Africa Blogging roundup 22 September 2008

The Fish Bowl
The Fish Bowl though not critical of President Mbeki’s tenure he does not believe history will judge him kindly. However he is critical of both the actions of the NPA and the response of ANC President Jacob Zuma to the calls for Mbeki to resign.
“I will go further to say that Zuma's silence during this process as president of the ANC has been one of his greatest failures in the past few years. Regardless of his perceived involvement or not, he is the top man in the ANC party, and he should have been a much, much stronger voice. Calls for unity should be coming from him, not the secretary-general, and it only adds to the view that the ANC at present is suffering from an abject lack of strong leadership.

Regardless, Zuma looks free to now take his place as president-elect and will undoubtedly be the next president of South Africa (acting president aside).”

My Haven
My Haven takes a biblical perspective on the drama.
“If we were in biblical times I’d probably say indeed this man was a man of God!”
Perhaps a big dramatic and over zealous, he does go to criticise the media and the what he sees as the failure of democracy in South Africa...
“I also thought of the fine line between being a “Mbeki critic” and an “anti-Mbeki pagan”. I have seen that sensational journalism has become obsessed with Mbeki, over-analysing and misleading the country. I would like to think that this is a sign that our democracy is maturing. As one opposition leader said, our democracy is now at its adolescent stage. No need for me to tell you what happens during that stage.”

Commentary South Africa
Commentary South Africathough highly critical and disdainful of Mbeki’s presidency is appalled at how a President can be thrown out by “the ANC and Zuma Camp” without he or any other citizens having a say in the matter.
“To be frank I’m struggling to reconcile my gut-reaction to the NEC’s petulent demands and Mbeki’s meekness with the simple fact that, so far, nothing in this process over the weekend has violated any regulations or constitutional laws. This is the wheels of the ANC and government moving ever so rapidly towards a goal I can’t quite see at the moment. I want to be outraged that this can happen. That we can lose our president without having an ounce of a say about it, that the ANC and the Zuma camp can depose our president at the snap of a finger while he himself has yet to undergo trial for corruption. It’s worrying, but at the same time, it’s entirely above-board.”

YBlog ZA
YBlog Z though he alludes to his “aloof nature”, is clearly a supporter of Mbeki who he believes leaves with his “moral integrity in tact”.
“Thabo Mbeki is a quiet man of few words. A tireless worker, he took his mandate seriously and expected South Africans to do the same. Elected to office, he saw little need for populism, eschewing fireside chats for negotiation and action, most frequently elsewhere and in relative obscurity. Discrete diplomacy was his talent and he was damned good at it.

Despite evidence to the contrary (many crossed Thabo and few survived), opportunists insisted his unassuming but aloof nature — painted 'paranoid' or 'conspiratorial' — to be the chink in his armor. Sooner or later, they believed (or in MotoMouth Malema's case, boasted), they would take him down.”

The Moor Next Door
The Moor Next Door provides us with a rare glimpse of the actions of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) operating in Mauritania and the Saharan region of North Africa. Having received copies of the interrogation transcripts of three terrorist suspects, he highlights some of the major aspects of the interrogation revealing a complex organisation which is spread throughout the Sahara region including Mali, Niger and Senegal as well as Algeria and Mauritania.
“This indicates that the AQIM presence in Mauritania is basically a GSPC [an Islamic militia operating to overthrow the Algerian government] colony whose operations and finances are controlled by Algerians and carried out by Mauritanians. They are less bin Laden’s franchise as they are El Para’s. When asked what the organization hoped to gain by recruiting suicide bombers, Ould Sidina responds that it was his understanding that Mauritanian youth were being recruited for use as suicide bombers in Algeria, not in Mauritania. He claims to have left AQIM because they started to sell drugs to help finance themselves, which should help us to understand AQIM within its wider strategic environment in the Sahara: as I and others have said, its existence is critically tied to the smuggling routes in the south-western Sahara, even more so than it is to jihadi ideology”

Black Looks
Black Looks guest blogger, Mia Nikasimo writes a series of articles on being a Nigerian trans lesbian. In this piece she writes about transphobia amongst lesbians and the scrutiny faced by translesbians like herself amongst the community.
“It is no surprise that suddenly all the lesbians around you feel threatened by the unknown they assume that you present them with. It is something people do out of insecurity, paranoia and a scream out for approval. The question I would love a straight answer to is, who’s transphobic/homophobic now? The assumption that only female born women can be lesbian has a history as dated as humanity itself. Translesbianism is only one strand of womanhood and trans-homosexuality (i.e. transsexual and homosexuality), there are trans-gay-men (a strand of manhood) out there doing their thing on various platforms too: be they non op, pre op or post op and we date with as much diversity as the mainstream does.”

Sotho
Finally, Sotho makes a plea for Troy Davis who is to be executed in the US on the 23rd September. By the time you are reading this it is very possible that an innocent man has been murdered by the State of Georgia and a racially divided justice system.
“The decisions about who lives and who dies are being made along racial lines by a nearly all white group of prosecutors. The death penalty presents a stark symbol of the effects of racial discrimination. In individual cases, this racism is reflected in ethnic slurs hurled at black defendants by the prosecution and even by the defense. It results in black jurors being systematically barred from service, and in the devoting of more resources to white victims of homicide at the expense of black victims. And it results in a death penalty in which blacks are frequently put to death for murdering whites, but whites are almost never executed for murdering blacks. Such a system of injustice is not merely unfair and unconstitutional–it tears at the very principles to which this country struggles to adhere.”

* Sokari Ekine blogs at www.blacklooks.org
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/