The European Union plans to create a trust fund to disburse European aid to Africa without depending on the World Bank, according to the bloc's top aid official. "European aid money should be spent according to European policies," EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel told journalists. He lamented that the EU does not have the influence it should in the World Bank. The 25-nation bloc is the world's biggest aid donor, providing 56 percent of development assistance.

Kenya's opposition coalition has urged the president to dissolve his cabinet following new allegations of corruption against four senior ministers. A recent report by former anti-corruption chief John Githongo was published, saying the four had tried to block corruption investigations. Two of the four, who include the vice-president and the finance minister, publicly denied the charges.

The South African government has gone to court to seize assets worth over $3m from businessman Schabir Shaik. The case began in the Durban High Court on Wednesday. Mr Shaik was not present. He is currently on bail after being convicted in July last year of having a generally corrupt relationship with ex-deputy president Jacob Zuma.

Also known as Congo-Brazzaville, the Republic of Congo should not be confused with its much larger neighbour, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire). Congo is the fourth-largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa and produces around 250,000 barrels a day. Government income from the oil sector totalled $1 billion in 2004, 70 per cent of the state's total revenue, and was projected to rise to $1.2 billion in 2005. Congo has a population of three million and with its substantial natural resources, it has the capacity to be a wealthy country. However, those riches are not finding their way to most of its people, 70 per cent of whom live below the poverty line.

The East Africa Customs Union integration process has been slowed down by lack of elaborate infrastructure at border points. "The situation has been compounded further by the absence of essential facilities such as physical structures and manpower that are necessary to hasten the process," said an East Africa Legislative Assembly (EALA) member. An EALA delegation that toured major border points of the three East Africa Community member states, said the integration had not picked up after members failed to put in place the requisite infrastructure to speed up the process.

The Africa Regional Sexuality Resource Centre (ARSRC) calls for applications to its annual Sexuality Leadership Development Fellowship (SLDF) Programme. The Fellowship is scheduled to take place in Lagos, Nigeria from July 10– 28, 2006. The fellowship is designed to catalyse development in the field of sexuality.

Uganda's opposition Forum for Democratic Change has lodged a complaint that supporters of the National Resistance Movement are tearing down their leader's posters for the presidential campaigns. They say NRM supporters tear the posters of the FDC presidential candidate, Dr Kizza Besigye, and replace them with those of President Yoweri Museveni in the municipality.
The area CID Officer said they were investigating the matter.

In Uganda, the worst Members of Parliament over the last year have been revealed in a survey commissioned by the Daily Monitor, a local daily. The survey, which covers the period from August 2004 to August 2005, measures the performance of the MPs by their contributions to bills, motions, reports and any other contributions.Army MPs were some of the worst performers in the House, contributing three members to the top-ten list of non-performers. Yet the Army lobbied extensively and successfully to keep its slots in the House when Parliament reviewed the need for special interest group MPs earlier this month.

“The MDC as an institution is hardly what we must be fighting to preserve or protect but rather the values that formed its formation and the formation of the broader progressive forces in Zimbabwe.” These were the words of well-known political analyst and human rights lawyer Brian Kagoro. Kagoro was speaking on the programme Hot Seat on the political crisis in the country and on how to salvage the opposition after the devastating effects caused by the infighting within the six year old opposition.

"As you may know Progressio (formerly the Catholic Institute for International Relations) has been involved in solidarity work with the peoples of Southern Africa for a considerable period of time. With our southern African partners and Northern partners in the CIDSE group of Catholic agencies we wish to draw your attention to significant events regarding Zimbabwe.

On December 5th 2005, the African Commission for Human and People's Rights (ACHPR) adopted a resolution condemning the human rights situation in Zimbabwe, and calling on the government of Zimbabwe to act urgently to improve the situation. The resolution calls on the Zimbabwean government to implement the recommendations of the previous ACHPR fact-finding mission, as well as those of the July 2005 report of the UN Special Envoy on Human Settlement Issues. It further calls on the government to cooperate with the African Commission Special Rapporteur on Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Internally Displaced Persons, including allowing a fact-finding mission to investigate the situation of internally displaced persons in Zimbabwe. It highlights the failure of the government to uphold the principle of separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary. We therefore urge all members of the African Union to ensure that the annual report of the ACHPR is adopted at the African Union Summit in Khartoum on the 23rd and 24th of January this year."

"We the representatives of more than 50 human rights institutions and non-governmental organizations meeting in Nairobi, Kenya from January 13th to 14th, 2006 representing African Civil Society are honored to present our compliments to your high Offices. We wish to express our deep concern with respect to the ongoing plans by the African heads of state and government to confer the AU Presidency for the year 2006-2007 on Sudan; and in particular to President Omar El-Bashir. We seriously believe that such an action will deeply undermine and erode the credibility of the AU and at the same time compromise the authority of its institutions."

Visit http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/ to read a submission of the Coalition for an Effective African Court on Human & Peoples' Rights in respect of the election of Judges to the African Court this January 2006 AU Summit.

No one can deny the striking similarities of the Zalingei and Mornay refugee camps in Sudan compared to Kibeho’s refugee camp at the time of the Rwandan genocide.

Everyday, newspaper articles advertise “fresh violence” in Sudan as if it were fresh produce or fresh coffee. Everyday, precious lives are being lost in Darfur while the media practices verbal gymnastics, trying to find the most animated way to describe the violence in Darfur, while Arab militiamen known as the Janjaweed (men on horseback carrying G3 guns) daily emulate the Rwandan genocide. The question is, “What are we going to do about it?” Ceasefire agreements have been broken, humanitarian efforts have been blocked, refugees returning to their villages have been shot and killed, the death toll is 50,000, at minimum; yet Geneva’s United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman, Peter Kessler, “can’t tell if people are being led into a trap.”

It is a shame that we have so horrific an example before us – the Rwandan Genocide – yet we are avoiding the obvious solution to the problem in Darfur. Neither the United Nations nor the United States has deployed military troops to Darfur, Sudan .

The United Nation’s reluctance to use force, however, is, in fact, inviting more violence and atrocities to the region. If the Janjaweed know that the UN does not plan to intervene militarily until “things [get] much worse,” (in accordance with Article 41 of the Security Council’s 30 July Resolution), the Janjaweed can intermittently curb the violence in Darfur just enough to prevent UN intervention. Moreover, since there are no military troops in Darfur humanitarian aid has been severely stifled. Some Darfuris believe that the restriction of humanitarian aid is a ploy by the Janjaweed and the Sudanese government to exterminate Darfuris through “forced starvation”. As a result, the death toll has climbed.

Subsequently, the high death toll in Darfur is a direct result of the lack of military intervention. If UN troops had been deployed to Darfur more than a year ago when the ethnic cleansing began, chances are the death toll would be significantly lower than the estimated 50,000 today. Even more Darfuris are being killed as they leave the Zalingei and Mornay refugee camps to return home to their villages. In spite of the fact that Rwandans were similarly killed as they journeyed home from the Kibeho refugee camp, the UN has yet to intervene militarily.

In the same way commissioner general for humanitarian affairs, Sulaf Din Salih, is encouraging Darfuris to leave the Zalingei and Mornay refugee camps and return home to their villages, the interhamwe in Rwanda urged internally displaced persons at the Kibeho refugee camp in 1995 to return to their homes. Like Rwandans, Darfuris attempting to return home in Sudan are being senselessly and brutally murdered in the same way Tutsis were killed by génocidaires a decade ago in Rwanda.

After Rwanda, we cannot feign ignorance. If there is no military intervention in Darfur, we know how the story will end; someone will author another “genocide” book entitled “Re-Imagining Sudan,” assessing the mass deaths and the effects of ethnic cleansing in Sudan on surviving Darfuris. Let’s do our part to stop the ethnic cleansing in Darfur so we won’t have to re-imagine Sudan.

African Union heads of state and government meet in Khartoum, Sudan, from 23-24 January for the sixth ordinary session of the continental body. Human rights groups have protested against the decision to hold the summit in Khartoum, due to the continuing conflict in the Darfur region of the country. For the latest news, information and statements coming out of the summit, visit http://www.pambazuka.org/aumonitor/ In the article below, Irungu Houghton tackles the subject of civil society engagement with the African Union, noting that as 2007 nears a series of important events offer the opportunity to “get things right”. He concludes that: “With the completion of the AU Strategic Plan, 2007 marks the first major review moment for understanding the progress towards the union. The year is also very powerfully symbolic in that it also marks the year in which the World Social Forum will take place in Nairobi, Kenya. It will also mark the advent of celebrations towards the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian and Guinean independence and 200 years since the abolition of slavery. Within this context, we cannot but remained inspired that Africa can, and must move to new heights of relationships between its states and its peoples before 2007.”

“We continue to interact with civil society groups at various levels. On a generic level, a civil society desk has been established at the NEPAD Secretariat with a view to having a one-stop focal point for civil society. At a sector level, all programmes are being implemented in consultation with relevant civil society groups. However, it must be noted that the level and extent of civil society participation in the implementation of NEPAD programmes is largely dependent on the capacity of civil society groups.” - Prof. W.L Nkuhlu, Former Chief Executive, The New Partnership for Africa’s Development, June 2005

"The Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union (ECOSOCC) must be against authoritarian regimes, hostile external efforts and the negative waves of globalization ...You should be by the side of those who suffer injustice and are deprived of their basic human rights." - H.E. Alpha Oumar Konare, Chairman, African Union Commission at launch of ECOSOCC, March 2005.

“Many colleagues in the NGO sector have cited instances when they have been asked if they would facilitate an interface between civil society and some public institution – at first because the institution wanted to look good in the eyes of some donor or other. More recently though, it appears that creative leaders are starting to recognize the value that comes from engaging broadly and seeking wide participation of all stakeholders.” - Ezra Mbogori, in Landsberg C. & Mckay C, Engaging the new Pan-Africanism: Strategies for Civil Society Paper

The establishment of the key facilitating structures for CSO and parliamentary participation within the African Union and NEPAD over 2005 come mid-way in the African Union Strategic Plan (2004-2007). Experience so far, suggests that the vision of a people driven Pan Africanism is yet to be translated into sustainable relationships in practice. The experience so far suggests that partnership between African CSOs and continental institutions would be more mutually respectful if they were re-designed around principles of solidarity, inclusion and autonomy. Until then, partnership will remain stuck at a very minimal level of the more comprehensive project of building a pan African consciousness and citizenship in Africa.

With the completion of the AU Strategic Plan, 2007 marks the first major review moment for understanding the progress towards the union. The year is also very powerfully symbolic in that it also marks the year in which the World Social Forum will take place in Nairobi, Kenya. It will also mark the advent of celebrations towards the 50th anniversary of Ghanaian and Guinean independence and 100 years since the abolition of slavery.

Making the links with Continental Citizenship, Public Accountability and Governance

Theories of citizenship often draw from the relationship between citizens and their rights and responsibilities and states and their duties and obligations on the other. Good governance is built on the understanding that the state is accountable to the public for the stewardship of public resources, public services and the upholding of the rights of its citizens (2). This model is only partially true for the path that the AU, NEPAD and even the RECs have embarked upon. In the absence of a basic state infrastructure such as the African passport, a Cape to Cairo driving licence, the Afro note, payment of taxes and delivery of public services, the concept of a collective Pan African citizenship seems remote. For this reason, it is in the development of a pan African consciousness and the willingness to struggle for the realisation of common continental rights standards such as the African Charter for Human and Peoples Rights and its Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa that African citizenship can be built. Nurturing and deepening actions by civil society organisations around the policies and programmes of continental integration is one important way of accelerating pan African consciousness. To illustrate this further, any observer of continental institutions can see the upward accountability to Heads of States. Yet, downward accountability is still very unclearly defined with certain consequences.

Travelling as a Kenyan, in Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania and Nigeria, I used to be struck by the negative comments of ordinary citizens to the travelling of their Heads of States. The Pan African project was often seen as competing for scarce national resources – the attention of the President and senior officials, the national budget and so on. With a number of active Presidents coming to the end of their terms or losing their credibility by refusing to keep to theirs, it is important to think about succession issues. Who will replace Mbeki, Wade, Mkapa and Obasanjo? Will it be Kikwete, Sirleaf-Johnson or Nkurunziza? Will public opinion demand that the new crop of leaders protect and expand the existing path or will it swallow them in a myriad of local and national concerns?

Background and the Promise

It is in the light of the quotes by Nkuhlu, Konare and Mbogori that the establishment of three critical structures namely the African Parliament (May 2004), The Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union (ECOSOCC), (March 2005) and the NEPAD CSO Think Tank launch (December 2005) find their relevance (3). On the one hand, the urgency at which Africa must take new and radical steps towards the universal realisation of human rights, economic and social justice and on the other, the critical imperative for a form of governance that is accountable and consistently responsive to Africa’s 870 million people.

Elsewhere, Charles Mutasa has provided a useful history of AU-CSO relations going back fifteen years to the Arusha Charter on Popular Participation (1990). Despite it’s recognition of the need for African governance to fully integrate African civil society in order for them to define the long term development policies of the continent, “the charter of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) made no reference to African civil society and OAU ... invited African Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to participate in some of its meetings and structures as observers”.

This framework did not allow for direct participation of CSO representatives at the meetings and had no reporting or follow-up systems. Furthermore, it enabled the widespread perception of the OAU as a meeting of elite leaders to persist. More serious attempts to integrate public participation in the public affairs of the continent took form after 2001 with a number of Summit declarations and decisions that sought to make CSOs not be observers of the African Union proceedings but be an integral part of the organization's decision and policymaking process. The Economic, Social and Cultural Council of the African Union (ECOSOCC), established under the founding charter of the African Union, defined African civil society as an advisory organ and explicitly invites African civil society through its various organisations to fully participate in the institutions of the Union (4).

New Energies bring new Possibilities

In 2005, a small but growing number of African CSOs and alliances are at the forefront of advocating continentally and globally on a range of human rights and equity issues. They are currently engaging the African Union Commission, Pan African Parliament, NEPAD, African Development Bank and the offices of other regional and sub regional organisations such as IGADD, ECOWAS, and SADEC (5). It is clear over 2004-2005 that CSOs have been able to engage effectively to influence continental policies and practices in as diverse areas as HIV/AIDS strategy development (March 2005), Bejing+10 review (September 2005), WTO Inter-Ministerial Conferences (September 2003) and trade meetings (African Trade Ministers Meetings, 2003-2005).

Other important joint advocacy initiatives include work on human rights reporting and the state’s responsibility to protect civilians in Darfur, streamlining the establishment of an African Court of Justice, lobbying for greater protection for journalists and calls for an end to impunity for crimes against humanity and the arrests and indictment of Taylor and Habre among others. The coming into force of the AU Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (2004-2005) on November 25 within a remarkably short period of time is a good example of what can be done.

Together with their international allies, African CSOs are also campaigning for global economic and social justice at the various international Summits including the G8 Summit, the World Summit, the Information Summit, World Bank and IMF meetings and the 6th WTO Interministerial. Significant and progressive calls for alternatives to a world economic and political order that keeps Africa disempowered and economically unviable have emerged as part of the World Social Forum. Leading up to the WSF in Nairobi in 2007, their vision that “another world is possible” will become a central theme in Africa (7).

2005 saw also the emergence of the largest single anti-poverty alliance in the world, The Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). African civil society leaders have been instrumental in expanding the movement both in Africa to 17 countries and across the world (8).

The SOAWR campaign reflects important lessons for CSO-AU relationships. It is clear that the open door policy by the AUC office of the Cabinet, the Commissioner for Political Affairs and some key Ambassadors enabled an autonomous constituency of women’s organisations to amplify the AUC call for countries to sign and ratify the Protocol. The Protocol has now come to force, the fastest coming into force of a Protocol in the history of the AU/OAU. Members of GCAP successfully sought access to the working papers of the NEPAD Heads of States and position papers for the G8 Summit. Furthermore, NEPAD secured space for African CSOs to participate in the African Partnership Forum.

Current Circumstances and Challenges

Despite these new energies, it is clear that we are far from seeing them as mainstream to the affairs of continental institutions. During the middle of 2005, thirty African CSO leaders were interviewed at length on CSO-AU relations. Overall, the study revealed very limited knowledge among CSOs about the AU, NEPAD and other key organs, their roles and policy-making processes. Due to their proximity to the respective offices, Southern African NGOs are relatively more familiar with NEPAD, whilst NGOs in Ethiopia know relatively more about the AU Commission. When asked whether they were aware that the AU has opened political space for dialogue with CSOs most said they were, but had very little knowledge of how this has happened and what the entry points were.

Communication between CSOs and continental institutions was described as reactive and ad hoc. It was interesting to note that individuals from CSOs and pan African secretariats spoke about the other in non-institutionalised terms thus; “good communication depends on who you know”, but often there is “no feedback”. For these reasons, the current accountability mechanisms remain weak.

Despite good intentions, it would not be unfair to say that African CSOs have insufficient capacity to monitor the fulfilment of agreed promises, policies and commitments by the African Union and related institutions on the full range of issues that are vital to the people of the continent (9). There are few independent networks and mechanisms for monitoring the effectiveness and impact of the decisions by African institutions. If this is the case for a particularly well-resourced and better-positioned constituency, then the vision of a people-driven AU is even further.

Citizens of Africa have extremely limited opportunities to participate and/or scrutinise strategic continental policy documents and processes during their conception, drafting, implementation and review. Even relatively well informed and educated individuals working for African CSOs have frankly exposed how little they know about the AU and its functions and the work of other sub regional organisations. Consequently, this has hampered ownership building with wider constituencies and marred the outcome of important policy development. Currently, important debates on universalising access to essential medicine are taking place without the participation of people living with AIDs. This pattern robs the AU and specialised agencies of the possibility of building public opinion across Africa and safeguarding the emergence of new Pan Africanist leadership long after the current crop of leaders have gone.

Overall, CSOs and citizens in Africa are ill prepared to be able to articulate or express their needs, aspirations and policy priorities. The absence of pan African media (radio, newspapers and television), social and political divisions conspire to keep the pan African project too remote from the consciousness of the majority. Consequently, a large number of African citizens continue to hold onto the stereotypes that characterised the OAU namely, “as too remote”, “captured by political elites”, largely unaccountable and donor dependent” (10).

Old Contradictions strangle new Possibilities

The African Union Fifth Assembly of African heads of States in Sirte, Libya, 28 June to 5th July 2005 brought the momentum that was building up between the political leadership and African CSOs to a screeching halt. Discussions between members of ECOSOCC and the AUC revealed that there were no plans by the AUC to hold a civil society side-event that could feed into the Council of Ministers. Consequently there were no invitations for even leadership of ECOSOCC to attend the event. Through a separate process, Chairperson Hon Wangari Maathai attended and spoke at the meeting, but in the absence of a pre-consultation could not have been speaking on behalf of any specific constituency (11).

The failure of other activists to get visas to attend the AU Summit in Libya dislocated them from access to African political leadership three days before the G8 Summit. Attempts to request AUC help were met with this helpless response; “Dear colleagues, the Director has asked me to inform you that unfortunately due to host government guidelines, the AU will not be able to invite any more NGOs and other partners to the Summit in Libya. We hope to be able to invite your Group to such meetings in future”. (12)

Sankore and Odinkalu had sounded the warning bell nearly a month before the Summit in the following way. It is worth quoting extensively from their correspondence:

“Unlike with previous summits, there will be no AU facilitated civil society meeting preceeding the Summit in Libya. As there has been no official and public explanation by the AU, it is best not to speculate on why the expected meeting will not be holding.

The fact that it will not be holding it however raises important questions. The most obvious of which is - should African civil society be reliant on the AU to fund its pre summit meetings? A No answer has its implications, the major question being how then will it be funded. A Yes answer also has implications in respect of independence and ethical questions, especially given that the state, its agents and agencies in many African countries are the main violators of human, political, economic and social rights on the continent. This is not withstanding the fact that the AU as an institution has surpassed the expectations of many cynics in terms of its engagement with civil society and its vision for Africa. Nevertheless, the fact that the regular AU supported civil society meeting will not be holding will raise a question mark over the relationship of civil society with the AU with regards to summit arrangements. Will this be a one off situation? Will the next one be guaranteed to hold? How is it that African civil society's major annual meeting will not be holding in the very year when Africa and Africa's problems are the focus of the world? Is it that African civil society is so insignificant in the equation that the governments of Africa, Europe, America and the G8 can decide Africa's future without the input of civil society - even at a time when rock musicians and pop stars across the West can claim to have influence on the future of Africa. The issues of debt; gender equality; human rights and democracy; conflict, peace and security; HIV/AIDS; agriculture and food security and many more are too crucial to be left to drift for another year without African civil society input (13).”

It is partially this lack of engagement that led to the vast gap in the verdicts between African civil society and the African Union minutes after the G8 Communiqué was read (14).

This experience reveals areas of weaknesses in the relationship of CSOs to the AUC through ECOSOCC. It was unclear whether a budget existed for the pre-consultation or the process for laying claim on resources. There was not an alternative source of financing. The leadership of ECOSOCC were not sufficiently cohesive to act decisively and protect their space. Lastly, the host state was able to impose its very low public record of facilitating the inclusion of people and participation on the entire continent.

As the 6th Assembly approaches in Khartoum, Sudan, in January, many observers will be watching carefully to see whether pan African citizenship and democracy dies a second time. Should this be the case, then our resolve to resist the cynicism of one of my colleagues when she says “the African Union only exists in Durban, Maputo, Addis and Abuja, elsewhere, it cannot even operate towards the realisation of its own vision” will be further weakened.

Implications for new ways of working

For the remaining duration of the African Union Strategic Plan 2004-2007, the AU Commission, NEPAD, African Parliament, African Court of Justice and the Heads of State Summits are all expected to involve CSOs in their work. Yet for the AU vision of “an integrated Africa, a prosperous and peaceful Africa, driven by its own citizens and representing a dynamic force in the international arena” to become a reality, we need to realise some pre-conditions. Firstly, we would all require the principles of transparency and dialogue to become evident in the practise of these institutions.

Secondly, we would require the active and meaningful participation of civil society in African governance. If both pre-conditions were met and sustained, we could collectively, Governments and citizens, claim to have strengthened the accountability of the African Union and NEPAD to continental constituencies. Secondly, we would have increased the credibility of the political and economic integration process underway in Africa today. Over the next two years, great synergies could be harvested. We could see the Common African Position defined not as the position of African states but as the position of states and their peoples. To do this we must shift the current model of collaboration between continental policymaking institutions and African civil society organisations and their networks. Firstly, continental policy-making institutions have to see interaction with CSOs less as an opportunity for technical advise, funding and in-put on policy development but rather as the humble beginnings of a process that increases their own accountability to the public. Instrumentalising this relationship subverts the principles of inclusion and participation and reduces the desirability for expanding circles of influence and involvement to key interest groups such as associations of farmers, people living with AIDS, youth, women etc.

Secondly, lessons from ECOSOCC suggest that a more resilient model could be built around democratising information and resources. Bridging structures, in the case of NEPAD the think tank, must be enabled to in-put in the development of the annual planning and budgeting processes. Specific elements of this include the annual calendar, the overall budget and the specific budget for CSO engagement. CSOs need to be aware what spaces exist for participation, both at the level of the Secretariat as they prepare documents but also with the political leadership.

Thirdly, it should be recognised that in the light of the vast population of Africa, existing spaces and mechanisms are only minimum arrangements for people to speak at a continental level. Other mechanisms should be established for widening public feed-back. AU and NEPAD could explore with civil society organisations, the use of citizens report-cards, independent reports on the projects performance, public hearings and social audits among others. The language of roles and stakeholders displaces the language of rights, responsibilities and obligations. Partnerships will be more mutually respectful if we are able to establish greater predictability and agreement on what both parties are obligated to do. Applying this, it should be possible to answer for NEPAD and CSOs that engage it, what obligations must exist for public accountability to be nurtured and sustained? Does the AU and NEPAD have a duty to enable the independent voice of civil society? Do CSOs have a duty to respond the formulation and implementation of policies and programmes? If the answer to these questions is in the affirmative then African citizenship can emerge in this continent.

On the side of civil society, organisations must be more demanding on the continental institutions to go beyond providing invited spaces to ensuring that the obligations on public participation enshrined in all the documents that matter are upheld consistently. Making claims on how the institutions think and act (public policies and behaviour) is a tried and tested way of keeping these institutions relevant and responsive to the broader public. Maintaining an autonomous capacity is a pre-requisite for effective influencing and engagement. At this early stage, relying on the continental institutions to completely manage this engagement will more likely end up in the agenda of civil society being subsumed, subordinated or at best, reduced to what the people managing these institutions think they can manage. Independent budgets, constituency meetings and independent leadership structures are key to this.

Lastly, from an institutional design perspective on future CSO-AU/NEPAD relations, I would propose three values and make some suggestions on processes that would assist thus;

Values

Inclusion:

- AU/ NEPAD should include guarantees that civil society representatives and non-state actors will have access to establish side-events alongside the formal agenda of Summits and key conferences.

- AU/NEPAD should open up spaces within the formal meetings for civil society to speak directly to various fora including the African Partnership Forum and Summits.

- Annual calendar of events should be shared in advance.

- CSO participation should look towards widening the space and/or rotating involvement in a manner that consolidates a culture and experience of working continentally.

Solidarity:

- Expectations should be clarified in order to identify those that are shared and those that are distinct to either party. These should then be negotiated as agreements.

- NEPAD and AU Budgets and Plans should be accessible either through arrangements with CSOs or simply placed on the website.

Autonomy:

- NEPAD and CSOs should facilitate regular pre-consultations of civil society prior to important decision-making fora, but managed by the latter.

- CSOs should organise themselves to ensure that they have the capacity to deliver on the agreements it makes with NEPAD.

Conclusion

In the absence of increasing the number of voices and actions and improving the quality of CSO engagement at the continental level, there are two scenarios for us. Firstly, the Pan African project remains an add-on for “five star civil society” alone. AU and NEPAD staff manipulate CSO involvement and constrain them to what they can themselves manage. Secondly, even this privileged group gets frustrated and is inspired by more protest-based models to make their views heard. Insecurity and the fear of external challenges gives rise to eagles in the Secretariat who spend more time defending their institutions than promoting and expanding their interaction with African citizens.

A series of important events towards 2007 give us an opportunity to get things right. With the completion of the AU Strategic Plan, 2007 marks the first major review moment for understanding the progress towards the union. The year is also very powerfully symbolic in that it also marks the year in which the World Social Forum will take place in Nairobi, Kenya. It will also mark the advent of celebrations towards the 50 th anniversary of Ghanaian and Guinean independence and 200 years since the abolition of slavery. Within this context, we cannot but remained inspired that Africa can, and must move to new heights of relationships between its states and its peoples before 2007.

* Irungu Houghton is Pan Africa Policy Advisor for OxfamGB and can be reached on [email protected] and Tel: +254-202820155. The author wishes to acknowledges paper by Wordofa D., Odete E. and Andipatin P. Report on the Consultative Process for African CSO initiative to establish an independent facility, 20 July 2005 in the preparation of this paper. This paper was presented by invitation to the Launch of the NEPAD CSO think tank and induction workshop, Nairobi, December 14-16 th.

* Pleased send comments to [email protected]

Notes:

2 See papers within Naila Kabeer (ed) Inclusive Citizenship: Meanings and Expressions 2005, Zed Books
3 While this paper largely focuses on the African Union and its specialised organs, the author recognises the importance of avenues for dialogue that have opened up in the ECA, ADB and other regions
4 Mutasa C. Is the African Union ECOSCC: a new dawn and a new deal?
5 Wordofa D., Odete E. and Andipatin P. Report on the Consultative Process for African CSO initiative to establish an independent facility, 20 July 2005
6 You can read about and join this campaign at www.pambazuka.org or send an email to [email protected].
7 See www.africansocialforum.org or www.enda.sn
8 See www.whiteband.org or www.gcapsms.org
9 It should be noted that International CSOs with operational presence in Africa are not relatively better poised despite access to more flexible resources.
10 Oxfam GB From Unity to Union: The Changes we seek, October 2994
11 In the light of civil society concerns over the capacity of a sitting Cabinet Minister to represent a civil society platform, this had further ramifications. 12 Name of the author of letter withheld
13 Sankore R. & Odinkalu C. African Civil Society and the African Union: Time for Self-Organisation? www.pambazuka.org, June 2005
14 Linda Odhiambo Are the African Union and Civil Society Organisations failing to find common cause in approaching the international community? Unpublished paper, August 2005
15 Full copy of the statement available at http://www.oxfam.org.uk/what_we_do/issues/panafrica/downloads/ african_orgs_statement_g8.rtf

Pambazuka News, the newsletter and website with a focus on social justice issues in Africa, recently nominated by PoliticsOnline and the 6th Worldwide Forum on Electronic Democracy as one of the top ten websites internationally “who are changing the world of internet and politics”, is to begin publishing of a French language version of it highly popular electronic newsletter on January 31, 2006.

“The newsletter has succeeded in creating a pan-African community, uniting people working in human rights, conflict prevention, health, social welfare, environment and social justice right across the region,” said Kenyan Director of Fahamu and Editor of Pambazuka News, Firoze Manji. “But there is a significant and unfortunate gap between those working in English-speaking and French-speaking countries, and we intend to bridge that gap through producing a French language version of Pambazuka News. ... But publishing in these languages is only the first step,” he said. “In the longer term we want to publish an Arabic edition, and then look at other African languages such as Kiswahili.”

Existing Pambazuka News subscribers are asked to:

- Inform Pambazuka News if they, as existing subscribers, would also
like to receive the French version of the newsletter by sending an email
to [email protected] with ‘subscribe French edition’ in the subject line and their full name in the body of the email.

- Inform French colleagues, networks, family and friends that they can subscribe to the upcoming French version of the newsletter by sending an email to [email protected] with ‘subscribe French edition’ in the subject line.

Watch out for more information in subsequent editions!

Click on the link to read the full press release.

So you’re thinking of going open source? Karoline Kemp looks at the benefits of freeing yourself from the grip of Microsoft domination, touching on issues of cost, accessibility and participation, but also cautioning that issues of infrastructure and compatibility need to be taken into account. The article ends with a listing of useful resources related to open source.

Free and open source software is not a new concept or tool, but is only beginning to gain in popularity. This too is the case in Africa, where, by its very nature, it is beneficial for organisations working with few resources. By way of a brief introduction to Free and open source software (FLOSS), a definition may be useful. Wikipedia defines FLOSS as “computer software and the availability of its source code as open source under an open source license to study, change, and improve its design.” FLOSS has over the years become an area of increased interest, not least because, as University of California FLOSS expert Steve Weber has stated: “Software determines how information is manipulated, where it flows, to whom, and for what reasons.”

That said, FLOSS’s growing popularity can be put down to a number of reasons. These can be identified as the following:

- Reduced costs and less dependency on imported technology and skills;
- Affordable software for individuals, enterprise and government;
- Universal access through mass software rollout without costly licensing implications;
- Access to government data without barrier of proprietary software and data formats;
- Ability to customise software to local languages and cultures;
- Lowered barriers to entry for software businesses;
- Participation in global network of software development;
- Supplier independence;
- Patches or updates become available quicker, which limits breakdowns and security risks.

A further examination of these benefits reveals the following.

Free and open source software is free in the sense that its code is free, and can thus be changed and manipulated. The difference between FLOSS and proprietary software is that there are no restrictions coming from patents, copyrights, licensing fees, etc. Because the code for FLOSS is free, it can be run for any purpose and further, can be studied, adapted, improved and then redistributed. It may not necessarily be free monetarily, but is often much cheaper than proprietary software.

The potentials for FLOSS to NGOs to become autonomous from corporate providers are also notable. Not only does this address economic issues, but it also gives the freedom of self-reliance. This means that NGOs using FLOSS can reduce their dependence on external technology providers. They also own what they have developed, thus building on capacity development. If a community owns their resources – understands how it works, adapts it for their specific purposes and takes pride in the fact that they have reclaimed something that was once not a part of their own infrastructure, then capacity is built.

FLOSS also has a political role to play. Not only does it offer a commercial alternative to Microsoft domination, but it also puts software into the hands of people, making it a freely available public good. This increases the choices available to users and means that software can meet a diversity of needs.

One of the primary advantages of FLOSS is its capacity to be customized and localized.
FLOSS can be used by anyone, but can be advantageous to NGOs in a number of ways. Groups can run and operate computers with FLOSS that have been programmed to meet their specific needs and preferences. The possibilities for software customisation are unlimited.

Free and open source software can also be localized to meet local demands, including the use of local languages. This aspect has huge potential, as it makes accessibility to information and communications technology widespread. This involves writing software so that words appear in a different target language.

Governments are often the heaviest consumers of information and communication technologies in developing countries, thus their participation is paramount to the success of any open source initiative. Historically, research and development of ICTs have responded mainly to global market incentives. Because developing countries do not usually have the resources to invest in these sorts of schemes, they have often been left behind. FLOSS introduces the potential to close this digital divide, and this is one area where the government has a crucial role to play. In addition, both governments and non-governmental organisations in the developed world alike are increasingly becoming computer enabled, which means that they will favour interaction with countries in the developing world that are similarly enabled and can interact effectively with their information and management systems. FLOSS also has the potential to save governments large amounts of money, as well as make them less dependent on the developed world in general terms of technological and skills transfer. Long term cost savings may also occur as a result of reducing reliance on single sources and suppliers.

The development of FLOSS also represents a means for skills development and knowledge transfer. Local personnel can be trained in the field – organisations benefit, jobs are created and African programmers thus have the opportunity to participate in a global market. This potential also creates prospects for further involvement in creating and strengthening the traditional ICT field of a country - business opportunities are thus created.

There do exist certain problems with FLOSS in Africa. The primary pitfall of FLOSS is that it needs, from the outset, someone with enough IT knowledge to implement the software. Having the actual resources – computers and some initial software also pose challenges, as does the ability to pay IT staff. Having the appropriate infrastructure to support all of this is also a problem, but not one confined to FLOSS users. What is unique, however, is the problem of compatibility with other operating systems as well as hardware. Having to adapt software to make it fit with other operating systems poses a big challenge. Being able to find existing FLOSS is also difficult, as it is generally not advertised. Upon finding the appropriate software it is often accompanied by documentation that is not user friendly.

* Karoline Kemp is a Commonwealth of Learning Young Professional Intern assigned to Fahamu.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Sources/Further Reading:

Alternative Routes in the Digital World: Free and open source software in Africa. Victor van Reijswoud and Corrado Topi
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/reijswoudtopi.pdf

Open Software & Open Standards in South Africa: A Critical Issue for Addressing the Digital Divide. National Advisory Council on Innovation (Open Software Working Group)
http://www.dst.gov.za/reports/discussion_docs/NACI%20opensource%20discu…

Open source software in Developing Economies. Steven Weber
http://www.ssrc.org/programs/itic/publications/ITST_materials/webernote…

Open source software: Perspectives for Development. Paul Dravis
http://www.infodev.org/files/837_file_Open_Source_Software.pdf

Straight from the Source: Perspectives from the African Free and Free and open source software Movement. bridges.org in collaboration with the Tactical Technology Collective
http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource/essay

The Politics of Open Source Adoption, NGO's in the Developing World. Gabriella Coleman
http://www.tacticaltech.org/SSRC_Report

Further links and reading:

NGO in a Box
http://ngoinabox.org/
(Offers peer reviewed and selected OSS tailored to the needs of NGOs)

Martus - http://www.martus.org/
(Offers software that allows users to document human rights abuses, upload them and store them on redundant servers around the world)

Nigerian Open Source Project
http://www.wazobiasoft.org/
(A Nigerian Open Source Project that aims to make software available in the three main Nigerian languages)

Ubuntu Linux
http://www.ubuntulinux.org
(OSS project based on the belief that OSS should be available free of charge, software tools should be useable in their own language and that people should be able to alter it)

Tactical Tech Conference http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource2
Conference in Uganda in Free and Open Source Software in local communities. It is an eight day conference aimed at building the technical skills of those working with African NGOs

Open Source Africa
http://www.opensourceafrica.org
(Aims to bridge the information divide by raising awareness about the benefits (and pitfalls) of open source software on the ground in Africa.)

Open NGO
http://www.openngo.org/
(Builds OSS for non-profit, NGO and social sectors)

Freedom Toaster
http://www.freedomtoaster.org.za/
(Provides free OSS downloads across South Africa)

NonProfit Open Source Initiative
http://www.nosi.net
Informal group of non-profit sector tech providers interested in the way OSS could benefit their work

Source Forge
http://sourceforge.net/
Largest OSS website, hosting OS code and applications

Open Knowledge Network
http://www.openknowledge.net/
Among other things, OKN uses OSS for the creation, display and exchange of locally relevant information)

Linux Chix Africa
http://www.africalinuxchix.org/
(Linux training of trainers in South African Townships)

Resources:

Free and Open Source Software in Africa - http://www.FLOSSfa.net
(Promotes the use of OSS in Africa and partners with the Health, Education, and Government Departments to meet ICT objectives in Africa)

Shuttleworth Foundation
http://www.shuttleworthfoundation.org/
(Supports education and social development through technology, including OSS)

Opensource Initative
http://www.opensource.org/
(Non-profit corporation dedicated to managing and promoting OSS for the good of the community)

Association for Progressive Communications
http://www.apc.org/english/index.shtml
(International network of CSOs dedicated to supporting social justice through the strategic use of technology, including the internet)

Tectonic - http://www.tectonic.co.za/
(Source for African OSS news)

Sokari Ekine points out that moving to open source requires not just a change in software solutions but a change in the culture of NGOs to more cooperative and sharing organisations. Ekine believes that issues of expertise and support will be overcome as take up of FLOSS increases and concludes by reviewing some innovative open source projects on the African continent.

Back in June 2005 KnowProse picked up on a paper by Gabriella Coleman, "The Politics of Open Source Adoption, NGOs in the Developing World". Briefly the paper discusses the initial take up of FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and some of the problems NGOs have encountered and continue to have with the transition from proprietary software to FLOSS.

The paper states that: “These challenges are usually magnified in the developing world, where institutional resources and society-wide IT infrastructures are inconsistently available or scarce. Adoption is further are hampered in countries (including nearly all developing countries) where the private sector in open source technologies is underdeveloped.”

Coleman goes on to say that the private sector in FLOSS technologies is essential to providing the necessary local tech support that would put FLOSS solutions on a level terrain with commercial players such as Microsoft. KnowProse adds that:

“There is still a culture within NGOs where they are simply used to buying things with project money. Some open source support costs money through maintenance, but this is a different culture for many - whereas, Microsoft and other proprietary software entities advertise and lobby actively, while offering discounts. The open source advocates have not displayed this ability, and it's unlikely that we will in the future simply because we don't have the budget of a small country.”

I would add to this that NGOs and individuals are often wary when offered something for "free" or when asked to change from traditional software solutions to FLOSS. Moving to FLOSS requires not just a change in software solutions but a change in the culture of NGOs to more cooperative and sharing organisations.

One advantage proprietary software has over FLOSS in Africa is the availability of pirated proprietary software which at the moment still has the advantage of local knowledge and expertise. As Coleman points out:

“The existence of a thriving black market in pirated (proprietary) software, for example, often supports local IT expertise trained in that software - typically in industry standards such as Microsoft software. Some NGOs keep their operating costs down by using pirated software and drawing on these support networks. FLOSS technologies and secondary support networks have generally not overcome this illicit network and its lock-in effects in many countries.”

This brings me to a recent statement reported in Timbuktu Chronicles in which a Nigerian representative for Microsoft said: "Africa has no need for Free Open Source Software." Gerald Ilukwe, the general manager of Microsoft Nigeria, said that cost is not important, even though he admitted that the average annual salary in the West African country is only $160 (£91). "It's easy to focus on cost and say how much is a product, but at the end of the day it's the total impact that's important. You can give people free software or computers, but they won't have the expertise to use it."

Microsoft do have a point here but I believe that the issue of expertise and support will be overcome as take up of FLOSS increases. In other words it is not a given fact that FLOSS will continue to lack support. As the blog Timbuktu Chronicles points out this opens up Microsoft's intentions in Africa which as I see it is to prevent as much as possible the development and use of FLOSS on the continent. One could even ask whether Bill Gates' altruism towards Africa in the form of some £200 million dollars for R&D into Malaria has any link to their ambitions in the African market, which is worth a lot more than $200 million.

So what is the present state of FLOSS in Africa?

WazobiaSoft (Timbuktu Chronicles) is a Nigerian open source software translation project which aims to make software available in Nigeria's three main languages - Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo. They choose to use Open Source:

"because it is free and probably the only way people will be able to use software legally at little or no cost".

Wazobia - which is derived from the words for 'come' in the three languages, wa, zo and bia - believe that:

“Wazobia.org is helping in the modernization of core languages in Nigeria. Although, English is the official language in Nigeria, however, we believe that by having local language translation in computing, we will encourage and stimulate growth in Computer literacy. Also, it will be easier for people to become computer literate when the barrier of having to learn English is removed particularly for the people whose primary form of communication is not English.”

OpenCafe (Digital Africa) is a community based computer center that uses and promotes the use of open source with an internet cafe, training, art online project and the Software Freedom Day, both part of their Pan African project which aims to:

"…keep in touch via the Net with bloggers, artists, and Linux users from all over Africa (we also work with people outside the continent.) So we thought it's time for creating an online section dedicated to African FLOSS users, artists and bloggers and everyone else interested in our projects."

Shuttleworth Foundation is a South African based organisation who have identified "improved education" as the major challenge for South Africa and:

“…endeavours to support projects that seek to pilot more effective ways of using existing resources more efficiently in education.”

The Foundation also has an Open Source project which aims to unite the SA open source community and again promote the tak eup of Open Source Software by facilitating, supporting and funding "initiatives on a corporate, private and government level that lead to the awareness, uptake and growth of open source in South Africa."

Their projects include the Freedom Toaster - which enables users to freely burn open source software as they require. Go Open Source aims to encourage the use of open source software amongst non-specialist IT users. Tuxlab Programme for schools, establishes open source computer centers in schools. Translate.org, is a translation project to produce multilingual software for South Africa.

LinuxChix Africa is a project established by a group of African women to promote and highlight the use of FLOSS. They have joined with Kasi Open Source Software (KFLOSS):

“…to develop GNU/Linux and Open Source Software development and technical skills in South African townships. The long term strategy is to replicate this model to rural areas and villages. And of course, Linuxchix Africa will then develop similar parallel programmes throughout Africa.”

* Sokari Ekine produces the blog Black Looks,

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Soenke Zehle traverses the virtual world of Free and Open Source Software (FLOSS), examining the practicalities, the politics and the debates surrounding an emerging movement that rivals the multinational software companies.

With a host of corporations, foundations, and organisations active in the fields of advocacy and assistance, free and open source software (FLOSS) has become a dynamic area of info-developmental cooperation. In the eminently pragmatic approach adopted by many of these efforts, the intense controversy over free vs. open source software and the extent to which advocacy should stress freedom over commercial applicability somehow seems a thing of the past. At the same time, the focus on FLOSS as an economic strategy of autonomous development within a global network of capitalism rather than a post-capitalist practice of collaborative creation recalls some of the general ambivalences at the heart of software-political struggles (1).

FOSSFA

In many African countries where computer users are not necessarily owners, important choices are often made by those in charge of establishing public ICT infrastructures. While many companies and organisations have chosen to adopt FLOSS on their own, the status of governments as the largest procurers of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) means that government action is bound to stimulate industry in various ways, including the provision of FLOSS training and support. The recently founded Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), currently headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya, has therefore identified national ICT policy and procurement procedures as major advocacy targets (2). For Bildad Kagai, co-founder and one of its secretaries, the licensing, localisation, and local skill building advantages of FLOSS, coupled with ‘leapfrogging’ technologies like wireless that help skip an entire generation of expensive infrastructural investments, offer an alternative to the technological dependency and resource drain associated with an exclusive reliance on mainstream proprietary software.

Given the many problems that beset the ICT sector in Africa, FLOSS advocacy is inevitably tied to political reforms in contracting, public services, and competition policy, as well as the creation of FLOSS related employment and business opportunities. FOSSFA has created an effective advocacy coalition: Kenya’s ICT policy now gives preference to open source (and open standards) over proprietary solutions, and FOSSFA also convinced the Committee on Development Information of the Economic Commission for Africa (CODI) to adopt a policy that prioritises FLOSS.

This is no small feat, given that many African states have yet to articulate any ICT policy whatsoever, and FOSSFA is also educating policy makers across the continent about FLOSS (3). The 2004 Idlelo meeting in Cape Town, co-organised by FOSSFA and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources Project (AVOIR) at Western Cape University, was the ‘First African Conference on the Digital Commons’ (4). Bringing some 200 FLOSS activists and developers from across the continent together with international researchers, Idlelo emphasised the need to shift from the mere adoption of FLOSS to the local development of FLOSS applications, the use of FLOSS in education, and the development of non-proprietary open content alternatives. Hoping to be able to recruit government representatives from all 53 African states, Idlelo 2 has already been scheduled for 2006 (5).

South Africa Goes Open Source

The breakdown of Idlelo participants by country reveals the uneven geography of IT development in Africa: by far the largest contingent came from South Africa, followed by Nigeria and Kenya (6). South Africa’s influence in the African FLOSS movement is related to its dominance of the African IT sector at large. But there are other reasons, one of which is the impact of projects sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth (7). Shuttleworth, a South African celebrity entrepreneur known for his space travel – Shuttleworth was the first ‘afronaut’ – as well as his philanthropic ambition, has overseen the development of Ubuntu (an already-popular linux distribution updated in regular release cycles) and his Shuttleworth Foundation has co-launched a nation wide ‘Go Open Source’ campaign (8).

But is South Africa ‘really’ Africa? FOSSFA’s Kagai notes that ICT developments in South Africa are not representative of Africa at large, and some see in the ideas of an ‘African Renaissance’ less a new Pan-Africanism than a mere culturalisation of South Africa’s own economic and geopolitical ambition (12).

Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, FLOSS has not been an easy sell. One reason, suggests Ethan Zukerman, might be the overemphasis on free beer at the expense of free speech; a reference to Richard Stallmann’s famous definition of free software (15). Zukerman, a co-founder of GeekCorps – ‘an international non-profit organisation that transfers tech skills from geeks in developed nations to geeks in emerging nations’ – and initiator of ‘BlogAfrica’, believes that many African users continue to associate ‘inexpensive’ with ‘inferior’, a legacy of technology transfer and appropriate technology projects that sometimes amounted to little more than the dumping of obsolete technology (16). And in areas where non-licensed copies of proprietary software are widely available as well as a great deal of corresponding ‘street’ expertise, comparatively expensive manuals and a lack of bandwidth for accessing online support can easily increase the total cost of ownership of non-proprietary alternatives generally assumed to be ‘free’. FLOSS advocates should stress the expandability, transparency and resulting high performance of their software instead.

While a growing number of studies make an empirically based case for FLOSS in general, less is known about the experiences of FLOSS adoption across Africa (17). One such report has been published by Bridges.org, an international NGO with offices in South Africa and the US (18). FLOSS, concludes the report, has become a mainstream alternative. Yet because of the level of expertise required to establish and maintain a FLOSS based computer lab, it tends to work better in large projects that have the resources to address the practical problems of migration, training, and support, in contrast to individual labs that can simply take advantage of proprietary solutions that are already in place.

Info-Political Visions

Beyond the issue of appropriate means, how do the local politics of software relate to competing visions of what ‘info-development’ is and should be about? In the larger info-political vision that frames local decisions over software and standards, questions of autonomy are central, frequently articulated in response to the hegemonic presence of corporate software and IT giants. FLOSS advocates have criticised the most recent wave of international public private partnerships in this area, for example, because they involve only the usual transnational suspects. Microsoft, HP, and Cisco are all well represented in the activities of major development agencies, advertising themselves as ‘partners in development’ to promote ICTs as the vehicles for ‘good governance’ and ‘effective service delivery’, but also to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out grassroots or public sector alternatives, and subvert South-South cooperation.

Take SchoolNet Namibia (19). Having to work with substantially fewer resources than the Shuttleworth Foundation, SchoolNet has nevertheless set up FLOSS-based thin client networks in over a hundred schools, launched an ISP to offer subsidised internet service, and is exploring the set up of wireless access in rural areas. Once they had found that students were a lot more likely to embrace FLOSS than their teachers, and standard advocacy tools were not doing much to change that, SchoolNet launched Hai Ti (‘Listen Up!’), a comic strip that features real life FLOSS users (20). Its contractual agreement with schools specifies that the teams who manage the local computer lab include students as well as teachers. Yet occasionally, SchoolNet finds that their FLOSS-LANs remain unmaintained while students use equipment donated by Microsoft and administered with support from MS certified engineers. Executive director Joris Komen is convinced that Microsoft has targeted Namibian schools specifically because SchoolNet Namibia has become an outspoken critic of the company and its philosophy (21).

Commenting on recent agreements between Microsoft and the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Bildad Kaigai of FOSSFA agrees that such deals work to confine the software choices these agencies can make and effectively transfer wealth away from an emergent local software industry. Kagai calls on African leaders to emulate the successful development strategies of Asian countries instead (22).

Other ICT analysts note, however, that African countries will have to do so under dramatically different circumstances. Yash Tandon stresses that “most of the so-called ‘technology transfers’ ... are essentially excuses for transnational corporations (TNCs) to take over local companies, or to carve out a share of the domestic markets” (23). Rather than “stripping naked” to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) from the North, Tandon also makes the case for the “creation of a home based Domestic Scientific and Technology Capacity (DSTC), including capacity to undertake relevant research and development, the actual purchase (as opposed to transfer) of appropriate technology from the open market, and a transfer of technology, preferably between South-South, only under certain conditions.”

It seems that third worldist strategies sustained by a generalised critique of neocolonialism have been replaced by the exhausting creation of advocacy networks that hold local governments just as accountable as transnational corporations (24). Yet while visions of Africa’s future have sobered significantly, the emergent dynamic of South-South cooperation still echoes a tricontinentalist spirit. Brazil’s official commitment to what its minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, has refererred to as a ‘tropicalisation’ of open source has been a major push for FLOSS advocacy in Africa (25).

An increasing “post-third wordlist” cooperation is visible in other international info-political fora as well. One example is the campaign for a “WIPO Development Agenda” and a Treaty for Access to Knowledge, supported by a broad coalition of southern governments as well as grassroots organisations (26). The World Intellectual Property Organisation is a UN agency whose current mandate is “the maintenance and further development of the respect for intellectual property throughout the world”.

In the eyes of its critics, this mandate limits WIPO to the role of an enforcer of Euro-American positions on intellectual property, supporting the WTO’s Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) as well as at least condoning the aggressive ‘TRIPS-Plus’ bilateralism both the US and the EU have engaged in to effectively bypass the ongoing review process of key TRIPS provisions (27). The access-to-knowledge campaign puts the question of FLOSS and the struggle over open standards in a much broader context. WIPO defines creativity in relation to the prospect of proprietisation, as culture is defined as the creation of private property. The FLOSS controversy, on the other hand, is not just about reducing the cost of running a computer lab, but over the implications of its approach to “commons-based peer production” (Yochai Benkler): i.e. processes of collaborative creation and an information and knowledge commons actively enlarged in opposition to the “second enclosure” (James Boyle) associated with an ever expanding IPR regime (28).

Take the role of FLOSS developers. Rishab Ghosh, FLOSS Program Leader at the Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology (MERIT), stresses that licensing costs do matter, especially when GDP is taken into account (29). But another key emphasis in his studies on FLOSS in developing countries is on the skills-building in FLOSS networks. In addition to standard developer skills, open source communities address, almost by default, questions of copyright law and licensing, and introduce users to new forms of collaborative creation.

Info-Political Pragmatism

Ghosh has been a major global FLOSS advocate, and his projects specifically address the use of FLOSS outside Europe. Yet some of his economic arguments are based on the assumption that proprietary alternatives are not locally produced. What Ghosh describes as the benefits of “deep access” offered by locally developed FLOSS applications – customisation, quick bug fixing, as well as the re-use of code in other applications – is exactly how Herman Chinery-Hesse, CEO of Ghana’s successful Soft Tribe, describes his own approach (31). All of Soft’s software is based on “tropically relevant” code, Chinery-Hesse’s reference to the full spectrum of constraints he associates with local computer use: frequent savings to disk help deal with power failures and work offline lowers costs for online access. In the case of Soft’s document management software for the Ghana Human Rights Commission, storage on remote servers addresses possible interruptions caused by a change in government. And unlike Ubuntu, Soft’s applications are optimised for the low-end hardware that dominates Ghana’s offices and cybercafés.

Soft trains the majority of Ghana’s programmers, often left to their own devices in poorly equipped computer science departments. Yet Chinery-Hesse thinks that FLOSS would impede the development of a local software industry, as developers would, he worries, be reduced to installers of pre-existing applications. His main concern, however, seems to be possible tampering with the code both by users and competitors – Chinery-Hesse fears internal mismanagement and has no interest in interoperability that could threaten Soft’s pole position in the local software market. Soft rarely releases beta versions, software does not have an auto-install function, and bug fixes are not generally released. Evidence of Chinery-Hesse’s entrepreurial pragmatism, he has also entered into a cooperation agreement with Microsoft, hoping to take advantage of its global distribution channels to bring an add on from Ghana to desktops around the world.

For Guido Sohne, a former Soft employee and vocal FLOSS advocate, Soft’s deal with Microsoft is a form of technology transfer rather than a simple sell-out, prompted by the departure of some of its key developers without whom their previous portfolio of applications could no longer be maintained (32). Sohne left in part because Soft did not want to explore FLOSS-based alternatives to address this development impasse. Microsoft is there to stay, but it looks like Soft’s emergent competitors are already relying on FLOSS. So while Ghana’s developer community as a whole has not yet embraced FLOSS, this is likely to change.

In the current ‘Africanisation’ of the politics of software, the proprietary/non-proprietary divide is but one of several vectors. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise, given the hybrid dynamic of FLOSS itself. In her analyses of the cooperation between corporations and the FLOSS community, techno-feminist Yuwei Lin describes this process as “hybrid innovation”, marked as much by a sense of interdependence and mutuality as by unease over the irresolvable tension between commercial and community-oriented practices (33).

The dependence on corporate support illustrates the paradoxes of immaterial labour and suggests that common assumptions regarding the relationship between FLOSS and visions of a post-capitalist future be revisited. Often understood in terms of an anti-monopolistic practice, FLOSS is not, as such, anti-capitalist. One of the reasons for the popularity of the FLOSS paradigm is that it appears to be able to accommodate a wide range of visions of cultural, economic, and social transformation, from cyberlibertarian views of natural capitalism to the post-autonomist vision of a coming communism, actively anticipated by way of multitudinal self-organisation. Countercultural cachet notwithstanding, the high visibility of FLOSS as a mainstream alternative to proprietary software is due in large part to the support from corporations like IBM or Sun Microsystems, and the commitment to openness reverberates with an info-capitalism attempting to reinvent itself around concepts of trust and transparency.

And while the controversies over software licenses are so intense because their clauses redefine what property means in the network society, not all of FLOSS is geared toward an enlargement of the information commons. Following the popularity of user-defined license provisions like Creative Commons, Sun Microsystems has announced its own “Open Media Commons” initiative to develop FLOSS based digital rights management tools (34). FLOSS, already adopted by cost cutting governments across the world, is also easily aligned with state power – South Africa’s FLOSS and open content strategy includes, after all, the migration to FLOSS of its prison management systems (35). This makes one-size-fits-all approaches to the politics of software almost impossible, even more so in the context of African ICT controversies.

While it is too soon to say what transformative impact FLOSS efforts may already have had, examples like FOSSFA or SchoolNet show that FLOSS is not reducible to an imperial voluntarism out of sync with the “real” Africa. FLOSS‘s collaborative ethic is not a post-materialist luxury limited to those on the sunny side of the digital divide. Instead, the Africanisation of FLOSS in terms of an ‘ubuntu’ philosophy of sharing may soon connect to other collective efforts in a larger Pan-African vision of renewal. This project driven mainly from below is rarely included in the sovereign perspective of afro-pessimist prophecies accompanying the current wave of imperial nostalgia (36).

In his documentary afro@digital, Congolese director Balufu Bakupa-Kanyinda retrieves the story of the Ishango Bone, the oldest known table of prime numbers, to suggest that mathematics, and by implication the network society as a whole, needs to be given a new, Afrocentric genealogy. FLOSS advocacy may not have to go that far. Yet perhaps a discussion of software politics in Africa should not begin with the question of software, but with the contradictory images of Africa that linger in the collective post-colonial imagination.

* Soenke Zehle (s.zehle AT kein.org) teaches transcultural media studies at Saarland University, Germany. This is a shortened version of an article that first appeared in Mute Magazine (http://www.metamute.com). It is reproduced here with permission of the author.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

FOOTNOTES

1 For an account of free software vs open source software in terms of a struggle over discursive hegemony, see David Berry, ‘The Contestation of Code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements’, Critical Discourse Studies 1.1 (April 2004), 65–89, http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/berry1.pdf

2 http://FOSSFA.net

3 Bildad Kagai and Nicolas Kimolo, ‘FOSSFA in Africa: Opening the Door to State ICT Development Agendas – A Kenya Case Study’, SSRC The Politics of Open Source Adoption (2005), http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/POSA; CODI, ‘Resolutions of the Fourth Meeting of the Committee on Development Information (CODI-IV)’, UNECA Commission on Development Information (23-28 April 2005), http://www.uneca.org/codi/codi4/codi_iv_report.pdf. See the country policy tables at: http://www.bridges.org/FLOSS/index.html

4 http://avoir.uwc.ac.za/

5 http://www.FOSSFA.net/idlelo2

6 Derek Keats, ‘Idlelo: First African Conference on the Digital Commons’, Final Report to Department of Science & Technology South Africa (2004), http://www.catia.ws/Documents/Indexpage/IdleloFinalReport.pdf

7 http://www.markshuttleworth.com

8 http://www.ubuntulinux.org, http://www.go-opensource.org/

9 http://www.freedomtoaster.org/, http://www.go-opensource.org/go_open

10 http://www.edubuntu.org/, http://www.tuxlab.org.za/
A thin client is a computer (client) in client-server architecture networks which have very few resources, so it has to depend primarily on the central server for processing activities. A thin client network centralises maintenance tasks on a (remote) server

11 http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce

12 For a middle of the road assessment of the African Renaissance, see Elias K. Bongmba, ‘Reflections on Thabo Mbeki’s African Renaissance’, Journal of Southern African Studies 30.2 (June 2004). For more critical views, see Neil Lazarus, ‘The South African Ideology: The Myth of Exceptionalism, the Idea of Renaissance,’ South Atlantic Quarterly 103.4 (Fall 2004), 607-28, and Neville Alexander, ‘South Africa – Example or Illusion?’ An Ordinary Country: Issues in the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy in South Africa, New York: Berghahn Books, 2003, 137-73, 188-90

13 John Perry Barlow, ‘Africa Rising,’ Wired 6.01 (1998) http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow_pr.html

14 http://www.balancingact-africa.com/

15 Ethan Zukerman, ‘Free Beer Doesn’t Sell’, Linux Journal 111 (July 2003) http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6785

16 http://www.geekcorps.org/, http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/

17 David Wheeler, ‘Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS, FLOSS, or FLOSS)? Look at the Numbers!’, (May 2005) http://www.dwheeler.com/oss_fs_why.html

18 Bridges.org, ‘Comparison study of Free/Open Source and Proprietary Software in an African context: implementation and policy-making to optimise community access to ICT’ (May 2005) http://www.bridges.org/software_comparison/index.html

19 http://www.schoolnet.na/

20 http://www.schoolnet.na/haiti

21 http://tatejoris.blogspot.com

22 Bildad Kagai, ‘FOSSFA responds to Microsoft-UNDP Deal’ (Feb 2004), http://FOSSFA.net

23 Yash Tandon, ‘An Alternative View on Technology’, SEATINI (Sept 2004), http://www.seatini.org/publications/factsheets/technology.htm

24 Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Good Governance: The Itinerary of an Idea’, D C Development and Cooperation 31.10 (01 Oct 2004) http://www.inwent.org/E Z/content/archive-eng/10-2004/tribune_art1.html

25 Rebecca Wanjiku, ‘Brazil opens its arms to Africa’, Highway Africa News Agency (05 April 2005) http://www.highwayafrica.ru.ac.za/hana/textviewer.asp?item_id=339

26 http://www.cptech.org/a2k/, http://www.eff.org/IP/WIPO/dev_agenda/, http://www.access2knowledge.org/cs/

27 Peter Drahos and John Brathwaite, ‘Who Owns the Knowledge Economy? Political Organising Behind TRIPS’, Corner House Briefings (Sept 2004), http://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/pdf/briefing/32trips.pdf, also see http://www.bilaterals.org/

28 Yochai Benkler, ‘Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm’ (2002) http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html; James Boyle, ‘A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?’ (1997) http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/intprop.htm

29 Rishab Ghosh, ‘Free/Libre/Open Source Software for developing countries: skills, employment and costs’, 2nd National Congress on Software Libre, Buenos Aires, Argentina (07 June 2005), http://www.flossproject.org/papers.htm

30 http://www.eriders.net

31 G. Pascal Zachary, ‘The African Hacker,’ IEEE Spectrum Online (Aug 2005), http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/aug05/0805ahac.html

32 My assessment of Soft is based on an email exchange with Guido Sohne (Sept 2005). Also see http://sohne.net.

33 Yuwei Lin, ‘Hybrid Innovation: How Does the Collaboration Between the FLOSS Community and Corporations Happen?’ Knowledge, Technology and Policy 18.2 (Summer 2005), http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/lin4_hybrid.pdf

34 http://www.openmediacommons.org/. As the history of commons-based resource management systems shows, ‘commons’ doesn’t necessarily imply the free-for-all often associated with it, and it is not necessarily obvious – a point made frequently by advocates of indigenous and traditional knowledge databases, for example – that ‘commons’ and ‘access restrictions’ are mutually exclusive; what emerges instead are ‘hybridised’ commons that take the information needs of specific communities into account.

35 http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce/CorrectProj

36 Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, London: Free Press, 2005; Seumas Milne, ‘Britain: imperial nostalgia’, Le Monde Diplomatique (May 2005). Also see Chris Landsberg and Shaun Mckay, ‘Engaging the new Pan-Africanism’, Centre for Policy Studies (Sept 2005) http://www.sarpn.org.za/documents/d0001537/CSO-Guide_pan-africanism_200…

Africa spends US$4 billion per year, representing 35% of total official development aid to the continent, to employ some 100,000 Western experts. These are recruited to perform functions generically described as 'technical assistance', which could have been done by African experts lost to the brain drain of the western world.

"The heart of the local government elections, then, is a contest over the politics of space," writes Raj Patel from the University of KwaZulu-Natal's Centre for Civil Society in a recent commentary about South Africa's upcoming local elections. "On the one hand are shack-dwellers who believed, and still believe, in the ideals of desegregation, of the possibility of rich and poor and black and white living side by side. On the other hand lie local councillors seeking to fence the rich from the poor - councillors who, faced by questions of redistribution from within their own party, can only remain mute."