What I have learned from the Libyan saga

Abraham Maslow was right. Satisfaction of physiological needs gives rise to the need to satisfy higher needs. The people of Libya may have had good good health care,education and roads but they had unmet civil and political needs. The west will intervene in a crisis if the country in question has oil and the conflict is getting in the way of the world's supply of crude oil. The African Union is toothless in the face of the west's hand wringing. The United Nations' Security Council is a mouthpiece for western interests. Staying in power for over four decades makes conditions ripe for a revolution given the right spark. Do not shoot and drop bombs on unarmed street protesters no matter how much power you think you wield. Do not ignore events in your neighbourhood they have a bad habit of spreading to your backyard. All conflicts have underlying economic undertones. Air prowess and strikes dont win wars on their own. 'You need boots on the ground'. Getting direct international intervention in national conflicts takes more than three weeks.

In Uganda,its a tense election eve

Many have been taken aback by the lack of violence in the Ugandan presidential election this year that goes against the experience similar elections in 2001 and 2006.
Ugandan jouralists are bemoaning an uneventful election season that makes it difficult to run 'all the news that is fit to print'.
Many ordinary Ugandans now feel that the unexpected calm before the presidential polls is akin to the calm before the storm.
In church yesterday, the priest strongly advised all his faithful to stock up on cereals just in case the election results spark violence and anarchy.'Buy lots of rice and maize meal and dry beans'he implored.
It is shocking how much violence is expected in the banana republics.
We are to lose almost an entire week in electioneering,voting and returning from upcountry voting trips.
May God bless Uganda!

China is not Russia: Why the US and China can be strategic partners

In the cold war mindset,a country that didnt agree with you ideologicallywas an adversary.
Many in the US view China's economic rise in adversarial terms but China is no USSR.
It is not communist in the strict sense of the world and its pursuit of export market capitalism rules it out of the strictly marxist-lennist lane.
To understand that China is not the ideological opposite of the United States one needs to go back to the power struggle between Mao Tse Tung and Deng Xiopeng in the early 1970s.
Chairman Mao, at the time the paramount leader of China,espoused marxist ideology and wanted China to follow a purist leftist doctrine in its politics and economy. Deng Xiopeng who is the father of China's economic reformation-and therefore it's recent rise to the second largest economy in the world,wanted China to pursue a leftist political ideology but a more liberal economic regime.
China and the United States need each other. They need to see themselves as strategic partners in the coming decades.
A strong and vibrant United States is good for China. Most of China's foreign reserves are in US dollars. The United States is a leading destination of Chinese products.
All major US corporations have operations in China where labor and expertise are cheap.
China constitutes a huge market for US products. The buyer of the Hummer brand of General motors was from China and almost all US computer hard ware companies such as Hewlett Packard,Dell etc have operations in China.
The US and China can strike up a dual partnership that can shape the coming decades.
The thorny issues of a devalued Chinese currency and human rights concerns can be resolved diplomatically without a recourse to more adversorial approaches.

Hope fading for Gbagbo removal from power

Hope is fading fast for the removal of Laurent Gbagbo, the Ivorian leader who defied a presidential election loss and has continued on president despite stringent international pressure to step down.
Diplomatic efforts and threats of his removal by force seem to have done little to weaken his resolve to cling to power despite clearly losing to Outtara according to the Independent Electoral commission of Ivory Coast and UN observers.
Despite several diplomatic pleas including visits by Thabo Mbeki,and an ECOWAS presidents' delegation and Kenyan Prime Minister Odinga's visits to Abidjan under AU urging to plead with Gbagbo to step down, the Ivorian leader is still hanging tough and rejecting any pleas to vanquish state power.
The United States recently proposed to him a generous offer for a post-presidential residency in America which he flatly declined.
Even threats of a military removal have not bore fruit.
And cracks are beginning to emerge in West Africa's ECOWAS resolve to bring Gbagbo to relinquish power.
Ghana announced yesterday that it would not take part in the military removal of Gbagbo because its military is 'overstreched',a clear signal that the alliance against Gbagbo's removal is cracking.
Already the international press is talking about a 'unity government', language which just a few days ago, was alien territory.
It would appear that the prospects of Gbagbo's removal from power are fading fast and a Kenyan-Zimbabwe option seem progressively alluring.
The losers will be Ivory Coast and electoral democracy on the African continent.
The Kenyan and Zimbabwean precedent and now in Ivory Coast seems to point to the demise of African presidential electoral democracy.

Will Ivory Coast go the Kenyan and Zim way?

A disputed election. The losing incumbent is quickly sworn in as president. The supposed victor is left out to dry. Riots and violence break out by angry disaffected youth of the undeclared victor.
International mediation teams jet into the country for talks between warring parties.
After several weeks of negotiations, the losing incumbent remains president and the supposed election winner is declared prime minister , with a few loyalists handed some non descript cabinet dockets in an uneasy,fragile settlement. Sounds familiar? Well this is the script that Zimbabwe and Kenya followed after bitterly disputed presidential elections a few years ago.Is this the future of electoral democracy in Africa?
Are African incumbent presidents becoming too cynical about African electoral democracy?
Hold an election which will leave you as president even when you lose it? Quicly swear in as president, close off your border and then let in a friendly mediator usually one who has been in the presidents club at the AU or EU.
In Ivory Coast this is about to play out between the incumbent and the undeclared victor.
Post election settlements are a real threat to the integrity of African elections and threaten to disenfranchise the African voter. Does national peace have to come at the price of a dashed election?

A little German twist of fate

If you told me in high school that I would visit Germany,the country I read about in my modern european history classes at secondary school, four times, I would think you were nuts.
But life throws us many suprises and my association with Germany ,thus far,is a real suprise ,even to me. Well, Forrest Gump warned me a long time ago, 'life is a box of chocolate, you never know what you are gonna get'.
I have now visited Germany four times in the last two years. That's two visits per year, on average.
And yes, I have enjoyed, immensly, all my trips to Germany.
Even as a child in elementary school, I often quizzed my helpless dad about countries and which was richer than the other(which questions my Dad always patiently provided,thanks dad!), I knew that Germany was one of the most advanced countries on the globe. At the time it was up there with the US and Japan. The Asians of course have had something to say about that lately.
But I didn' count Germany among the first countries I would probably visit. There was the language barrier,the stereo types, and thenthe obvious history,which I mastered as a high school history major.
But as I write, I have now visited Germany more times than any other country outside Uganda.
My association with Germany was never delibarately planned. I would say it was fate and Germany came calling each time.
In 2008, I applied and was selected as a German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD)fellow at the University of Oldenburg.

Will the Kings from the east be as benevolent as those from the west?

It is no secret. The global balance of power is shifting from the west to the east. Martin Jaques has an intriguing book title 'When China Rules the world: The end of the western world and the birth of a new global order'. Studies show that the west is undergoing a steady decline especially in economic terms and the in contrast countries such as China and India are on the rise.
And with the loss of economic predominance so too goes global influence and cultural leadership.
But this diatribe is not about the rise of the east and the fall of the east. Its about who would be a more benevolent global leaders, the Chinese or the europeans for instance.
In Uganda, Vice president Gilbert Bukenya recently urged Ugandans to learn chinese.
European values have ruled the world in the last century. With China becoming an economic power one wonder what kind of global leader China will be. What values will it profess to the world.
Bill Gates was in China recently to talk to some Chinese millionaires about donating to global causes. He didnt get many converts.
Some would say that the west gives to poor countries out of guilt of a history of colonialism and imperialism and that China doesnt owe the poor world anything.
Would human rights, democracy, the rule of law, liberty be the dominant ideal in a world led by China?
For all the west's failings, the world in the past two centuries has grown to expect some sense of 'western' justice in the conduct of human affairs. With Asian countries emerging as global power houses will european values still prevail.
As africans we have grown used to western philanthropy,albeit with its strings attached' but will a world ruled by Asia in the next fifty years continue with a western value system?
Can Asia provide a compassionate leadership of the world? Can it guarentee a 'just' world order.
Will international law systems such as the United Nations still play the role they do today? Will diplomacy still be chosen over war?
Can the world depend on Asian global leadership the way the west has done in past centuries?