UN and donor employees: third world misery is their career blessing

BY GEORGE KAGAME

I am seated in the waiting lobby of an NGO office located on the 12th floor of a glass skyscraper in downtown Citi. There are eight individual chairs in the lobby but we are only two people waiting for different officials of the NGO whose main activity is to assist Citi families with counselling and awareness services. The other guy has been in the office longer than I have but he seems patient as if what brought him to the office is an important errand and he has to sit it out till his supposed appointment shows up. Despite the fact that there are only two of us waiting and in the past 15 minutes none has been called, the receptionist who is hidden behind a desk that resembles a church pulpit seems quite occupied. She repeatedly picks up the phone and says the same words to different callers. In the 15 minutes that I have been waiting she has picked up more than 15 phone calls and to each she repeated the same words. “She is out of office/ she is in a meeting/do you have an appointment with her?/is she expecting you?” Most of the people working in this NGO are women. Maybe they are the most compassionate lot in the gender class. But it cannot be true, I have been here for 20 minutes now while the lady I am due to meet is being traced or so I am told. The walls in the waiting lobby are affixed with trendy notice boards on which hang pick up brochures and pamphlets, a large flag of Citi stands in the middle, a family from the country walks into the office. The family comprises an aged couple and their chubby teenage boy. They cannot speak Citi so they need a translator. A man in his 20s accompanies them and helps with translation. He has ear piercings and earrings and it is obvious that aged couple do not approve of his presence in their entourage. He is a necessary evil since his services are needed and so they have no choice but to deal with him. They are particularly afraid that their teenage boy seems to like hanging with the translator. But whatever the country family wanted help for seems not forthcoming in this office. They are advised to go back home and make another appointment with the responsible officer of the NGO; as such they are given a phone number on which to make the said second appointment From the look of the old lady, she knows that when they make the call, there won’t be a person to pick up the phone on the other end. But the wisdom of old age tells her to accept what seems to be sincere apologies from the receptionist. The old lady puts up a brilliant performance of hiding her bitterness and obvious frustration at the receptionist and the NGO. The lobby was a good vantage point from which to observe the goings on in the NGO and the hoo haa of what their brochures advertised as activities and services. There was a fair amount of young beautiful woman in tight pants walking about with a pseudo display of urgency. The receptionist speaking on phone or attending to her colleagues was desperately trying to appear humble, courteous, kind, and at the same-time putting up an impressive performance of appearing to be busy too. After 20 minutes of waiting in the offices, I heard the receptionist say, “I am sorry,” more than 16 times when I stopped counting. The NGO is like an embassy of a bigger NGO whose headquarters are located in a huge city overseas and it is one of the major players of the do-good industry. I was here to do my part in the industry which was simply write another story to appear in their journal, brochure or pamphlet about what they do. As a result, I do not have a place in the hierarchy of the organization. I am a contractor and therefore an outsider. The lobby experience reminded me of a time I worked at the UN base in Citi years  yonder. At the UN I was also an outsider and as such I observed the goings on with a detached interest. The UN base was located in a relatively flat part of Citi but it was ironical that most of the employees in the UN offices exclusively drove sports utility vehicles. They might as well have as the UN subsidized the costs of maintenance and fuel. This area was also particularly stable and peaceful relative to the surroundings but this did not stop UN employees to have panic buttons installed in all the rooms of their exclusively built houses. From a distance, everybody at the base appeared busy but they really did nothing to show for their being busy. The violence the base was meant to stop was instead feeding off the excess of the UN. Violence and crime had/have a symbiotic relationship with the UN and the do-gooders. If/when a location where the donor and UN employees had a report of an incident of crime or violence, the employees gleefully wrote a report to their overseas offices that carried alarm and threat in high dozes. This ensured that the salaries and benefits of the employees would be revised in accordance with the crime and violence of the areas where they were working. This was called the hardship allowance. The hardship allowance ensured that the UN became the most hypocritical organization in the world. Having been started to help reduce violence, war, crime, ensure peace and stability prevailed and those other good things of saving the world, the UN employees thrived in war zones and conflict prone areas. This beats the logic behind the do gooders, one was constantly exposed to the double standards of the UN. It happened in Nairobi recently when UN employees publicly protested The UN’s International Civil Service Commission when they reclassified the  UN office in Nairobi from level C to B in what is known as ‘safe’ places to work and the subsequent allowances that the staffers receive for living in such areas. The Nairobi UN staff protested the reclassifying as it reduced their hardship allowance. Interestingly, Nairobi has been a high risk area to work since January 2001 when Mzee Arap Moi was still in charge. Today I prayed for my people in the DR Congo for MONUC is not likely to leave soon while their hardship allowance keeps rising!!

musajja memoirs

Kafulu, I'm scheming in my head a story, "memoirs of a Musajja," It is basically that, memoirs of a Musajja.
Now really, what is a musajja?
Well, a musajja is the archetypical Rwandan immigrant that was born and bred in Uganda. In Uganda Luganda is the biggest language in a country made up of 52 tribes.


Luganda however is the chemistry that keeps the country intact, students, soldiers, chapati makers and the elite speak the thing. The native speakers of Luganda, the Baganda are among the most humiliatingly humble kind, they kneel, they sir to almost every man, some women are in the privileged position of having the title of sir too, when their kind is passing around, his subject prostrate in the way you can only see in movies. Their beads touching the ground as a symbol that only beads sweep the kings pathways. Just imagine how many beads it can take to sweep a dusty rural road and you have an idea of humble.


When Baganda eat it is a feast. Every meal in Buganda is a ceremony. First is served in a circle format on green banana leaves while the staple food, steamed banana mashed in green leaves and peanut sauce. The middle of a circle elaborately spread in the house forms a pinnacle of the meal. From which everyone in the house stretchers under the watchful eye of the family mother, to pick a serving.
All in the household sit squarely on the floor. Only the father of the house sits on a chair and desk which serves as his perennial solo dining table.


The musajja, in his incarnation in Rwanda was a returnee who had lived his entire life as a immigrant without paperwork. You have to Wyclef Jean in his song "Peace God"
Sweetest Girl??
Anyhow the Rwandan musajja was as intriguing as confusing, but that was the brand of a product manufactured in musajjaland. When musajja arrived din Rwanda it was with shock that he realized that hugging are actually African practices, that women don't kneel or wear skirts forever.
That in Rwanda there are actually no cows.
It was a myth what our forefathers told us.
Where did the cows go?
When were they ever in Rwanda actually?
in which parts of the country?
Unless Masisi was part of Rwanda in years yonder.
That I'd agree because there's no place like Masisi if the topic is cows. Masisi and cows and the few native Rwandans have the perfect threesome made in heaven, under the watchful gaze of God.



No actually I was thinking of something else when I started writing this stuff, I was thinking of della Madonina, that is not something complex, i might as well have made it up. It is actually just a socdr match between AC Milan and Inter Milan,



No words for words for della Madonina. Crap, I don't watch soccer anymore. There's nothing like that in North America.

As it goes in Angola, Egypt are up for seven today.
Woe to Ghana,

And guess what Ahmed Hassan is alleged to have said after they earned the finals berth,
"those black people.....Africans don't know how to play soccer....."
Then a reported asked him,"from which continent are you?"
Kasasiro those Arabs.

Calgary is wonderful, is just minus 12 today, snow falling.
But that is a good day by average.
No pub in North America "yalaga" ACN, can you imagine? All this stuff we watched as kids, even, "this is sportscentre," clips.

And these people don't show anything from our side?
As it were, I am now coming up with seven teams that are likely to feature in the 2010 Nationals College Basketball Championships play offs of you know where. it will be around April.

While on March 7th I think is the HUGE SUPERBOWL, it is a cathedral of American sports.Nothing is bigger,
the tradition is that you have a host among your friends, then each one carries beer, chilli sauce, beer, and even the women carry themselves....
Yeah, it is a long rant,
Not heard from you in days,
just "Telling on myself."

Haiti

Unedited Ramblings 
Last Sunday New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an opinion article that has caused a quiet outrage. Commenting on the horrific earthquake in Haiti that killed over 50,000 people, Brooks suggested it’s mostly the Haitians, not nature, that should be blamed.

Brooks controversially suggested that Haitian culture (thus black culture, if you wish to stretch it) is given to underachieving. Also that it’s averse to planning, so Haitians build sloppy houses that crumbled like a pack of cards when the quake struck.
Maybe he has a point, because we have to acknowledge that if the earthquake had hit quake-prone cities Tokyo or San Francisco, 50,000 wouldn’t have been killed. Maybe 150. Reason? They build houses to withstand quakes, and are better prepared for emergencies.

Like many Third World cities, Port-au-Prince has the same problem you would find in Nairobi, Kampala, Lagos, or Cairo: Thousands of people living buildings that are unfit for human habitation because a corrupt official took a bribe, closed his eyes, and issued an occupancy certificate.
Brooks is not the first, nor will he be the last, Caucasian commentator to argue that Third World cultures, and black ones in particular, are inefficient.

Controversial (and even detestable) as his point might be, we have got to that point where the Brooks of this world can no longer be countered with argument alone. That is even before one considers what Pat Robertson said in reference to Haiti's misery, saying that the Haitians have a pact with the devil in regard to their fight to end slavery from the French in the 18th C.
We need a shining example of a black country that is a shining example of economic success, efficiency, and innovation, in the world. It stands to reason that is we are as good as everyone else (which we are are), it is time for us to show it - we should do as well as everyone else.




What do white people that have no interest in Africa for example know about Botswana? Mauritius? Gabon? Gambia? And some other 'black' (black even sounds evil to many) countries??


Remember the the comments about black people in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide?? How we are so savage as to butcher ourselves on a whim??

Well, today most people of sane minds are marveling at the shining star that is Rwanda. Interesting that natural is not racist, or is it??

I am reminded of Hurricane Katrina, the Tsunami in Asia, the floods in Philippines, the earthquake in Tokyo as you mentioned

fLOODS killed many in China recently, (in that country, they prudently don't allow western media to sway opinion that way the media is doing to Haitians, who in the wake of the earthquake are now portrayed as a violent lot, bent on looting. Now the priority there is SECURITY rather than emergence relief.

And of yes, it is christmas time foe the good old aid workers.

No. It is not the shining example of a black country that we need, (it will never happen if the standards are set elsewhere)
We instead need many black people to bring us on the information highway, we need strONG black media, to tell our own stories. and to resist the idea of understanding ourselves based on other people's conceptions and impressions of us.

AN Important meeting I dream of having one day

Having a meeting with a plate of chicken. “Hello, Chicken. Glad you could make it to this function. Let me introduce everybody. On  your left are chips and next to chips is coke. They are going to be accompanying you on your mission. You will have plenty of time to get to know them better. We have scheduled a mingling session for later. Heh heh. Now that we are all here, let’s get right into it. The venue for this afternoon’s festivities is my mouth. And Speaking of getting right into it…”

Cowism and Umoja: Choosing between two hard ideologies for the EAC

BY GEORGE KAGAME

Forty years ago or some, Tanzania established itself as a country of umoja, meaning unity. Umoja was also a popular brand of rubber slip on sandals, we called them Sapatu and in Rwanda they were known as Kama'mbiri.

Sapatu was a measure of pride in East Africa in the 80s, in some communities the thing was worn strictly indoors, as it was considered distasteful to walk about in "things of the bathroom outside the house."  In this community the wearer afforded normals shoes so as to render the sapatu an exclusively indoor attire, like an under pant. It was considered shameful to wear sapatu in public in some areas.

While in other communities,  the sandals were 'sunday' shoes, the other days of the week were spent thumping the earth bare foot, most times in scorching heat. Thank God it was not winter.  A picture of a kid wearing a pair of Umoja, and a smiling face smeared with vaseline jelly is a monument in my home town of Busunju todate.

Tanzania strictly and officially practiced Umoja both as a popular footwear as well as a political ideology but somewhere in the late 1990s something went wrong, socialism aka Umoja alias Ujaama was abolished.But while Umoja was successful in Tanzania, (they never had tribal wars, spoke a local national language that is soon becoming the official language of Africa and had a stable government on top of a coastal city, those bastards!!), Tanzania really was not much different from other Umoja adherents in its footwear reincarnation.

As a result of the success of Umoja in later years I shared a room at university with a Tanzanian journalist currently reporting for The Daily News. As would happen in our universities, each country had a group that brought together students from one country into a single association, this association participated in drama and theatre performances representing their countries at cultural galas. Rwanda was a leading contender in most of these cultural galas.

After one performance by a Rwandan dance troupe, the UN as the Tanzanian journalist who traced his lineage to Rwanda called himself,  said his country had only learnt about socialism in textbooks while Rwanda had in it their DNA and dances, he found it particularly hilarious that the dances resembled the movement of cows.

Then we would speak of people doing 'good things in the world', when we talked of vegetarians he said Rwandans care for the environment, thats why they dance like cows! "We have also learnt this by textbook," he would say. The cow was important in Rwanda that the business of eating meat was despised by the 'highly cultured' of the day.

A cow would be left to age gracefully and if seen to be incapable of living anymore it would be bartered for beans and sweet potatoes by neighbouring crop farmers. As a monument to the cow, the Kinyarwanda dance was crafted to actually resemble the movement and make up of the cow in the community. The UN said Rwanda practiced Cowism. Before Send A Heifer and Land O' Lakes thought about it, "they also learnt it from the textbooks," he said.

It is ironic that the cow, the way we know it in East Africa, has defined the story of Rwanda. The country is small but perhaps because on large parts of all its comprising hills,  a cattle ranch could coexist amidst crop farming ranches. Crop and animal have been central in the scope of the story. Sometimes and in foresight, the interest of the two could  override each other, but largely the two got along quite well. Someone later broadened the scope of "got along quite well" or simply changed its meaning and then things got of of order.

The business of the cow and its importance was in its recent replenishment officially a program at the current Ministry of Agriculture. It goes under the auspices of Girinka. Among its tenets is that each household with a given income capacity was given a cow as income support  for families, but with immediate and urgent emphasis to those in abject poverty. At the time of the cow story getting to the newspapers, the cow givers had 'dished' the cows to people who were relatively well to do and could afford their own cows after-all.

The recent cow story comes just before the report on the land squabbles in the Eastern Province shows up in your face.

If you are not familiar with the land, note that, in the Eastern province it took President Paul Kagame’s personal intervention in resolving matters connected to unequal distribution of land.

In large parts of the province, senior security officials had acquired large portions of land making many peasants landless and reducing them to squatters. Currently there are, according to the ministry of lands, 7.5 million plots of land in the country serving a population expected to be above 10 million now.

Cowism has its dangers, as seen with Girinka just as are many its benevolence targets; "a chosen group of one.."  And if you think Land and cow was a mess, read about the scholarship loans and how they are managed. One highly placed journalist at the Focus wrote: " Numerous allegations are that whoever gets loans from SFAR do so only a) after lengthy periods of pleading and begging, b) if you are his personal friend and c) if you are one of his girlfriends."

Superstition and witchcraft

Is superstition king in Africa? You bet. Even I am scared enough not to give details, but I will tell the story. There is a rich East African farmer, and four years he went to his farm which at the edge of a forest. He thought he saw armed men deep inside the forest, and thinking they were protecting illegal loggers he crawled to the edge of the forest and peeped over to see.

What he saw shocked him to the bone. There were many armed men around. A little inside in a clearing, was a witch doctor (whom the farmer knew) in feather cap and leopard skins standing over a bare-chested figure. The witch doctor was sprinkling “magical potions” over the kneeling man. The kneeling fellow was the most powerful in the land!!! And there he was being sprayed probably with chicken blood mixed with crocodile teeth and mountain gorilla testicles powder!

This should not come as a surprise. According to a report by the Pew Research Centre released last week, roughly one in four Christians in sub-Sahara Africa believes sacrifices to spirits or ancestors can protect them from bad things happening.
The report, published April 15, said: “Sizable percentages of both Christians and Muslims - a quarter or more in many countries - say they believe in the protective power of juju (charms or amulets).

In Tanzania and South Africa – where 60 per cent and 87 per cent of respondents respectively claimed to be Christian – more than half the people surveyed (60 per cent and 56 per cent respectively) said they believed that sacrifices to ancestors or spirits could protect them from harm. (See “Tolerance and Tension: Islam and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa”, at http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=515).

In Uganda, a minister who is a very Born-Again Christian who wants gays and lesbians to be hanged, adulterers to be stoned, and critics of the government (he believes President Yoweri Museveni is God’s messenger) to be tortured, did a U-turn when it came to witchcraft. Child sacrifice is rampant in Uganda, and when it seemed to be getting out of control, there were calls for tough laws against witchcraft. The minister, however, came out and said a tough law that imposes the death penalty for extreme juju was too harsh. So to him, sacrificing children was a less than cheating on your husband or wife, consensual gay and lesbian sex.

If you a child living with albinism, you can be killed and eaten in full sight of the police and they will not intervene. There was that horrible story in Tanzania two weeks ago when a man raided the house of the single mother who lived next door to him. She had an albino child. He frightened the hell out of her, leaned down, chopped off the arm of the child, and walked out calmly with it!

How crooked feet can make for an epic end of year story

BY GEORGE KAGAME

I was thinking of an epic write up to end 2009 and start 2010 with some sort of unique foresight but before I could think of anything to write I checked this paper’s hypothesis of the past as well as outlook for the new year. I started terribly in the exercise by reading first, Betumire Pan’s “Let’s Explode the Myth of ‘Baringa’!”

While giving a concise explanation of Baringa, a Kinyarwanda verb for a certain type of shadow dance, the writer almost captures the meaning of a related word (Mbariga) in my first language.

Mbariga in this case means a person’s feet face sideways instead of facing in the direction straight of the body. When such a person walks the strides resemble a flat ground broom, the feet are like wings! In fact there was legend in my neighbourhood that people with Mbariga never walked, they were always flying. They were also said to face difficulty in walking and keeping in straight lines. As such when an individual lost direction or knocked something to the floor while walking about, a person with Mbariga would be blamed or they would be reprimanded with the statement; “Stop walking as if you have Mbariga.”

Baringa and Mbariga aside, Betumire does a wonderful job by starting his ‘explosion’ with the idea that most people in the media predictably, are currently giving their treatise of the past decade, and as such there is no need for all of us to take more ink and pages of the paper talking about last or new year. His cynicism ensured that my own take on the end of the year was thrown to the dustbin of the computer. 

The computer itself is what I had come to consider as the centre of my “end of year analysis” as it is the single most important idea and object that defined the decade. Yes, the good old computer brought me the third street Nigerian movies, the internet, mobile phone, DVD, reality television and most importantly UTAKE.

Had it not been for Betumire's note I was going to fill this space with more mambo jumbo of facebook, google, Obama, Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton  and all newsy crap, but no, Mbariga is important and it also needs some coverage. This is because the ailment is not given serious thought by officials in planning sectors. But problem is that Mbariga is not so controversial and while one is writing about such topics as Mbariga, it is generally advised that they listen to such songs as:”These are the times” by Billy Joel. Because frankly, what is so inspiring to write about Mbariga?

Mbariga is a minor natural physical disorder at the lower end of the human body and happens when the feet face a parallel direction to that of the body which they carry. It can be corrected with gradual practice such that the feet face straight ahead of the body, just like a poor alinement of the teeth can be made good by the devices placed in the mouth whose name I don’t know. But because the feet are hidden away in closed shoes or in dirt, their problems are not taken with the aura of other ailments on other part parts of the body. And as if speaking for the less fortunate parts of the body,Tanzanian hip hop artist Professor J raps in his song Nazeeka; " "Ukitaki ku'juwa muhimu wa matako jaribu kukaa'ria kichwa." Loosely translated If you want to know the importance of a bum try sitting on your head.

 I 'suffered' from the Mbariga disorder myself exactly 10 years ago and can witness recovery from the thing. The cure of Mbariga, if there’s anything like that is walking. Walk, walk, walk and just like the way the actor of Forrest Gump runs in the movie, walk with out end until the feet start to face straight like other normal feet.

So with this ailment I spent many days and sometimes nights walking. I would walk to events, to class, to town, to the market and sometimes to community ceremonies. Other times I invited myself to all the ceremonies that happened to be in the chosen line of walking on any given day and time.

One time, like so many in my neighbourhood I was in a national stadium where some important people had organized a prayer crusade to usher in a new millennium. The world was reportedly ending at some second of that night and the Son of God was returning. And even if the important people never publicly mentioned it, the prayer crusade was organized such that if Jesus was coming back to mother earth that night, he would find ‘us.’ (US being me, the crowd of the neighbourhood plus the important people in prayer.) Does the guy have to come in the night by the way?

There had been concerns about a millennium bug that was eating into all kinds of machinery and computer chips and at some second some of these collapsed, but we the humans made it through.

So as Billy Joel sings in his melody:“This is the time to remember/'Cause it will not last forever,/These are the days to hold on to /'Cause we wont although we'll want to./This is the time/The time is gonna change./ You've given me the best of you/ And now I need the rest of you.”