Saturday, June 26, 2010
In Defence Of Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu
Emeka Esogbue
Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, an infantry and intelligence officer born in northern region of Kaduna and a native of Okpanam in present Delta State represents different things to different people and remained controversial even in death. His role in the military coup of 1966 in Nigeria declined his stature in the political affairs of the nation and brought untold hardship and massacre to his people but whether the coup led by him was a sectional one or not is what this write-up sets out to establish.
After the said coup of 1966 which included many Igbo and Ademoyega Adewale, a Yoruba man, Nzeogwu was captured and imprisoned at the Kirikiri Maximum Prison in Lagos by Major-General Aguyi-Ironsi who was himself overthrown in July 1966 in another coup led by Yakubu Gowon a northerner. The conception of the north was that the coup led by Nzeogwu was an Igbo coup. Modern events in the country have since provided evidences to disclaim this assertion. Specious arguments and propagandas of the north had submitted that the 1966 coup was a sectional one citing the deaths of a Prime Minister, a federal minister, two regional premiers and other top government functionaries from the north and western regions and the survival of Nnamdi Azikiwe as evidences.
In truth, the tagging of the activities of the coup plotters as sectional remains unfortunate and one of those errors of judgments in the political history of Nigeria which neglected what the coup plotters represented quite bereft of tribalism. Nzeogwu and his co-coup plotters were quick to notice the imbalance in the leadership of the nation created by the British colonial administration to favour the northerners who at first were reluctant to secure independence with the rest of the nation from the British. Nzeogwu was not also comfortable with the level of corruption perpetuated by the leaders of the first republic.
The British unsatisfied with the overthrow of the northern led government of the first republic installed by them moments before independence paved way for the outbreak of months of Civil War in the country by running a broadcast in the BBC that the coup was an Igbo coup which lacked national outlook. Obviously, the British displayed preference for Balewa over Nzeogwu and swiftly raced to prepare Gowon another northerner to successfully counter the Ironsi government and take over. By implication, the British had planted a seed of discord that led to the loss of innocent souls in massacres and a Civil war that followed.
The highly instigated and suspicious northerners were also unhappy that It was Ironsi another Igbo man that countered Nzeogwu’s coup. The patience of the north was further strained with the reluctance of Ironsi to court-martial the coup plotters. With this development, the stage was set for another counter coup by the British prepared-Gowon and other young officers who were mainly of the northern region.
Post war political activities of the country with the intention of the everlasting desire of the north to hold on to power till infinity proves shows that Nzeogwu was right after all for the north has continuous occasions claim the leadership of the nation as the birthright of the region. The reluctant north that refused to embark on the journey to independence with the sympathy of the British has grown to ward-off challenges for the contention of the nation’s leadership seat. It was enormously astonishing that the less popular Balewa among the people could beat Azikiwe and Awolowo for the leadership position of the country and emerge as the Prime Minister just as Azikiwe was made his ceremonial President.
People who liken the 1966 coup to the Igbo ethnicity often become oblivious of the fact that at the time of the coup northerners carefully positioned by the British occupied almost all the important political and military positions and it was just natural that office holders become targets in the strife to unseat any government if the coup must see the light of the government. Not much Igbo were murdered because marginalized as they were then, not much of them rose to higher positions. The coup plotters therefore may have reasoned that absolute power resided with the Prime Minister in the parliamentary system of government and the President being only a figure head held no real power. Would Gideon Orkar Coup largely participated in by young officers from the Middle Belt be referred to as Middle Belt coup?
Not many remember that the Murtala Mohammed that was hailed as a hero and messiah was a coup plotter who seized power from Gowon using the means that other coup plotters used. Today, his icon is gloriously rested in the nation’s 20 Naira currency as a national hero. Perhaps if Nzeogwu had succeeded in the coup that was first hailed before the British intervention, he would have been applauded. Such is life. By and large, there is no emphasizing much on the reason more westerners and northerners lost their lives which obviously was because they ruled the nation.
Nzeogwu was never propagated secession judging from the interview he granted in Dennis Ejindu in 1967, in that interview he posited that:
“Secession will be ill-advised, indeed impossible. Even if the East fights a war of secession and wins, it still cannot secede. Personally, I don’t like secession and if this country disintegrates, I shall pack up my things and go. In the present circumstances, confederation is the best answer as a temporary measure. In time, we shall have complete unity.”
The case of Nzeogwu is like that of AbduMuttallab who though was born in Nigeria was western trained lad only to be disclaimed and re-linked to his country of birth. Nzeogwu as a child of immigrant parents from Mid-western region who settled in Kaduna was a product of the northern region. Till date it remains doubtful whether he spoke the Enuani dialect of Igbo or even understood it passably. It must be noted that the above official statement made to Ejindu set him apart with Ojukwu which is why the nature of his death also at Nsukka remains suspicious. And quite typical of Africans Ojukwu has never spoken to clear the air on this development and principal characters involved in the scene have all given conflicting accounts on the possible cause of his death. He was to communicate his strained relationship Ojukwu to his best friend Obasanjo. Indeed, it was a relationship that left him bored in the South East.
He is still respected by the Federal troop principal actors such as Lieutenant Abdullahi Shelleng, Domkat Bali and even Gowon that ordered that his body be honourably buried in a military cemetery at Kaduna. All of which points to the fact that the 1966 coup led by him was not an Igbo coup. His death is regrettable.
Major Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu, an infantry and intelligence officer born in northern region of Kaduna and a native of Okpanam in present Delta State represents different things to different people and remained controversial even in death. His role in the military coup of 1966 in Nigeria declined his stature in the political affairs of the nation and brought untold hardship and massacre to his people but whether the coup led by him was a sectional one or not is what this write-up sets out to establish.
After the said coup of 1966 which included many Igbo and Ademoyega Adewale, a Yoruba man, Nzeogwu was captured and imprisoned at the Kirikiri Maximum Prison in Lagos by Major-General Aguyi-Ironsi who was himself overthrown in July 1966 in another coup led by Yakubu Gowon a northerner. The conception of the north was that the coup led by Nzeogwu was an Igbo coup. Modern events in the country have since provided evidences to disclaim this assertion. Specious arguments and propagandas of the north had submitted that the 1966 coup was a sectional one citing the deaths of a Prime Minister, a federal minister, two regional premiers and other top government functionaries from the north and western regions and the survival of Nnamdi Azikiwe as evidences.
In truth, the tagging of the activities of the coup plotters as sectional remains unfortunate and one of those errors of judgments in the political history of Nigeria which neglected what the coup plotters represented quite bereft of tribalism. Nzeogwu and his co-coup plotters were quick to notice the imbalance in the leadership of the nation created by the British colonial administration to favour the northerners who at first were reluctant to secure independence with the rest of the nation from the British. Nzeogwu was not also comfortable with the level of corruption perpetuated by the leaders of the first republic.
The British unsatisfied with the overthrow of the northern led government of the first republic installed by them moments before independence paved way for the outbreak of months of Civil War in the country by running a broadcast in the BBC that the coup was an Igbo coup which lacked national outlook. Obviously, the British displayed preference for Balewa over Nzeogwu and swiftly raced to prepare Gowon another northerner to successfully counter the Ironsi government and take over. By implication, the British had planted a seed of discord that led to the loss of innocent souls in massacres and a Civil war that followed.
The highly instigated and suspicious northerners were also unhappy that It was Ironsi another Igbo man that countered Nzeogwu’s coup. The patience of the north was further strained with the reluctance of Ironsi to court-martial the coup plotters. With this development, the stage was set for another counter coup by the British prepared-Gowon and other young officers who were mainly of the northern region.
Post war political activities of the country with the intention of the everlasting desire of the north to hold on to power till infinity proves shows that Nzeogwu was right after all for the north has continuous occasions claim the leadership of the nation as the birthright of the region. The reluctant north that refused to embark on the journey to independence with the sympathy of the British has grown to ward-off challenges for the contention of the nation’s leadership seat. It was enormously astonishing that the less popular Balewa among the people could beat Azikiwe and Awolowo for the leadership position of the country and emerge as the Prime Minister just as Azikiwe was made his ceremonial President.
People who liken the 1966 coup to the Igbo ethnicity often become oblivious of the fact that at the time of the coup northerners carefully positioned by the British occupied almost all the important political and military positions and it was just natural that office holders become targets in the strife to unseat any government if the coup must see the light of the government. Not much Igbo were murdered because marginalized as they were then, not much of them rose to higher positions. The coup plotters therefore may have reasoned that absolute power resided with the Prime Minister in the parliamentary system of government and the President being only a figure head held no real power. Would Gideon Orkar Coup largely participated in by young officers from the Middle Belt be referred to as Middle Belt coup?
Not many remember that the Murtala Mohammed that was hailed as a hero and messiah was a coup plotter who seized power from Gowon using the means that other coup plotters used. Today, his icon is gloriously rested in the nation’s 20 Naira currency as a national hero. Perhaps if Nzeogwu had succeeded in the coup that was first hailed before the British intervention, he would have been applauded. Such is life. By and large, there is no emphasizing much on the reason more westerners and northerners lost their lives which obviously was because they ruled the nation.
Nzeogwu was never propagated secession judging from the interview he granted in Dennis Ejindu in 1967, in that interview he posited that:
“Secession will be ill-advised, indeed impossible. Even if the East fights a war of secession and wins, it still cannot secede. Personally, I don’t like secession and if this country disintegrates, I shall pack up my things and go. In the present circumstances, confederation is the best answer as a temporary measure. In time, we shall have complete unity.”
The case of Nzeogwu is like that of AbduMuttallab who though was born in Nigeria was western trained lad only to be disclaimed and re-linked to his country of birth. Nzeogwu as a child of immigrant parents from Mid-western region who settled in Kaduna was a product of the northern region. Till date it remains doubtful whether he spoke the Enuani dialect of Igbo or even understood it passably. It must be noted that the above official statement made to Ejindu set him apart with Ojukwu which is why the nature of his death also at Nsukka remains suspicious. And quite typical of Africans Ojukwu has never spoken to clear the air on this development and principal characters involved in the scene have all given conflicting accounts on the possible cause of his death. He was to communicate his strained relationship Ojukwu to his best friend Obasanjo. Indeed, it was a relationship that left him bored in the South East.
He is still respected by the Federal troop principal actors such as Lieutenant Abdullahi Shelleng, Domkat Bali and even Gowon that ordered that his body be honourably buried in a military cemetery at Kaduna. All of which points to the fact that the 1966 coup led by him was not an Igbo coup. His death is regrettable.
Israel: the third strategic threat
Thomas Keenan and Eyal Weizman
Israel's assault on an aid flotilla heading to Gaza is a decisive episode in the country's challenge to international humanitarian law and its advocates. But it may have unexpected results, say Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman
Many details remain to be established about the Israeli commando assault on the Mavi Marmara - the lead ship in a flotilla intent on carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip - in the early hours of 31 May 2010. But whatever the investigation of the incident ultimately reveals, the killing of nine human-rights activists bears witness to two related developments: the increasing politiciisation of humanitarian aid, and the growing sense of threat that the Israeli government seems to feel from human-rights organisations and international law.
The humanitarian minimum
Rare book cover for Mare LiberumSince human-rights workers and humanitarian groups emerged in the field of international conflict, they have been the targets of repressive regimes or violent militias, who often interpret the provision of relief and assistance to civilians as intervention on behalf of the enemy. Aid convoys to the ”other side” have routinely been attacked or hijacked, staff kidnapped or killed, hospitals and compounds seized and destroyed. When shelter, medicine, and food are seen as interventions, it means that control over the conditions of civilian life has become one of the weapons in the conflict.
Humanitarianism is in a strict sense grounded in the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and commitment, first and foremost, to the civilian victims of conflict. However, aid workers are not always successful in convincing fighters of their independence, and sometimes themselves blur the border between support for victims and support of a political cause. Furthermore, when the pursuit of a military strategy (such as a state of siege) entails and/or is designed to affect the quality of civilian life, the provision of aid can become an element in a politico-military calculation. When aid is thus politicised it can easily become a target for all parties in a conflict. As Toni Pfanner of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) noted in 2005: ”recent attacks on humanitarian organisations, including the ICRC, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan have shown that humanitarian relief may be contrary to the belligerents' interests or, even worse, that attacks on humanitarian workers may foster their agenda."
But with very few exceptions, direct and intentional attacks on aid workers or human-rights advocates have hitherto been largely the work of undisciplined militias, ragged armies, criminal gangs, and police-states. The perpetrators have included the Taliban, the Bosnian Serb army, Iraqi insurgents, and the organisers of Latin America’s “dirty wars”. Now, with the lethal raid on the Mavi Marmara, is Israel in this respect following in their footsteps?
The double logic
To answer this question, it is necessary to rewind. The attack in the Mediterranean - albeit it was followed on 5 June by a non-violent prevention of the later attempt to deliver supplies to Gaza via the MV Rachel Corrie - represents the violent culmination of a process in which the Israeli government, and various private proxy groups, have come to see humanitarian and human-rights groups, and even international humanitarian law itself, as an "enemy" of or a threat to the existence of the state.
In this context, the fact that navy commandos used lethal force to “defend their nation” from an aid convoy should perhaps not be a surprise. Before the departure of the Mavi Marmara-led flotilla, Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon declared that "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" and therefore that the flotilla was not a relief mission in fact but "a provocation intended to delegitimise Israel" (the Israeli government press office even emailed copies of a Gaza restaurant menu to reporters.) After the attack, Ayalon's description of the flotilla as an "armada of hate and violence in support of the Hamas terror organisation" was simply the ratification of this more general Israeli government interpretation of civil-society activists, at sea and on land.
The process is more complex, however. The vigorous current discussion around the politics of humanitarianism provides evidence for the case that aid can indeed be politically motivated and manipulated by both its givers and its receivers.
It is in this connection that the apparently inverse phenomenon of attempts by powerful states to instrumentalise or monopolise the construction of humanitarian space and the delivery of aid can be understood. The Israeli government’s attempt to "manage" the humanitarian situation in the Gaza strip as an instrument of state policy belongs to this modern history of instrumentalisation (whose precedents include the refugee-camps across the border from Kosovo during the Nato air-campaign there in 1999).
This regulation of the flow of cross-border aid for political purposes has been echoed, in reverse, in the increasingly partisan rhetoric of some aid organisations, as some of the statements from the activists on Gaza flotilla testify.
The closure policy of Gaza is regulated, after a decision in January 2008 by the Israeli high court of justice, by a policy through which the state assumes the responsibility of providing the inhabitants with a "humanitarian minimum" meant to forestall the possibility of a humanitarian crisis developing - but no more than that. Dov Weisglass, adviser to former prime minister Ehud Olmert, explained the rationale: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."
In June 2009 the newspaper Ha'aretz published an Israeli document entitled "Red Lines" which specifies precisely the number of calories allowed to enter the strip, organised according to gender and age, at a level just above the United Nations's definition of hunger. The control of these supplies provides Israel with political leverage, but it can only be maintained if goods pass through its borders rather than through underground tunnels or from the sea.
In this sense, the attack on the Gaza flotilla obeyed a complex logic: it confirmed in practice the definition of humanitarian and human-rights activists as enemies of the state, and it reaffirmed the state's attempt to manage the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a instrument of policy.
The next enemy
The current campaign began in summer 2009, in the wake of a number of reports from human-rights organisations challenging the conduct of the Israeli military in Operation Cast Lead, its three-week assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. The new government of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu - who had consolidated his hardline reputation during an earlier term in 1996-99 - seemed to react to the reports, their authors, and their logic with unusual severity.
"We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human-rights groups to shoot at us with impunity", Ron Dermer, director of policy planning in the prime-minister's office told the Jerusalem Post in July 2009. "Every NGO that participates in this adds fuel to the fire and is serving the cause of Hamas", he said. "This is exactly what Hamas wants to do."
In August 2009, Moshe Ya'alon - the minister of strategic affairs, and a former Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief-of-staff - declared in a meeting with settlers that the activists of Peace Now represented a "virus". “We again are dealing with the issue of the virus, Peace Now - the elitists, if you may - who have incurred great damage."
Although he was reprimanded by the prime minister for the remark, Ya'alon's phrase - especially following Dermer's militant words - set the tone of the campaign that has since unfolded. It came into its own after the publication of the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (under the chairmanship of the South African judge Richard Goldstone) to the UN’s Human Rights Council) in September. The report concluded that there was evidence indicating that serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law had been committed by Israel (and Hamas) during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.
The Israeli government could in principle have simply ignored the report, or dismissed it by attributing it to the usual "anti-Israeli" suspects. Instead it took the charges extremely seriously, although not in the way the commission might have hoped.
The Netanyahu government decided to "combat" both the Goldstone report and the entire phenomenon which it saw the document as exemplifying – something it referred to variably as "Goldstonism" and the "Goldstone effect", which it understands as an international tendency to delegitimise Israel, denying its right to exist.
Binyamin Netanyahu himself, in a November 2009 lecture at the Saban Forum, one of Israel's leading security-studies institutes, identified three strategic threats facing Israel. The first of these so-called "three challenges to Israel's security", he explained, was "a nuclear Iran", which has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." The second was cross-border "missile and rocket attacks" from Islamist militant organisations such as Hamas and Hizbollah.
What was the third after these first two formidable, if classic, opponents? "The third challenge to peace is the attempt to deny Israel the right to self-defence. The UN Goldstone report on Gaza attempts to do that."
The logic of this argument is far-reaching. Binyamin Netanyahu was quick to emphasise that it is not simply Justice Goldstone or any particular organisation or report which constitutes the threat, nor is Israel its sole target ("Be assured that this UN report is not Israel's problem alone. It threatens to handcuff all states fighting terrorism.") The problem is more too, Netanyahu suggested, than simply an ideologically- or politically-motivated abuse of international humanitarian law (the so-called laws of war). Rather, it is the current definition itself of this law, which he argued gave undue protection to "terrorists embedded in civilian areas [who] deliberately launch attacks on the innocent" and thus undermined the legal and moral position of the states which fight against them.
In response, Israel’s prime minister called for a radical rewriting of IHL to address the "threat." "Paradoxically", he said, "it is possible that the firm response of important international leaders and jurists to this morally twisted report will accelerate the re-examination of the laws of war in an age of terror."
It is one thing to criticise the Geneva conventions or IHL. It is yet another thing to violate or ignore them. States and non-state actors do both of these things all the time. It is third, and a rather different thing, to construe IHL itself, and its advocates, as a threat to the existence of a state, and to initiate a systematic process of combating them. But this interpretation, advanced now quite routinely by the Israeli government, might explain why legal opinions such as the Goldstone report - which would limit Israel's capacity to act "disproportionally" - could be seen as an existential threat.
The enemies within
In this light, perhaps the raid on the Mavi Marmara demonstrates what the Israeli government might mean by the end of "impunity" for human-rights NGOs and other international activists, and by granting them a new status as a strategic threat on a par with Iranian nuclear weapons or thousands of missiles and rockets.
In January 2010 a leading Israeli think-tank, the Reut Institute, worried about what it called the "delegitimation war". Its director, Gidi Grinstein, wrote in Ha'aretz: "Our politicians and military personnel are threatened with lawsuits and arrest when they travel abroad, campaigns to boycott our products gain traction, and our very existence is challenged in academic institutions and intellectual circles. The country is increasingly isolated. To date, Israel has failed to recognise these trends for the strategically significant, potentially existential, threat they constitute" (see Gidi Grinstein, “Israel delegitizers threaten its existence”, Ha’aretz, 14 January 2010).
Perhaps the "recognition" has now happened. The Israeli government and a group of proxy organisations have launched a multi-pronged project of "counter-delegitimisation", directed at humanitarian and human-rights NGOs. They seek, in the words of one of its participants, "to end the practice used by certain self-declared 'humanitarian NGOs' of exploiting the label 'universal human rights values' to promote politically and ideologically motivated anti-Israel agendas." Likewise, Israeli groups have launched campaigns against the New Israel Fund, a United States-based organisation that funds civil-society activists in Israel and which has been accused (as have the NGOs it has funded) of undermining the foundations of the state by contributing to the research behind the Goldstone commission report.
This recent atmosphere contributed to two recent high-level political decisions in Israel: the Knesset’s overwhelming vote in February 2010 to pass a law depriving groups that receive support from foreign governments (as most human-rights and humanitarian groups do) of their tax-exempt status, and thus their ability to raise money abroad; and the proposal of a new law in April that sought to close down NGOs involved in bringing legal proceedings against Israeli government officials or military officers abroad.
The military, for its own part, has started confronting international activists with renewed vigour and zeal. It has recently developed a practice of invading Palestinian towns to arrest not militants but international activists (mainly European members of the International Solidarity Movement). Many other activists do not even get the chance to enter, having been turned around at the border or held in the new detention facility built in the Tel Aviv airport for this purpose.
In a public letter released at the end of January 2010, a group of thirteen Israeli human-rights organisations called on the government to "denounce the increasing assaults on the human rights and social change organisations in Israel." It cited "a series of invective comments by various officials who wish to delegitimise the civil society organisations who work for human rights and social change" (The authors at this point would like to express thanks for the work of ACRI's director Hagai El-Ad). Buried among the citations were words attributed to Moshe Ya'alon, who was quoted as saying of human-rights organisations: “your enemies will come from within”. In this mindset, international NGOs presumably would be the “enemies from without”.
The threat of law
The notion that the Mavi Marmara-led flotilla itself and the activists on it were designated as enemies could help explain why a full-scale military operation was ordered against a humanitarian mission (after all, several ships carrying humanitarian aid had been allowed into Gaza in previous years); and why, even when resistance from some of the ship's passengers to the takeover seem to have turned violent, the soldiers' response was so disproportionate. But what is harder to explain is why the designation happened in the first place. That militias, bandits, terrorists, and pirates seek to threaten or kill human-rights activists and humanitarian-aid workers seems easy to comprehend, however reprehensible their actions. But it remains somewhat mysterious that a state which insists it is the only one upholding human rights and democracy in the neighbourhood would decide to "combat" them so directly. Why the assaults, and why the worry?
One of the most frequent and powerful critiques of international war-crimes law is that it is too often only applied to the weakest parties in a conflict. The International Criminal Court, as Guénaël Mettraux points out, "has thus far only indicted Africans." International criminal law, he writes, "remains to a large extent le droit des autres, a set of rules that we seem content to apply to others, but not to ourselves. The 'others' are those, states and individuals, who have lost the political muscle to pre-empt or resist the application of that regime to them" (see Guénaël Mettraux, “International Justice-For Others”, International Herald Tribune, 1 June 2010).
The powerful states, it would seem, can simply get away with violations of the laws of war, and barely even need to worry about the bad publicity. While the United States was hiding “ghost” detainees from the Red Cross and subjecting them to “advanced interrogation techniques”, its officials were loudly - if anonymously - advertising the use of those methods in leaked stories on the frontpages of major newspapers. They did not appear terribly worried about the potential legal consequences.
Similarly, when Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told Radio Reshet Bet during the war in Gaza that "Israel is … a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing", she seemed to promote with pride the sheer disproportion of the military operation then underway. But when that very quotation appeared as the centrepiece of the Goldstone commission's report, the government reacted with outrage, and some fear about possible war-crimes charges.
At a moment when questions of humanitarianism and human rights have become a major stake in the conflict, the battle-space has expanded to include them, discursively and physically. There are two available interpretations of this trend and the campaign which it has spawned, apparently including the violent raid on the aid flotilla on 31 May 2010.
The Israeli government's reaction to the strategic threat posed by international humanitarian law, and its advocates, might suggest (first) that it fears it belongs to the “others” - to those without the political force to resist the application of the law. By contrast, the government’s reaction might suggest (second) that with each passing day the extension of the law grows; and that accountability for all before this law could become more of a reality, perhaps even sooner rather than later.
If Israel still seeks to rewrite international humanitarian law and to regulate humanitarian supplies as instruments of state power, and if some international organisations respond with increased legal challenges and others with more more ships on the seas, then the incident of the Mavi Marmara will be remembered as one of the opening shots in this emerging battle of law and aid.
for decades of authoritarian government and has implemented neoliberal economic policies, but (at least until recently when they openly voted in favour of banning access to abortion in many state-level legislation) has been largely supportive of sexual and reproductive rights both nationally and internationally. Classifying the PRI as ‘progressive’ or ‘right-wing’ party would not be an appropriate or helpful characterization. Daniel Ortega was cast as a revolutionary during the 1970s Sandinista struggle against the Nicaraguan dictator and faced intervention by the United States under Republican President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Today, as President of Nicaragua and leader of the Sandinista Party, he supported the Catholic Church’s position and the introduction of laws in Nicaragua that make access to legal abortion impossible, has publicly allied with the Catholic Church on other matters of public policy, and is openly persecuting civil society organizations and international donors, as well as feminists and women’s rights activists.
AWID’s research has settled a number of issues: it has identified common characteristics of religious fundamentalist agendas across religions and religions; revealed that the vast majority of activists do distinguish between religion and religious fundamentalists; and unmasked the diversity of fundamentalist actors. The remaining complexities and challenges involved in identifying religious fundamentalists hint at a different strategic advantage between labelling a phenomenon or a movement and labelling individuals. They suggest that it may be more effective to lable agendas rather than actors as ‘fundamentalist’; it may at times be strategic to ‘name and shame’ a fundamentalist leadership or organization, but the advantages of labelling followers is far less certain.
Israel's assault on an aid flotilla heading to Gaza is a decisive episode in the country's challenge to international humanitarian law and its advocates. But it may have unexpected results, say Thomas Keenan & Eyal Weizman
Many details remain to be established about the Israeli commando assault on the Mavi Marmara - the lead ship in a flotilla intent on carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip - in the early hours of 31 May 2010. But whatever the investigation of the incident ultimately reveals, the killing of nine human-rights activists bears witness to two related developments: the increasing politiciisation of humanitarian aid, and the growing sense of threat that the Israeli government seems to feel from human-rights organisations and international law.
The humanitarian minimum
Rare book cover for Mare LiberumSince human-rights workers and humanitarian groups emerged in the field of international conflict, they have been the targets of repressive regimes or violent militias, who often interpret the provision of relief and assistance to civilians as intervention on behalf of the enemy. Aid convoys to the ”other side” have routinely been attacked or hijacked, staff kidnapped or killed, hospitals and compounds seized and destroyed. When shelter, medicine, and food are seen as interventions, it means that control over the conditions of civilian life has become one of the weapons in the conflict.
Humanitarianism is in a strict sense grounded in the principles of neutrality, impartiality, and commitment, first and foremost, to the civilian victims of conflict. However, aid workers are not always successful in convincing fighters of their independence, and sometimes themselves blur the border between support for victims and support of a political cause. Furthermore, when the pursuit of a military strategy (such as a state of siege) entails and/or is designed to affect the quality of civilian life, the provision of aid can become an element in a politico-military calculation. When aid is thus politicised it can easily become a target for all parties in a conflict. As Toni Pfanner of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) noted in 2005: ”recent attacks on humanitarian organisations, including the ICRC, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan have shown that humanitarian relief may be contrary to the belligerents' interests or, even worse, that attacks on humanitarian workers may foster their agenda."
But with very few exceptions, direct and intentional attacks on aid workers or human-rights advocates have hitherto been largely the work of undisciplined militias, ragged armies, criminal gangs, and police-states. The perpetrators have included the Taliban, the Bosnian Serb army, Iraqi insurgents, and the organisers of Latin America’s “dirty wars”. Now, with the lethal raid on the Mavi Marmara, is Israel in this respect following in their footsteps?
The double logic
To answer this question, it is necessary to rewind. The attack in the Mediterranean - albeit it was followed on 5 June by a non-violent prevention of the later attempt to deliver supplies to Gaza via the MV Rachel Corrie - represents the violent culmination of a process in which the Israeli government, and various private proxy groups, have come to see humanitarian and human-rights groups, and even international humanitarian law itself, as an "enemy" of or a threat to the existence of the state.
In this context, the fact that navy commandos used lethal force to “defend their nation” from an aid convoy should perhaps not be a surprise. Before the departure of the Mavi Marmara-led flotilla, Israel’s deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon declared that "there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza" and therefore that the flotilla was not a relief mission in fact but "a provocation intended to delegitimise Israel" (the Israeli government press office even emailed copies of a Gaza restaurant menu to reporters.) After the attack, Ayalon's description of the flotilla as an "armada of hate and violence in support of the Hamas terror organisation" was simply the ratification of this more general Israeli government interpretation of civil-society activists, at sea and on land.
The process is more complex, however. The vigorous current discussion around the politics of humanitarianism provides evidence for the case that aid can indeed be politically motivated and manipulated by both its givers and its receivers.
It is in this connection that the apparently inverse phenomenon of attempts by powerful states to instrumentalise or monopolise the construction of humanitarian space and the delivery of aid can be understood. The Israeli government’s attempt to "manage" the humanitarian situation in the Gaza strip as an instrument of state policy belongs to this modern history of instrumentalisation (whose precedents include the refugee-camps across the border from Kosovo during the Nato air-campaign there in 1999).
This regulation of the flow of cross-border aid for political purposes has been echoed, in reverse, in the increasingly partisan rhetoric of some aid organisations, as some of the statements from the activists on Gaza flotilla testify.
The closure policy of Gaza is regulated, after a decision in January 2008 by the Israeli high court of justice, by a policy through which the state assumes the responsibility of providing the inhabitants with a "humanitarian minimum" meant to forestall the possibility of a humanitarian crisis developing - but no more than that. Dov Weisglass, adviser to former prime minister Ehud Olmert, explained the rationale: "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger."
In June 2009 the newspaper Ha'aretz published an Israeli document entitled "Red Lines" which specifies precisely the number of calories allowed to enter the strip, organised according to gender and age, at a level just above the United Nations's definition of hunger. The control of these supplies provides Israel with political leverage, but it can only be maintained if goods pass through its borders rather than through underground tunnels or from the sea.
In this sense, the attack on the Gaza flotilla obeyed a complex logic: it confirmed in practice the definition of humanitarian and human-rights activists as enemies of the state, and it reaffirmed the state's attempt to manage the humanitarian situation in Gaza as a instrument of policy.
The next enemy
The current campaign began in summer 2009, in the wake of a number of reports from human-rights organisations challenging the conduct of the Israeli military in Operation Cast Lead, its three-week assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009. The new government of prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu - who had consolidated his hardline reputation during an earlier term in 1996-99 - seemed to react to the reports, their authors, and their logic with unusual severity.
"We are going to dedicate time and manpower to combating these groups; we are not going to be sitting ducks in a pond for the human-rights groups to shoot at us with impunity", Ron Dermer, director of policy planning in the prime-minister's office told the Jerusalem Post in July 2009. "Every NGO that participates in this adds fuel to the fire and is serving the cause of Hamas", he said. "This is exactly what Hamas wants to do."
In August 2009, Moshe Ya'alon - the minister of strategic affairs, and a former Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) chief-of-staff - declared in a meeting with settlers that the activists of Peace Now represented a "virus". “We again are dealing with the issue of the virus, Peace Now - the elitists, if you may - who have incurred great damage."
Although he was reprimanded by the prime minister for the remark, Ya'alon's phrase - especially following Dermer's militant words - set the tone of the campaign that has since unfolded. It came into its own after the publication of the report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (under the chairmanship of the South African judge Richard Goldstone) to the UN’s Human Rights Council) in September. The report concluded that there was evidence indicating that serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law had been committed by Israel (and Hamas) during the Gaza conflict, and that Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, and possibly crimes against humanity.
The Israeli government could in principle have simply ignored the report, or dismissed it by attributing it to the usual "anti-Israeli" suspects. Instead it took the charges extremely seriously, although not in the way the commission might have hoped.
The Netanyahu government decided to "combat" both the Goldstone report and the entire phenomenon which it saw the document as exemplifying – something it referred to variably as "Goldstonism" and the "Goldstone effect", which it understands as an international tendency to delegitimise Israel, denying its right to exist.
Binyamin Netanyahu himself, in a November 2009 lecture at the Saban Forum, one of Israel's leading security-studies institutes, identified three strategic threats facing Israel. The first of these so-called "three challenges to Israel's security", he explained, was "a nuclear Iran", which has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map." The second was cross-border "missile and rocket attacks" from Islamist militant organisations such as Hamas and Hizbollah.
What was the third after these first two formidable, if classic, opponents? "The third challenge to peace is the attempt to deny Israel the right to self-defence. The UN Goldstone report on Gaza attempts to do that."
The logic of this argument is far-reaching. Binyamin Netanyahu was quick to emphasise that it is not simply Justice Goldstone or any particular organisation or report which constitutes the threat, nor is Israel its sole target ("Be assured that this UN report is not Israel's problem alone. It threatens to handcuff all states fighting terrorism.") The problem is more too, Netanyahu suggested, than simply an ideologically- or politically-motivated abuse of international humanitarian law (the so-called laws of war). Rather, it is the current definition itself of this law, which he argued gave undue protection to "terrorists embedded in civilian areas [who] deliberately launch attacks on the innocent" and thus undermined the legal and moral position of the states which fight against them.
In response, Israel’s prime minister called for a radical rewriting of IHL to address the "threat." "Paradoxically", he said, "it is possible that the firm response of important international leaders and jurists to this morally twisted report will accelerate the re-examination of the laws of war in an age of terror."
It is one thing to criticise the Geneva conventions or IHL. It is yet another thing to violate or ignore them. States and non-state actors do both of these things all the time. It is third, and a rather different thing, to construe IHL itself, and its advocates, as a threat to the existence of a state, and to initiate a systematic process of combating them. But this interpretation, advanced now quite routinely by the Israeli government, might explain why legal opinions such as the Goldstone report - which would limit Israel's capacity to act "disproportionally" - could be seen as an existential threat.
The enemies within
In this light, perhaps the raid on the Mavi Marmara demonstrates what the Israeli government might mean by the end of "impunity" for human-rights NGOs and other international activists, and by granting them a new status as a strategic threat on a par with Iranian nuclear weapons or thousands of missiles and rockets.
In January 2010 a leading Israeli think-tank, the Reut Institute, worried about what it called the "delegitimation war". Its director, Gidi Grinstein, wrote in Ha'aretz: "Our politicians and military personnel are threatened with lawsuits and arrest when they travel abroad, campaigns to boycott our products gain traction, and our very existence is challenged in academic institutions and intellectual circles. The country is increasingly isolated. To date, Israel has failed to recognise these trends for the strategically significant, potentially existential, threat they constitute" (see Gidi Grinstein, “Israel delegitizers threaten its existence”, Ha’aretz, 14 January 2010).
Perhaps the "recognition" has now happened. The Israeli government and a group of proxy organisations have launched a multi-pronged project of "counter-delegitimisation", directed at humanitarian and human-rights NGOs. They seek, in the words of one of its participants, "to end the practice used by certain self-declared 'humanitarian NGOs' of exploiting the label 'universal human rights values' to promote politically and ideologically motivated anti-Israel agendas." Likewise, Israeli groups have launched campaigns against the New Israel Fund, a United States-based organisation that funds civil-society activists in Israel and which has been accused (as have the NGOs it has funded) of undermining the foundations of the state by contributing to the research behind the Goldstone commission report.
This recent atmosphere contributed to two recent high-level political decisions in Israel: the Knesset’s overwhelming vote in February 2010 to pass a law depriving groups that receive support from foreign governments (as most human-rights and humanitarian groups do) of their tax-exempt status, and thus their ability to raise money abroad; and the proposal of a new law in April that sought to close down NGOs involved in bringing legal proceedings against Israeli government officials or military officers abroad.
The military, for its own part, has started confronting international activists with renewed vigour and zeal. It has recently developed a practice of invading Palestinian towns to arrest not militants but international activists (mainly European members of the International Solidarity Movement). Many other activists do not even get the chance to enter, having been turned around at the border or held in the new detention facility built in the Tel Aviv airport for this purpose.
In a public letter released at the end of January 2010, a group of thirteen Israeli human-rights organisations called on the government to "denounce the increasing assaults on the human rights and social change organisations in Israel." It cited "a series of invective comments by various officials who wish to delegitimise the civil society organisations who work for human rights and social change" (The authors at this point would like to express thanks for the work of ACRI's director Hagai El-Ad). Buried among the citations were words attributed to Moshe Ya'alon, who was quoted as saying of human-rights organisations: “your enemies will come from within”. In this mindset, international NGOs presumably would be the “enemies from without”.
The threat of law
The notion that the Mavi Marmara-led flotilla itself and the activists on it were designated as enemies could help explain why a full-scale military operation was ordered against a humanitarian mission (after all, several ships carrying humanitarian aid had been allowed into Gaza in previous years); and why, even when resistance from some of the ship's passengers to the takeover seem to have turned violent, the soldiers' response was so disproportionate. But what is harder to explain is why the designation happened in the first place. That militias, bandits, terrorists, and pirates seek to threaten or kill human-rights activists and humanitarian-aid workers seems easy to comprehend, however reprehensible their actions. But it remains somewhat mysterious that a state which insists it is the only one upholding human rights and democracy in the neighbourhood would decide to "combat" them so directly. Why the assaults, and why the worry?
One of the most frequent and powerful critiques of international war-crimes law is that it is too often only applied to the weakest parties in a conflict. The International Criminal Court, as Guénaël Mettraux points out, "has thus far only indicted Africans." International criminal law, he writes, "remains to a large extent le droit des autres, a set of rules that we seem content to apply to others, but not to ourselves. The 'others' are those, states and individuals, who have lost the political muscle to pre-empt or resist the application of that regime to them" (see Guénaël Mettraux, “International Justice-For Others”, International Herald Tribune, 1 June 2010).
The powerful states, it would seem, can simply get away with violations of the laws of war, and barely even need to worry about the bad publicity. While the United States was hiding “ghost” detainees from the Red Cross and subjecting them to “advanced interrogation techniques”, its officials were loudly - if anonymously - advertising the use of those methods in leaked stories on the frontpages of major newspapers. They did not appear terribly worried about the potential legal consequences.
Similarly, when Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni told Radio Reshet Bet during the war in Gaza that "Israel is … a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild – and this is a good thing", she seemed to promote with pride the sheer disproportion of the military operation then underway. But when that very quotation appeared as the centrepiece of the Goldstone commission's report, the government reacted with outrage, and some fear about possible war-crimes charges.
At a moment when questions of humanitarianism and human rights have become a major stake in the conflict, the battle-space has expanded to include them, discursively and physically. There are two available interpretations of this trend and the campaign which it has spawned, apparently including the violent raid on the aid flotilla on 31 May 2010.
The Israeli government's reaction to the strategic threat posed by international humanitarian law, and its advocates, might suggest (first) that it fears it belongs to the “others” - to those without the political force to resist the application of the law. By contrast, the government’s reaction might suggest (second) that with each passing day the extension of the law grows; and that accountability for all before this law could become more of a reality, perhaps even sooner rather than later.
If Israel still seeks to rewrite international humanitarian law and to regulate humanitarian supplies as instruments of state power, and if some international organisations respond with increased legal challenges and others with more more ships on the seas, then the incident of the Mavi Marmara will be remembered as one of the opening shots in this emerging battle of law and aid.
for decades of authoritarian government and has implemented neoliberal economic policies, but (at least until recently when they openly voted in favour of banning access to abortion in many state-level legislation) has been largely supportive of sexual and reproductive rights both nationally and internationally. Classifying the PRI as ‘progressive’ or ‘right-wing’ party would not be an appropriate or helpful characterization. Daniel Ortega was cast as a revolutionary during the 1970s Sandinista struggle against the Nicaraguan dictator and faced intervention by the United States under Republican President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Today, as President of Nicaragua and leader of the Sandinista Party, he supported the Catholic Church’s position and the introduction of laws in Nicaragua that make access to legal abortion impossible, has publicly allied with the Catholic Church on other matters of public policy, and is openly persecuting civil society organizations and international donors, as well as feminists and women’s rights activists.
AWID’s research has settled a number of issues: it has identified common characteristics of religious fundamentalist agendas across religions and religions; revealed that the vast majority of activists do distinguish between religion and religious fundamentalists; and unmasked the diversity of fundamentalist actors. The remaining complexities and challenges involved in identifying religious fundamentalists hint at a different strategic advantage between labelling a phenomenon or a movement and labelling individuals. They suggest that it may be more effective to lable agendas rather than actors as ‘fundamentalist’; it may at times be strategic to ‘name and shame’ a fundamentalist leadership or organization, but the advantages of labelling followers is far less certain.
A rose and a duck: labelling religious fundamentalisms
Cassandra Balchin and Juan Marco Vaggione
When it comes to religious fundamentalisms women's rights activists say Shakespeare was wrong: the way we name things does affect the way we engage with them. To address the phenomenon more effectively, it's better to use the duck test.
What do we mean when we speak of the phenomenon of “religious fundamentalisms”? Is the term even useful for people trying to advance a rights-based agenda? Who are the main fundamentalist actors in the contemporary world? Are women’s rights activists throwing the net too wide when they label fundamentalists, or are we instead overlooking many?
Take the 10,000 participants in the annual March for Life held in Canada last month, whose theme this year was “Abortion: a Crime against Humanity”. Priests and nuns, hundreds of young people bussed in by Catholic schools, and over 20 members of parliament; in a country more noted for its liberal, tolerant stance than the recently visible rise of a religious Right. How do we distinguish the fundamentalist profile from those actors more open to persuasion or negotiation?
These are some of the key questions that AWID’s Resisting and Challenging Religious Fundamentalisms Initiative has attempted to resolve in the hope of building a more effective global response to fundamentalisms - a phenomenon that, according to 69 percent of over 1,600 women’s rights activists surveyed by AWID, obstructs women’s rights more than other political forces.
The first step was to discover how activists understand religious fundamentalisms on the ground. As women’s rights activists often find themselves at the forefront of struggles against regressive social and political forces, their perspectives and voices are critical to the debate.
The term “religious fundamentalism” was coined at the turn of the 20th century by militant North American Christian Evangelicals as a proud lable for their fight to preserve the “fundamentals of faith” in the face of modernizing trends in other religious groups. It has evolved today to be applied in some instances to a wide range of anti-human rights political forces that have little to do with religion (for instance ‘economic fundamentalism’), or more narrowly as code for specific actors in a particular religion, for example ‘Islamic extremists’.
In 2007 an AWID meeting that brought together some 44 experts on religious fundamentalisms from over two dozen countries agreed that attempting a single definition would be an unhelpful distraction, especially given the diverse manifestations of fundamentalisms across regions and religions. More effective is to identify the characteristics of religious fundamentalist movements and actors, in other words focus on the content of their agendas and their impact.
Through the survey, this approach revealed a number of key defining characteristics that resonate across religions and regions. The characteristic most frequently mentioned is “absolutist and intolerant,” followed by “anti-women and patriarchal,” “about power and politics”, “anti-human rights and freedoms”, and “violent”. A description provided by Nira Yuval-Davis, one of the 51 activists interviewed in depth for the study, reflects these characteristics: “The term has several elements: [it] shows that it’s a political use of religion; unlike liberation theology, it is not open to other ways of being religious, especially of the same religion. They say there is one version which they impose through various media on their constituency; and in most cases, this version of religion, because it also tends to be pre-modern and talk about “purification” and going back to The Truth, latches [on] to patriarchal modes of society and control of women. Most religions emerged in pre-modern times when sexism was much more shameless and dominant.”
But women’s rights activists disagree about whether the term ‘religious fundamentalisms’ is useful. While half of the activists AWID surveyed do find it useful, one-quarter are unsure and one-quarter had clear reservations about its effectiveness for activism.
In AWID’s survey the most common concern was the term’s potential to alienate the religious and to reinforce negative stereotyping—targeting Muslims and Islam was specifically mentioned. Indeed, 50 percent of activists surveyed felt that their efforts to challenge religious fundamentalisms were helping to increase prejudice and racism. Pragna Patel of Women Against Fundamentalisms in an interview for AWID says “I’m part of a movement of trying to de-link it from Islamic fundamentalism. For me what’s been the most useful thing is to use the word “fundamentalisms” and say it applies as much to Christian fundamentalism in the United States and Hindu fundamentalism in India, as to Muslim fundamentalism in Iran… It can be used to argue that they’re all part of the same problem.” Even activists working in similar contexts appear to offer contradictory perspectives on the utility of labelling. For some, the term ‘religious fundamentalist’ is potentially divisive and not helpful in encouraging people to reflect critically on their beliefs. Says Ugandan activist Winnie Sseruma: “I think it just makes the people who join these religious sects - the Christian fundamentalist churches - more defensive or feel persecuted. I would prefer the term ‘Charismatic’.”
On the other hand, labelling can aid counter-strategizing. For Hope Chigudu, a Ugandan feminist based in Zimbabwe: “I am able to name what I see and by naming it am able to address it or lobby. Until it was named, I had not been able to study it the way I have.” One survey respondent from the United States also seemed to feel that naming fundamentalist movements as such can help unmask a trend found across regions and religions: “Sometimes religious fundamentalism is easy to identify and sometimes it is insidious. In the United States, the [2007] current leadership is quite openly Christian fundamentalist and laws that are slowly revoking the rights of women are being passed by the day. This in turn makes it easier for other state leaders to justify national laws that are based on strict religious beliefs, but no one is calling it religious fundamentalism.”
For some rights activists, the term even helps draw a crucial distinction between ‘being religious’ and ‘being fundamentalist’. In the context of their struggle to resist Catholic fundamentalist efforts to restrict sex education in rural Canada, the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre found that “Naming them as a separate, oppressive and regressive ideology within a dominant religion and, therefore, different from it, allows those practicing that religion to separate themselves from [the] imposition of a set of values to which they do not adhere.” On the other hand, AWID’s research found that a significant minority of women’s rights activists –precise figures are difficult to assess but it seems around 10-20% - label all religious actors as ‘fundamentalist’ rather than distinguishing between religion and religious fundamentalisms.
This then raises the challenge of how to approach actors who promote a religious fundamentalist agenda through secular organisations such as charities and NGOs, or political parties as is common in Latin America. According to activists, Daptnhe Cuevas and Marusia López Cruz both from Consorcio para el Diálogo Parlamentario y la Equidad, “In Mexico, religious fundamentalisms operate through various actors: the Catholic hierarchy and its network of priests, nuns and parishes installed throughout the country; the National Action Party, which today has the Presidency of the Republic and the majority in Congress; ultra-right groups such as the Legion of Christ and Opus Dei that are characterized by the training of leaders, their insertion in public office and various tactics of blackmail and extortion against opposing groups; civil society organizations such as Provida or ANCIFEM that, under the slogan of the right to promote citizen participation, promotes values and practices associated with religious fundamentalism; corporate monopolies including Televisa) which has a monopoly on mass media), or Sabritas and Bimbo (which have monopolies on the manufacture of bread and candy). The story is similar in India, according to Pramada Menon, a founder of Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (CREA), “The players are many: political parties, the religious right amongst Hindus and Muslims, the social and cultural wings of the Hindu right and organizations and individuals who subscribe to the philosophies being perpetuated.
Indeed, AWID found that there is no ‘typical’ fundamentalist actor. Apart from working across the apparent lines between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, they can be local or international in their sphere of operation, and work as organisations or individuals. Fundamentalist actors are also composed of both elites and followers.
However, a key remaining challenge is to understand and characterise the relationship between conservatism and fundamentalism. Is there a dividing line and how do we spot it? This is particularly difficult because neither conservatives, nor fundamentalists nor the context are homogenous and unchanging. Shared positions on some issues may lead conservatives to see only the commonalities they have with fundamentalists rather than the dissimilarities. As Parvin Ali, a women’s rights activist from the United Kingdom observes, “Because there’s so much hostility still towards gay and lesbian people within the Muslim community, a lot of Muslims actually think that ‘Because we don’t accept them [LGBT people], maybe we are more like the orthodox.....the extremists have played on that”.
It has been AWID’s experience throughout its Initiative that terms such as ‘conservative’, ‘right-wing’, ‘traditional’ and their apparent opposites, ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’, ‘left-wing’ and ‘modern’ are increasingly inadequate for describing specific contemporary social, economic and political actors and capturing the realities shaping feminist strategizing. This is a world where the Christian Right-dominated Republican Party in the United States can have openly gay men in senior policy positions, The presumption that political figures hold consistently right-wing or consistently left-wing views on all social and economic issues today faces the challenge of apparently contradictory positions held by one person. This is particularly true when the positions of the actor that is being labelled change over time.
Two examples from Latin America illustrate these challenges. Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (International Revolutionary Party, PRI) has historically has been categorized as a ‘social democratic’ party (and continues to be part of the Socialist International); it was responsible
When it comes to religious fundamentalisms women's rights activists say Shakespeare was wrong: the way we name things does affect the way we engage with them. To address the phenomenon more effectively, it's better to use the duck test.
What do we mean when we speak of the phenomenon of “religious fundamentalisms”? Is the term even useful for people trying to advance a rights-based agenda? Who are the main fundamentalist actors in the contemporary world? Are women’s rights activists throwing the net too wide when they label fundamentalists, or are we instead overlooking many?
Take the 10,000 participants in the annual March for Life held in Canada last month, whose theme this year was “Abortion: a Crime against Humanity”. Priests and nuns, hundreds of young people bussed in by Catholic schools, and over 20 members of parliament; in a country more noted for its liberal, tolerant stance than the recently visible rise of a religious Right. How do we distinguish the fundamentalist profile from those actors more open to persuasion or negotiation?
These are some of the key questions that AWID’s Resisting and Challenging Religious Fundamentalisms Initiative has attempted to resolve in the hope of building a more effective global response to fundamentalisms - a phenomenon that, according to 69 percent of over 1,600 women’s rights activists surveyed by AWID, obstructs women’s rights more than other political forces.
The first step was to discover how activists understand religious fundamentalisms on the ground. As women’s rights activists often find themselves at the forefront of struggles against regressive social and political forces, their perspectives and voices are critical to the debate.
The term “religious fundamentalism” was coined at the turn of the 20th century by militant North American Christian Evangelicals as a proud lable for their fight to preserve the “fundamentals of faith” in the face of modernizing trends in other religious groups. It has evolved today to be applied in some instances to a wide range of anti-human rights political forces that have little to do with religion (for instance ‘economic fundamentalism’), or more narrowly as code for specific actors in a particular religion, for example ‘Islamic extremists’.
In 2007 an AWID meeting that brought together some 44 experts on religious fundamentalisms from over two dozen countries agreed that attempting a single definition would be an unhelpful distraction, especially given the diverse manifestations of fundamentalisms across regions and religions. More effective is to identify the characteristics of religious fundamentalist movements and actors, in other words focus on the content of their agendas and their impact.
Through the survey, this approach revealed a number of key defining characteristics that resonate across religions and regions. The characteristic most frequently mentioned is “absolutist and intolerant,” followed by “anti-women and patriarchal,” “about power and politics”, “anti-human rights and freedoms”, and “violent”. A description provided by Nira Yuval-Davis, one of the 51 activists interviewed in depth for the study, reflects these characteristics: “The term has several elements: [it] shows that it’s a political use of religion; unlike liberation theology, it is not open to other ways of being religious, especially of the same religion. They say there is one version which they impose through various media on their constituency; and in most cases, this version of religion, because it also tends to be pre-modern and talk about “purification” and going back to The Truth, latches [on] to patriarchal modes of society and control of women. Most religions emerged in pre-modern times when sexism was much more shameless and dominant.”
But women’s rights activists disagree about whether the term ‘religious fundamentalisms’ is useful. While half of the activists AWID surveyed do find it useful, one-quarter are unsure and one-quarter had clear reservations about its effectiveness for activism.
In AWID’s survey the most common concern was the term’s potential to alienate the religious and to reinforce negative stereotyping—targeting Muslims and Islam was specifically mentioned. Indeed, 50 percent of activists surveyed felt that their efforts to challenge religious fundamentalisms were helping to increase prejudice and racism. Pragna Patel of Women Against Fundamentalisms in an interview for AWID says “I’m part of a movement of trying to de-link it from Islamic fundamentalism. For me what’s been the most useful thing is to use the word “fundamentalisms” and say it applies as much to Christian fundamentalism in the United States and Hindu fundamentalism in India, as to Muslim fundamentalism in Iran… It can be used to argue that they’re all part of the same problem.” Even activists working in similar contexts appear to offer contradictory perspectives on the utility of labelling. For some, the term ‘religious fundamentalist’ is potentially divisive and not helpful in encouraging people to reflect critically on their beliefs. Says Ugandan activist Winnie Sseruma: “I think it just makes the people who join these religious sects - the Christian fundamentalist churches - more defensive or feel persecuted. I would prefer the term ‘Charismatic’.”
On the other hand, labelling can aid counter-strategizing. For Hope Chigudu, a Ugandan feminist based in Zimbabwe: “I am able to name what I see and by naming it am able to address it or lobby. Until it was named, I had not been able to study it the way I have.” One survey respondent from the United States also seemed to feel that naming fundamentalist movements as such can help unmask a trend found across regions and religions: “Sometimes religious fundamentalism is easy to identify and sometimes it is insidious. In the United States, the [2007] current leadership is quite openly Christian fundamentalist and laws that are slowly revoking the rights of women are being passed by the day. This in turn makes it easier for other state leaders to justify national laws that are based on strict religious beliefs, but no one is calling it religious fundamentalism.”
For some rights activists, the term even helps draw a crucial distinction between ‘being religious’ and ‘being fundamentalist’. In the context of their struggle to resist Catholic fundamentalist efforts to restrict sex education in rural Canada, the Antigonish Women’s Resource Centre found that “Naming them as a separate, oppressive and regressive ideology within a dominant religion and, therefore, different from it, allows those practicing that religion to separate themselves from [the] imposition of a set of values to which they do not adhere.” On the other hand, AWID’s research found that a significant minority of women’s rights activists –precise figures are difficult to assess but it seems around 10-20% - label all religious actors as ‘fundamentalist’ rather than distinguishing between religion and religious fundamentalisms.
This then raises the challenge of how to approach actors who promote a religious fundamentalist agenda through secular organisations such as charities and NGOs, or political parties as is common in Latin America. According to activists, Daptnhe Cuevas and Marusia López Cruz both from Consorcio para el Diálogo Parlamentario y la Equidad, “In Mexico, religious fundamentalisms operate through various actors: the Catholic hierarchy and its network of priests, nuns and parishes installed throughout the country; the National Action Party, which today has the Presidency of the Republic and the majority in Congress; ultra-right groups such as the Legion of Christ and Opus Dei that are characterized by the training of leaders, their insertion in public office and various tactics of blackmail and extortion against opposing groups; civil society organizations such as Provida or ANCIFEM that, under the slogan of the right to promote citizen participation, promotes values and practices associated with religious fundamentalism; corporate monopolies including Televisa) which has a monopoly on mass media), or Sabritas and Bimbo (which have monopolies on the manufacture of bread and candy). The story is similar in India, according to Pramada Menon, a founder of Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (CREA), “The players are many: political parties, the religious right amongst Hindus and Muslims, the social and cultural wings of the Hindu right and organizations and individuals who subscribe to the philosophies being perpetuated.
Indeed, AWID found that there is no ‘typical’ fundamentalist actor. Apart from working across the apparent lines between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’, they can be local or international in their sphere of operation, and work as organisations or individuals. Fundamentalist actors are also composed of both elites and followers.
However, a key remaining challenge is to understand and characterise the relationship between conservatism and fundamentalism. Is there a dividing line and how do we spot it? This is particularly difficult because neither conservatives, nor fundamentalists nor the context are homogenous and unchanging. Shared positions on some issues may lead conservatives to see only the commonalities they have with fundamentalists rather than the dissimilarities. As Parvin Ali, a women’s rights activist from the United Kingdom observes, “Because there’s so much hostility still towards gay and lesbian people within the Muslim community, a lot of Muslims actually think that ‘Because we don’t accept them [LGBT people], maybe we are more like the orthodox.....the extremists have played on that”.
It has been AWID’s experience throughout its Initiative that terms such as ‘conservative’, ‘right-wing’, ‘traditional’ and their apparent opposites, ‘progressive’ or ‘liberal’, ‘left-wing’ and ‘modern’ are increasingly inadequate for describing specific contemporary social, economic and political actors and capturing the realities shaping feminist strategizing. This is a world where the Christian Right-dominated Republican Party in the United States can have openly gay men in senior policy positions, The presumption that political figures hold consistently right-wing or consistently left-wing views on all social and economic issues today faces the challenge of apparently contradictory positions held by one person. This is particularly true when the positions of the actor that is being labelled change over time.
Two examples from Latin America illustrate these challenges. Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (International Revolutionary Party, PRI) has historically has been categorized as a ‘social democratic’ party (and continues to be part of the Socialist International); it was responsible
China and America: the uses of vulnerability
Kerry Brown
Chinese politics exist on an economic cliff-edge. This makes the outcome of a contest within the country’s elite decisive, not least for the future relationship with the United States, says Kerry Brown.
A number of events in April-June 2010 has seemed to suggest that relations between the United States and China are back on track after a difficult period. They include Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington in May for the opening of the international review-conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the suspension of arguments about the need to revalue the Chinese currency, and discussions on the latest crisis over North Korea.
The world’s two most important powers have, it seems, moved beyond a period of difficult, sometimes fraught exchanges. There is still potential for disputes, such as over Taiwan or climate change, but overall the picture is one of a return to business as normal (see Daniel W Drezner, “China and America, sitting in a tree?”, Foreign Policy, 2 April 2010).
However, the few months’ edginess from late 2009 was significant, and examining it may reveal something of the tension that often underlies the vital relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.
It is not too much to say that for four decades the overriding priority of Chinese foreign policy has been to stick close to Washington. In the dark days of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, Mao Zedong instructed some old comrades to advise him on how to reconnect with the US. Within three years, Richard Nixon had made his historic visit, and the relationship was set on the path it has followed ever since. Deng Xiaoping consolidated it further by crafting a whole policy around getting benefits, including investment, from increased links with the world’s most powerful economy. This was condensed into an edict: “keep a low profile, build up our capacity and be cooperative”. It could be argued from the perspective of 2010 that it is the most successful piece of foreign-policy wisdom in history.
The strength of the relationship at elite level was seen after June 1989, when President George HW Bush helped China rejoin the international community quicker than many expected as it faced relative isolation in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. From its side, Beijing refused to allow periodic clashes - over Taiwan, joining the World Trade Organisation, or US interventions in Yugoslavia (where the Chinese embassy was bombed) or Iraq - to deflect it from Mao’s strategy of sticking close.
Two ways of seeing
Beijing has its foreign-policy disputes and factions, however, even if they are not always as public as Washington’s. And in the background of the arguments between the two capitals, a deeper internal battle over China’s foreign-policy soul can sometimes be glimpsed. The useful if familiar distinction between hawks and doves is one entry-point that can help make sense of it.
The hawks (who are also often both nationalists and leftists) believe that it is no longer necessary to stay faithful to Deng Xiaoping’s edict. They see a US that is in decline, yet continuing to pursue brutally self-interested behaviour: the attempt to bind China into climate-change commitments that will restrict its economic growth, and to entice the country into expensive military programmes that will squander its hard-worn reserves and lead it along the same path to oblivion as the Soviet Union.
The conclusion is that China must now prepare to live in a world where battles - over energy resources, Taiwan, and China’s territorial integrity - will soon make sticking close to the US redundant and self-defeating. The argument here is reflected in the calls made at the national people’s congress (NPC) in March 2010 that China needs to have aircraft-carriers, and to move from being a land power to becoming a naval one.
The doves see a China where the country’s $2.6 trillion reserves co-exist with a per capita GDP that ranks 115 in the world (behind, for example, Namibia); and note that China’s water resources are 50% more polluted than had been reported even a year before. They highlight the fact that 12 million petitions are delivered each year to the central government, evidence both of a society in ferment and a state that has failed to build a credible legal order. To take on the US now would be catastrophic; indeed, the day of encounter recedes into the distance. In this view, the most China realistically can hope to be is a perpetual number-two.
The hawkish-nationalist case has a strong appeal to the Chinese public’s heartstrings, not least in its appeal to a sense of historic grievance. Wang Xiaodong, a vehement exponent of this view, talks of China at last fulfilling its aspiration to proper hard power, and jettisoning the soft-power strategy pursued before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. All that ever led to, he argues, was grief. “We [should] answer our critics with force, because that is all they have ever given to us”, he says, bemoaning that fact that even China’s heralded economic system has been built on the “blood and sweat of Chinese cheap labour to make the western consumers rich”.
But there is a big problem in adopting a more hardline course. Wang Hui, among the most respected leftists, says: “the US comes to our borders, and sometimes is inside our borders”. America remains a country with 680 military installations in 120 countries, a $780-billion defence budget, and technical capacity decades ahead of anyone else. Even the Chinese military’s strategy of focusing on non-conventional capacity-building in “information systems” has been hit in the confrontations with Google. The nationalists see the latter as an inevitable warning-shot from the US: go back into your boxes once more.
A report published in March 2010 vividly illustrates why the doves are so concerned. In 2008-09, China’s military spending increased by 14% to $80 billion. A much less noticed figure is the $85 billion budget for internal security. China spends more on policing itself than it does on protecting itself from the outside world. This gives tangible insight into the vulnerabilities of the internal situation. The doves know well that if China had not achieved 9% growth in 2009, if it had shrunk like several major western economies, the regime would have been hit by enormous unrest. Chinese politics exist on an economic cliff-edge (see “China: inside strain, outside spleen”, 25 March 2010).
A difficult transition
Both doves and (probably) hawks know that in the period until 2015-20 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will have to face acute challenges. Among the most acute will be establishing a proper legal system where courts might one day hold the party to account against its will; a proper legal basis for civil society to prevent social explosion; and a system of accountability that can address the issue of corruption. China towards 2020 will be a society where two people of working age will be supporting one who is retired, and where the gender imbalance resulting from the one-child policy will produce a surplus of 50 million single men. There is peril here for the CCP leadership at every step (see “China’s shadow sector: power in pieces”, 14 September 2009).
Indeed, so great are the tasks ahead that the the 2007-10 period - the very time when much of the rest of the world suffered during the economic downturn - may even come to be viewed by the top party bosses as being as good as it would ever get for China.
But there is no escape from emerging problems, and there are no easy options in confronting them. And a Chinese elite divided among itself is a recipe for more disagreement, attrition and volatility in relation to the outside world (see “China’s coming struggle for power”, 14 May 2009).
The Chinese leadership’s awareness of the vulnerabilities of its position is reflected in prime minister Wen Jiabao’s comment directly to President Obama in November 2009: “We do not want to be in a G2. We are not ready. We have too many of our own problems”. The United States and other western countries should show a similar realism: by supporting the Beijing doves as China approaches a painful (and perhaps imminent) political transition, while being clear about their own national interests. If the west gets it right, China may yet emerge on the other side as a modernised country and a more stable and more amenable partner - rather than the aggressive nationalist behemoth much of the world fears and some influential voices in China are tempted by.
Chinese politics exist on an economic cliff-edge. This makes the outcome of a contest within the country’s elite decisive, not least for the future relationship with the United States, says Kerry Brown.
A number of events in April-June 2010 has seemed to suggest that relations between the United States and China are back on track after a difficult period. They include Hu Jintao’s visit to Washington in May for the opening of the international review-conference on the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the suspension of arguments about the need to revalue the Chinese currency, and discussions on the latest crisis over North Korea.
The world’s two most important powers have, it seems, moved beyond a period of difficult, sometimes fraught exchanges. There is still potential for disputes, such as over Taiwan or climate change, but overall the picture is one of a return to business as normal (see Daniel W Drezner, “China and America, sitting in a tree?”, Foreign Policy, 2 April 2010).
However, the few months’ edginess from late 2009 was significant, and examining it may reveal something of the tension that often underlies the vital relationship between the People’s Republic of China and the United States.
It is not too much to say that for four decades the overriding priority of Chinese foreign policy has been to stick close to Washington. In the dark days of the cultural revolution of the late 1960s, Mao Zedong instructed some old comrades to advise him on how to reconnect with the US. Within three years, Richard Nixon had made his historic visit, and the relationship was set on the path it has followed ever since. Deng Xiaoping consolidated it further by crafting a whole policy around getting benefits, including investment, from increased links with the world’s most powerful economy. This was condensed into an edict: “keep a low profile, build up our capacity and be cooperative”. It could be argued from the perspective of 2010 that it is the most successful piece of foreign-policy wisdom in history.
The strength of the relationship at elite level was seen after June 1989, when President George HW Bush helped China rejoin the international community quicker than many expected as it faced relative isolation in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre. From its side, Beijing refused to allow periodic clashes - over Taiwan, joining the World Trade Organisation, or US interventions in Yugoslavia (where the Chinese embassy was bombed) or Iraq - to deflect it from Mao’s strategy of sticking close.
Two ways of seeing
Beijing has its foreign-policy disputes and factions, however, even if they are not always as public as Washington’s. And in the background of the arguments between the two capitals, a deeper internal battle over China’s foreign-policy soul can sometimes be glimpsed. The useful if familiar distinction between hawks and doves is one entry-point that can help make sense of it.
The hawks (who are also often both nationalists and leftists) believe that it is no longer necessary to stay faithful to Deng Xiaoping’s edict. They see a US that is in decline, yet continuing to pursue brutally self-interested behaviour: the attempt to bind China into climate-change commitments that will restrict its economic growth, and to entice the country into expensive military programmes that will squander its hard-worn reserves and lead it along the same path to oblivion as the Soviet Union.
The conclusion is that China must now prepare to live in a world where battles - over energy resources, Taiwan, and China’s territorial integrity - will soon make sticking close to the US redundant and self-defeating. The argument here is reflected in the calls made at the national people’s congress (NPC) in March 2010 that China needs to have aircraft-carriers, and to move from being a land power to becoming a naval one.
The doves see a China where the country’s $2.6 trillion reserves co-exist with a per capita GDP that ranks 115 in the world (behind, for example, Namibia); and note that China’s water resources are 50% more polluted than had been reported even a year before. They highlight the fact that 12 million petitions are delivered each year to the central government, evidence both of a society in ferment and a state that has failed to build a credible legal order. To take on the US now would be catastrophic; indeed, the day of encounter recedes into the distance. In this view, the most China realistically can hope to be is a perpetual number-two.
The hawkish-nationalist case has a strong appeal to the Chinese public’s heartstrings, not least in its appeal to a sense of historic grievance. Wang Xiaodong, a vehement exponent of this view, talks of China at last fulfilling its aspiration to proper hard power, and jettisoning the soft-power strategy pursued before the Beijing Olympics in 2008. All that ever led to, he argues, was grief. “We [should] answer our critics with force, because that is all they have ever given to us”, he says, bemoaning that fact that even China’s heralded economic system has been built on the “blood and sweat of Chinese cheap labour to make the western consumers rich”.
But there is a big problem in adopting a more hardline course. Wang Hui, among the most respected leftists, says: “the US comes to our borders, and sometimes is inside our borders”. America remains a country with 680 military installations in 120 countries, a $780-billion defence budget, and technical capacity decades ahead of anyone else. Even the Chinese military’s strategy of focusing on non-conventional capacity-building in “information systems” has been hit in the confrontations with Google. The nationalists see the latter as an inevitable warning-shot from the US: go back into your boxes once more.
A report published in March 2010 vividly illustrates why the doves are so concerned. In 2008-09, China’s military spending increased by 14% to $80 billion. A much less noticed figure is the $85 billion budget for internal security. China spends more on policing itself than it does on protecting itself from the outside world. This gives tangible insight into the vulnerabilities of the internal situation. The doves know well that if China had not achieved 9% growth in 2009, if it had shrunk like several major western economies, the regime would have been hit by enormous unrest. Chinese politics exist on an economic cliff-edge (see “China: inside strain, outside spleen”, 25 March 2010).
A difficult transition
Both doves and (probably) hawks know that in the period until 2015-20 the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will have to face acute challenges. Among the most acute will be establishing a proper legal system where courts might one day hold the party to account against its will; a proper legal basis for civil society to prevent social explosion; and a system of accountability that can address the issue of corruption. China towards 2020 will be a society where two people of working age will be supporting one who is retired, and where the gender imbalance resulting from the one-child policy will produce a surplus of 50 million single men. There is peril here for the CCP leadership at every step (see “China’s shadow sector: power in pieces”, 14 September 2009).
Indeed, so great are the tasks ahead that the the 2007-10 period - the very time when much of the rest of the world suffered during the economic downturn - may even come to be viewed by the top party bosses as being as good as it would ever get for China.
But there is no escape from emerging problems, and there are no easy options in confronting them. And a Chinese elite divided among itself is a recipe for more disagreement, attrition and volatility in relation to the outside world (see “China’s coming struggle for power”, 14 May 2009).
The Chinese leadership’s awareness of the vulnerabilities of its position is reflected in prime minister Wen Jiabao’s comment directly to President Obama in November 2009: “We do not want to be in a G2. We are not ready. We have too many of our own problems”. The United States and other western countries should show a similar realism: by supporting the Beijing doves as China approaches a painful (and perhaps imminent) political transition, while being clear about their own national interests. If the west gets it right, China may yet emerge on the other side as a modernised country and a more stable and more amenable partner - rather than the aggressive nationalist behemoth much of the world fears and some influential voices in China are tempted by.
Procurement Portal: Fresh Twist in National Transparency
EMMA OKWUAHABA
Public sector procurement has been identified as one of the major channels of corruption in Nigeria, which has for long defied remediation. However, a procurement monitoring portal, launched in Abuja on June 2 by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a non-governmental organisation, seeks to check official corrupt practices in the country. Abimbola Akosile analyses an exhaustive process, which seeks to make Nigeria a better place for all
Exciting Picture
Imagine a scenario where any public procurement process is displayed on an easily accessible website for the average weary citizen to monitor any lapses by potential corrupt government officials. Imagine a situation where at the click of a computer mouse, previously hidden details of official procurement transactions are revealed for those who seek to know how government is expending the monies available for budget implementation.
Imagine where at the sight of the first discrepancy, an alarm is raised and the erring official is subjected to public odium, name-calling, strict sanctions, and even an unattractive jail term.
Now imagine a process like that being replicated at the federal level, and eventually trickling down to eager states and wary local councils; all in a bid to check official corruption and ensure capital expenditure is utilised in the proper manner all over Nigeria for nation-wide development.
That is the focus of the launch of the procurement monitoring portal, launched by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a non-governmental organisation, with active support from the United Nations Development Fund (UNDEF), a willing international organisation. A launch, which is the result of a painstaking process undertaken by PPDC and its affiliates, for a collective good.
Current Scenario
The latest official update on public procurement process in Nigeria is that, in line with the Public Procurement Act of 2007, the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), one of the coordinating bodies for public spending in Nigeria, is currently collating procurement plans for uploading on their websites where they can be accessed by Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs)
Meanwhile as that is going on at BPP, official looting and siphoning of public funds, through inflation of government contracts and bogus contracts for white elephant projects, continue unabated.
The plan to establish a public procurement portal by PPDC is both timely and necessary for national growth and development. It is one of the sub-themes under the Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Project designed by PPDC, according to the organisation's coordinator, Mr. Chibuzor Ekekwuo.
Vital Context
The role of governments all over the world is to provide for the welfare, peace and security of the citizens. It is for this reason that section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provides that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.”
Governance, according to PPDC, envisages the management of public, material and human resources for the common good. Good and effective governance therefore is dependent upon the workings of institutions charged with the delivery of public good, services and the guarantee of public security.
Public procurement is a very important aspect of the delivery of public goods and services. Virtually every business of government is conducted through a procurement process. Where the process of procurement is unregulated and ineffective, it affects socio-economic and human development as public services and projects which give support to human existence and activities will be lacking.
In order to arrest this ugly trend, governments at Federal and State levels embarked upon various legal and institutional reforms to improve governance, economic development and the delivery of public goods and services to the citizens. These reforms led to the passage and signing into law of the Public Procurement Act (the Act) in June 2007.
The Act establishes the “National Council on Public Procurement and the Bureau of Public Procurement as the regulatory authorities responsible for the monitoring and oversight of public procurement, harmonizing the existing government policies and practices by regulating, setting standards and developing the legal framework and professional capacity for public procurement in Nigeria and for related matters.”
Progressive Collaboration
On January 27, Ekekwuo and his team paid an advocacy visit to the House of Representatives Committee on Due Process, led by Hon Maitama Tugar, at the National Assembly Complex in Abuja.
The advocacy visit was by a delegation of CSO members led by Public & Private Development Centre (PPDC) and representation from Crime Free and Peace Initiative (CRIPFI), Zero Corruption Coalition (ZCC), and National Procurement Watch Platform (NPWP).
In an address he presented to the legislators, the lawyer cum civil society practitioner sought to explain the rationale for PPDC's persistent quest for transparency and accountability in the public procurement process in Nigeria, and the need to check any sharp practices by public officials.
After the passage of the Public Procurement Act 2007, PPDC designed and launched its Procurement Watch Programme, which sought to activate the citizens monitoring provisions in that law. The programme, he said, soon secured support from PACT Nigeria ADVANCE programme and achieved some outputs.
These included the formation of the National Procurement Watch Platform along with many other CSO actors; publication of the first guide for procurement Observers called Non State Actors and Procurement Watch in Nigeria; an assessment of levels of implementation of Procurement Act 2007.
Crucial Project
The Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Project has four major objectives to build capacity of non state actors on procurement observation and monitoring; strengthen the legislature on procurement oversight and monitoring; improve access, analyses and sharing of procurement information; strengthen advocacy for improved transparency and accountability in the procurement process.
The programme is geared to establish an independent procurement monitoring mechanism for Nigeria. The strategy and activities will include capacity building; building partnerships; documentation and research; and design and deployment of ICT tool called Procurement Observatory.
To ensure shared ownership, as well as synergy with other existing development programs. PPDC is setting up an independent Advisory board for the Portal. The advisory board will meet annually to assess performance of the portal and suggest ways of making it more efficient and effective.
Monitoring Portal
The procurement monitoring portal aims to improve citizen participation in governance, in a way that supports improved integrity and prevents corruption in Nigeria, according to information from PPDC's Programme Officer of the Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Project, Miss Seember Nyager.
The portal is an initiative of the PPDC and part of the Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Programme, which aims to provide the much needed tools for increased and effective citizen monitoring of the Public Procurement Process.
The procurement monitoring portal, developed in consultation with many NGOs and development agencies in Nigeria, has an online free procurement monitoring training, free legal advice for registered journalists and procurement monitors, information sharing platform, mechanism for online collation and analysis of reports of procurement monitoring, based on a standard checklist, space for hosting sub-sites for stakeholders and mass mailing list capability all now functioning.
The first 50 Journalists, the first 50 NGOs and the first 50 Professional body representatives to register on the portal at www.procurementmonitor.org will enjoy free legal advice from a top-notch Nigerian Procurement law firm on all their procurement related activities via the blog.
Deserved Gratitude
Ekekwuo (sic), who welcome stakeholders to the formal launch of the completed Nigerian Procurement Observatory, gave special thanks to PACT Nigeria for their continuous support to PPDC.
He expressed gratitude to Dan Spealman and Ekanem Bassey for nurturing the dream, to Chief Bayo Awosemusi, the Lead procurement specialist of the World Bank, Dayo Olaide of OSIWA, Edetaen Ojo of MRA, his colleagues at the National Procurement Watch Platform, Interlink technologies who are the portal developers, this reporter, Dr. Chi Chi Okoye and her colleagues at EU SRIP, Dr. Lilian Ekeanyanwu of TUGAR, the Bureau of Public Procurement and many others.
“This portal which we present to you today has been built with the following features: Online free procurement monitoring training; free legal advice for registered journalists and procurement monitors; information sharing platform; mechanism for online collation and analysis of reports of procurement monitoring, based on a standard check; space for hosting sub-sites for stakeholders; and mass mailing list capability etc
The membership of PPDC Advisory Board currently include: Chief Awosemusi Engr. Emeka Ezeh; DG of the Bureau of Public Procurement; Mr. Debo Adedokun of the Bureau of Public Procurement; Ojo, Executive Director of Media Rights Agenda; and Father John Patrick Ngoyi of Justice and Peace Development Centre.
Others are this THISDAY reporter; Hon Tuggar; Mr. Maxwell Kadiri of Open Society Justice Initiative; Dr. Hussaini Abdu; Country Representative of Action Aid Nigeria; Mr. Auwal Rafsanjani of CISLAC; Hon. Olusegun Akinloye of House Committee on Public Procurement; and Dr. Chi Chi Okoye, Deputy Country Director of EU SRIP
Now it Begins…
Analysts believe that as public office appears more unattractive through greater checks and balances on public spending and procurement, transparency becomes more entrenched and looters look for other safer options.
As this reporter is wont to say, naming and shaming of official looters will be renewed when the Whistle Blowers Bill eventually sails through current legislative hitches, to help check frivolous public procurement processes in the country.
The procurement monitoring portal by PPDC has kick-started a heart-warming process, which has the potential effect of halving and eventually eliminating corruption in official circles; with consequent positive effect on the lives of the angry citizens.
Transparency and accountability may not be far from official and un-official corridors, is where the tenets of the monitoring process are religiously followed. The day shall yet come, when public officials will think twice before dipping greedy fingers in the national till. The end of the tunnel is near.
Public sector procurement has been identified as one of the major channels of corruption in Nigeria, which has for long defied remediation. However, a procurement monitoring portal, launched in Abuja on June 2 by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a non-governmental organisation, seeks to check official corrupt practices in the country. Abimbola Akosile analyses an exhaustive process, which seeks to make Nigeria a better place for all
Exciting Picture
Imagine a scenario where any public procurement process is displayed on an easily accessible website for the average weary citizen to monitor any lapses by potential corrupt government officials. Imagine a situation where at the click of a computer mouse, previously hidden details of official procurement transactions are revealed for those who seek to know how government is expending the monies available for budget implementation.
Imagine where at the sight of the first discrepancy, an alarm is raised and the erring official is subjected to public odium, name-calling, strict sanctions, and even an unattractive jail term.
Now imagine a process like that being replicated at the federal level, and eventually trickling down to eager states and wary local councils; all in a bid to check official corruption and ensure capital expenditure is utilised in the proper manner all over Nigeria for nation-wide development.
That is the focus of the launch of the procurement monitoring portal, launched by the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC), a non-governmental organisation, with active support from the United Nations Development Fund (UNDEF), a willing international organisation. A launch, which is the result of a painstaking process undertaken by PPDC and its affiliates, for a collective good.
Current Scenario
The latest official update on public procurement process in Nigeria is that, in line with the Public Procurement Act of 2007, the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP), one of the coordinating bodies for public spending in Nigeria, is currently collating procurement plans for uploading on their websites where they can be accessed by Ministries, Departments, and Agencies (MDAs)
Meanwhile as that is going on at BPP, official looting and siphoning of public funds, through inflation of government contracts and bogus contracts for white elephant projects, continue unabated.
The plan to establish a public procurement portal by PPDC is both timely and necessary for national growth and development. It is one of the sub-themes under the Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Project designed by PPDC, according to the organisation's coordinator, Mr. Chibuzor Ekekwuo.
Vital Context
The role of governments all over the world is to provide for the welfare, peace and security of the citizens. It is for this reason that section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria provides that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.”
Governance, according to PPDC, envisages the management of public, material and human resources for the common good. Good and effective governance therefore is dependent upon the workings of institutions charged with the delivery of public good, services and the guarantee of public security.
Public procurement is a very important aspect of the delivery of public goods and services. Virtually every business of government is conducted through a procurement process. Where the process of procurement is unregulated and ineffective, it affects socio-economic and human development as public services and projects which give support to human existence and activities will be lacking.
In order to arrest this ugly trend, governments at Federal and State levels embarked upon various legal and institutional reforms to improve governance, economic development and the delivery of public goods and services to the citizens. These reforms led to the passage and signing into law of the Public Procurement Act (the Act) in June 2007.
The Act establishes the “National Council on Public Procurement and the Bureau of Public Procurement as the regulatory authorities responsible for the monitoring and oversight of public procurement, harmonizing the existing government policies and practices by regulating, setting standards and developing the legal framework and professional capacity for public procurement in Nigeria and for related matters.”
Progressive Collaboration
On January 27, Ekekwuo and his team paid an advocacy visit to the House of Representatives Committee on Due Process, led by Hon Maitama Tugar, at the National Assembly Complex in Abuja.
The advocacy visit was by a delegation of CSO members led by Public & Private Development Centre (PPDC) and representation from Crime Free and Peace Initiative (CRIPFI), Zero Corruption Coalition (ZCC), and National Procurement Watch Platform (NPWP).
In an address he presented to the legislators, the lawyer cum civil society practitioner sought to explain the rationale for PPDC's persistent quest for transparency and accountability in the public procurement process in Nigeria, and the need to check any sharp practices by public officials.
After the passage of the Public Procurement Act 2007, PPDC designed and launched its Procurement Watch Programme, which sought to activate the citizens monitoring provisions in that law. The programme, he said, soon secured support from PACT Nigeria ADVANCE programme and achieved some outputs.
These included the formation of the National Procurement Watch Platform along with many other CSO actors; publication of the first guide for procurement Observers called Non State Actors and Procurement Watch in Nigeria; an assessment of levels of implementation of Procurement Act 2007.
Crucial Project
The Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Project has four major objectives to build capacity of non state actors on procurement observation and monitoring; strengthen the legislature on procurement oversight and monitoring; improve access, analyses and sharing of procurement information; strengthen advocacy for improved transparency and accountability in the procurement process.
The programme is geared to establish an independent procurement monitoring mechanism for Nigeria. The strategy and activities will include capacity building; building partnerships; documentation and research; and design and deployment of ICT tool called Procurement Observatory.
To ensure shared ownership, as well as synergy with other existing development programs. PPDC is setting up an independent Advisory board for the Portal. The advisory board will meet annually to assess performance of the portal and suggest ways of making it more efficient and effective.
Monitoring Portal
The procurement monitoring portal aims to improve citizen participation in governance, in a way that supports improved integrity and prevents corruption in Nigeria, according to information from PPDC's Programme Officer of the Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Project, Miss Seember Nyager.
The portal is an initiative of the PPDC and part of the Nigerian Procurement Monitoring Programme, which aims to provide the much needed tools for increased and effective citizen monitoring of the Public Procurement Process.
The procurement monitoring portal, developed in consultation with many NGOs and development agencies in Nigeria, has an online free procurement monitoring training, free legal advice for registered journalists and procurement monitors, information sharing platform, mechanism for online collation and analysis of reports of procurement monitoring, based on a standard checklist, space for hosting sub-sites for stakeholders and mass mailing list capability all now functioning.
The first 50 Journalists, the first 50 NGOs and the first 50 Professional body representatives to register on the portal at www.procurementmonitor.org will enjoy free legal advice from a top-notch Nigerian Procurement law firm on all their procurement related activities via the blog.
Deserved Gratitude
Ekekwuo (sic), who welcome stakeholders to the formal launch of the completed Nigerian Procurement Observatory, gave special thanks to PACT Nigeria for their continuous support to PPDC.
He expressed gratitude to Dan Spealman and Ekanem Bassey for nurturing the dream, to Chief Bayo Awosemusi, the Lead procurement specialist of the World Bank, Dayo Olaide of OSIWA, Edetaen Ojo of MRA, his colleagues at the National Procurement Watch Platform, Interlink technologies who are the portal developers, this reporter, Dr. Chi Chi Okoye and her colleagues at EU SRIP, Dr. Lilian Ekeanyanwu of TUGAR, the Bureau of Public Procurement and many others.
“This portal which we present to you today has been built with the following features: Online free procurement monitoring training; free legal advice for registered journalists and procurement monitors; information sharing platform; mechanism for online collation and analysis of reports of procurement monitoring, based on a standard check; space for hosting sub-sites for stakeholders; and mass mailing list capability etc
The membership of PPDC Advisory Board currently include: Chief Awosemusi Engr. Emeka Ezeh; DG of the Bureau of Public Procurement; Mr. Debo Adedokun of the Bureau of Public Procurement; Ojo, Executive Director of Media Rights Agenda; and Father John Patrick Ngoyi of Justice and Peace Development Centre.
Others are this THISDAY reporter; Hon Tuggar; Mr. Maxwell Kadiri of Open Society Justice Initiative; Dr. Hussaini Abdu; Country Representative of Action Aid Nigeria; Mr. Auwal Rafsanjani of CISLAC; Hon. Olusegun Akinloye of House Committee on Public Procurement; and Dr. Chi Chi Okoye, Deputy Country Director of EU SRIP
Now it Begins…
Analysts believe that as public office appears more unattractive through greater checks and balances on public spending and procurement, transparency becomes more entrenched and looters look for other safer options.
As this reporter is wont to say, naming and shaming of official looters will be renewed when the Whistle Blowers Bill eventually sails through current legislative hitches, to help check frivolous public procurement processes in the country.
The procurement monitoring portal by PPDC has kick-started a heart-warming process, which has the potential effect of halving and eventually eliminating corruption in official circles; with consequent positive effect on the lives of the angry citizens.
Transparency and accountability may not be far from official and un-official corridors, is where the tenets of the monitoring process are religiously followed. The day shall yet come, when public officials will think twice before dipping greedy fingers in the national till. The end of the tunnel is near.
Silvio Berlusconi: culture bites politics
Geoff Andrews
A successful, intimidating prime minister has moulded Italy’s public life in his own image. A fearful, supine opposition is paralysed by his achievement. But there is one source of hope, says Geoff Andrews.
It has been clear for a long time that Silvio Berlusconi is a leader very far from the classic professional politician of the western liberal-democratic mould. Rather, Italy’s premier is a postmodern populist who employs a highly personalised style of leadership in which television plays a central part. His rule during three periods in office (1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-) has been a celebration of image and power fuelled by a constant appeal to the gut instincts of the people. His wealth is at once the source of his route to power, a measure of his invincibility, and a constant reminder to Italians of his entrepreneurial success and ability to get things done.
In all this, Berlusconi draws a winning symbolic contrast with the older type of political leader - locked in the world of newspaper columns and council-chamber meetings. driven to explain policy by reference to ideology, constrained (however grudgingly) by claims of accountability and transparency. No wonder Italy’s official opposition is afraid of him.
Indeed, Berlusconi’s current period in office (since his victory in the elections of April 2008) has seen fear acquire increasing political importance. The prime minister regularly uses his media influence to remove dissidents from the main public-broadcasting channels; assails his opponents as communists or conspirators; harasses his critics with legal writs; denounces judges (whom he sees as his main adversaries); and even speaks out against the president of the republic.
This aggressive stance has paralysed Italy’s official opposition. Its main representative, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) - itself relatively new, but led by ex-communists and ex-Christian Democrats shaped by the political failures of an earlier era - has been unable either to confront the source of Silvio Berlusconi’s political power during its brief period in government or to begin to construct a plausible vision of a post-Berlusconi world. Italy’s opposition has yet answer the big questions surrounding Italy’s future in any credible way.
The overall result is that a kind of fatalism now pervades Italian public life. Almost every week brings fresh allegations about Berlusconi’s behaviour (of mafia associations or corruption scandals, for example), which are widely reported in a foreign media fixated on the idea of “Berlusconi in crisis”; yet these continue to have little effect on those that matter - the Italian people. In another notable departure from the norms of everyday European politics, many Italians even perceive the prime minister’s human frailties (as others see them) as virtues of his leadership. An almost incredible aspect of this bizarre political situation is that amid a morass of condemnation and vitriol, Berlusconi - one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in modern Europe - has been able successfully to present himself as a victim.
The artists’ answer
This questions that arise from this situation are obvious: how can it be understood, and - if the leader is so commanding and the opposition so stultified - where will real challenge come from?
Italy’s artists offer answers to both. The filmmaker Erik Gandini has created an extraordinary social document called Videocracy which in effect argues that Silvio Berlusconi has (mainly through the vehicle of television) initiated a cultural revolution that has moulded Italians in his own image. In this perspective Berlusconismo’s drenching celebrity culture has a sinister twist - consolidating the leader’s almost unassailable personal power by creating a public culture in his own image. As a result what the Italian think-tank Vision refers to as the “B-factor” continues to dominate Italy and set the terms of political debate.
Italy’s public broadcaster RAI banned trailers for Gandini’s film being shown, part of a now familiar pattern of threats and censorship in response to artists’ interventions. The same scorn was poured on Sabina Guzzanti’s new film Draquila: L’Italia Che Trema (Draquila: Italy Trembles), which the Italian culture minister Sandro Bondi dismissed as a “propaganda film..that insults the truth and the Italian people”. The film, whose title combines Dracula and L’Aquila (the Abruzzo town devastated by an earthquake in April 2009 which killed almost 300 people and made 60,000 homeless), is a courageous attempt to address the plight of these citizens who feel abandoned by their government. Guzzanti, one of Italy’s leading satirists, has through this work engaged directly with citizens and local movements, such as the “Yes We Camp” group I met when I visited L’Aquila (see “Italy and the G8: voices from L’Aquila”, 10 July 2009). Draquila won a standing ovation at the 2010 Cannes film festival.
An earlier example of an artistic effort to make sense of Italy’s predicament under Berlusconi is Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, released just before the 2006 election. Moretti had already played a major role in civil-society movements such as the girotondi, which campaigned against Berlusconi’s conflicts of interests in the absence of any leadership from the official opposition. “With these leaders we will never win”, he famously told a crowd in Piazza Navona in Rome in 2002, with the centre-left functionaries behind him – largely the same crowd which leads the Democratic Party today.
More recently, the comic blogger Beppe Grillo - a constant critic of the corrupt nature of Italy’s political class - has moved from marginal dissident to serious political opponent; in the regional elections of March 2010 his Movimento a 5 Stelle (Five-Star Movement) captured half a million votes. His challenge extends beyond Berlusconi to the timid and compromised politicians of the official opposition, among which only Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values) Party offers an exception. Beppe Grillo’s imaginative use of new media has helped him to establish an extraordinary political network.
On their own, these “cultural critics” cannot end Berlusconismo and change Italy. But in two ways they can provide a new opposition and revitalise Italy’s public life. First, they use a language which enables them to reach beyond the restrictions of the orthodox politicians and can help galvanise rather than alienate other dissentingl voices in civil society. Second, they interrogate in a courageous and creative way the darker sides of the Berlusconi phenomenon.
Above all, they understand the nature of Silvio Berlusconi’s power as well as its limits. They do not retreat from difficult questions. They have gone where the official opposition has feared to tread. They provide hope, if not yet a vision, of a different Italy.
A successful, intimidating prime minister has moulded Italy’s public life in his own image. A fearful, supine opposition is paralysed by his achievement. But there is one source of hope, says Geoff Andrews.
It has been clear for a long time that Silvio Berlusconi is a leader very far from the classic professional politician of the western liberal-democratic mould. Rather, Italy’s premier is a postmodern populist who employs a highly personalised style of leadership in which television plays a central part. His rule during three periods in office (1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-) has been a celebration of image and power fuelled by a constant appeal to the gut instincts of the people. His wealth is at once the source of his route to power, a measure of his invincibility, and a constant reminder to Italians of his entrepreneurial success and ability to get things done.
In all this, Berlusconi draws a winning symbolic contrast with the older type of political leader - locked in the world of newspaper columns and council-chamber meetings. driven to explain policy by reference to ideology, constrained (however grudgingly) by claims of accountability and transparency. No wonder Italy’s official opposition is afraid of him.
Indeed, Berlusconi’s current period in office (since his victory in the elections of April 2008) has seen fear acquire increasing political importance. The prime minister regularly uses his media influence to remove dissidents from the main public-broadcasting channels; assails his opponents as communists or conspirators; harasses his critics with legal writs; denounces judges (whom he sees as his main adversaries); and even speaks out against the president of the republic.
This aggressive stance has paralysed Italy’s official opposition. Its main representative, the Partito Democratico (Democratic Party) - itself relatively new, but led by ex-communists and ex-Christian Democrats shaped by the political failures of an earlier era - has been unable either to confront the source of Silvio Berlusconi’s political power during its brief period in government or to begin to construct a plausible vision of a post-Berlusconi world. Italy’s opposition has yet answer the big questions surrounding Italy’s future in any credible way.
The overall result is that a kind of fatalism now pervades Italian public life. Almost every week brings fresh allegations about Berlusconi’s behaviour (of mafia associations or corruption scandals, for example), which are widely reported in a foreign media fixated on the idea of “Berlusconi in crisis”; yet these continue to have little effect on those that matter - the Italian people. In another notable departure from the norms of everyday European politics, many Italians even perceive the prime minister’s human frailties (as others see them) as virtues of his leadership. An almost incredible aspect of this bizarre political situation is that amid a morass of condemnation and vitriol, Berlusconi - one of the wealthiest and most powerful figures in modern Europe - has been able successfully to present himself as a victim.
The artists’ answer
This questions that arise from this situation are obvious: how can it be understood, and - if the leader is so commanding and the opposition so stultified - where will real challenge come from?
Italy’s artists offer answers to both. The filmmaker Erik Gandini has created an extraordinary social document called Videocracy which in effect argues that Silvio Berlusconi has (mainly through the vehicle of television) initiated a cultural revolution that has moulded Italians in his own image. In this perspective Berlusconismo’s drenching celebrity culture has a sinister twist - consolidating the leader’s almost unassailable personal power by creating a public culture in his own image. As a result what the Italian think-tank Vision refers to as the “B-factor” continues to dominate Italy and set the terms of political debate.
Italy’s public broadcaster RAI banned trailers for Gandini’s film being shown, part of a now familiar pattern of threats and censorship in response to artists’ interventions. The same scorn was poured on Sabina Guzzanti’s new film Draquila: L’Italia Che Trema (Draquila: Italy Trembles), which the Italian culture minister Sandro Bondi dismissed as a “propaganda film..that insults the truth and the Italian people”. The film, whose title combines Dracula and L’Aquila (the Abruzzo town devastated by an earthquake in April 2009 which killed almost 300 people and made 60,000 homeless), is a courageous attempt to address the plight of these citizens who feel abandoned by their government. Guzzanti, one of Italy’s leading satirists, has through this work engaged directly with citizens and local movements, such as the “Yes We Camp” group I met when I visited L’Aquila (see “Italy and the G8: voices from L’Aquila”, 10 July 2009). Draquila won a standing ovation at the 2010 Cannes film festival.
An earlier example of an artistic effort to make sense of Italy’s predicament under Berlusconi is Nanni Moretti’s Il Caimano, released just before the 2006 election. Moretti had already played a major role in civil-society movements such as the girotondi, which campaigned against Berlusconi’s conflicts of interests in the absence of any leadership from the official opposition. “With these leaders we will never win”, he famously told a crowd in Piazza Navona in Rome in 2002, with the centre-left functionaries behind him – largely the same crowd which leads the Democratic Party today.
More recently, the comic blogger Beppe Grillo - a constant critic of the corrupt nature of Italy’s political class - has moved from marginal dissident to serious political opponent; in the regional elections of March 2010 his Movimento a 5 Stelle (Five-Star Movement) captured half a million votes. His challenge extends beyond Berlusconi to the timid and compromised politicians of the official opposition, among which only Antonio Di Pietro’s Italia dei Valori (Italy of Values) Party offers an exception. Beppe Grillo’s imaginative use of new media has helped him to establish an extraordinary political network.
On their own, these “cultural critics” cannot end Berlusconismo and change Italy. But in two ways they can provide a new opposition and revitalise Italy’s public life. First, they use a language which enables them to reach beyond the restrictions of the orthodox politicians and can help galvanise rather than alienate other dissentingl voices in civil society. Second, they interrogate in a courageous and creative way the darker sides of the Berlusconi phenomenon.
Above all, they understand the nature of Silvio Berlusconi’s power as well as its limits. They do not retreat from difficult questions. They have gone where the official opposition has feared to tread. They provide hope, if not yet a vision, of a different Italy.
Friday, June 25, 2010
How Finance, Economic Planning Ministries Are Killing Delta Owned Media Houses
Three years gone, one year to go, yet the state of the Delta state owned media houses, Delta Broadcasting Service (DBS), Asaba, (DRTV),Warri and the Pointer Newspapers, Asaba still remain a big shame to an oil rich state where billions of naira roll in monthly from the Federal Government allocation.
The Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan’s led administration, no doubt since inception has channeled several billions of naira into other facet of government yet the state owned media house remain a mirage. Every now and then the state government roll out coloured adverts spread across some of the notable private owned media where huge sum of state funds are spent but in the state owned media houses, nothing to write home about.
Despite all the out cry by Deltans from every nooks and crannies, government seems not to be interested about the state owned media houses.
The Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan’s led administration, no doubt since inception has channeled several billions of naira into other facet of government yet the state owned media house remain a mirage. Every now and then the state government roll out coloured adverts spread across some of the notable private owned media where huge sum of state funds are spent but in the state owned media houses, nothing to write home about.
Despite all the out cry by Deltans from every nooks and crannies, government seems not to be interested about the state owned media houses.
Dr Nnamdi Onochie Addressing Uduaghan Vision Elders Council on the need to support Governor Eweta Uduaghan come 2011
When the state Information Commissioner, Mr.Oma Djebah initiated the idea for the need to have a reputable media houses in the state, the idea was immediately keyed into by the state government starting with the re-branding of the Pointer Newspapers which the Delta State government launched in Lagos in 2008 which out come was welcomed by every one.
But today, the beautiful idea of such a young man may have been dashed following the inability of the state government release funds to continue with the idea. As I talk today, the paper is still crying and begging for survival.
It would be recalled vividly that Mr. Djebah while inaugurating the Boards of Delta Broadcasting Service, Asaba and Warri recently in Asaba, said “My ministry will spare no efforts at ensuring that the three media organs of the state government perform effectively and efficiently to enlighten and educate Deltans on the polices and programmes of the state government.
It is towards the realization of the Ministry’s vision of revamping, re-engineering and re-positioning the state owned media organs for better service delivery that in November 2007, set up a 14 man committee which comprised of seasoned journalists from both the print and electronic organs across the country was set up to re-appraise the conceptional frame work and operational modalities of the establishments and come up with workable suggestions that will enhance the fortunes of the outfits and the performance of their staff”.
Ogbueshi Douglas Okolotu mapping out strategies on the way forward for the realization of Uduaghan Vision to Elders and Ward Leaders ahead of Delta North Rally for Governor Eweta Uduaghan
According to the widely traveled and experienced seasoned Journalist of international repute. “The revamping of the two electronic media establishments has been broken into three phases. The first phase is the refurbishing of the radio arms of the two stations which will commence soon, while the second phase will entail the refurbishing of the television arms. Work on the third phase will involve the refurbishing of the booster stations and the inter-connectivity of the two stations, to enable them give out better service to Deltans.
My Ministry will also ensure that in the next stage of revamping process, the Delta Printing and Publishing Company Limited, publisher of the Pointer title will be completely overhaul with the installation of brand new machines, purchase of vehicles, computers and training of staff, to improve its operations and service delivery in order to attract greater leadership and patronage from advertisers” Mr. Djebah assured.
But the big question now is that, in actual sense of the gentle man’s big ideas, has government been able to release funds for the prosecution of these laudable ideas of Mr.Djebah, the answer is as good as capita NO.
After three years, the three government media houses are still in comatose, still in shambles, still in slumber and horrible working condition, staff complaining here and there, suffering from bad working environment, what a big shame and disgrace to an oil rich state like Delta state.
This could be very shocking that a whole DBS, Asaba still hire cameras outside. Though it was learnt that about two cameras were recently bought to support the only two cameras the station had before.
Just take a look at this, In the News department, a full broadcasting outfit like DBS, Asaba, there are no vehicles, studio in a very terrible and disarray state where cut and nail jobs are carried out. Eleven years of democracy and three years of Uduaghan's administration, DBS TV is not on air for over three weeks now and the governor seems not bothered.
Just take a look at this, In the News department, a full broadcasting outfit like DBS, Asaba, there are no vehicles, studio in a very terrible and disarray state where cut and nail jobs are carried out. Eleven years of democracy and three years of Uduaghan's administration, DBS TV is not on air for over three weeks now and the governor seems not bothered.
Authentic information before this writer has it that there are certain cabal in the Uduaghan’s government who never want to see the state owned media houses grow to a standard.
A senior Director in the Ministries of Finance who pleaded for anonymity who confided in this writer disclosed that the Ministry and the Economic planning Ministry have since inception contributed to the lingering problems militating against the state owned media houses.
Explaining further, the Director who is pained over the situation stated that government can not beat its chest to tell Deltans that actually they really mean well for these media houses but rather, government prepares to channels all its resources to physical projects the people can see with their naked eyes.
According to the Director, whenever government make pronouncement for approval of funds to change the life of these media houses, these two Ministries frustrate all efforts to see that the money is released because the idea is that any money spent is a waste. “My brothers don’t be deceived government knows where the problems of these media houses lie. I want to say without fear or favour that the Information Commissioner as a young man and first timer in government has tried his best to make the media houses a haven for modern broadcasting”.
I know because of fear and as a government man, Mr. Djebah, the Information Commissioner will not tell you all this, but the truth is that he is not the cause of the predicament been faced by the state media houses that I can assure you. However I am not holding brief for him, but the truth must be told”.
Investigations carried out revealed that the equipment been used presently in the state owned electronics media houses were bought ten years ago by Hon. Young Daniel Igbrude then Commissioner of Information and all the equipment are now absolute compared to the current modern standard of Broadcasting.
Hon Onochie Nash Okonkwo supporting the Pro-Uduaghan movement at the Elders Forum For Uduaghan
A visit to AIT, Channels, and Silver Bird Television Stations in Lagos
My brothers and Sisters I must beg that you people should take the pains to visit the Asaba DBS station, you will marvel at what is going on there, all the equipment there have collapsed.
The POINTER, DBS and DRTV are gradually going into extinction with the irregular off the air and the unattractive daily and weekend Pointer which have been nicknamed “Photocopy”.
The POINTER, DBS and DRTV are gradually going into extinction with the irregular off the air and the unattractive daily and weekend Pointer which have been nicknamed “Photocopy”.
After Over 40 years of silence, these American Professors (Fraser Ottanelli -male- and Elizabeth Bird -female-) are helping Asaba October 1967 genocide survirors seek and obtain peaceful redress and bright future.
My brothers and Sisters it is a big shame that for a state like Delta blessed with enormous human and material resources, cut and nail works are still been carried out in its TV and Radio stations even the Pointer Newspapers and the workers work in a very terrible environment or are you talking of several days the Radio station will go off the air and upon all these, the government of the day is there boasting to have delivered to Deltans the dividends of democracy.
It beats ones imagination if actually the Uduaghan's government really knows all what dissemination of information is all about or the vital rolls of government owned media.
On August 27, 2009, Delta state clocked 18 years and in this digital and computer age, the state cannot boast of standard media houses to showcase its activities, what a big shame and disgrace.
Recently, the Best Sisters Health Association of Nigeria organized a step-down training on Roll Back Malaria Campaighn for community health care workers and peer educators at Oshimili North LGA, Delta State.
It would be recalled that on August 27, 2008, who is who in the media World across the globe gathered in the Prestigious Grand Hotels, Asaba to grace the state first information summit and official unveiling of the True Face of Delta (TFD) by the state governor, Dr Emmanuel Uduaghan.
The event which was packaged by the state Information Commissioner, Mr. Oma Djebah had the former Secretary -General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku as the chairman of the occasion while the likes of Chief John Odey, Minister of Information Communication, Alhaji M.D. Yusuf, former Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Timi Alaibe, MD/CEO, Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and Prof. Sam Oyovbaire, former Minister of Information were Guests of honour in the one day event.
The event which was packaged by the state Information Commissioner, Mr. Oma Djebah had the former Secretary -General of the Commonwealth, Chief Emeka Anyaoku as the chairman of the occasion while the likes of Chief John Odey, Minister of Information Communication, Alhaji M.D. Yusuf, former Inspector-General of Police, Mr. Timi Alaibe, MD/CEO, Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) and Prof. Sam Oyovbaire, former Minister of Information were Guests of honour in the one day event.
The concept of the event according to the initiator, Information Commissioner, Mr. Djebah was to bring Delta state into the World map of comity of nation against the backdrop that so many people have tagged the state with all sort of unimaginable and unprintable names to the detriment of the good people of Delta state.
The True Face of Delta (TFD) project is driven basically by a strategy assembled under the auspices of the Honourable Commissioner for Information, Mr. Oma Djebah which has Mr. Oma Djebah, Commissioner for Information as Head (TFD), Mr. Richard Mofe-Damijo, Commissioner, Directorate of Culture and Tourism, Mr. Oke Epia, Special Assistant to the Information Commissioner as Manager, (TFD), Mr. Austin Mowah—Director of Information, Delta State,Mr. Sunny Ogefere, Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Mr. Norbert Chaizor, Delta Broadcasting Service, Warri and Mr. Lucky Omokri, Head, Website Unit as Members of the team.
Perception they say is every thing. In these days of media power, governments all over the world are increasingly becoming aware of the need to strategically map out information management systems to promote their efforts and showcase their development policies for the citizenry to make input.
Perception they say is every thing. In these days of media power, governments all over the world are increasingly becoming aware of the need to strategically map out information management systems to promote their efforts and showcase their development policies for the citizenry to make input.
This vibrant team said “It has also become very much important for governments, while providing the enabling environment for businesses to thrive, to showcase investment opportunities in the state.
For a state like
It is against this backdrop that the TFD project comes in. True Face of Delta is a Perception-Re-ordering and strategic marketing concept aimed at promoting the rich socio-cultural heritage of Delta State, the prevailing peaceful climate, investment opportunities and the overall development strides of the Administration of His Excellency, Dr. Emmanuel Eweta Uduaghan within the context of the Three Point Agenda (TPA).
TFD is wide in scope and reach. Its campaigns and activities will have national and international reach without losing sight of Deltans in Delta as it is one of our goals to make Deltans true Ambassadors of their homeland” they said..
Today several states like Imo, Lagos and Anambra among others have keyed into the beautiful initiative of Mr.Djebah where you can find a face of this and face of that in so many of these state across the nation.
Mr.Djebah might not be a politician but has done his best even more than these so called politicians who deserve nothing but to die by hanging, a source said.
Government house sources who confided in the writer revealed that they were sometime ago privileged to witnessed a presentation by the Information Commissioner before EXCO on the need to pay more attention to the state media houses but some persons sees it as not important and even when monies are approved they are not release which they said have hindered progress in the media houses.
The sources however warned that if before the Uduaghan’s government elapses nothing was done to the media houses, the Finance and Economic planning Ministries must be held responsible not Mr.Djebah.
According to the government house sources, Mr. Djebah’s proposals to government to revamp the state media houses were presented to government in EXCO even before government came up with the idea of focusing more attention on street lights projects, Asaba International Air-Port, Roads Dualisation, even the recently built multi-billion naira government Asaba Conference center (DOME) among others.
The governor who refuted a newspaper publication that he refused to sign the 2010 budget said "The budget was not signed because it was not ready" according to him "Government is running and we are still paying contractors, so I don’t see any reason why it should be a political issue".
The budget is made up of a total recurrent expenditure of 115 billion naira and total capital expenditure of 218 billion naira, shortly after the governor signed the bill into law; he said "I assure you that with this budget we will fast track our developmental activities for the benefit of Deltans".
Governor Uduaghan had on December 9th, 2009 presented a budget proposal of 235.71 billion naira to the Sate House of Assembly after which it was increased by the legislative arm to 322 billion naira.
Recently, Prof. Amos Utuama (SAN), chairman, Committee on the Third Anniversary of the Administration of Dr. Emmanuel Uduaghan, in a press briefing, Thursday, 20th, May, 2010 at the Press Center, government House, Asaba had told Journalists that the state Broadcasting station (DBS), Asaba, will soon be connected to the satellite.
According to the Deputy Governor “Government was poised to reposition the TV station and this year’s budget the sum of N1.6 billion has been approved to reinvigorate the TV station, DBS and another N150 million for the Pointer Newspaper” promising that the government intends to put DBS on satellite very soon”.
Why is the revamping of the state owned media houses been politicized when the governor is aware that he uses the medium to reach out to the grassroots mostly now that another election is around the corner again.
I challenge the governor to as a matter of importance and priority to wake up to the responsibility of giving the state media houses the needed and deserve face lift, having a trusted and tested media guru with him as the Information Commissioner so that when his administration ends, his name will be written in gold.
Reacting to the pitiable condition of the media houses, Delta state 2007 Governorship Candidate, People’s Redemption Party, (PRP), Comrade Igbini Odafe Emmanuel accused Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of hiding under the ineffectiveness of the state owned gloried media houses to continue to steal state funds to the detriment of Deltans.
Comrade Igbini also lambasted the state government of losing focus in revamping the three glorified owned media houses which are in the state of comatose.
Meanwhile when contacted over the predicaments been faced by the media houses in the state, Information Commissioner, Mr. Djebah said it has not been easy at all in the past three years.
According to Mr.Djebah who debunked the insinuation from some quarters that the N1.6billion for DBS and N150million for Pointer Newspapers has been released to him stated that every challenge been faced by the sector will be a thing of the past by the grace of God as according to him those who are not in government, who don’t understand how government is run only sit somewhere and begin to talk what they don’t know.
Mr. Djebah however assured Deltans that government will do everything with its resources to see that the state has a befitting standard media houses.
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