Letter

I would have liked the editorial (Pambazuka News 131: Liberation and the Unfinished Business of Democratic Consolidation in Southern Africa) to go into the gendered dynamics of frustration beyond the new class now handing over their briefcases to ubiquitous body guards. The other day some young ladies came to the Pan African Movement and I said I was a radical feminist in the sense that I want to get to the root of the problem: Why are women marginalized and why are promises not kept? Why have the goal posts shifted on socio economic transformation? Why are Africans and poor women peasants for example getting impoverished by the day in the much-vaunted globalised order?

Compare and contrast the arms sales figures to Africa: small arms alone account for $22b, money poured into the coffers of the rich as we subsist on less than a dollar a day. It was understood in the heady liberation days that the main objective was to craft a better world. When in Mwalimu Nyerere's words Africans would control the "commanding heights of the economy". Indeed the anti globalisation refuseniks cry: Another world is possible. But how is it possible for me when that is the cry of young unemployed workers in the North joined by several NGOs funded by Northern NGOs, many supported by the same callous G8 governments known for their double standards, surviving on Northern per diems and filing financial reports to the North, breeding dependency.

Where is the African state, who is it accountable to now that it is run by "independent Africans"? Or are they? Is it the leadership style, modes of control or what is known as raison d'etat in French. Has the State subsumed the populace to which it owes its rise? As a Pan Africanist I still wonder why all the objectives of African unity are still but a remote possibility, the economic and geo political rationale notwithstanding. An article on Tito Mboweni in yesterday's Monitor in Uganda opens thus: "TM...is probably not alone in his scepticism about a single African currency ..." Yes, unfinished business, a creeping Orwellian nightmare. But not forever. A luta continua.