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Nigerians
visiting South Africa for the opening game of the 2010 World Cup on
June 11 may not appreciate that they are experiencing not one African
first – a World Cup on African soil; but two! May 31, 2010 marked the
end of the first century of South Africa’s existence as a state in its
current boundaries with internal autonomy, akin to the other British
dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The Act of Union of
May 31, 1910 combining two former colonies- (the Cape Province and
Natal)—and two former Afrikaner republics—(the Orange Free State and
the Transvaal Republic) -into one state liberated white South Africans
from colonial rule while entrenching the oppression of non-white South
Africans by white South Africans. In fact, all South Africans were to
cast their first vote in one election only in 1994; hence the view of
many Africans that South Africa became “independent” only in 1994. As a
matter of law, that popular view is false. South Africa was the first
European colony in Africa to acquire autonomy over its internal affairs.

Should the
formation of South Africa in 1910 be counted as an event worthy of
celebration by Africans? The answer turns on two other questions.
First: were white South Africans “Africans” and have they behaved like
other “Africans” since 1910? Second: did May 31, 1910 signify the end
of some anti-colonial struggle in Africa? There is no doubt in my mind
that the Afrikaners were “African” by 1910. They had lived in Africa
for a couple of centuries, elevated their own dialect of Dutch into an
independent language, forged their own history, and formed themselves
into a distinct community. The non-Afrikaner speaking white immigrants
(then known as “Uitlanders”) have become Africans.

Like many other
African tribes, which succeeded British colonialists, the Afrikaners
and the English speakers used freedom from colonial rule to oppress
their fellow citizens. Through apartheid, white South Africans
confirmed their place as a quintessential first generation African
ruling tribe in independent Africa. Like the Asantes who fought against
the British in the Yaa Asantewa war of 1900-1902, the Afrikaners fought
the British Empire from 1899 to 1902 to control their own destiny and
the gold resources within the Transvaal Republic.

The British spent
the equivalent of 16.2 billion Pounds (in today’s money) to win the
South Africa war (also known as the “Anglo-Boer war”), the deadliest
war fought by the English between the defeat of Napoleon and the First
World War. At least 20,000 white men, women, and children and 10,000
black and colored people died in the 20th century’s first concentration
camps opened by the British on the South African veld. South Africans
lost that war, but they won the peace and freedom on May 31, 2010 for
themselves, and, eventually, other Africans! South Africa presents an
urban face of “First World” development to the world. Johannesburg and
Cape Town can hold their own, with ease, against many a European or
American city. Indeed, many white South Africans use that face to
suggest that they were effective rulers of South Africa until 1994.
That face is used also to characterise any number of South African
attributes as the “best” in Africa. But, they forget to mention that,
as a dominion, white South Africa received the majority of foreign
investment poured into Africa during the 20th century, and is,
therefore, likely to be the “best” in Africa. Consequently, I prefer to
measure the performance of South Africa’s rulers against the
performance of other former British dominions, which received similar
levels of investment.

How do South
African living standards stack up against those of Australia, for
example? Using the real wage rate of white workers in the building
trade in 1910 in South Africa as a base, Australian building workers in
1910 earned 97.6% of South African wages. A South African plumber today
earns about 80,000 Rands (about $11,000) while his Australian
counterpart earns at least A$75,000 (or $63,750). South Africa has been
the poorest of the dominions for at least one generation! Why? Its
rulers spent its first century concentrating on extracting unjustified
compensation from those devoid of political power instead of baking a
bigger pie for all their citizens. They should devote their second
century to deepening the productive capacity and living standards of
all South Africans.

In a few days the
World Cup will open South Africa to the world. Let the 2010 World Cup
fiesta usher in a productive African century.

It’s a safe bet that in 1946 in Orlando, Florida, USA, when Earl Silas Tupper developed the product that has now become a synonym for kitchen containers he had no idea it would ever be sporting the slogan, ‘Proudly African’. In Nigeria we generally just stick to the generic short form, as in ‘just pack the fried rice in the plastic’, or in the related, ‘wrap the eba in the lylon’… but I digress.

Despite its Floridian origins, Tupperware, the product with the singular distinction of serving as an empowering tool for post world war housewives smarting at being relegated back to the kitchen after tasting the liberating fervour of the workplace, is in the full swing of the new awakening now sweeping South Africa.

Although it was Avon, founded in 1886 by David H, McConnell (California) that pioneered a direct marketing system developed by Mrs. P.F.E. Albee through the idea of the Avon lady, Tupperware is known for the Tupperware party, a strategy that made the company famous, spurred sales, and provided home bound women with a convenient way to make some money for themselves.
Right now there is a huge party on the roll in SA and its theme is finally, African. The flyer for this month’s Proudly African Tupperware campaign, displays a colour suffused, on the go food storage container in saturated red, purple, yellow, violet and green.
Woolworths, SA’s generally toffee nosed quality food and clothes brand store is bursting with touches of local colour. I did a double take two weeks ago when I bumped into rails of brightly coloured t -shirts and tops, boasting not just the logos of European and American soccer teams but the names of South Africa’s provincial capitals. There were rows of big flamboyant afrocentric jewelry, giant hoop earrings, big in- your-face necklaces, and unmistakably “tribal” bangles: In Woolies? The home of the winter greys and autumn browns? Hey, we are finally African! Who knew?

For the government owned broadcaster, SAFM, the World Cup inspired the brilliant idea of playing 100 percent African music in the month leading up to and for the duration of the soccer festival. This was so visitors could get a taste of South African music whenever they tuned into the station, otherwise they might just have been confused as to whether the planes that brought them actually had landed on a different continent.

The flag story comes in two parts. Right now every other car is festooned with the South African flag and the drivers span the rainbow. Some cars have two South African flags and a third from a different country, as well as nifty gloves on both car mirrors patterned like the country flag. Traders armed with flags hit the Joburg streets two months ago. Yours truly was on the look out for African flags because there are SIX African countries taking part in this historic African FIFA World Cup that we have been told, ad nauseum, is unlikely ever to happen on this continent again! Trust me, at least in the part of town where I looked there were no African flags to be seen, and each trader I asked would give a puzzled look and point to the SA flags he had.

Ditto for the shops and offices that were proudly displaying their commitment: all the flags in sight were of the elites of the soccer world, Brazil. Germany, Spain, Italy. Just as patience exhausted, I was about to put irate pen to angry paper, I drove out one morning and glimpsed my first Nigerian flag fluttering from the hands of a street trader, along with Ghana, Cameroon, Ivory Coast and Algeria. Phew! These are not small victories. South Africa is very often many countries in one, but there is a papable sense of national pride and achievement in making this World Cup possible, evinced outwardly in the displays of patriotism and in private conversations among South Africans of all races.

Last week witnessed another destination reached in this ‘long walk’ in the hosting of the Super 14 Rugby final in Soweto, one of the world’s symbolic black capitals. Apartheid divided everything along racial lines. This coming together, an equivalent of Mohammed and the mountain meeting, was a huge deal in ushering the hopes for transfiguration that is part of the message of this achievement.

Yes, it may be transient, and the message may at times get tossed aside in the hurly burly of all the other battles still to be won here, as seen in the muttered threats to African foreigners, just wait till after the games.

But a memory of what can be, will have been made; a political question will have been answered with the words, yes we can; Africans will have the luxury of 6 teams root and cheer for and FIFA’s cultural lens will have had its angle adjusted somewhat. We will all then go home and deal with the hangover.

What more can you ask of a party?

IN
1993, Equity Building Society in Kenya was declared technically
insolvent; in 2010 it is a fully fledged bank, listed on the Nairobi
Stock Exchange and claims more than half of Kenya’s banked population
as its customers.

In 2006 alone, its
customer base grew 82,5% and its deposits grow 80% a year. What is the
secret of its success? The innovative and efficient provision of
financial services to low- and middle- income groups at a good price.

While the large
local and international banks were doing what banks generally prefer to
do — courting wealthy elites and multinationals — Equity ditched its
unsuccessful mortgage financing business and focused its efforts on the
“missing middle” of the market.

Another big success
story in Kenya also focuses on that missing middle — the mobile banking
system M-Pesa, which is soon to be launched in South Africa. M- Pesa,
in partnership with mobile operator Safaricom, allows people to move
money without a bank account, using only mobile phones. The product
struck a chord in the market — less than three years after its launch,
it has almost 10-million customers.

Banking low- to
middle-income earners, particularly those outside the cities, has
traditionally been shunned by large African and foreign banks because
it was complex terrain that didn’t seem to have much profit upside.

But, almost under
the radar, there has been a steady shift into this market, with mobile
telephony playing a crucial role in enabling new ways of doing
financial transactions. Even poor people don’t keep their money under
the mattress anymore, which presents a big business opportunity for
banks.

As financial analyst Mark Napier points out, the fact that people are unbanked in Africa doesn’t mean they don’t want to be.

Napier is the
editor of an interesting book launched in SA last week, Real Money, New
Frontiers — a collection of case studies and essays on financial
innovation in Africa, which also looks at why some succeed and some
don’t.

The case studies
focus on the success stories across the continent, of which there are a
surprising number. It also includes some of the more unusual
innovations such as the relationship Barclays Bank in Ghana developed
with susu collectors — informal money traders who collect daily the
profits from small informal businesses and keep them safe for a fee.

Barclays lured the
susu collectors to deposit the money with the bank and it cultivated
them as middlemen to lend money back into the community. Now, more than
700 susu collectors have grown their businesses, traders have more
access to finance, and Barclays grew its new deposits in one year from
2m (2007) to 10,2m.

It has taken time
for South African institutions to get into lower-income finance, mostly
because of concerns about profitability and the complexity of
addressing this segment. Unsuccessful government microfinance
initiatives also dented confidence.

But this market is
now growing rapidly, largely because of mobile phone tie-ups, and South
Africa has a significant place in the book. Case studies include
initiatives by the big banks in conjunction with cellphone operators
and off- the-shelf insurance products.

The commonly held
view that poor people are bad debtors is quickly being debunked. Bad
debt ratios of microfinance banks can be extremely low and, in some
cases in Africa, loan repayments have been 100%.

But many
microfinance schemes fail. This is partly because of the difficulty of
doing business on the continent. According to the World Bank, 27 of the
35 least business-friendly countries in the world are in Africa.

Not only are
African governments not moving quickly enough to improve the business
environment, they are diverted in their quest to address poverty by the
tendency to focus on redistributing wealth, rather than creating it.

There is also an
inordinate focus on the resources and agriculture sectors as being
wealth creators for Africa’s future. This does not recognise that
consumer spending on goods and services has been a consistent and
dependable driver of growth in Africa over the past decade. The
cellphone revolution is one manifestation of that.

If there is one
message that emerges from all of this, it is that the best way of
creating sustainable growth is to do so from the ground up rather than
from the top down.

– Games is CE of Africa @ Work, a business information consultancy

The coverage in the
Western media of the recent conviction of two gay Malawians
(subsequently pardoned) for homosexuality was dominated by western
human rights activists’ self-serving — but ultimately self-defeating
— dismissal of African homophobia as “the desperate defence of western
mores in indigenous clothing”.

Writing in the
Independent, the British activist Peter Tatchell, who is heavily
involved in the Malawian test case, made these claims:

“Before the British
came … there were no laws against homosexuality… While many African
leaders decry homosexuality as a “western disease” or a “white man’s
import”, the truth is very different. Prior to colonisation, many
tribal societies and kingdoms had a more relaxed attitude to same-sex
relations than their subsequent colonial occupiers.”

He thus concluded
that “Today, the minds of many . . . Africans remain colonised by the
homophobic beliefs that were drummed into their forebears by the
western missionaries who invaded their lands”.

The works of Marc
Epprecht and Neville Hoad show that homosexuality and homophobia
existed in pre-colonial Africa. Yet, ironically, western activists
persist in challenging the prejudiced claims by some Africans that
homosexuality is “un-African” with the equally prejudiced counterclaim
that homophobia is “un-African”.

The leading
authority for this fallacy, which has been pontificated to the point of
infallibility, is a 66-page report by Human Rights Watch (HRW). It
provides an accurate account of the colonial origins of most of the
statutes that criminalise homosexuality in Africa today.

For example,
Nigeria’s federal sodomy statute – section 214 of the Criminal
Procedure Act – remains identical to the original provision – section
208 – of the 1899 Penal Code of the Australian colony of Queensland.

However, it is a
fallacy for HRW to conclude that “sodomy laws throughout . . .
sub-Saharan Africa have consistently been colonial impositions”, simply
because “no ‘native’ ever participated in their making”.

Rich and varied
systems of indigenous law, which are now collectively called customary
law, existed in pre-colonial Africa. Customary criminal law applied
wherever there was a political entity requiring the enforcement of
certain standards of behaviour and imposing sanctions for their breach.

Although there was
no single body of law that applied throughout the continent, a degree
of basic uniformity of content existed over a wide range of matters,
including the suppression of homosexuality, as was indeed the case
among the rest of mankind.

Customary law was
affected in many parts of Africa by Islam long before European
colonisation. Thus, the British colonialists met different systems,
ranging from relatively simple indigenous systems of social norms based
on the family, the village, or group of villages, to the highly
systematised and sophisticated sharia law of crime.

The fundamental
feature of customary law was that it was unwritten. Although sharia law
was written, it was and still is embodied in disparate rulings of
jurists of the various schools. Therefore, the criminalisation of
homosexuality in pre-colonial Africa was not embodied in comprehensive
codes.

However, a vast
majority of Africans of all faiths and cultures are united today in
their hostility towards homosexuality and this is a reflection of the
similarity of the various systems of customary law to each other and to
the foreign codes on the subject.

Customary law
continues to regulate many areas of people’s lives in Africa today.
Though largely superseded by legislation, it still governs issues such
as family relations. More significantly, customary law on issues such
as homosexuality negates the enforcement of contradictory statutory
law. This happens, for instance, in South Africa, where the legal
recognition of homosexuality has resulted in a backlash against gays
and their perceived assertiveness.

So the fact that
the legislation, which criminalises homosexuality is in apparent breach
of the respective countries’ constitutions, and international treaties,
such as the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, which
guarantee the right to privacy and prohibit discrimination (as held by
the United Nations Human Rights Committee and the courts in South
Africa and India), does not necessarily mean that a change in
legislation will end the persecution of gay people in Africa.

It should also be
noted that some African constitutions guarantee the right to culture
and oblige the courts to apply customary law in certain circumstances.
Similarly, the African Charter provides that “the rights and freedoms
of each individual shall be exercised with due regard to morality and
common interest”, and prescribes that “the promotion and protection of
morals and traditional values recognised by the community shall be the
duty of the state”.

As such, while
current efforts to strike down the sodomy laws through the institution
of test cases are an important step in the right direction, there is a
need for a more informed and culturally aware strategy that goes beyond
litigation and legislation.

Critical in this regard is an understanding of the various brands of Christianity practiced today in Africa.

Perhaps a more
pragmatic way to serve the interests of gay Africans in the short term
is to appeal to the humanity of a sufficient number of their brothers
and sisters. This could reduce homophobia in the continent to a level
similar to the one deemed tolerable in the west, where, as the Sun’s
poll after the David Laws story shows, homophobia remains rife.

Africa cannot
afford to face this problem with yet another imported and, in its own
way, blinkered attitude, which refuses to acknowledge the existence and
influence of homegrown prejudice.

This article was first published in the NewStatesman magazine, London.

Finally, it seems that the plan to
amend the 1999 Constitution has gone past the point of no return. It is
heartwarming to note that the National Assembly has actually done some
real work – the journey up to this stage has involved both chambers
sweating out the finer details of the review, and carrying out series
of harmonisation sessions to iron out several differences between the
versions they arrived at. Now there is a harmonized draft version,
which the Senate adopted last week. What is left now is for all the 36
State Houses of Assembly to formally ratify the revised constitution.

Nigerians have some reason to rejoice.
Senate President David Mark described the day the Senate approved the
revised draft as “historic”, noting that it was “the first time the
Senate would cross this point in the attempt to alter the 1999
Constitution.

Indeed this is not the first time there
has been an attempt to review the 1999 Constitution. In 2005, during
the Obasanjo administration, there was a short-lived constitution
review move. The failure of this is traceable to Obasanjo’s last-minute
move to introduce a clause that would have allowed him to rule longer
than two terms. So the fact that the process has now got to a point
where there is a single draft version, which has been adopted by the
two chambers of the National Assembly, is nothing but good news.

Some of the revisions in the proposed
constitution are truly groundbreaking. A good example is the move to
free the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Judiciary
and National Assembly from subservience to the executive arm of
government, in terms of funding. Under the current Constitution these
bodies depended on the executive for their running costs, making a huge
joke of their supposed autonomy. Under the proposed draft review
constitution however, their funding is to come directly from the
country’s Consolidated Revenue Fund (CRF), making them no longer
directly dependent on the executive.

The ambiguous, loophole-ridden Section
145, which was at the centre of the six-month constitutional crisis
that rocked the country,

recently, has also undergone revision.
The revised constitution compels the President to transmit a written
declaration when “proceeding on vacation or is otherwise unable to
discharge the functions of his office” and gives him 21 days to do so.
When that 21-day period expires, the revised draft constitution expects
the National Assembly to “by a resolution made by a simple majority of
the vote of each House of the National Assembly mandate the Vice
President to perform the functions of the office of the President, as
Acting President,

until the President transmits a letter
to the President of the Senate and Speaker of the House of
Representatives, that he is now available to resume his functions as
president.” Sadly, however, the revised constitution leaves the powers
of appointment of the INEC Chairman in the hands of the President. We
consider this a huge shame.

We are now left to hope that the State
houses of Assembly will expedite action on the approval of the draft of
the revised constitution.

Taking into consideration the
unpredictable nature of politicking in Nigeria,and the fact that 36
different legislative bodies are required to assent to the draft
constitution, it is certainly not out of place for anyone to be feel a
sense of concern, or alarm. Only last week, the crucial House of
Representatives vote on the harmonised draft version was aborted by the
shameful near-brawl between the Speaker and a member of the House of
Representatives.

A number of State Houses of Assembly
are in turmoil at the moment, caught up in internal strife. Two weeks
ago the premises of the Akwa Ibom House of Assembly was taken over by
policemen, to avert crisis following the impeachment of the Speaker and
his deputy. The Ogun State House of Assembly has been a theatre of
crisis for months now, with the membership split into at least two
factions. The Ekiti Assembly has in the recent past witnessed a series
of tussles between members belonging to the Action Congress (AC) and
those belonging to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

We call on the various State Houses of
Assembly to see this constitution review process as a matter of urgent
national importance, and to set aside all differences and conflicts so
as to enable speedy ratification.

Once the revised draft scales this
final hurdle, it will automatically start to take effect, and history
would have been made. The dedication that the National Assembly has
shown towards the constitution review process is commendable, and
should be extended to all their other duties and functions.

Nigeria has suffered for too long at the hands of a lethargic,
self-serving legislature. Recently the Deputy Speaker of the House of
Representatives and Chairman of the House Adhoc Committee on the Review
of the Constitution and Usman Bayero Nafada, was quoted as saying,
regarding the constitution review: “We set aside individual, group and
other primordial sentiments to work for our fatherland.” Mr. Nafada
shouldn’t have to tell us that; in the affairs of the Assembly that
kind of attitude should be the rule,not an exception.