Friday Afternoon Africana

Because Congolese singer-songwriter Barbara Kanam has a garden of love that she wants to share with you:

This Week in the Great Lakes

1. Head of MONUC claims the UN mission has not ‘signed a pact with the devil‘; less clear on relationship with purgatory.

2. Andrew Mwenda asks if Rwandan oppositional candidate Ingabire will be Rwanda’s saviour, or at least bring back cheese and mustard next time she travels from Belgium.

3. Sarkozy apologizes for French involvement in the Rwandan genocide; Kagame thanks France in English.

4.   Horrible drought in Burundi leaves people very, very thirsty.

5. Thomas Lubanga’s lawyers request witnesses testify via video conferencing from eastern DRC; webcams purchased for everyone in the Congo!

Franco-Rwandan Relations & the Era of Fruit Baskets

After three years of broken diplomatic relations, French President Nicolas Sarkozy arrives in Kigali today. It is the first time a French president has landed on Rwandan soil since the genocide in 1994 and an attempt to reinvigorate ties:

Speaking to journalists in Kigali, President Paul Kagame confirmed that the visit was on and that it had “implications on how we carry forward this relationship (between France and Rwanda).”

Now that diplomatic ties have been renewed with both countries sending their respective envoys to each other, there is a general feeling in Rwanda that the continued failure by the French to own up and apologise for their failures could derail full restoration of Franco-Rwanda relations.

According to the French press, the stake in the rapprochement between the two countries is more cultural than economic.

However, renewed Franco-Rwandan relations are not about cultural and diplomatic reconciliation. They are about failed politics.

The French have all but lost their economic stronghold in Sub-Saharan Africa and are trying to finagle their way back in.  Sarkozy is trying to patch up the policy pitfalls of Mitterand and Chirac, but lacks the influence or impact.  Kouchner, Sarko’s Africa man, thinks everything is a humanitarian crisis and doesn’t have the political savvy to engage countries that haven’t been hit by disaster in a mutually beneficial way. Sarkozy’s two-stop Africa trip to Gabon and Rwanda, an oil producer and extractive resource powerhouse respectively,  illustrates the bluntly forward and increasingly ineffective French agenda in Africa.

On the other hand, the Kagame administration is smug with the visit. Now that they are a commonwealth country, they don’t need to worry about French patronage politics. Rather, Kagame can use the two countries tumultuous relations to shift focus from Commonwealth Election Monitors and human rights criticism of the regime back to Kagame’s favored arena of genocide politics.  In their meeting today, Sarkozy and Kagame are scheduled to discuss genocide fugitives living in France and ways to ‘work past’ the French indictment of Kagame for purportedly killing Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana. Moreover, bringing back the French into the equation might symbolically quell internal Rwandan frustration over the quick Anglicization of the country. Either way, Kagame gets to dictate the rhetorical agenda.

The likely outcome of the meeting: Sarkozy goes home with his tail between his legs as the French continue their failed Africa policy and Kagame gains more control over this week’s political agenda in Rwanda. The underlying benefit: Kagame most likely convinced Sarkozy to bring him a fruit basket.

Update: Graham at KigaliWire pointed out that Sarkozy is stopping in other African countries as well. However, France is not following the list supplied by the Tanzanian Daily nation.  France has added Mali and skipped over Equatorial Guinea, in a confusing and bizarre move that reveals more floundering than cohesion.

The Rwanda Trail

The Rwandan Development Board has decided to diversify the country’s tourism by adding a 202 kilometer trail along the eastern shore of Lake Kivu. Because every Great Lakes country needs to claim a spot where the Nile starts:

The 8-day by foot and 3-day by vehicle trail to be known as the Congo-Nile Trail which snakes along the shores of Kivu is being developed by RDB in collaboration with United Nations World Tourism Organisation (UNWTO) and SNV Rwanda.

The trail also covers historical heritage sites including Gihaya Island which had the residence of King Baudouin of Belgium as well as Richard Kandt’s residence at Ishangi, Rusizi District.

It will also comprise of a boat cruise on the Kivu in the new Umunezero Boat acquired by RDB.

Much like the Oregon Trail computer game, tourists trekking this new adventure will cross mountains, rivers,  and hunt and when they arrive at the end-point where the Nile Basin separates from the Congo Basin, they will be greeted by onomatopoeic sounds “BANG,” “WHAM,” and “POW.”

News Alert: Conflict Causes Death, and Altruism

MICROCON’s leading academic sextuplet, Maarten Voors, Eleonora Nillesen, Philip Verwimp, Erwin Bulte, Robert Lensink and Daan van Soest recently tried to figure out how conflict changes long-term behavior. Using experimental data from 35 randomly selected villages in Burundi, the team finds that besides systematic violence and destruction, war isn’t that bad in the long-term:

The main objective of this paper is to examine the causal effect of exposure to violence on behavior in economic experiments in which payoffs vary between choices across three dimensions: timing, riskiness, and social consequences. Do victims of conflict behave more pro-socially, do they have a higher propensity to invest in the future, and are they more prone to taking risks? We try to answer this important question by pulling together survey and new experimental data from Burundi.

Our results strongly suggest that exposure to violence affects behavior – possibly via altering preferences. We find that individuals who have either experienced violence themselves, or who live in communities that have been violently attacked, display more altruistic behavior, are more risk seeking, and act less patiently. Our results are robust across several specifications, and are obtained for both experimental and observational data. We believe they shed important new light on post-war recovery processes by speaking against overly pessimistic views on the destructive long-term consequences of civil war.

The paper does an excellent job of challenging assumptions about how violence alters behavior and is a great read for anybody working in post-conflict reconstruction and development.

Friday Afternoon Africana

Because wildly absurd and somewhat disconcerting Afrikaaner rap group, Die Antwoord, make ridiculous hip-hop electronica dance videos:

This Week in the Great Lakes

2. Rwanda splurges on luxury jets for Government; official statement claims ownership of luxury jets new development metric for post-conflict countries.

2. IMF disburses 10 million USD to Burundi; martinis on the beach for everyone!

3. French envoy to DRC kicks off Economic Community of the Great Lakes Region Conference; hints that community is missing the “economic” part.

4. DRC slaps mining companies with additional taxes; miners forced into low-pay labor now out of jobs.

5. Tanzania Daily Press produces worst article title ever: “Local Tennis Stars Eye Rwanda Scalp.”

New and Amazing Ways to End the Conflict in the Congo, Edition 2

Last week it was goats for disarmament. Now, it’s guinea pigs. According to the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, guinea pigs are the secret to successful famine relief and conflict resolution:

“Small and easy to conceal, guinea pigs are well-suited to (Congo’s) conflict zones, where extreme poverty and widespread lawlessness means that the looting of larger domestic livestock is commonplace,” the group said in a statement.

The furry animals have other advantages: they can be fed kitchen waste and are a relatively low-cost investment compared to other livestock. Crucially, they reproduce quickly, with females giving birth to multiple litters that total 10 to 15 offspring per year.

“None of the scientists had contemplated guinea pigs as an option in (Congo) when the project started,” said CIAT’s Michael Peters. “Now they really could turn out to be indispensable.”

Scoot over United Nations Peacekeepers. Make way for camouflaged and easy-to-conceal guinea pig brochettes.

Ensuring Really, Very Democratic Elections in Burundi

The International Crisis Group has issued a report on the upcoming presidential and parliamentary elections in Burundi.  Word on the street is that election preparation is getting a bit militarized:

The CNDD-FDD youth wing’s physical training, war songs and quasi-military organisation raise the spectre of militia violence and a large-scale intimidation campaign. The other former rebels, the Forces nationales de libération (FNL) and the Front pour la démocratie au Burundi (FRODEBU) are mobilising their own youth wings to oppose intimidation tactics. The police have remained passive or become accomplices to the ruling party’s abuses. There are thus legitimate fears they could become further politicised, similar to the National Intelligence Service (Service national de renseignement), which is already trying to destabilise the opposition. Meanwhile, the main opposition political parties’ election strategies either have yet to be worked out or, apart from those of a few new players, fail to offer an alternative political vision.

With a lacking opposition (as awesome as oppositional candidate Alexis Sinduhije is, his political networks beyond the Bujumbura elite are shallow) and a return to the aesthetics of youth wing force, politics in Burundi aren’t looking so hot. With the expulsion of the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General to the Mission in Burundi and weak African Union electoral delegations, there aren’t any strong third parties to enforce election recommendations. Rwanda’s probably-not-so-democratic elections, which will be held just a few month before Burundi’s election, might stoke the political flames.

The Crisis Group follows up their insightful political analysis with a series of recommendations on how to ensure a free and fair election in Burundi. However it is difficult for any set of democratic directions to not sound pre-packaged and it is unlikely they will be implemented.

So, what to do? Hope that Government sponsered political TV Show, “Coup Plotters,” is really entertaining.

Friday Afternoon Africana

Because Koffi Olomide, rumba-rapper king of Kinshasa, choreographs construction workers dancing in the streets: