African News

Angola, not often in the news, made headlines when the country's Leila Lopes became Miss Universe

“He likened Zanu-PF to a troop of baboons incessantly fighting among themselves, but coming together to face an external threat. New leadership was essential and would emerge as some of the old timers, including Mr Mugabe, left the scene,” the cable said.

Why such views could not be expressed freely and directly to the population is a mystery, but the effect of every leak (and according to Wikileaks only 5% of the juicy details have been released) is that the aura around information and power has burst like a rotten pumpkin.

But Wikileaks' treasure trove went back further, and political characters at the centre stage of the Zimbabwean story were all dutifully recorded spilling their thoughts to successive US officials so that historians will one day have no doubt where the centre of influence lay for this former British colony – in Washington.

Former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo is quoted in cables going back to 2007 as having discussed targeted sanctions, the machinations of trying to persuade Mr Mugabe not to run in 2008, and the possibility of forming a “Third Way” to lift the ailing nation out of its political and economic malaise.

At one stage he pleads that sanctions should not be extended to all “as he though it unfair… to include the large majority of parliamentarians who are not members of either politburo or central committee… Including them on the sanctions list might push them into Mugabe's camp.”

A local newspaper picked up on this earlier this month and Mr Moyo has now run to the courts to sue the Daily News for $100,000 (£64,000) for allegedly misrepresenting his side of the story in the leaked cables.

Throwing biscuits

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

In this age of information as choice, we cannot always hear what we want to know, only what the rulers would have us know”

End Quote

But in reality Mr Moyo and others said much more in the belief that their words would not become a Pandora's box that judged those who spoke in confidence: “[former reserve bank governor Gideon] Gono and Moyo are soulmates, and no doubt both are keen to advance their own interests. Gono has always struck us as deeply ambitious, supremely confident, and fundamentally disloyal.”

Like all politicians then. And an educated and literate population will not take long to realise that the chiefs have been preaching one thing and talking another over cups of tea with diplomats. A yearning for real unsanitised information has now become raw.

Of course, there will be those regimes south of the Sahara for whom the new age of free information, the internet and inquiring journalism has made little difference.

In The Gambia, journalists are still harassed and President Yahya Jammeh is given to throwing biscuits and money out of his motorcade like some 19th Century chieftain.

The social networking phenomena that affected the North African revolutions is absent from Mr Jammeh's realm and, as he campaigns to prolong his presidency in elections this year, we can expect as little information as possible, although it is still possible to learn that children have been dying on the tarmac in a rush to pick up the crumbs of his largesse.

While we are hard-pressed to find real news about Africa's fastest developing nation that is oil-rich Angola, where student protests against the 32-year rule of President Eduardo dos Santos have been spewing young people into the courts, we are nonetheless over-informed that the new Miss Universe is Angolan.

Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh, who seized power in 1994, is seeking a fourth term in office

In this age of information as choice, we cannot always hear what we want to know, only what the rulers would have us know, unless, of course, they have been bearing their souls to a US diplomat and Wikileaks releases the details.

However, there are others for whom Wikileaks has proved a stone around the neck in the seas of intolerant governments.

Take the case of Argaw Ashine, the Ethiopian journalist who had to flee Addis Ababa after being cited in a cable about press harassment.

Clearly, Wikileaks does not have a fool-proof system to protect the little people.

For, while a serving prime minister could be threatened with treason for speaking to US diplomats, safe in the knowledge that it will not really happen because everyone else is doing the same, for the humble journalist, escape and exile is the only option.

Whatever laws may be passed over information, it is clearer now than it has ever been that the muzzle cannot hold.

If you would like to comment on Farai Sevenzo’s column, please do so below.

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Senegal has been held up as one of Africa's model democracies. It has an established multi-party system and a tradition of civilian rule.

Although poverty is widespread and unemployment is high, the country has one of the region's more stable economies.

For the Senegalese, political participation and peaceful leadership changes are not new. Even as a colony Senegal had representatives in the French parliament. And the promoter of African culture, Leopold Senghor, who became president at independence in 1960, voluntarily handed over power to Abdou Diouf in 1980.

The 40-year rule of Senegal's Socialist Party came to a peaceful end in elections in 2000, which were hailed as a rare democratic power transfer on a continent plagued by coups, conflict and election fraud.

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At a glance

Politics: Abdoulaye Wade came to power in 2000, ending four decades of Socialist Party rule; he won a second term in February 2007

Economy: Agriculture drives the economy; tourism is a source of foreign exchange

International: Senegal has mediated between Sudan and Chad over Darfur tensions; many African illegal migrants use Senegal as a departure point for Europe

Security: Despite a peace deal, a low-level separatist rebellion simmers in Casamance, in the south

Senegal is on the western-most part of the bulge of Africa and includes desert in the north and a moist, tropical south. Slaves, ivory and gold were exported from the coast during the 17th and 18th centuries and now the economy is based mainly on agriculture. The money sent home by Senegalese living abroad is a key source of revenue.

A long-running, low-level separatist war in the southern Casamance region has claimed hundreds of lives. The conflict broke out over claims by the region's people that they were being marginalised by the Wolof, Senegal's main ethnic group.

The government and rebels signed a peace pact at the end of 2004, raising hopes for reconciliation.

On the world stage, Senegal has sent peacekeeping troops to DR Congo, Liberia and Kosovo.

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BENGHAZI/SIRTE, Libya (Reuters) – Libya's interim rulers said on Friday they would announce a new government within the next few days, signaling a breakthrough in previously unproductive efforts to form a more inclusive administration to lead the war-torn North African country.

“We've agreed on a number of portfolios and who would hold the most important ones. There will be 22 portfolios and one vice premier,” said Abdel Hafiz Ghoga, a spokesman for the National Transitional Council (NTC). “It would be a compact government, a crisis government.”

His comments came a day after NTC forces said they had achieved gains on the battlefield, tightening their grip on southern oasis towns which sided with Muammar Gaddafi.

That progress was overshadowed by unsuccessful efforts to take two remaining strongholds loyal to the ousted leader, which if captured would bolster the NTC's credibility.

Discussions in Libya to set up a more inclusive interim government have been unproductive before. It remains unclear whether the NTC, still based in the eastern city of Benghazi, can unify a country split along tribal and regional lines.

NTC forces now control a string of desert towns in Libya's deep south, although they said Gaddafi loyalists were still holding out in pockets of at least one oasis.

So far they have failed to take the two much larger loyalist strongholds far to the north, Bani Walid and Gaddafi's hometown of Sirte, in a series of chaotic offensives which have raised questions about the NTC's ability to control the country.

The NTC, Libya's de facto government since Gaddafi's fall, has been anxious to show it can establish firm control over a country riven by tribal and regional rivalries.

But, despite support from NATO warplanes, government forces have struggled to capture Sirte, the biggest city outside its control.

This is a complex job because many residents sympathize with Gaddafi. The city typifies the problem the NTC faces in reconciling the significant parts of the country that have tribal loyalties to Gaddafi or did not support the revolution.

A Reuters reporter on the western edges of Sirte saw dozens of cars with civilians leaving the town on Friday. Rebels fired sporadic tank shells and artillery at suspected positions of Gaddafi loyalists. NATO aircraft could be heard overhead.

“In the city, as soon as you leave the main square there is shooting. It is an effort to scare the residents,” said Massoud al Adawi, a fleeing resident of Sirte. “They (Gaddafi loyalists) don't want people to leave the city. They want to use them as human shields.”

Amr al-Aswar, an NTC military commander on the western edge of Sirte, said civilians who remained in the town were the main obstacle.

“The civilians, this is the real problem,” he said. “They don't know the truth. Gaddafi's media obscured what's been happening.”

Until Thursday, some parts of Sabha, the traditional base for Gaddafi's own tribe about 800 km (500 miles) south of Tripoli, had been occupied by fighters loyal to the leader who lost control of the capital and most of the country last month.

“RESISTANCE IS HOPELESS”

“Our revolutionaries are controlling 100 percent of Sabha city, although there are some pockets of resistance by snipers,” NTC military spokesman Ahmed Bani said on Thursday in Tripoli.

“This resistance is hopeless … They know very well that at the end of the day they will show the white flag or they will die. They are fighting for themselves, not for the tyrant,” he told reporters, referring to Gaddafi.

The U.N. atomic agency said on Thursday Gaddafi's government had stored raw uranium near Sabha, after CNN reported NTC forces had found a military site containing what appeared to be radioactive material.

In Vienna, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokeswoman Gill Tudor said: “We can confirm that there is yellow cake stored in drums at a site near Sabha … which Libya previously declared to the IAEA.”

The NTC says it also controls Jufra, to the northeast of Sabha, and the nearby oasis towns of Sokna, Waddan, and Houn.

A manhunt for Gaddafi, who has been in hiding for weeks although he occasionally issues defiant audio messages, was drawing closer to its target, said Bani.

A spokesman for Gaddafi, Moussa Ibrahim, said on Thursday NATO air strikes and interim government forces' shelling of Sirte were killing civilians.

His claims could not be verified as journalists are unable to reach the city. NATO comment was not immediately available.

Rebel fighters near Sirte and residents fleeing the city said pro-Gaddafi forces had been executing people suspected of sympathizing with the NTC.

North of Bani Walid, NTC military forces brought forward tanks and Grad rocket launchers for a renewed attempt to take the town although it was not clear when the attack might begin.

The offensive there has been frustrated by stiff resistance from well-drilled loyalist fighters, and also by a lack of organization among the NTC forces. They operate in disparate units based on their home towns, with little overall command.

Many fighters go into battle wearing flip-flop sandals, t-shirts and jeans and have no military training. “We don't take orders from the NTC. We listen only to our own commander,” said Ziyad Al Khemri, a fighter from Zawiyah, just west of Tripoli.

If the NTC cannot swiftly take control of the country and its own forces, this may embarrass Western leaders, especially France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David Cameron, who took a gamble by backing the anti-Gaddafi leadership.

The NTC said last week it would move to Tripoli only after its forces are in full control of Libyan territory, contradicting an earlier pledge to move the interim administration to the capital around mid-September.

“Complete liberation would be announced when we are in control of Sirte and Bani Walid and control all the border crossings,” said NTC spokesman Ghoga. “This means Gaddafi forces would have no control over any of those crossings. I believe it's a matter of few days.”

(Reporting by Tarek Amara in Tunis, Emma Farge, Joseph Logan and William Maclean in Tripoli, and Sherine El Madany east of Sirte; Writing by Joseph Nasr and David Stamp; Editing by Sophie Hares)

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Angola, not often in the news, made headlines when the country's Leila Lopes became Miss Universe

“He likened Zanu-PF to a troop of baboons incessantly fighting among themselves, but coming together to face an external threat. New leadership was essential and would emerge as some of the old timers, including Mr Mugabe, left the scene,” the cable said.

Why such views could not be expressed freely and directly to the population is a mystery, but the effect of every leak (and according to Wikileaks only 5% of the juicy details have been released) is that the aura around information and power has burst like a rotten pumpkin.

But Wikileaks' treasure trove went back further, and political characters at the centre stage of the Zimbabwean story were all dutifully recorded spilling their thoughts to successive US officials so that historians will one day have no doubt where the centre of influence lay for this former British colony – in Washington.

Former Information Minister Jonathan Moyo is quoted in cables going back to 2007 as having discussed targeted sanctions, the machinations of trying to persuade Mr Mugabe not to run in 2008, and the possibility of forming a “Third Way” to lift the ailing nation out of its political and economic malaise.

At one stage he pleads that sanctions should not be extended to all “as he though it unfair… to include the large majority of parliamentarians who are not members of either politburo or central committee… Including them on the sanctions list might push them into Mugabe's camp.”

A local newspaper picked up on this earlier this month and Mr Moyo has now run to the courts to sue the Daily News for $100,000 (£64,000) for allegedly misrepresenting his side of the story in the leaked cables.

Throwing biscuits

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

In this age of information as choice, we cannot always hear what we want to know, only what the rulers would have us know”

End Quote

But in reality Mr Moyo and others said much more in the belief that their words would not become a Pandora's box that judged those who spoke in confidence: “[former reserve bank governor Gideon] Gono and Moyo are soulmates, and no doubt both are keen to advance their own interests. Gono has always struck us as deeply ambitious, supremely confident, and fundamentally disloyal.”

Like all politicians then. And an educated and literate population will not take long to realise that the chiefs have been preaching one thing and talking another over cups of tea with diplomats. A yearning for real unsanitised information has now become raw.

Of course, there will be those regimes south of the Sahara for whom the new age of free information, the internet and inquiring journalism has made little difference.

In The Gambia, journalists are still harassed and President Yahya Jammeh is given to throwing biscuits and money out of his motorcade like some 19th Century chieftain.

The social networking phenomena that affected the North African revolutions is absent from Mr Jammeh's realm and, as he campaigns to prolong his presidency in elections this year, we can expect as little information as possible, although it is still possible to learn that children have been dying on the tarmac in a rush to pick up the crumbs of his largesse.

While we are hard-pressed to find real news about Africa's fastest developing nation that is oil-rich Angola, where student protests against the 32-year rule of President Eduardo dos Santos have been spewing young people into the courts, we are nonetheless over-informed that the new Miss Universe is Angolan.

Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh, who seized power in 1994, is seeking a fourth term in office

In this age of information as choice, we cannot always hear what we want to know, only what the rulers would have us know, unless, of course, they have been bearing their souls to a US diplomat and Wikileaks releases the details.

However, there are others for whom Wikileaks has proved a stone around the neck in the seas of intolerant governments.

Take the case of Argaw Ashine, the Ethiopian journalist who had to flee Addis Ababa after being cited in a cable about press harassment.

Clearly, Wikileaks does not have a fool-proof system to protect the little people.

For, while a serving prime minister could be threatened with treason for speaking to US diplomats, safe in the knowledge that it will not really happen because everyone else is doing the same, for the humble journalist, escape and exile is the only option.

Whatever laws may be passed over information, it is clearer now than it has ever been that the muzzle cannot hold.

If you would like to comment on Farai Sevenzo’s column, please do so below.

Source

Susan Githuku describes herself as a high achiever

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Kenyan Susan Githuku is no stranger to success: A one-time African tennis champion, she became a development economist, a human resource practitioner, and is now an accomplished entrepreneur.

She says she knew that she was going to start her own business the moment she got her first job, more than 20 years ago.

“I realised at the time, because I am a low-risk individual, that I needed to ensure that I had the requisite experiences,” she told the BBC's African Dream series.

“I needed experience in the government sector, I needed experience in the NGO sector, and I also needed experience in the private sector,” she added.

She first worked for Kenya's government as an economist and was later employed by Coca Cola where she climbed up the ladder to become the company's Eurasia and Africa director for learning and development.

She says that her burning idea was to start a consulting company because she is passionate about providing solutions.

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“Working in the private sector for Coca Cola for almost 10 years and understanding how brands are built, that completely solidified the idea for me,” she explained.

In 2009, she broke free of employment and flew solo by beginning her own human resource consultancy, HPDA Africa.

Gold medallist

As a teenager Mrs Githuku – who is now married and has two children – represented Kenya at several international events, including the All Africa Games, where she won gold and silver medals, and the Junior Wimbledon Tournament.

She then received a bachelor's degree in Economics and Psychology from St Lawrence University, in New York, and a master's degree in Development Economics from Strathclyde University, in Glasgow, Scotland.

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Susan Githuku

Age: 50

Represented Kenya at the All African Games in 1978, winning Gold in the doubles and Silver in the singles

Bachelor's Degrees in Economics and Psychology from St Lawrence University, US

Master's Degree in Development Economics from the University of Strathclyde, UK

Worked with the Kenya government and Coca Cola

Started human resource consultancy HPDA Africa in 2009

But she says that she went back home because she wanted to make a difference in Africa.

“In the last 15 years I've worked in human resources so I always understood what good talent can do,” she said.

“And my idea was to go out there and be an employer, doing my own thing, making some small difference, employing others, rather than always being the one on the receiving end.”

Mrs Githuku considers that her success has a lot to do with her cautious approach to life.

“I'm not of those risk-taking entrepreneurs that love to fly by the seat of their pants. I'm structured, I'm organised, my risks are calculated.”

She also warns aspiring business people that if they want to triumph, they have to make sacrifices.

“Sacrifice is absolutely relevant whether you are an employee in a great corporate, whether you are a sportsperson who must put in the hours training or whether you are an entrepreneur such as myself, working away the nights to ensure that you are delivering on promises that you've made to customers or clients.”

Mrs Githuku says that her philosophy of life is to be fair and that she is not one of those employers who like to underpay “to make others sacrifice more than they should.”

“What I look for in employees is attitude. I hire for attitude and I train for skill. What attitude means is that you're looking for a certain talent, and to translate that talent into something meaningful in the end.”

“You're not going always to be able to afford that talent, and certainly for a growing business that's something that we face every day, but what you want to ensure is that that talent is so motivated that it's performing at the highest level that it can.”

“Sometimes that means some trade-offs. You may not pay as well as you may want to, and that talent, if it has the right attitude is going to understand that at some point is going to get its due but for the time being it must do what it needs to do in order to support this growing business.”

African Dream is broadcast on the BBC Network Africa programme every Monday morning.

Every week, one successful business man or woman will explain how they started off and what others could learn from them.

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