Nairobi Notebook

Sub Standard Reporting

That’s it. The new look The Standard newspaper continues to sink to deeper depths. It is bad enough that the sports section is upside down. Page 2 however consistently goes beyond the ridiculous.

Take today’s issue. The front-page splash is a big headline: Top Al Qaeda Man Now Back in Kenya. Here is a big story, just five days before the anniversary of the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam as once again the mastermind behind Kenya’s deadliest terror attack has slipped through the police’s shredded net...in Kenya.

As an aside, the timing of the failed arrest makes you question the extent to which Fazul Mohamed is just a political pawn as far as Kibaki’s administration is concerned. What a coup it would have been for the embattled coalition to parade Fazul Mohamed before the eyes of Kenyans and the world media? But they screwed up. 

But back to The Standard.  You have to wait to Page 7 to read any more on this development because Page 2 is dedicated to the perverted whims of some flasher. I’ll hand it to the journalist though, Peter Opiyo, for his choice language. Here is an extract:

Seizing the opportunity, the man reportedly unzipped his trousers, removed his manhood and moved closer to the dozing woman…When the woman awoke, she noticed her seatmate was fidgeting. Before long she came face to face with the reason with is discomfort – his exposed, erect manhood. So shocked was she that she immediately let out a loud scream.

Congratulations to The Standard for shuffling its pack with such effect.

Musical Offices

There is a new, disturbing trend in the systematic murders taking course in Somalia as aid workers are increasingly becoming deliberate targets.

This month gunmen have killed the local head of the UN Development Programme and the deputy head of a German charity. The UN Food Agency (WFP) has lost five contracted workers this year. Four foreign aid workers - two Italians, a Kenyan and a Briton - are currently being held hostage.

Apparently there are real concerns here in Nairobi too that certain UN Somalia offices outside 'Fortress Gigiri'  are soft targets, vulnerable to attack by Islamists. My source, who starts a new UN assignment on Monday, does not yet know where her office will be based as the UN is in the process of relocating certain members of staff to more secure buildings.

Back in Mogadishu, threatening leaflets are appearing on the city's lawless streets raising fear levels yet further. According to Reuters, the leaflets threaten local aid workers with death if they did not leave their posts. Such killings have usually been pinned on the al-Shabaab, the Islamist rebels employing Iraq-style tactics in their insurgency against Somalia's Ethiopia-backed government. But I hear there are suggestions from different quarters - including as you might imagine, the Islamists - that  government hardliners are behind the latest wave of aid-worker killings. The logic: to push the international community into sending a peacekeeping force (one actually capable of establishing some degree of law and order rather than a handful of overstretched Ugandans) into Somalia, thereby stabilising the TFG.

The WFP has called on foreign governments to provide naval escorts for vessels delivering food aid into Mogadishu's port. Aid agencies claim the worsening security situation could soon force humanitarian programmes to be suspended at a time Somalia faces all-out famine.

The Exodus Begins...

So, as widely anticipated the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo has laid charges of genocide and war crimes against Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir. With this move the plight of Darfuris just got a whole load more precarious. It's only a few hours since the announcement but already the UN has ordered all but essential staff to withdraw from the region.

Here's how one humanitarian worker feels right now:

"The potential implications of these indictments are many an depressing. Everything from anti-Western riots on the streets of Khartoum to government-backed attacks on UN targets to the expulsion of many or all international organizations. I imagine that this is a bit of what it feels like to wait for a grenade to explode".

The airwaves right now are full of the debate I wrote about earlier today: In whose interests do these indictments serve? The argument carrying most support right now seems to be that Moreno-Ocampo's bid to haul Al Bashir in front of the judges will do nothing to ease the suffering of Dafuris, only inflaming the situation as promises of more "blood and violence" are unleashed.

Rewind the clock a bit and you will remember it was the UN's Security Council that gave the green light to Moreno-Ocampo to investigate the Sudanese authorities in the first place - an irony not lost on Sudanese Thinker.

"What is ironic is that the UN insists on deploying all peacekeepers and pushing the peace process forward, yet at the same time it is coordinating badly with the ICC initiative, which in turn will only hurt the UN’s peace agenda for Darfur".

For anyone wondering what is going on Moreno-Ocampo's head, here it is from the horse's mouth...

"In the camps Bashir's forces kill the men and rape the women. I don't have the luxury to look away. I have evidence."

Perhaps. No doubt. But how exactly does he intend to get Al Bashir to The Hague?

Courting Trouble

In a few hours the International Criminal Court is expected to seek the arrest of top Sudanese officials at its chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo opens a new file on Darfur. Diplomatic sources say Moreno-Ocampo is widely expected to include Sudan's President Omar Al Bashir, the first time the international court has even laid charges of war-crimes against an incumbent head of state.

Reports coming out of Sudan suggest Khartoum is a city poised to spit venom at western conspirators. Top of the list are the US and EU but the United Nations and even the aid agencies trying to alleviate the misery of millions of Darfuris won't escape the wrath of Khartoum. UN agencies are going into lock down, fearing retaliatory attacks for the ICC's move. On Sunday protesters at a government organised rally chanted "Down, down USA" while a Sudanese government spokesmen told The Times “If an international organisation or the organisations working in the humanitarian field are behind such an indictment of the head of state, our symbol of national sovereignty, then no one should expect us to turn our left cheek,” he said. Expect more blood to be spilled in Darfur.

Don't expect Sudan to heed Moreno-Ocampo's call to arrest Al Bashir. Khartoum does not recognise the ICC and Sudanese President has said Sudan will cooperate "over his dead body". The Darfur peace process is already in tatters but the ICC's move will do nothing to help get the process back on track.

Which begs the question: in whose interest does the ICC serve? No doubt it would be inaccurate to say there is no support for the ICC's move. I imagine there are countless Darfuris (especially those who have managed to flee the region) who are in full-support, as well as the human rights campaigners, the Mia Farrow's of the world. Certainly, the African continent has for decades allowed too many of its leaders to commit war crimes with total impunity and scant regard for the lives of their citizens.  I write this knowing full well that comments will fly back with allegations of hypocrisy - what about Bush and Blair in Iraq?! However the ICC's mandate to hold war criminals to account is necessary - but that does not mean it has to scupper peace efforts?

Just take a look at the case of the Lord's Resistance Army. There is little doubt that the ICC arrest warrants against Joseph Kony are the single biggest hurdle to sealing a peace accord. Given the untold horrors Kony has committed against the people of northern Uganda and southern Sudan, and now in DRC, he should fear eventual arrest and prosecution. So it is no surprise he refuses to emerge from his bush hideout. Would Kony have finally signed on the dotted line in Juba if all he had to do was return to Gulu, northern Uganda, step on an egg, drink the juice of bitter leaves and apologise to his people? It is the classic debate over "traditional custom of forgiveness and reconciliation versus western-styled punitive justice".

For more of this debate in the context of Darfur go to Making Sense of Darfur.
So what happens once Moreno-Ocampo announces his scalps? Firstly ICC judges will take up to three months to rule on the likely application for the arrest warrants. In the meantime the UN security council can pass a resolution suspending the ICC warrant if they fear the potential repercussions are too dangerous for Darfur. This would be another humiliating blow to the ICC which is having a torrid time of it at the moment.

Will He Stay or Go?

A few weeks ago I blogged on the farcical deal cut between the Kenyan Anti Corruption Commission and one of the greatest looters of Kenyan funds in the country’s history. The Goldenberg scandal of the early 1990s brought the Kenyan economy to its knees. Chief architect of the multi-billion dollar swindle was one Kamlesh Pattni. In April this year the KACC agreed to accept Pattni hand over his  5* Grand Regency Hotel to the Central Bank of Kenya, and thus the public. Pattni gloated on television that he had been “immunised”-  the KACC had granted an amnesty.

This week the farce has continued as details have slowly leaked out regarding the fraudulent sale of the Grand Regency, a sale directed by Kenya’s Minister of Finance, Amos Kimunya, and the Governor of the Central Bank. Kimunya’s cabinet colleagues claim they knew nothing of the sale, which was never offered out to public bids contrary to Kenyan law. Initially Kimunya denied the Hotel had been sold. A fellow minister blew-the-whistle and Kimunya backtracked admitting it had, for a price of 2.9 billion shillings $(45 million). Now it turns out the land and building were sold for just 1.8 billion shillings, way under the market value for a piece of Nairobi’s hottest real-estate.

Kimunya is a man on the rack. Yesterday parliament passed a vote-of-no-confidence against Kimunya. A 5-man team appointed by the PM Raila Odinga told the President Kimunya ought to resign and an investigation set up.

And you can bet Kimunya will resign. An even safer bet is that he will be back holding a ministerial post in a matter of months, a year or two at the most. He would be joining a fair-sized list of Ministers who have done the same…Prof George Saitoti to name one. He was named by an inquiry into Goldenberg years ago…but he wasn’t wondering in the political wilderness long before he was brought back on board.

It’s too early to say that Kimunya has pocketed public funds or whether he's just been careless. There is a strong whiff of corruption and at the very least however he has acted outside the law in what appears to be a fraudulent deal. Kimunya’s next few days and months will be a telling indication of whether Kibaki is serious, and indeed capable, of fighting corruption, or whether Ministers are still able rob Kenyans with total impunity. Bear in mind you get seven years behind bars in Kenya just for stealing a chicken!

 Needless to say, Kenyans are shaking their heads in dismay. I took a ride yesterday in Christopher’s (taxi driver) battered Toyota. “We work 24 hours a day for peanuts”, he bemoaned, “while they pay themselves a handsome salary. Why, why do they steal on top? It’s not enough for him to resign. He should go to jail.”

There is a danger Kimunya becomes the fall guy and we must not lose sight of the fact that this latest scandal is just one piece of a far bigger fraud. There are politicians and businessmen who need bringing to book. A year ago the KACC spokesperson told me that he could assure Kenyans " all the big fish would be brought to justice". If surrendering a hotel bought with stolen funds in the first instance is the KACC's idea of justice then these are sad times for Kenya.

Rape: A Weapon of War

Yesterday the UN declared that it deemed rape to be a war tactic, a deliberate weapon to humiliate and break the will of communities. Russia, China, Indonesia and Vietnam all expressed reservations over whether rape was a matter for the UN Security Council. In the end the vote was unanimous.

Two years ago I traveled to the town of Bukavu in the Democratic Republic of Congo's war-scarred east. Once this town was the summer playground of the Congolese elite and their Belgian colonisers. It sits on the southern edge of Lake Kivu, nestled under steep, rugged and now deforested hills. Dilipadated boat-houses and diving platforms line the lake shore. In this volatile region Bukavu is now relatively peaceful but it hasn't always been. It is not difficult to find women with tales of untold horrors.

Honorata Zakumwilo was 54 years old when I met her. She looked at me through squinted eyes. All her front teeth were missing or broken and blackened - the result of endless beatings. Her story is horrendous. What is worse, she is just one of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of women in the DRC alone to have suffered such an ordeal. Here are excerpts of her interview.

"In October 2001 the Interehamwe came to our village at 4am. They were dressed in military fatigues and heavily armed and they encircled the huts we were sleeping in. They killed many men and took about a dozen women with them. I was one of them.

"We walked for many hours until finally we arrived at a camp in the forest. The rape began immediately. Four men would hold a woman down be her hands and feet while a fifth would enter her. One by one they all had their turn. Sometimes they would chose a woman and hang her upside down from a wooden cross so that her head almost touched the ground. Up to twenty would rape her at a time. Everyone joined in.

"In the forest we were worth less than wild animals, less than objects. They would cry out 'A manger' [dinner time] but they weren't calling for food, they were calling for us".

It was fourteen months before Honorata summoned up the courage to escape her captors.

I am not sure the UN classifying rape as a weapon of war will changing anything. Automatic rifles, RPGs, land-mines all kill, mutilate and destroy the social fabric of communities....that is why they are used. An updated UN handbook will not end the rape of women caught up in wars. But at least it affords some recognition to the atrocities they endure.

Sick State of Health

I went to Hargeisa's General Hospital yesterday. It is Somaliland's only referral hospital. Apart from a brand new operating theatre (built with donor aid and equipped with $500,000 worth of equipment donated by the Kuwait Red Cross - not a Somaliland shilling from the government), the hospital is a depressing, pathetic place. Old, fading blood stains still splattered the paving stones beyond the main gate, the plaster-ceiling of the paediatric ward was caving in and the mental patients just don't get any care at all. There simply isn't the man-power to give patients the care they require so they lie chained to the bed. The deep groans and strong odour make for a tragic place.

The other day I blogged about the Somaliland government budget. $30 million dollars in all last year, up to $50 million this year thanks to some foreign funding for elections that the President decided to put-back a year. The Ministry of Health receives just $750,000 from the pie. As a result, the poorest patients in one of the poorest regions of the world have to pay for their own treatment and medicine. The official term is something like "community payment" i.e the clan pays. Doctors at the hospital are paid just $65 a month. A new medical school in the nearby town of Boroma is churning out the first doctors the country has trained for decades - 16 in all last year. The British government is having to supplement their salary with an extra $435 a month to keep them not only in the country but in the public sector.

In the paediatric ward, flies swarmed all over the plates of old food brought in by relatives of patients. There was a single oxygen cylinder in the corner of the room but it didn't work. There were three children in with severe malnutrition. The skin of one starving toddler, whose glazed eyes stared vacantly, was riddled with something nasty, his feet swollen with fluid. The remedy should be simple, starting with high energy milk. Except there isn't any high-energy milk in the country. "His case shouldn't be difficult", said Dr Farhan, one of last year's medical graduates, "but we can't be sure he'll make it".

The one ray of hope for this hospital is its staff...paid peanuts but dedicated to caring for their patients.

That's it from Hargeisa. Back to Nairobi.

 

How to Spend a National Budget of $30 Million

I am told that last year that the 'Somaliland government' (we have to remember that this is not an internationally recognised state)  had a  budget of  just $30 million to play with.  More than half of this I understand would have been spent on defence and security...when you are a breakaway republic your borders need defending!

That leaves no more than $15 million for health, education, and justice...not to mention agriculture, immigration and social security...if only. No international recognition means no direct foreign budgetary assistance...quite literally zero dollars, neither direct contributions to a government pot, nor ringfenced to specific programmes. Some money does make its way through UN programmes and international aid agencies, but the numbers are miniscule relatively speaking. The frustration of Somalianders'  is understandable when you consider the money being paid to warlords in neighbouring Mogadishu - see this article written by Rob Crilly of The Times of London.

Just in case $30 million sounds a decent chunk of money, here's how far it goes elsewhere...

Saddam's Yacht - the decor aboard this floating palace - originally called Qadissivat Saddam - includes Arab the decor aboard the floating palace -originally called Qadissivat Saddam - include Arabesque  arches, dark wood carvings, deep pile carpets and loose rugs woven in Islam's holiest cities.

Carlton House, London. Price: £17 million - This new, 15,000-square-foot house on a half-acre features a 50-foot long ballroom, catering kitchen fitted out for banquets, has nine bedroom suites, all with Italian marble bathrooms. The leisure complex has a heated mosaic swimming pool, sauna, gym and a 12-person Turkish bath, and, like Thunderbirds, there is a vehicle lift that takes your car from the forecourt into the four-vehicle garage below.

And should you ever forget your swim-wear on holiday, how about this for value for money! The bikini, contains over 150 carats of flawless diamonds, some of which are the rarest in the world including a 51-carat, pear-shaped diamond, a 30-carat emerald cut, a pair of 15 carat rounds  and a pair of eight carat pear shaped stones. The stones are sent in platinum for one valuable and very tiny bikini.

To prove it is the real deal, you can see it being modeled at http://www.luxist.com/2006/02/15/the-30-million-diamond-bikini/

How To Cook A Camel

Somaliland isn't known for its haute cuisine. Ask people here what their staple foods are and they will reply rice and spaghetti. The days of a meat and milk diet are drawing to end as pastoralists succumb to export bans, land rights and of course, climate change.

However, if there is a speciality dish, then it is camel. They say you can judge a restaurant by its kitchen. In which case the omens were not good for my lunch-stop this afternoon. The wooden work-surface was covered with innards, off-cuts and slop from the huge vat of camel, onion and tomato that simmered away on a  charcoal-burner below. Flies swarmed over hunks of meat  and piles of the sour tasting njera laid out on the side  ready to be thrust through the hatch.

The recipe is simple: grill the meat over coals for ten minutes then add to the simmering cauldron of mucky water and vegetables. Eat with soggy njera.

But I was brought up to try eveything once and for a meat-lover the camel meat was more than palatable. A little like mutton perhaps, nice and tender. Not quite so easy to stomach was the  'soup' with its layer of fatty globules on the surface. I drew the line at a slab of fat from between the brain and skull.

My stomach survived the experience and it got me thinking there's probably a book-load of camel recipes out there. I've had a quick scan...here's the pick of the bunch.

1 medium camel
4 lambs
20 chickens (roasted)
150 eggs (boiled)
40 kilos tomatoes
Salt and seasonings

Stuff eggs into tomatoes, stuff tomatoes into chickens, stuff chickens into lambs, stuff lambs into camel. Roast until tender

This though leaves the cook asking several questions:

- Just how big is a medium camel?

- How exactly do you stuff 2 kilos of tomatoes in a single chicken and five chickens in a lamb?

- Are we talking oven roast (how?!) or spit roast? And how many minutes per pound?

Any other recipes out there, send them my way...

Khat Dependency

It is bitter, requires hours of dedicated chewing and leaves less food on the kids' dinner plates, but khat is the love of nearly every man throughout the Horn of Africa, Somaliland included. The reality is that it is less of a love and more of an addiction. Chewing khat provides an amphetamine like high. It's the Prozac of this part of the world. Of course that's not how it is seen in Hargeisa where alcohol is abhorred and hard drugs are non-existent. No, here the men here will try and tell you it is an integral part of life.

Every day at 10am the trucks arrive from Ethiopia where khat is a lucrative cash-crops for farmers living in a country where aid agencies say millions of children are at risk from famine this year. The money involved is phenomenal. It's thought - hard figures are hard to come by - that Somalialand's men spend some $300,000 a day on khat. Given this is one of the most impoverished regions in the world it's hard to work out where the cash comes from. There simply isn't $2,000,000 in weekly lose cash floating around here.

For men, the day revolves around chewing. Government ministries empty at 1pm sharp, so to do private businesses and cafes. The working day is effectively over. Aid workers joke that politicians are at their most productive whilst chewing...this is when the real negotiations take place. For the unemployed khat is a means to escape the drudgery of life and chew their way to an over-stimulated oblivion.

For women khat is the greatest curse and one of the main reasons their husbands don't bother seeking work. Their husbands pathetically argue they chew becasue they have no jobs. It's a convenient excuse that leaves many wives simmering with anger and contempt for their husbands. But they have few alternatives other than to work fifteen hours a day to support the family.

Some scientists say there is a link to impotence - could be the best antidote for polygamy!