fear. We are truly sad about what is happening in our country. We cannot carry out our work openly for fear of reprisals. In spite of this, we are working, relying on God, and hoping that our country will rapidly overcome this situation.’ Coulibaly stated: ‘As a representative of the Democracy and Human Rights Fund (FDDH), I do not feel safe.’

IMPACT OF THE CRISIS ON WORK ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS

The punitive sanctions imposed on Côte d'Ivoire have had a very negative impact on non-governmental organisations that depend mainly on international funds for their survival. Toure explained that most of their financial partners in the United Nations system and the World Bank have closed their offices, which has in turn forced the NGOs to suspend most of their activities. Furthermore, due to political instability, it is increasingly difficult to operate as normal. Coulibaly stated: ‘nothing is sure. We have to tailor our plans according to how events evolve. We are afraid to go to work and sometimes we receive information or hear rumours that cause us to stay away from work.’

OTHER RAMIFICATIONS OF THE CRISIS: THE WIDENING OF THE DIVISION

The riots that broke out in September 2002 in Côte d’Ivoire divided the country between the south, run by the Gbagbo government, and the north, controlled by rebel forces led by Guillaume Soro, the current prime minister in the Ouattara administration. However, in 2008, after signing the Ouagadougou Agreement, the country began a reunification process, which led to the consensual organisation of the recent presidential elections.

However, some people are afraid that the alliance between Soro and Ouattara will cause a revival of the divisions, and will introduce a religious dimension to the divide. Nonetheless, it should be emphasized that there are different opinions on this subject, as highlighted by Toure. ‘No matter what is being said, the people in Côte d’Ivoire do not promote division,’ she said. ‘It is the politicians who have put us into this situation because of their personal interests. In the south, there are Christians and Muslims, and there are also people from the north, and we live together in harmony, at least those who have understood that division does not suit us, which is most of us. The same is true in the north. Therefore, there is no real division in Côte d’Ivoire, even if this is what they want you to believe. Ivorians have suffered through ten years of crisis. In the end, everyone was tired of this. Our will to leave it behind was shown by the high voter turnout in the elections: 83 per cent in the first round and over 70 per cent in the second round.’ However, Coulibaly does not agree: ‘the division is inevitable. The politicians accuse the people of the north of being rebels. Women are divided in the markets. Some pro-Gbagbo market women tell their pro-Ouattara counterparts to ask their leader to build them their own market.’

The current situation in Côte d’Ivoire is worrying. The Ivorian population, which underwent almost a decade of crisis, strongly desires that a peaceful outcome to this situation be found quickly for the benefit of everyone. Human and women’s rights organisations are particularly affected because funding opportunities for their work are becoming scarce. Furthermore, growing fears for their personal safety reduce their capacity to engage, and very few of them dare to openly express their analysis of the situation. Coulibaly confided to AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) that, as far as she knew, no public action has been undertaken by human rights organisations and that only the Civil Society Agreement of Côte d’Ivoire (CSCI), which is a leading organisation in the country, has made proposals for a solution. Other organisations prefer not to issue statements because they do not share the same point of view or analysis of the situation. However, Toure stated that there are discreet initiatives being carried out by around 20 organisations and women’s networks to encourage the two protagonists to protect the lives of women and children, and to seek a peaceful outcome to the crisis.

Source:pambazuka.org

Indict Muammar Gaddafi now for War Crimes in Sierra Leone

Aroun Rashid Deen – With international pressure already mounting on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and with the International Criminal Court now in the process of gathering information on civilian deaths in Libya, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal Court have a profound opportunity to indict Gaddafi for war crimes and crimes against humanity he has committed in Sierra Leone. The United Nations has already sanctioned Gaddafi’s government, and now it’s time his prior crimes in West Africa are brought to justice, too.

Muammar Gaddafi was the mastermind and key financier of the brutal war that left hundreds of thousands dead in Sierra Leone in West Africa in the 1990s. The war would not have happened in the first place had it not been for the desire of the Libyan leader to punish the government of Sierra Leone for what he regarded as its siding with the West in the 1980’s when Gaddafi was at loggerhead with particularly the United States and Britain. It was also part of Gaddafi’s broader agenda including his geopolitical ambition to destabilize much of West Africa and establish satellite states in the region to be headed by puppet regimes that will be doing his biddings.The decade-long war ripped Sierra Leone apart. Thousands of its victims, whose arms and limbs were chopped off by rebels,were reduced to paupers, roaming the streets as beggars in Freetown and other cities. Children as young as a day old were also among those whose arms and limbs were hacked off by Gaddafi’s rebels. Pregnant women, too, were disemboweled with delight in their display of ghastlybrutality.

As part of his criminal plans to set West Africa on the warpath, Gaddafi instituted a program of guerilla warfare in Libya for a group of disgruntled West Africans, including a group of Sierra Leoneans he had invited to Tripoli to undergo training. The men who led the war on Sierra Leone — former Liberian leader and warlord, Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone’s rebel leader, Foday Sankoh, and The Gambian Fugitive, Kukoi Samba Sanyang– were among those who trained in Libya.

The ring leaders of the Revolutionary United Front rebel group, which was fighting to overthrow the government of Sierra Leone, also received massive financial support from Libya through Gaddafi’s People’s Revolutionary Council.

Long before the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations jointly set up the Special Court for Sierra Leone to prosecute key suspects of the war for war crimes and crimes against humanity, calls have been made for Gaddafi to face international justice for his role in Sierra Leone — like Charles Taylor now in The Hague. An opposition leader in Sierra Leone, Charles Margai, who was one of the strong advocates for Gaddafi’s indictment, was incensed when Gaddafi visited the country in 2007. In a BBC interview, he called on Sierra Leoneans to boycott the reception that was hosted for him at the national stadium.

David Crane, the first Chief Prosecutor at the Special Court,considered indicting the Libyan dictator. The former prosecutor, who now teaches law at Syracuse University, says that the direct participation of the Libyan leader in the wars in both Sierra Leone and Liberia caused the “murder, rape, maiming, and mutilation of over a million human beings…” But calls for justice were not heeded because it appears principle Western nations developed a fondness for Mr. Gaddafi following his so-called positive gestures, such as his abandoning of WMD programs.

In January 2004, former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was quick to express hope that French firms would participate fully in business activities in Libya. This followed Libya’s signing of a deal to pay $170 million to relatives of French victims of a UTA French airliner bombing in 1989, which was blamed on Libya.Current French President Nicolas Sarkozy also went to Tripoli in July 2007.

The greatest irony of it all is that Sierra Leone and Liberia never got compensations from Libya for the untold suffering, infrastructural damage and needless loss of lives even though evidence suggests that he was the master-mind of the carnage.

Then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, met Gaddafi in Tripoli in 2004. The meeting was christened with the signing of a deal by oil giant, Shell, estimated at hundreds of millions of British pound sterling for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.

In August 2008, Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi visited Libya and signed a $5 billion dollars investment deal with Gaddafi. Condoleezza Rice, the former US Secretary of State has also been to Libya where she met with the controversial Gaddafi.

The Libyan leader’s promise to, at the least, pay compensations to relatives of his brutal crimes as well as his giving up of his WMDs were welcome news in a world — particularly in Europe — that confronts many terrorists activities. Oil supplies from Libya mean much to the West. But appeasing the West should not stand in the way for justice for Sierra Leone, just so because it is not an affluent country endowed with oil deposits.

Up till now, Gaddafi’s relations with the West were getting cozier by the day. His brutal treatment of peaceful protesters — who seek nothing more than just a political change that guarantees freedom and better living standards — shows clearly that Gaddafi is too grown to learn new tricks. He is fundamental in his choice to resorting to brutality as a means of addressing challenges.

Muammar Gaddafi bears the greatest responsibility for the brutality in Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up at the end of the war found out that Libya contributed in a significant way to the chaos and mayhem that engulfed the country. Mr. Gaddafi’s role in the training in Libya and financing of the rebels justify his direct involvement in the mayhem. Such key roles deserve more than mere naming and shaming.

The desire for a share of Libyan oil or business prospect should not rub leading international policy makers of their moral responsibility to let Mr. Gaddafi account for his brutal misdeeds.

Gaddafi’s hatred for Sierra Leone goes back to the early 1980’s when then President of Sierra Leone, Siaka Stevens, in November 1982,  boycotted an Organization of African Unity conference Libya was scheduled to host. The 1982 conference lacked a quorum due to the absence of many heads of state as a result of controversies surrounding Gaddafi’s role in the rebellions that were going on in Africa at the time. Gaddafi must not go unpunished. What was good for the British and French must be good for Sierra Leoneans too.

Source:aloftnews.com

The impact of the fall of Ghaddafi, sub-Sahara African dictators’ colonel

The impact of the fall of Ghaddafi, should it happen, could be equivalent to the impact of the fall of the Soviet Union to Sub-Sahara Africa. (Photo:  Col. Muamarr Ghaddafi)

The sudden transition of the political landscape, especially in West Africa, in the 1990s owed much to the fall of the Soviet Union when countries that benefited from super-power patronage found themselves with limited external support. The results of that, without doubt, were the very destabilising wars and coups that took over in countries such as Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Since the 1970s, Libya had been the preferred ground for Sub-Saharan warlords who used it to train and arm fighters, who were then sent back to their respective countries to ignite national upheavals and skirmishes. Such recruitments were very effective in the Sierra Leone and Liberia wars. 

Today, not many Sub-Saharan leaders would deny receiving financial support from the celebrated Colonel. Asked by a Western journalist as to where he got his money from to build his spanking new airport, hospitals and roads, President Yayah Jammeh of the Gambia responded by saying that it was from the ‘Bank of Allah’. That ‘Bank of Allah’ was located north of the Sahara in Tripoli, and it never gave out pennies. In their desperate attempt to let their wretched, cancerous and corrupt party, SLPP, remain in power, supporters of the former President of Sierra Leone, Tejan Kabba, announced in 2007 that a shipload of rice from Libya was heading voters’ way. That prompted a massive euphoria in cities, in anticipation of free food in exchange for votes. In fact Ghaddafi became so influential that he was granted an honorary membership to the Sierra Leone parliament. That was another defining stage in the bastardisation process of Sierra Leone’s democracy.

In most countries in the region, Ghaddafi is the patron guru of dictators such as Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe. He propped him up so as to brutally and mindlessly attack his own people, blaming them for his failings.

Coups and elections are not successful without Ghaddafi’s intervention one way or the other. Prolonged and destructive civil wars are not possible without being sustained by the man who wants to unify Africa. 

The significance of Ghaddafi in Sub-Sahara Africa should not be underestimated at all; he is the only North African leader who looks southward. He considers himself very much African, and he advocates for a united Africa. This claim and link enabled him to detach himself from the Middle East, and used his huge oil wealth to bankroll the AU (Africa Union) (formally OAU- Organisation of African Union). Since the beginning of the Libyan upheaval the AU has remained silent, fearing that if any hasty statement is made to condemn the revered Colonel, it may come back to haunt them and their crumbling regimes. Even though evidence of extreme human rights abuses in the country has been made widely known, the AU still remains tightlipped.  This fear of speaking out is not so much about the seizure to financially prop-up dictatorial regimes; it is more or less about the man’s capabilities to change such regimes in these states should he survive his very own homegrown rebellion.

It is now a matter of who first is going to put his head in the snood by publicly condemning the Colonel. African dictators are fully familiar with the proverb that one should never crack a nut on the head of he who carries you on his shoulders. The widely publicised mercenaries being used in the quelling of the Libyan rebellion has come under scrutiny recently.  But, for those Sub-Saharan Africans who are typically familiar with the operations of the Libyan state, seeing African fighters in military jeeps on the streets is no surprise. Were they members of specific states’ forces from Sub-Saharan Africa who were on training missions but became caught-up in this bloody affair?  The answer may be found in what has been happening in authoritative states; fighters who spearheaded the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia spent several years in the 1980s training in various military camps in Libya. And so did Angolan, Ugandan, and Congolese core rebel fighters. For many years, these training facilities acted as additional mentoring and monitoring schemes between the then pariah Libya and its subordinates. They also became places where new warlords were born; Foday Sankoh, Charles Taylor, Prince Johnson, Yoweri Museveni, Kukoi Samba Sanyan (Gambia), and the Kabila family of Congo.

Ghaddafi filled the void that was left by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Men and women who once trained in the Soviet Union now had a shorter distance to travel. Dictators who once received patronage funds from the Soviet Union now had Libyan oil money available to them. Students who once queued to go to ‘the USSR’ for studies now had to go to Libya under state sponsorships.

Ghaddafi’s influence on countries and institutions did not only stop in Africa; in the last few days the head of the London School of Economics resigned after it became public that the institution received substantial funding from Libya.

The departure of Ghaddafi, should it happen, would leave a very big void indeed. The question, however, is who would fill that void? That answer lies fairly and squarely with the Chinese! The Chinese have managed to put themselves in such an economic pole position in Africa that even new roads built by them ends on the East coast looking China-ward (just like Europeans did in colonial Africa when all roads ended on the West coast looking Westward! Easy shipment.) China is now so engaged in Africa that it ships anything that looks vaguely valuable! Dictators such as Theodore Obiang, who relied on the Colonel for security, would now have to look China-ward.

The current scramble by Western governments to gain a foothold in Libya backfired in some fashion when Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague, announced that Ghaddafi had left for Venezuela during the second day of protest! The defiant Colonel appeared live on national TV to tell Hague that he was not for leaving. As Britain was busy airlifting its citizens out of Libya, China was shipping oil from the east coast of Libya!  It is even worrying for the British government when Libyan rebels held eight of its SAS military personnel.

For those African dictators who know the old Colonel very well, fence sitting is the best option for now. That, nonetheless, is very dangerous for their health.

President Koroma should now address the position of one of his honorary MPs.   

James Fallah-Williams, Sierra Leonean Human Rights Activist

Source:www.sierraexpressmedia.com

Clock Ticks for Africa's Sit Tight Dictators

By Cudjoe Kpor, economic analyst at Independent Newspapers Limited, reflects on the wind of change blowing across the continent...

A new, disorderly decapitation of government has hit the continent's corrupt, tinpot dictators. It is not a military coup by the armed forces: the jackbook dictators terrorise the entire population, especially when they are messing up, worse in governance than the incompetent civilians they toppled. Nor is it the spontaneous uprising of civilians who resort to guerilla warfare against the government. It is not the passive, collective resistance through civil disobedience for addressing specific grievances either.

The name of this wave of forceful overthrow of the corrupt tyrants and their henchmen is colour revolution: so far, Jasmine for Tunisia and Black for Egypt - and counting. Perhaps Green for Libya is next, though the sanguinary repression of the unarmed civilians by the desperate Muammar Ghaddafi regime's security forces makes political pundits see its imminent fall albeit more tardy. A bad government's bloodthirsty violence against civilian protestors only hardens them when they begin to count their dead, who number at least 200 so far nationwide: but yes, the Ghaddafi regime is history.

And the warning bell is not tolling for only the home-grown dictators: some of the Western nations' favourite despots are also being swept off. No tyrant appears safe in the cocoon of his luxury presidential palace till the protestors' motion stops - or never started at all - on good governance. No empty platitudes acceptable either. And the hurricane sweeping them off? It is the mass of humanity, peaceful civilian protestors, using the new media, Internet chatrooms and social sites on the cyber-highway to organise the protests.

The domino theory's prediction has begun. The continent's corrupt despots have begun tumbling from power. As said, the power is not oozing from the turrets of tanks and barrels of AK47 assault rifles. These are wielded by usually disgruntled soldiers. But their often brutal dictatorships are worse than the illiterate civilians they threw out. Needless to say, it is finally obvious: as the old saw says, the most terrible civilian government is absolutely better than the most benign military dictatorship!

More importantly, the disorderly usurpers of power from the tyrants are their dissatisfied compatriots who stage peaceful revolts starting as street protests over mundane frustrations like unemployment, escalating food prices and corruption in high places. At the point of their fall, not even the most tight security networks which they once used to suppress the population, committed all the heinous atrocities against their populace, are of any help to the tyrants.

That is the irony of it: the tyrants used the security forces to abuse the rights of their compatriots flagrantly. The excesses provoke their regime's ouster. But at the point of their fall, the security network turns around, in cunning betrayal, to mastermind toppling the "wicked regime" they once propped up to subjugate their populace in bondage. It makes no difference if the bondage is the bird-cage freedom.

Hosni Mubarak, whom his Egyptian praise-singers called "pharaoh", is gone! So did Ben Ali in Tunisia. And the barbarity with which Ghadafi unleashed his ruthless security dogs, a still loyal faction of the armed forces and revolutionary militias on the peaceful protestors in Libyan cities, has only aggravated the protests which snowballed into an increasingly outraged citizenry nationwide. Now, the angry Libyans abroad are pressurising foreign governments to help the peaceful protestors.

But a tall list of similar, tinpot dictators are on the African Union's (AU) list. All of them are now wondering whether the fall of the one-time "powerful" Ghaddafi, who spearheaded the drive for the transformation of OAU into AU, would spread to them, too. Meantime, AU is silent over the deplorable bloodbath in Libya, though its current chairman, Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika, was a dictator-basher. Predictably, other dictators are chafing in their palaces, hoping or believing, that the hurricane could only blow away other heads of states: Sudan, Morocco, Gambia, Algeria, Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Fasso, Gabon, Cameroun, etc are all tainted. Contrarily, the real transformers of the backward continent into modernity are too few to list.

For now, all these dictators are "trapped" in the opulence of their presidential palaces, hemmed in by the power, prestige and glamour of their offices. Their myrmidons and praise-singers butter their egos to make them believe they are gods on earth. Their security network, in its ignorance or bootlicking, or both, makes them believe that anyone who reminded them, or better still, taught them, that the sole goal of governance is assuring the welfare and happiness of the significant majority of the population at all times, or all the population some of the times, is public enemy number one. The ignoramuses in the security networks thus arrest, detain, torture, harass and jail these so-called enemies, especially if they recommend uncharted paths to advancing their economies which confuse their no-better-informed tinpot dictators in the state houses.

These security networks, which every country sets up as state insurance policy, are usually lawless, wasteful and know nothing about accountability. In the hands of dictators, they turn into a law unto themselves: they commit murders, maimings and tortures with glee, boasting into the bargain that "nothing will happen." In the advanced countries, only First Class university graduates are recruited into security networks, except the illiterates, brawns and retired agents retained to do the menial chores. That way, even if they cannot trick or fool their foreign enemies, which is their common currency, at least they themselves cannot be fooled by the enemies. Not so, on the continent: the dropouts predominate, plus the unenlightened ones a psychologist called mesomorphs of obviously limited intelligence: in Lagos parlance, the animals. No wonder they are the easily fooled like zombis.

Worse still, the same Western nations, particularly Britain and USA, supply them tonnes of foolish, harassing gases with which they torture their citizens with the reckless abandon of primitive illiterates who mistake the gases for babies' toys. Now, the British and Americans have taken their treachery one step up: they corrupted some of the ignorant zombis in the networks to implant a fake, manipulative, mind-bug hi-tech in the brains of their own ignorant tribesmen and women to turn the latter into perpetual daydreamers once the complementary foolish gases are sprayed around. Predictably, the continent will witness pockets of inter-tribal wars which the combatants on both sides of the conflict have no clue what caused them - except their daydreams....

The continent is terribly unfortunate: Preposterously, dictators who hit the skids in the bad governance and economic mismanagement lane perpetuate the vicious circle of recruiting more wasteful security agents - rather than cut down on their numbers to channel recurrent expenditure funds into regenerating their economies to attenuate the citizens' anger. Not surprisingly, Mubarak's Egypt recruited one million security agents to police its 80 million population.

When the end comes, the same security network, in their avowed quest for state stability, would turn around to betray the dictator without qualms. In Egypt, Vice President Omar Suleiman read only two sentences to oust Mubarak in classic security betrayal - and melted back into the shadows.

Suleiman, at the head of the Directorate General of Intelligence, was the single most powerful man in the country. Worse still, he was also the notoriously ugly face of the regime. Too many of the egregious atrocities perpetrated by the Mubarak regime, some of which brought the peaceful mob into Tahrir Square in Cairo, were committed against their own people by the soiled hands of Suleiman. Of course, the Western nations looked away when the heinous human rights abuses - detention without trials, torture, death and disappearances, frame-ups and trumped-up charges - were committed, hailing the regime as the Mubarak strongman, a stable bulwark against terrorism.

When Mubarak's opponents were silenced, Suleiman exported his bestiality, specifically, to the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When the hairbrained former US president George Bush launched his discredited extraordinary rendition bestiality on the world, Suleiman opened Egypt's detention cells for Bush. Egypt became notorious for its black sites or interrogation and torture centres for both Egyptians and other Middle East victims of the extraordinary rendition, no doubt including the callous waterboarding.

Source:allafrica.com