Of spoilt Thai beaches and the false promise of accountability  25 Jan 2009

The Andaman beaches of Thailand are famous for their golden sand, pristine beauty, azure skies and unspoilt waters. But looks can be deceptive. Beneath the calm serenity lies a dark and ominous secret about the treatment of Rohingya boat people who’ve been turning up on beaches and reportedly being subjected to cruel and inhuman treatment by the Thai military.  

Photographs showed bodies lined up like sardines, face down on the hot sand, and tourist reports claimed they were frequently whipped if they complained. Such a far cry from a tourist destination that occasionally wins international awards. 

The Rohingya are muslims from Myanmar who take to the seas to escape persecution from the brutal regime which for decades has subjected them to shocking repression, using them as slaves on public works, and doing everything to destroy their culture, religion and way of life.  

They’ve been washing up on Thai shores en route to supposedly friendly destinations like Malaysia. But they find themselves caught literally between the devil and the deep blue sea because their tribulations are mixed up with all the evils of human trafficking which includes illegal arms trading.  

The troubled Thai muslim south is a particularly delicate scenario from which authorities are anxious to keep these seafarers. Thailand is also anxious to persuade potential tourists that the insurgency in the south is too far away from the tourist circuit.  

So far the message has held. But now the Rohingya question is surfacing right on the precious tourist beaches, where shocked tourists are relaying messages back to their countries about the brutality they witnessed. The problem won’t go away.  

But at least the allegations of brutality will end now that the issue is receiving so much media attention. More importantly, it seems, is the need for a lasting solution. The Myanmar junta is clearly not interested, but pressure needs to be applied by the international community, not only for these unfortunate people but for the sake of all Burmese who continue to be subject to brutality.  

The Rohingya have tried Bangladesh and experienced nothing but repression there too. Thailand isn’t turning out to be such a brilliant idea now. Many of these people believe Malaysia is the land of milk and honey, and that they can be absorbed by the Rohingya population there. It is for many, a vain hope. But they’re still prepared to take their chances, believing an uncertain life on the high seas is a much better prospect than life in Myanmar. 

Now for some good news, at least if you think ancient Chinese astrology holds the answers to the universe. We’re about the enter the year of the ox, which some feng shui masters believe to be quite an auspicious one. On 26 January we usher in a year of global peace and calm financial markets after the turbulence of the last year.  

The fact that the incoming US president Barack Obama was born in the year of the ox, the ‘yin earth’ year helps. It might not be too far-fetched to expect calmness and a respite from the madness of the year of the rat. We’re not out of the woods yet. Jobs are being lost left, right and centre, and there’s little light at the end of the tunnel.  

However, the measures now being put in place by every government worth its salt are a promising start to the new year. Obama’s message of hope which has been welcomed the world over is also likely to create a new mood and climate of tolerance, especially in trouble spots like the Middle East.  

And in a year’s time we’ll look back and ask was peace realized in Gaza, and hopefully in the Congo and elsewhere because of the effect of the interplay between astrological elements or because common sense prevailed? At the end of the day, it probably doesn’t matter. The important thing is that peace becomes a reality. 

The world has placed an enormous burden on the shoulders of one man who appeared from political obscurity two years ago and embarked on an improbable journey that his opponents dismissed with contempt from the word go. Watching and listening to the constant allusions to Obama’s Kenyan roots one sometimes wondered what country he was talking about with such fondness.  

The post-election violence, the never-ending intrigues about grand corruption, the arrogance and greed of Kenyan politicians. Watching Obama talk about holding people to account made you see Kenya as part of a parallel universe, a sort of Alice in Wonderland where nothing is ever as it seems. For in Kenya public accountability is an alien notion. The idea that powerful individuals can be held to account for their actions remains a fiction.  

By rejoicing over Obama’s successes Kenyans are celebrating what they believe they could achieve if their dreams weren’t shattered and their hopes dashed by repression and lack of opportunity. Claiming Obama as a son of the soil is both an extravagant aspiration for what they can only dream of and an indictment on the shabby leadership they’re accustomed to. Where presidential inaugurations following flawed elections are hurried affairs held under cover of darkness, how autocratic African leaders can be sending congratulatory messages to Obama is quite amazing.

Woman assumes the title of ‘Indian Obama’  18 Jan 2009

Barack Obama is clearly the greatest inspiration of our time, for ordinary people and rogue leaders alike. His name is now being appropriated by all sorts of leaders with a point to make about ‘their turn’. 

The most interesting one I’ve come across recently is a woman known simply as Mayawati, not to be confused with Megawati, former Indonesian president. She’s the Chief Minister of Utter Pradesh, the second poorest state of India, where a third of the population of 190 million lives below the poverty line and only 20% of households have electricity.  

Yet, Utter Pradesh enjoys a special role in Indian history, religion and culture. Hinduism started here. The iconic Taj Mahal is found here. It has throughout history enjoyed a special place in Sanskrit-based learning.  

What makes Mayawati remarkable is that she’s from that much-despised caste of the dalits, sometimes referred to as untouchables, and has risen to the highest job in the state. And she’s not stopping there. She has the premiership in her sights. 

The concept of untouchability was abolished in 1950. However, you can pass laws to ban the use of a word, but it’s a little more difficult to abolish a centuries-old mindset and culture. Referring to them by their official term, dalit, has done little to eradicate institutionalized prejudice and discrimination.   

Mayawati believes that if a black man could overcome centuries of discrimination and sit behind the most powerful desk in the world, there’s nothing to stop a dalit from governing India. And why not? For that leader to overcome both caste discrimination and the equally insidious effects of gender discrimination would be nothing short of a miracle. 

For some years now, Mayawati has embarked on an ambitious drive to rewrite history to demonstrate the achievements of the dalit and in the process inspire them to take pride in who they are. She started by trying to tackle poverty, creating jobs instead of giving money away. For that she earned the respect of many.  

She has now turned her attention to building monuments across the state, to showcase the unknown history of the dalits, and show the world what her people are capable of. If the upper classes as well as the British Raj could transform the Indian landscape with grandiose monuments and sculptures, so can the lowliest.  

Critics estimate she has spent close to one billion dollars on this megalomaniac ride.  For this the dalits love and revere her. But you would think that money would have been better spent not on concrete and marble but on creating jobs, providing electricity, schools and heath facilities. For a very well educated person, apparently with degrees in law and education, and who used to be a teacher, you’d think she would have more sense about how to improve the plight of millions who have known nothing but poverty and lack of opportunities.  

The dalits will walk the streets of Lucknow and Kanpur, admiring behemoth structures constructed in their honour and in honour of their few historical figures, but they’re unlikely to find job opportunities improve. The millions of landless peasants will see little change in land tenure, or in the way their upper-caste employers treat them.  

Mayawati could well ascend to the highest office in the land one day. But today, her grandiose ambitions are coming in for a lot of criticism. For a woman who calls herself ‘Indian Obama’, this is not good for business. Given her history of controversy, her halo has never been truly stable, but now it’s clearly beginning to slip.  

She has a habit of raising money publicly for her birthday celebrations, events which are explained away as part of the dalit-enhancement initiatives. But the mysterious death of a man who had allegedly refused to part with ‘birthday money’ has cast a shadow over this year’s celebrations.  

This, plus her shoddy treatment of fellow politicians as well as the fact that her party is populated by politicians with serious allegations of corruption and other felonies, is now raising questions about her judgment and credibility.  

Someone asked me the other day, why is it cheaper to fly from London to Nairobi than the much shorter distance from Nairobi to Bujumbura, apparently by the same airline, the one and only ‘pride of Africa.’ I’m not privy to his ticket invoice, so I don’t have the specific details.  

But I thought to myself, here we go again. The failure of businesses in Africa to function efficiently on the continent and in the process burden their customers with unreasonable prices. From banking to travel and telecommunications, it’s the same story over and over again. If you ask them they’ll plead low volume of business, poor infrastructure and God knows what else. There is no reason why the cost of doing business across Africa should be so prohibitive.  

While young people in Europe spend their holidays Euro-railing across the continent at very low cost, taking advantage of excellent transport facilities and cheap accommodation, open borders, practicing different languages along the way, African countries remain impenetrable by neighbours except the most intrepid aid-workers and businesspeople, or those forced to flee terror. We risk remaining underdeveloped, in spite of all the advances in technology.

A health service in search of credibility   11 Jan 2009

How does a dead body simply disappear from a hospital? That’s the question they’re asking in Hong Kong after the body of a dead child disappeared without trace. One nurse claims that when she once worked in a public hospital she often saw staff disposing of dead bodies in black plastic bags. 

It sounds like a case for Sherlock Holmes. A staff member apparently placed the dead child’s body in the same bag as that of an obese man. Why would he do a thing like that? Apparently he’s too shocked to remember. The body of the obese man was handed over to the family for cremation. Was the child’s body still in the bag, and could the two have been cremated together?  

The funeral home denies having handled a child’s body. Attention now focuses on whether it could have been disposed of with the rubbish. In typical shoddy public relations reticence, the Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital only revealed the fiasco following media speculation.  

Disappearing bodies have been reported in the territory in the past. In some cases, mourners were given the wrong body to cremate and only discovered the error long after the ceremonies. 

This disappearance comes hot on the heels of an equally unfortunate event when a heart attack victim was allowed to die within the hospital grounds. Just before Christmas, a man rushed into a hospital seeking help for his father who was having a heart attack just outside the hospital door. You would think an emergency like that one would galvanize even the laziest and most unsympathetic health care worker.  

The receptionist at Caritas Medical Centre told the man to phone an ambulance. Phone an ambulance, outside a hospital, within spitting distance of doctors? Later, a doctor who was passing by called the hospital’s accident and emergency and tried in vain to resuscitate the man, who died barely half an hour later. Common sense and quick action on the part of the receptionist could possibly have saved a life.  

But that’s the bizarre thing about institutions. You often fail to get a sympathetic ear where you most expect it, compassion where you have a right to expect it. From people being turned away at hospitals in Kenya because of lack of funds to the case above, human kindness and basic commonsense are factored out of the equation of costs and guidelines. In the Caritas case, the chief executive said that staff had followed guidelines, which simply sounded like a failure to accept responsibility.  

Apologies have now been issue for ‘mishandling the case’. With a strong catholic culture, the hospital’s motto is ‘Love in the service of hope’. Now there’s some irony. 

Even if you were simply following guidelines, the blind pursuit of bureaucratic procedures must never be an excuse for poor judgment and lack of commonsense. Otherwise, people become programmed unthinking robots, routinised procedures leave little room for initiative and creativity, while institutions become prisons.  

Paradoxically, the whole practice of phoning an ambulance is now being questioned after it transpired that the level of abuse of the service is higher than previously thought. Some people even dial 999 for an ambulance after suffering a minor insect bite. Such ignorance and selfishness can only be addressed by educating people about the risks they cause to those whose needs are more urgent, and more genuine. 

Meanwhile, readers might recall that Taiwan’s former president Chen Shui-bian went on a 16-day hunger strike in November to protest over what he called political persecution. He faces jail for collaborating with his wife to embezzle funds, forgery and money-laundering. His case looks bleak after a businessman recently confessed to handing him and his wife millions of dollars in bribes. 

During his hunger strike, his creative juices flowed like never before. He wrote a love poem dedicated to his wife and maintained a prison diary, no doubt hoping to emulate political detainees who were often forced to be creative not only in what they wrote but what they wrote on and how they concealed it from the sharp eyes of prison warders.

Mister Chen says he was inspired by the hunger strike. A newspaper now reports he was ‘powered on’ by snacks he was secretly filmed eating at night. So, the hunger-strike turns out to be a sham calculated to enhance his desired martyr status. This will hardly help his credibility when his case comes up. He is said to be reading an inspirational book ironically entitled Nothing Left But Money.   

And finally, the fire in Bangkok which left 61 dead showed once again why it’s such a bad idea to bring fireworks indoors. This comes barely three months after a similar incident in Shenzhen, China which killed 44, when a performer lit fireworks in a nightclub.  

The Thai incident also confirmed yet again the disdain with which nightclub owners treat customers when it comes to health and safety. In the ill-fated Santika club that hosted more than a thousand revelers on New Year’s Day they reportedly had only one fire extinguisher to cover three floors, no water sprinklers and emergency exits were blocked. To add insult to injury, their insurance lapsed months ago. It’s the same story over and over again where fires in public places like shopping malls, clubs and hotels are a common occurrence.

Lack of visionary leadership stands in Kenya's way   4 Jan 2009

A number of people have written to me suggesting that there’s not much we can learn from China. I agree, but only to the extent that the Chinese political ideology is not one I personally subscribe to.  

We need to distinguish between political ideology and leadership, and avoid confusing voting with democracy. Our history of rigged elections has shown clearly that casting a ballot does not create a true democracy. If a Chinese rural peasant or urban worker enjoys a better quality of life and higher life expectancy, and yet he’s never voted in a general election, his Kenyan counterpart who goes to the polls every five years, occasionally gets clobbered for it and sees little change for the better in his personal circumstances, must be wondering why he’s being taken for a fool.  

Leadership is about offering people a vision of who they are, where they’re going and how to get there. The last time this happened in Kenya was prior to independence with the likes of Kimathi, the early Kenyatta, Mboya, Oginga and so forth. After independence, we’ve largely been treated to a charade, in spite of the millions of votes that have been cast. No one has come forward with a distinctive message, a dream, a vision, and anyone who tried was quickly silenced. Kibaki raised hopes in 2002 and although he oiled the bureaucratic apparatus, the dream quickly died. Visionary leadership remains elusive.  

One commentator told me that what China has achieved in the last thirty years is to reclaim its past glory. Which begs the question, if they can reclaim the much vaunted five thousand year civilization in thirty years after decades of poverty, starvation, blood-letting and misery, how long does it take an African country with no such history to provide clean water for its citizens, decent roads and a viable railway network, a reliable supply of electric power?  

One of the problems we have brought upon ourselves is to invest a degree of reverence in our politicians that is totally disproportionate to their true leadership potential. We refer to people as VIPs, and treat them as though they were royalty, thus encouraging them to believe they have a divine right to rule. Undue privilege, fear of the powerful and a reluctance to hold them to account merely creates a culture of arrogance and impunity.  

VIPs swagger around thinking the citizenry owes them a living. We’ll never have any true leadership as long as our so-called VIPs refuse to humble themselves to the level of public servants, which is what they are in true democracies. We do ourselves a disservice as a nation because we fail to remind them that their duty is to serve. We don’t need a five-thousand year civilization to inculcate a culture of service amongst the political elites.  

What we can do is ask ourselves why is it that in many countries in the east which like us went through a period of subjugation by foreigners, whether it be western powers in much of south east Asia or the Japanese in the case of China, went on to realize sustainable economic growth? There are many explanations, but one that stands out is leadership.  

As Kenyans we have a tendency to take our sense of national pride too far, to sit on our laurels and pretend everything is alright. Hubris is a bad thing; it prevents us from seeing where the rain started to beat us, as it were, and it forces us to make excuses for those who’ve failed us.  

There’s nothing as pathetic as being an apologist for one’s oppressor who has shown little interest in meeting one’s needs. For those who still insist they have nothing to learn from other nations, perhaps the answer for them lies in a change of language. Instead of comparison and learning from, perhaps we should be saying let’s try to understand how others overcame challenges and raised the standards of living of their people.  

It has been said that those who ignore the lessons of history are condemned to repeat it. The apologists for our party and parliamentary dictatorships need to ask themselves some tough questions because as far as I’m concerned, the challenge isn’t so much about learning from others but more appropriately looking at the log in our own eyes. Our national fascination with the political intrigues of VIPS has done nothing to eradicate poverty and disease.  

It hasn’t stopped hordes of university graduates and school-leavers despondently searching for the Holy Grail of non-existent jobs. The apologists amongst us need to tell us why is it that Asians were creating firm foundations for industrialization by attracting foreign investments while our leaders, many of whom are even better educated, were perfecting the ignominy of begging for foreign aid.  

African countries have had the benefit of well-educated workers, proximity to the markets of the west, a history of close association with former colonial powers. And yet the jobs are going to Asia. It is no good saying that South Korea was propped up by the west. So was Kenya, as it happens. Propped up and damaged in the process. Our salvation is not exactly rocket science. It’s in the economy and leadership. Unfortunately, hubris, politics and VIPs keep coming in the way.