A crisis that the world is ignoring

Long ago when I was still competing on the Public Speaking circuit in High School, they taught us that one way to grab an audience’s attention was to start with startling statistics. Well here they are:

The United Nations has estimated that 750 000 people will die within the next three months in Somalia due to the on-going famine. That is almost the same number of people dead as the total number of casualties in Iraq over the past ten years.

Already over 29 000 children under the age of five have died since the beginning of the year. In terms of September 11 casualties, that is the equivalent of eighteen planes crashing into nine twin towers full of five year old children.

For the situation to be classified as a famine in the first place, at least two people out of every ten thousand people are dying. Of hunger. Every single day.

Have I grabbed your attention enough? Have I startled you enough to want to continue reading? Please say yes because the very act of typing these figures is traumatic enough. I am sure you’ve seen the images on the evening news, on your Home page as you log into Facebook every sixteen minutes. A tweet here or there might have pierced your consciousness, tended on the few drops of pity that came dripping out and been relegated to the constant flow of news that we are subjected to. That was my reaction, a reaction born of having lived with these images on TV since I was as young as I can remember. Surely someone, somewhere is doing something about it, I told myself.

Unfortunately a Time Magaezine article broke through the bubble of my comfortable existence. According to Time Magazine, the United Nations remains fatally short by almost $700 million dollars of the $2.4 billion needed to feed the starving. Of the fifty five sitting heads of state in Africa, only four bothered to turn up to a summit convened to discuss the crisis in Somalia. And Africa’s richest nation, South Africa, has so far put forward $1.2 million to the cause, Nigeria’s pledge is still nowhere to be seen and the rest of the African continent is religiously mute on the subject of action.

What makes it intolerable, what makes it almost a crime against each and every one of those children whose sunset today might have been their last as they faced a night filled with the noise of the steady declines of their bodies, is that for decades now, Africa (seemingly led by Julius Malema) has been screaming; “African solutions for African problems”. Any attempt at interference by Western governments be it in politics, or religion, or human rights is met with the refrain of this song. ‘Leave us alone’, they say, ‘we are no longer your colonies’. ‘We can handle our own problems’. I pass no judgement on the wisdom, or lack of it, of this attitude, this is not the time to talk politics.

And yet, the time has come when a humanitarian disaster is unravelling in the plains of the Somali landscape, and the powers that be in the Halls of our continents buildings of power, have turned their gaze firmly elsewhere. Libya, has been an example of the African Union kicking itself into overdrive, countless heads of state climbing their presidential jets to “mediate” a solution to the crisis that ended with what the Libyan people had been asking for all along. Again, my argument here is not about the rightness or wrongness of what has happened in Libya over the past few days (let us leave that discussion for another night). My argument is in fact not about what has been done, so much as what has been left undone for the people of the Horn of Africa.

A few more statistics. The United States of America, has so far poured $593 million (this year alone) and the EU, beset as it was by a crippling financial crisis, is the second largest donor with $267 million.

“We as Africans have to get out of this situation of sitting back and waiting for people to fly here from far away to solve our problems,” said Nicanor Sabula of the East African Civil Society Forum ahead of the African Union Summit which failed to raise the $30 million target it had set for itself.

And if it seems that my disappointment lies with the African continent exclusively, I am sorry to disappoint in kind. Over the past few months the world has been shown nothing but the images of the recent revolution in Libya that the people of Libya started. Over the past few days the media has been saturated with images of Nicolas Sarkozy walking into fabulously opulent halls to discuss how to get Greece out of a debt that Greece created. A global movement has been started that aims to ‘Occupy’ the financial markets that until recently the citizens of those countries benefited from. I aim not to belittle each of these events, historic in their scale, but to show that in comparison, very little is being said about the citizens of a country who woke up to find that the rain refused to fall from the heavens through no fault of their own.

Long ago, in the innocent days of High School they taught us that a good writer would close with a conclusion that showed that the issues one had posed had a logical end, a termination of the train of thought. Dear reader, accept my apologies I have no conclusion for you. I leave it to you to ask yourself what it means to be an African, what it means to declare that you will solve your own problems and then back down when an actual problem does appear. And for the African and non-African alike, I leave you to ask yourself the question: Are we really going to let a quarter of a million people starve to death? It is not enough to click like on Facebook photo’s, it is not enough to create hash-tags on Twitter, or tut pityingly over the photos that we see on CNN. What is it that you are going to do to save at least just one, only one, of those your fellow human beings.

(Caption Image: The Pulitzer Prize winning photo by Kevin Carter taken in Sudan of a girl being trailed by a vulture waiting for her to die.)

**Click here for a stark and haunting photo essay by Time Magazine

UPDATE: There are many ways you can get involved, either as an individual or as a group. Many NGO's have branches worldwide, visit this page for a list of NGO's working in the Horn of Africa. To multiply the effect of your donation, consider holding a fundraiser (click here for some creative ideas) in your community. For those living in South Africa, Médicine Sans Frontières Supports direct cash deposits.

Bloodied Dawn Of A New Libya

Thursday must have begun like any other day for most people in the world. But for a former head of state it began with a rain of fire from heaven, capture at the hands of what used to be ‘his’ people and a bloody death, recorded in all its gory detail and broadcast all over the world for the world to see…and in most cases rejoice.

There are differing views of the man that was Gadaffi. To some he was the model of a Pan-African leader, a visionary who dared dream of an African free of the perceived shackles of her former colonial powers. To some he was the man who took Libya from an anonymous Middle eastern country to a leader both in Middle Eastern and African politics. And to yet more he was a dictator who took over a country forty two years ago and in those decades allowed no dissent; tortured thousands, jailed millions, aided terrorists and even managed to call himself the Imam of Imams (partly at the heart of a bitter enmity with Saudi Arabia).

But on Thursday he was just a man on the run. Hounded by NATO warplanes and shot at by ‘rebels’. He sought refuge in a drainage tunnel before he was found and dragged along the road, wounded and bleeding, before being summarily executed. What followed managed to surprise even me, celebration and euphoria erupted not only in Libya but all over the world. David Cameron, strode out of the black door of Number Ten Downing Street to announce with great pride, the role that Britain had played in the liberation of the Libyan people. Hillary Clinton erupted with a “wow” that was more befitting Lady Gaga and not the Secretary of State of the most powerful nation in the world. But at what were they so excited about?

Beyond all the rhetoric of freeing Libya, of releasing people from the reigns of oppression; there lay a bloodied body on the street of a man who was summarily dispatched from this coil without even the dignity of a trial, of at least facing his crimes, of facing his people and his family for the last time. Beyond the dictator, butcher, human rights abuser; he was still a man and deserving of every single one of the rights laid out in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. He was a human being who even in the last moments of his life deserved the dignity of a private death, of a dignified trial.

Yes I hear your howls of outrage. He did not deserve it, he did not deserve to be treated with respect, he had to pay for his crimes. But at the very foundation of human rights is the belief that there is nothing a person can do to deserve their rights to life, and the implicit statement that there is nothing they can do to un-deserve them. Even the worst of the worst dictators should be treated with the dignity and respect for human life that they failed to give to their people because we are not them. To put it in simple terms, the world sunk to the level of the Gadaffi’s of this planet as we celebrated his cold blooded execution.

Perhaps in a world where Jack Bauer takes the affairs of the world into his own hands and saves the world time and time again every twenty four hours, it is easy to be awestruck by the sight of the fluttering flag of freedom in the early morning breeze. But the world is a complex place, its history described only partially in volumes that prove time and time again that the web of events is a complex one that is not solved by a simple gunshot to the head of the bad guy. Will we be proud when the books of history describe us as the people who dragged a man through the dust of a Libyan street and then shot him for all the world to see (including his wife and children) even as he begged for mercy? Will not that new flag drip the blood of a man who died so shamefully on that dusty road?

Reflecting on my South African heritage and finding my Zimbabwean roots

South Africa carries a strange allure for Zimbabwean Ndebele’s. It is that land that stays in our dreams, whispers in our waking moments with a strange call that seems to grate on the conscience self that declares one to be Zimbabwean.

As my dear friend & famous writer, Novuyo Rosa Tshuma, puts so eloquently in her blog, we are a people not quite comfortable with our place in the world. I mean, if the current government denies the white Zimbabwean his citizenship what does that say about the Ndebele who arrived in Zimbabwe only a generation before Cecil John Rhodes? It is a complicated question that not many stop to consider and even less have sympathy for but that does not make it any less urgent, any less an issue that the modern Zimbabwe should face and deal with. Just ask the estimated one point five million Zimbabweans living in South Africa. A statistic of which I now find myself a part of.

It has been a complicated journey. I did not make the jump across the Limpopo River in one leaping bound. The journey has taken me from my humble home in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe to a four year stint in Algeria, North Africa before finally returning to find that to find that the geographical anomaly that the Ncube family called their shelter from the universe had transported itself from Bulawayo, 1500km's down the road to Randburg, South Africa.

I will not lie and say that it is not without relief that I am able to call Randburg home (for now) but as always in life, it is more complicated than that. Whereas Zimbabwe hits the headlines with stories such as, “No power in Zim Capital for three days” or “Mysterious fire _____ “(one can fill in the blank with the aid of Google) South Africa has not been the image of a welcoming host country. I watched with horror as people were burnt alive in the townships, listened with concern as friends recounted incidents of racism, tribalism and general xenophobia in everything from border control to their universities.

My own encounter with the above, happened three days after my arrival in South Africa. A simple visit to the Post Office to open a Bank Account turned into a nightmare. The teller first expressed incredulity that the Department of Home Affairs had written in ink on my visitors permit in my passport. He then handed it over to the manager who rained a litany of accusations that included:

“You Zimbabweans are a problem..."

"Your passport is expired...." (despite the bold lettering declaring it to expire in 2017)

"Your passport has been tampered with...." (Really? What is with me and passports!)

"I cannot help you, go and find business elsewhere...”

To say I left that office furious is to understate it. I was a mix of emotions, made worse by the recent rejection of my visa application by the French Embassy in Oran. But it got me to reflect on the fate of the foreigner, a state I have been living in for the past four years. It is a sad state of affairs to be a foreigner in the modern world. It is a stripping away of the right to call oneself at home, to basic services & respect. And as much as Zimbabwean Ndebele’s would like, no love, to call South Africa their home away from home, that ancient place that the spirits of our ancestors call us back to; the bleak truth is that our home is to the north and not south of the mighty Limpopo River.

And as much as I admire South Africa, with her multiculturalism, her super liberal constitution, the comedy that is Julius Malema and the superwoman that is Thuli Madonsela, I can never allow myself to fall into the trap of forgetting those roots that lie buried somewhere in the land that was once called ‘Africa’s Paradise’.