Harrasment of media practitioners still rife in Africa.

South Sudan TV editor says security agent threatened him with gun

The head of South Sudan's only private television station said he was threatened at gunpoint by a national security agent who was attempting to censor its news programs.
Nhial Bol, managing editor of Citizen TV in Juba, said the official showed up at his office late on Thursday and demanded that he hand over the broadcast schedule as well as all news materials relating Vice President Riak Machar.
"He pulled out his pistol and said he was ready to shoot anybody who didn't show him respect," Bol told Reuters.
"He said he would shut down the station if we didn't cooperate. This is censorship," said Bol who also heads the Citizen daily newspaper.
The ministries of national security and information were not immediately available for comment on the accusation.
Rights groups say the harassment of journalists by state security officers has already eroded press freedom and led to self-censorship in Africa's youngest nation, just two years after it gained independence from its long-time foe Sudan.
Bol said senior security officers apologized to the station on Friday but that agents would be deployed to all media houses to monitor and censor news from now on.
Last month, the New York-based advocacy group Committee to Protect Journalists sent a letter to President Salva Kiir urging him to prosecute security agents responsible for repeated harassing, intimidating and detaining journalists.
In April, Kiir, who heads the ruling Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), halted a reconciliation initiative launched by Machar to end tribal and rebel violence, which had been viewed as an attempt by his deputy to raise his profile ahead of an anticipated contest for the party leadership.
The two men were on opposing sides of a split within the SPLM during much of the 1983-2005 civil war that ended after the two factions reunited.
"The whole thing is related to the (ruling party) and contesting for the 2015 elections," Bol said.
This year, South Sudan slipped 13 places to 124 out of 179 countries on the world press freedom index compiled by media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.
(Editing by Ulf Laessing and Sonya Hepinstall)

Culled from reuters

Zimbabwean Politics full of up and downs

It was reported that Mr Tsvangirai was attempting to lure Dr Dabengwa and in the not so distant past, Dr Dabengwa was reported to have berated the securocrates for not respecting Tsvangirai and threatening not to respect the will of the people if Tsvangirai wins.

Some people were livid at Dr Dabengwa's defence of Tsvangirai and were quick to remind Tsvangirai that he can not trust Dabengwa as Dr Dabengwa has in the past made it clear that his support for MAVAMBO was an attempt to thwart Tsvangirai's chances in the last general elections.

The same people who accused Dabengwa acted like jilted wives, they wanted Prof Welshman Ncube and his MDC to be the ones in negotiations with Tsvangirai.

Someone in Tsvangirai's camp is a political genius, but I will expose his or her plans right here. Tsvangirai's approach is like a double edged sword, it cuts on both sides,  their aims are very clear, their goal are to recapture the constituency of Matebeleland and Midlands which they have lost through negligence, they will use whatever means, fair or foul. In endeavours to recapture, they want to do it in a number of ways, first, which is their major aim is to form an alliance with the MDC led by Prof Ncube, however, they are aware that straight negotiations will not work because the MDC led by Ncube has gained so much support in Matebeleland, Midlands and Mashonaland East.

This support base makes it hard for MDC to be persuaded to form an alliance with Tsvangirai. The MDC won quite a sizeable number of seats in the last general elections when it was weaker than what it is today and therefore by extrapolation it is clear that if things stand as they are the MDC will sweep the whole of Matebeleland, sweep the whole of Midlands and win a hand full of seats in Masvingo and Mashonaland East. The MDCT wants to destroy this support base, or to shake it to a stage when the MDC will start doubting its chances. Secondly, they want to destroy the MDC led by Welshman Ncube.

The negotiations with Dr Dabengwa's ZAPU is one of those efforts of destabilising the MDC support base and to send a clear message that the NDCT will stop at nothing in its efforts to destabilise and destroy the MDC if the MDC does not want to succumb to its bully tactics
.
 Tsvangirai is not intending the end result to be an MDCT-ZAPU alliance, but what what he really want or envisaging is to scare the MDC, so that when they approach it, the MDC will be weakened and willing to negotiate.

However, if the MDC does not move from its principled stand, Tsvangirai will be prepared to go all the way and form an alliance with ZAPU. Tsvangirai is aware that even though ZAPU is not that strong at the moment, however, it has a lot of good will in Matebeleland and Midlands and if ZAPU is supported financially to mount proper campaign, the MDC will be dwarfed within a very short period of time and the MDCT-ZAPU team will surely win the whole of Matebeleland and Midlands.

The danger for Tsvangirai is here, it is most likely that Dr Dabengwa will accept all the campaign support but at the last minute he will jump ship and join hands with his homeboy- Ncube. The DD-Ncube alliance will be a formidable force in Matebeleland and it can not be defeated.

The danger for DD is that Tsvangirai will dump him at the 11th hour and go with Ncube's MDC, but worse still; the MDCT may opt to go with Zanu-PF.

These are interesting political times, we will wait and see who out smart all of them as it stand right now, the Ncube led MDC has an uphill task to climb, all odds are against them, but they are known for their fortitude and foresight, we shall see.
Culled from Bulawayo 24 news

New president of kenya already faced wth challenges with his ministers,so early to encounter such problems

(Reuters) - Kenyan members of parliament, already among the world's best-paid lawmakers, voted on Tuesday to increase their salaries to more than 130 times the minimum wage in defiance of government plans to cut them as part of spending reforms.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, who won a closely fought March 4 election on an economic growth agenda, has implored lawmakers to accept pay cuts and help rein in public sector salaries to free up cash to create jobs.
Many Kenyans view members of parliament as symbols of a greedy political culture, seeking public office as an opportunity for personal gain at the expense of a country mired in poverty and where the unemployment rate stands at 40 percent.
Lawmakers on both sides of the house voted overwhelmingly for higher pay.
"They have taken away our dignity and we must reclaim it," member of parliament Jimmy Angwenyi told the assembly, backing a motion to overturn a legal notice slashing their pay and to increase it to an average of 851,000 shillings ($10,000) a month, up from 532,000.
The average monthly wage in Kenya is 6,498 shillings ($76).
Many Kenyans expressed outrage at the pay increase.
"Did we vote in the wrong guys? This is nonsense! What work have they done in the last two months to deserve this?" prominent businessman Chris Kirubi said on Twitter.
The president has no direct power to determine MP salaries, and the legislators' decision is expected to be challenged in court by civic rights groups.
The lawmakers' move to overturn a reduction in their pay decided by the state Salaries and Remuneration Commission before the election has caused anger that has led to street protests.
But lawmakers said the pay cut was imposed illegally. They argued they needed high wages because constituents expected them to provide charitable support. Some also said that MPs could be vulnerable to bribes if their salaries were set too low.
The Law Society of Kenya (LSK) said it would go to court seeking to challenge whether the MPs can set the new salaries.
"The supreme law (Constitution) ended the era when elected leaders could use their muscle to illegally determine their remuneration," LSK chairman Eric Mutua said in a statement.
Kenyans are worried that by increasing their pay, the lawmakers could provoke demands for higher wages from local officials in the country's newly-demarcated counties, as well as teachers, police and doctors.
Kenyatta, who made an election pledge to achieve double-digit economic growth in his five-year term, wants a slimmer government as part of efforts to make savings. He has proposed a cabinet of 18 members instead of the maximum 22 granted by law.
Officials say the economy will grow 6 percent in 2013, up from 4.6 percent last year.
Kenya's public sector wage bill stands at 50 percent of annual government tax revenue. The International Monetary Fund puts the global benchmark at about 35 percent.
Kenyatta's Jubilee coalition has promised to deliver free maternity care, laptops to primary school children, better roads and a million new jobs a year.
($1 = 85.0000 Kenyan shillings)

History repeating its self in many african countries

history repeating its self in many africaj coujtries

Malema’s case taken off the roll

The contempt of court case against Julius Malema has been taken off the roll on.

The former African National Congress Youth League leader was expected to appear in the Pretoria High Court. Details on why the case was removed from the court roll were not immediately available.

The curators of Malema's estate brought the application against him for allegedly failing to declare his assets.

Cloete Murray from Sechaba Trust and Aviwe Ndyamara from the Tshwane Trust Company were appointed curators of Malema’s estate at the beginning of March.

They were tasked with ensuring Malema declared all his assets following a court order, and despite Malema agreeing to do so, he allegedly did not.

Malema's lawyer Tumi Mokwena previously told the Sunday Independent that her client intended to oppose the contempt of court application.

If found guilty, Malema could face a R500 000 fine, a jail term or a suspended sentence.

 

 

Patrice lumumba"s rise to National Politics

The year 1959 saw the emergence of Patrice Lumumba as the sole truly national figure on the Congo political scene. His persuasive, magnetic personality dominated the Luluabourg congress of April 1959, where all those political formations favoring a unitary form of government for the Congo attempted to establish a common front. Lumumba's growing prestige as well as his comparative radicalism, however, antagonized other MNC leaders, and the outcome was a split in the ranks of the party (July 1959), as a result of which most of the original founders of the party rallied behind Albert Kalonji while Lumumba retained the bulk of the rank and file.
Lumumba was briefly imprisoned in November 1959 on charges of inciting riots in Stanleyville, but he was set free in time to attend the Round Table Conference in Brussels, where his dramatic appearance stole the show from other Congolese leaders. Lumumba's efforts throughout this period were directed more steadfastly than those of any other Congolese politician toward the organization of a nationwide movement. To this effect, he took full advantage of local political situations, of his earlier connections in Stanleyville, and of his own ethnic background, which provided him with an initial foothold in many districts of the Congo. His linguistic abilities - unlike Kasavubu or Moïse Tshombe, Lumumba was an effective speaker in each of the Congo's major vehicular languages as well as in French - also helped his campaigning.

Head of Government

In the May 1960 general elections, Lumumba and his allies won 41 of 137 seats in the National Assembly and held significant positions in four of six provincial governments. As leader of the largest single party (the MNC's nearest competitor had only 15 seats), Lumumba was somewhat reluctantly selected by the Belgians to form a coalition cabinet and became the Congo's first prime minister (and minister of defense) a week before independence, and Kasavubu, leader of the Bakongo, became president of the republic with Lumumba's tacit support.
During his brief incumbency, Lumumba had to face a conjunction of emergencies such as has seldom been met by a newly independent country: the mutiny of the army and the succesion of Katanga and then of Southern kasai, aided and abetted by Belgian interests and the unilateral intervention of Belgian forces. Lumumba turned to the United Nations for support, only to discover that they had no intention of accepting his definition of the Congo's national interest and insisted on opposing the use of force whether by legal or illegal authorities. In desperation, Lumumba asked for Soviet logistical support to mount an offensive against the break away regimes of Southern Kasai and Katanga but was stopped in his tracks when President Kasavubu dismissed him from office on Sept. 5, 1960.
The National Assembly reconfirmed Lumumba in power, but a fraction of the army, led by Col. Mobutu, took power, and Lumumba was confined to de facto house arrest under the protection of Ghanaian troops of the UN force. His political associates had meanwhile withdrawn to Stanleyville to organize a rival government. Lumumba slipped out of the capital and tried to make his way toward Stanleyville, but he was arrested by an army patrol and incarcerated in a military camp at Thysville.

 






A turning point of record proportions is billed to usher Africa from yesteryear ravages to a remastered dispensation of peace, progress and positive growth.
There is a fresh upsurge of optimism that Africa is set to overturn conditions that have short supplied its epic quest for better days and relocate from the backyard of civilisation to a pre-eminent station in international affairs.
The African Dream at High Tide
Impassioned campaigns for a mass crossover to destiny are fermenting across Africa. There is a joint effort among statesmen, media practitioners, authors, academics, artists, pressure groups and clergymen to awaken our continent to the incredible possibilities at its disposal.
It is pertinent from the outset, though, to inquire from the elites and the rank and file of our populace a question that is long overdue: Can we fail to see that the whole discourse is for about a better Africa is old wine in new wineskins?
 Hindsight to the continent’s progress through history, against the base residues of slavery, imperialism and post-colonial impediment conveys a graphic depiction of our people’s determination to press against the manifold array of problems militating against the continent’s pursuit of triumph.
The current flare of optimism is not without precedent. It dates as far as the preliminary phases of the decolonization campaign when Afrocentric proponents of a new era stepped up in arms against the colonial scourge.
These firebrand exponents of widescale reform who flighted sunny forecasts of a glorious dispensation across the threshold of independence. They called time on Africa’s anguish and tribulation, saddled on the continent by long years of slavery, subjugation and servitude.
Great expectations ran viral as Pan-Africanist luminaries such as Kwame Nkrumah, Marcus Garvey, Edmund Blyden, Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere articulated Africa’s eventual tap into the dream dispensation through the ‘master key’ of self-government.
Patrice Lumumba, that grand partriach of African renaissance signifies this consciousness: “We have long suffered and today we want to breathe the air of freedom. The Creator has given us this share of the earth that goes in the name of the African continent; it belongs to us and we are its only masters. It is our right to make this continent a continent of justice, law and peace.
“We wish to bid farewell to the rule of slvery and bastardization that has so severely wronged us.”
The founding premier of independent Congo, who had a shortlived tenure in office, was survived by his articulate renditions of the African Dream:
“Despite the boundaries that separate us, despite our ethnic differences, we have the same soul plunged day and night night in anguish, the same desire to make this African continent a free and happy continent that has rid itself of unrest and of fear and of any sort of colonialist domination.
“The aspiration of colonized and enslaved people are everywhere the same. The common goal is the liberation of Africa from the colonialist yoke.
Kwame Nkrumah, the foremost exponent of Pan-Africanism and first leader of black Africa had these concerns to register:
“We have too long been victims of foreign domination. For too long we have had no say in the manner our own affairs are run or in deciding our own destinies. Now the times have changed and today we are masters of our own fate.”
Nkrumah pledged to avail his country’s nascent autonomy towards the upgrading of his people’s condition. He outlined the master plan to abolish, poverty, disease and ignorance, setting a standard for all subsequent leaders who were to echo this legendary election promise hook, line and sinker.
“We shall measure our progress by the improvement in the the health of our people; by the number of children in school and by the quality of the education and by the availability of water and electricity in our towns and villages and by the happiness which our people take in being able to manage their own affairs. The welfare of our people is our chief pride and it is by this that my government will ask to be judged.”
Nkrumah affirmed with a note of optimism that : “It is therefore patent that we in Africa have the resources present and potential for creating this kind of society.”
Thus high soared the tide of expectation across the region and all subsequent administrations have sought to espouse it.
Things Fall Apart
Going by this billing, one would expect Africa to be an epitome of positive transformation 70 years after Lumumba. Far from it!
                                        
Africa is yet to shed defrock its dark continent tag, not to mentioned that she has found herself immersed in even greater mess. The ascent to better days has derailed and Africa is gravitating deeper into the miry bog.

Frustrations show up at every turn, and the ‘master key’ of self-government has proved a hoax and multitudes gasping for the air of freedom have come to equate their new leaders with colonial taskmasters. A view has run viral that oppression has merely changed hands from white to black. Charles Mungoshi notes in Walking Still that customs and costumes have changed but the conditions are still the same.

The new stock of leaders has abdicated from confronting generational problems and given in to further problems. The insistence on African solutions for African problems, while bearing the marks of an enlighten cause has not yielded anything tangible.

Sourcing help from offshore resorts has also proved a compromised recourse as the relations entered are slanted to Africa’s disadvantage and fraught with double standards. As long as Africa remains stuck at the base of the geopolitical pyramid she is not likely to register a significant presence on the global scene.

Ariston Chambati, Zimbabwe’s late finance minister recounted an exchange he had with Henry Kissinger on the sidelines of a United Nations Summit. The latter had presented a report outlining the dynamics of world economies – except Africa. Chambati was offended and confronted Kissinger over the matter. Kissinger declined to respond and simply answered: “I rest my case.”

culled from mschavar.wordpress.com

Nelson Mandela’s Legacy

Ever since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after winning his country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, the national anthem has consisted of two songs spliced—not particularly mellifluously—together. One is “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” or “God Bless Africa,” sung at black protest rallies during the forty-six years between the rise and fall of apartheid. The other is “Die Stem,” (“The Call”), the old white anthem, a celebration of the European settlers’ conquest of Africa’s southern tip. It was Mandela’s idea to juxtapose the two, his purpose being to forge from the rival tunes’ discordant notes a powerfully symbolic message of national harmony.

Not everyone in Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was convinced when he first proposed the plan. In fact, the entirety of the ANC’s national executive committee initially pushed to scrap “Die Stem” and replace it with “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Mandela won the argument by doing what defined his leadership: reconciling generosity with pragmatism, finding common ground between humanity’s higher values and the politician’s aspiration to power.

The chief task the ANC would have upon taking over government, Mandela reminded his colleagues at the meeting, would be to cement the foundations of the hard-won new democracy. The main threat to peace and stability came from right-wing terrorism. The way to deprive the extremists of popular support, and therefore to disarm them, was by convincing the white population as a whole that they belonged fully in ‘the new South Africa,’ that a black-led government would not treat them the way previous white rulers had treated blacks. In a political context so delicate, Mandela pointed out, you had to be very careful with the messages you put out. Strike a false note and you risked undermining the nation’s stability; make the right gesture and national unity would be reinforced. The matter of the anthem offered a case in point, Mandela said: the short term satisfaction of banning the despised old song might come at a dangerously high price, whereas the magnanimous act of retaining it could yield mightily valuable returns.

And so it proved. Mandela’s wisdom in reaching out to the old enemy, repressing any vengeful impulses he might have accumulated during his twenty-seven years in prison, is the principal reason why South Africa has consolidated its transition from tyranny to democracy, and done so not, in the time-honored style of revolutions, through repression, but by persuasion. The triumphant expression of Mandela’s life’s work is seen in a political system that, seventeen years after he took power, remains as stable as it is authentically democratic. The rule of law, freedom of speech, free and fair elections: these are the gifts Mandela has bequeathed his nation.

Flaws, nevertheless, abound today, stemming from corruption in all its creeping manifestations. These could in time destroy the edifice Mandela built. But they will not undermine Mandela’s place in history, which is more durable than any political construct. As with Abraham Lincoln, his deeper legacy lies in the example he has left for succeeding generations.

Mandela is Africa’s Lincoln. You don’t do Lincoln too many favors if you scrutinize the detail of what came after him: he fought against slavery, yet black Americans would remain second-class citizens for more than one hundred more years; he appealed to “the better angels of our nature,” yet genocidal massacres of American Indians continued for some time after his death. It would be as unfair to tarnish Lincoln’s memory with the shortcomings of those that followed him as it would be to question Mandela’s lasting value by pointing to the mediocrity or venality of his successors.

The big truth is that Mandela, like Lincoln, achieved the historically rare feat of uniting a fiercely divided country. The feat is rare because what ordinary politicians have always done is seek power by highlighting difference and fueling antagonism. Mandela sought it by appealing to people’s common humanity.

It was behind bars that he learnt his most valuable lessons in leadership. As he himself has acknowleged, prison shaped him. He went in angry, convinced that the only way of achieving his people’s freedom was by force of arms. This was neither an original nor a morally opprobrious approach back then, in 1962, given every attempt to negotiate with successive white governments over the previous half century had been contemptuously rebutted; and given, too, the enormity of the injustice to which the eighty-five percent of the population who were not white had been subjected since the arrival of the first European mariners in 1652.

What the experience of prison did was elevate Mandela to a higher political plain, setting him apart from the great mass of ordinarily brave, ordinarily principled freedom fighters within his country and beyond. He learnt that succumbing to the vengeful passions brought fleeting joys at the cost of lasting benefits; he learnt, through studying his jailers closely, that black and white people had far more in common, at bottom, than they had points of difference; he learnt that forgiveness and generosity and, above all, respect were weapons of political persuasion as powerful as any gun.

When his time came, he deployed these lessons to devastating political effect—through countless small gestures in the same spirit of the big one he made on the national anthem, and, equally important, in the critical encounters he held, one on one, with figures from the white establishment whose influence on South Africa’s political destiny was almost as great as his own. During Mandela’s last four years in prison, he held secret talks about talks with the minister of justice of South Africa and the country’s top spy, and—once—with the president himself, the iron-fisted and (by reputation) ogreish P. W. Botha. The outcome of these meetings was that he was released from prison and the process of negotiations began that led to his people’s freedom and his rise to the highest political office in the land.

How did he convince his enemies to succumb to his will? First, by treating them individually with respect, by showing them trust, and by making it clear that he had a core set of values from which he would never be persuaded to depart. The human foundations having been laid, his sincerity having been established, he set about rationally persuading them that violent confrontation would only lead to the peace of the cemeteries, to everybody losing out, and that the only hope for all parties lay in negotiation.

I have talked at length to two of those three men with whom Mandela met secretly when he was still in prison, the minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, and the intelligence chief, Niel Barnard. Coetsee wept while describing Mandela to me as “the incarnation of the great Roman virtues, gravitas, honestas, dignitas.” Barnard referred to him continually as “the old man,” as if he were talking about his own father.

Mandela had the same effect on practically everyone he met. Take the case of General Constand Viljoen, who in 1993, with the path set for multiracial elections a year later, was anointed leader of South Africa’s far right, charged with heading “the white freedom struggle.” Viljoen, who had been head of the South African Defence Force between 1980 and 1985, travelled the country organising what he called armed resistance units, others called terrorist cells. Mandela reached out to him through intermediaries and the two men met in secret at his home. Viljoen, with whom I have talked about this encounter, was almost instantly disarmed. Expecting a monster, having conditioned himself to regard Mandela as a fearsome Communist with little regard for human life, Viljoen was dumbstruck by Mandela’s big, warm smile, by his courteous attentivenes to detail (“Do you take sugar in your tea, General?”), by his keen knowledge of the history of white South Africa and his sensitivity to the apprehensions and fears white South Africans were feeling at that time. When the two men began discussing matters of substance, Mandela put it to him that, yes, he could go to war and, yes, his people were more skilled in the military arts than black South Africans; but against that, if it came to race war, black South Africa had the numbers, as well as the guaranteed support of practically the entire international community. There could be no winners, Mandela said. The general did not disagree.

That first meeting led to another, then another. Viljoen succumbed to Mandela’s lethally effective political cocktail of charm, respect, integrity, pragmatism and hard-nosed sense. He called off the planned “armed struggle” and, to the amazement of the South African political world, he agreed to take part in the all-race elections of April 1994, thereby giving his blessing to the political transformation Mandela had engineered, agreeing to the peaceful hand over of power from the white minority to the totality of the population. Viljoen won a parliamentary seat in representation of his freshly formed rightwing Freedom Front and I remember watching him on the day the new, all race parliament was inaugurated. Mandela was the last to enter the chamber and, as he walked in, Viljoen’s eyes settled on his new black president. His face wore an expression that could only be described, I thought at the time, as adoration. I asked him when we talked some years later whether I had been right in that description and he said I had been. The retired general also reminded me that before taking his seat on that inaugural parliamentary occasion Mandela had broken protocol by crossing the floor to shake hands with him. What had Mandela said to him? “He said, ‘I am very happy to see you here, general’.” And what did the general reply? “I said nothing. I am a military man and he was my president. I shook his hand and I stood to attention.”

Viljoen, who has had many encounters with Mandela since then, told me that one left his company feeling as if one were a better, more virtuous person. Viljoen was not alone. Mandela did appeal, and with uncanny success, to the better angels of people’s natures. But he did so—and this is very important—not primarily out of a desire to win a place in heaven, or to be well-liked. Mandela was the quintessential political animal: he did everything he did with a clear political purpose.  Not to understand this—to insist only on his admirable ‘lack of bitterness’ and his spirit of forgiveness—is to miss the bigger point that Mandela’s widely applauded saintliness was the instrument he judged to be most effective in the achievement of his political goals. Had he calculated, as he once did, that violence was the way to liberate his people, he would not have hesitated to pursue that route. Luckily for South Africa, he reached the conclusion that there could be no democracy without reconciliation, no justice without peace.

He acted wholeheartedly on this understanding, investing every last drop of his boundless charm, his political cunning, and his farsightedness in achieving his life’s goal by following the only strategy he knew could realistically work. Mandela’s legacy, the imperishable lesson he holds for the ages, and the reason why he stands head and shoulders above every leader of his generation, or practically every leader there has ever been, is that he showed it is possible to be a great human being and a great politician at the same time; that showing respect to friends and enemies alike can get you a long, long way; and that nothing beats the combination—in Mandela’s case, the seamless convergence—of magnanimity and power.

Nelson Mandela’s Legacy

Ever since Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa after winning his country’s first democratic elections in April 1994, the national anthem has consisted of two songs spliced—not particularly mellifluously—together. One is “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika,” or “God Bless Africa,” sung at black protest rallies during the forty-six years between the rise and fall of apartheid. The other is “Die Stem,” (“The Call”), the old white anthem, a celebration of the European settlers’ conquest of Africa’s southern tip. It was Mandela’s idea to juxtapose the two, his purpose being to forge from the rival tunes’ discordant notes a powerfully symbolic message of national harmony.

Not everyone in Mandela’s party, the African National Congress, was convinced when he first proposed the plan. In fact, the entirety of the ANC’s national executive committee initially pushed to scrap “Die Stem” and replace it with “Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika.” Mandela won the argument by doing what defined his leadership: reconciling generosity with pragmatism, finding common ground between humanity’s higher values and the politician’s aspiration to power.

The chief task the ANC would have upon taking over government, Mandela reminded his colleagues at the meeting, would be to cement the foundations of the hard-won new democracy. The main threat to peace and stability came from right-wing terrorism. The way to deprive the extremists of popular support, and therefore to disarm them, was by convincing the white population as a whole that they belonged fully in ‘the new South Africa,’ that a black-led government would not treat them the way previous white rulers had treated blacks. In a political context so delicate, Mandela pointed out, you had to be very careful with the messages you put out. Strike a false note and you risked undermining the nation’s stability; make the right gesture and national unity would be reinforced. The matter of the anthem offered a case in point, Mandela said: the short term satisfaction of banning the despised old song might come at a dangerously high price, whereas the magnanimous act of retaining it could yield mightily valuable returns.

And so it proved. Mandela’s wisdom in reaching out to the old enemy, repressing any vengeful impulses he might have accumulated during his twenty-seven years in prison, is the principal reason why South Africa has consolidated its transition from tyranny to democracy, and done so not, in the time-honored style of revolutions, through repression, but by persuasion. The triumphant expression of Mandela’s life’s work is seen in a political system that, seventeen years after he took power, remains as stable as it is authentically democratic. The rule of law, freedom of speech, free and fair elections: these are the gifts Mandela has bequeathed his nation.

Flaws, nevertheless, abound today, stemming from corruption in all its creeping manifestations. These could in time destroy the edifice Mandela built. But they will not undermine Mandela’s place in history, which is more durable than any political construct. As with Abraham Lincoln, his deeper legacy lies in the example he has left for succeeding generations.

Mandela is Africa’s Lincoln. You don’t do Lincoln too many favors if you scrutinize the detail of what came after him: he fought against slavery, yet black Americans would remain second-class citizens for more than one hundred more years; he appealed to “the better angels of our nature,” yet genocidal massacres of American Indians continued for some time after his death. It would be as unfair to tarnish Lincoln’s memory with the shortcomings of those that followed him as it would be to question Mandela’s lasting value by pointing to the mediocrity or venality of his successors.

The big truth is that Mandela, like Lincoln, achieved the historically rare feat of uniting a fiercely divided country. The feat is rare because what ordinary politicians have always done is seek power by highlighting difference and fueling antagonism. Mandela sought it by appealing to people’s common humanity.

It was behind bars that he learnt his most valuable lessons in leadership. As he himself has acknowleged, prison shaped him. He went in angry, convinced that the only way of achieving his people’s freedom was by force of arms. This was neither an original nor a morally opprobrious approach back then, in 1962, given every attempt to negotiate with successive white governments over the previous half century had been contemptuously rebutted; and given, too, the enormity of the injustice to which the eighty-five percent of the population who were not white had been subjected since the arrival of the first European mariners in 1652.

What the experience of prison did was elevate Mandela to a higher political plain, setting him apart from the great mass of ordinarily brave, ordinarily principled freedom fighters within his country and beyond. He learnt that succumbing to the vengeful passions brought fleeting joys at the cost of lasting benefits; he learnt, through studying his jailers closely, that black and white people had far more in common, at bottom, than they had points of difference; he learnt that forgiveness and generosity and, above all, respect were weapons of political persuasion as powerful as any gun.

When his time came, he deployed these lessons to devastating political effect—through countless small gestures in the same spirit of the big one he made on the national anthem, and, equally important, in the critical encounters he held, one on one, with figures from the white establishment whose influence on South Africa’s political destiny was almost as great as his own. During Mandela’s last four years in prison, he held secret talks about talks with the minister of justice of South Africa and the country’s top spy, and—once—with the president himself, the iron-fisted and (by reputation) ogreish P. W. Botha. The outcome of these meetings was that he was released from prison and the process of negotiations began that led to his people’s freedom and his rise to the highest political office in the land.

How did he convince his enemies to succumb to his will? First, by treating them individually with respect, by showing them trust, and by making it clear that he had a core set of values from which he would never be persuaded to depart. The human foundations having been laid, his sincerity having been established, he set about rationally persuading them that violent confrontation would only lead to the peace of the cemeteries, to everybody losing out, and that the only hope for all parties lay in negotiation.

I have talked at length to two of those three men with whom Mandela met secretly when he was still in prison, the minister of justice, Kobie Coetsee, and the intelligence chief, Niel Barnard. Coetsee wept while describing Mandela to me as “the incarnation of the great Roman virtues, gravitas, honestas, dignitas.” Barnard referred to him continually as “the old man,” as if he were talking about his own father.

Mandela had the same effect on practically everyone he met. Take the case of General Constand Viljoen, who in 1993, with the path set for multiracial elections a year later, was anointed leader of South Africa’s far right, charged with heading “the white freedom struggle.” Viljoen, who had been head of the South African Defence Force between 1980 and 1985, travelled the country organising what he called armed resistance units, others called terrorist cells. Mandela reached out to him through intermediaries and the two men met in secret at his home. Viljoen, with whom I have talked about this encounter, was almost instantly disarmed. Expecting a monster, having conditioned himself to regard Mandela as a fearsome Communist with little regard for human life, Viljoen was dumbstruck by Mandela’s big, warm smile, by his courteous attentivenes to detail (“Do you take sugar in your tea, General?”), by his keen knowledge of the history of white South Africa and his sensitivity to the apprehensions and fears white South Africans were feeling at that time. When the two men began discussing matters of substance, Mandela put it to him that, yes, he could go to war and, yes, his people were more skilled in the military arts than black South Africans; but against that, if it came to race war, black South Africa had the numbers, as well as the guaranteed support of practically the entire international community. There could be no winners, Mandela said. The general did not disagree.

That first meeting led to another, then another. Viljoen succumbed to Mandela’s lethally effective political cocktail of charm, respect, integrity, pragmatism and hard-nosed sense. He called off the planned “armed struggle” and, to the amazement of the South African political world, he agreed to take part in the all-race elections of April 1994, thereby giving his blessing to the political transformation Mandela had engineered, agreeing to the peaceful hand over of power from the white minority to the totality of the population. Viljoen won a parliamentary seat in representation of his freshly formed rightwing Freedom Front and I remember watching him on the day the new, all race parliament was inaugurated. Mandela was the last to enter the chamber and, as he walked in, Viljoen’s eyes settled on his new black president. His face wore an expression that could only be described, I thought at the time, as adoration. I asked him when we talked some years later whether I had been right in that description and he said I had been. The retired general also reminded me that before taking his seat on that inaugural parliamentary occasion Mandela had broken protocol by crossing the floor to shake hands with him. What had Mandela said to him? “He said, ‘I am very happy to see you here, general’.” And what did the general reply? “I said nothing. I am a military man and he was my president. I shook his hand and I stood to attention.”

Viljoen, who has had many encounters with Mandela since then, told me that one left his company feeling as if one were a better, more virtuous person. Viljoen was not alone. Mandela did appeal, and with uncanny success, to the better angels of people’s natures. But he did so—and this is very important—not primarily out of a desire to win a place in heaven, or to be well-liked. Mandela was the quintessential political animal: he did everything he did with a clear political purpose.  Not to understand this—to insist only on his admirable ‘lack of bitterness’ and his spirit of forgiveness—is to miss the bigger point that Mandela’s widely applauded saintliness was the instrument he judged to be most effective in the achievement of his political goals. Had he calculated, as he once did, that violence was the way to liberate his people, he would not have hesitated to pursue that route. Luckily for South Africa, he reached the conclusion that there could be no democracy without reconciliation, no justice without peace.

He acted wholeheartedly on this understanding, investing every last drop of his boundless charm, his political cunning, and his farsightedness in achieving his life’s goal by following the only strategy he knew could realistically work. Mandela’s legacy, the imperishable lesson he holds for the ages, and the reason why he stands head and shoulders above every leader of his generation, or practically every leader there has ever been, is that he showed it is possible to be a great human being and a great politician at the same time; that showing respect to friends and enemies alike can get you a long, long way; and that nothing beats the combination—in Mandela’s case, the seamless convergence—of magnanimity and power.

Colonel Muammar Gadaffi and Lybia

Gaddafi"s biography

Born 7 June 1942 was the leader of Libya from 1969, when he overthrew the monarchy in a bloodless coup, until 2011 when he was overthrown by a NATO-backed internal rebellion. He declared Libya a directly democratic state (jamahiriya) in 1977, and stepped down from government office two years later, although he remained the effective center of power. Gaddafi pursued an anti-colonial and pan-African foreign policy that the United States and European countries condemned as sponsorship of terrorism.

EUROPEANS AGAINST RADICAL STATESMEN OF OUR GREAT AFRICA

Did Libya invade Italy or was it Italy that invaded Libya? You attack us now as you did then. In other ways, with other systems, by supporting Israel, opposing Arab unity and our revolutions, frowning on Islam and calling us fanatics. We’ve been too patient with you. We’ve put up with your provocation for too long. If we hadn’t been so wise, we would have gone to war with you a thousand times. We didn’t because we think the use of force is a last resort for survival and because we have always been on the side of civilisation. After all, during the Middle Ages we civilised you. You were poor barbarians, primitive, savage creatures.

Chinua Achebe dies 

the Nigerian novelist seen by millions as the father of African literature, died at the age of 82.

African papers were reporting his death following an illness and hospital stay in Boston this morning, and both his agent and his publisher later confirmed the news to the Guardian.

Simon Winder, publishing director at Penguin, called him an "utterly remarkable man".

"Chinua Achebe is the greatest of African writers and we are all desolate to hear of his death," he said.

In a statement, Achebe's family requested privacy, and paid tribute to "one of the great literary voices of all time. He was also a beloved husband, father, uncle and grandfather, whose wisdom and courage are an inspiration to all who knew him."

A novelist, poet and essayist, Achebe was perhaps best known for his 1958 novel Things Fall Apart, the story of the Igbo warrior Okonkwo and the colonial era, which has sold more than 10m copies around the world and has been published in 50 languages. Achebe depicts an Igbo village as the white men arrive at the end of the 19th century, taking its title from the WB Yeats poem, which continues: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold."

"The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers and our clan can no longer act like one," says Okonkwo's friend, Obierika, in the novel.

The poet Jackie Kay hailed Achebe as "the grandfather of African fiction" who "lit up a path for many others", adding that she had reread Things Fall Apart "countless times".

"It is a book that keeps changing with the times as he did," she said.

Achebe won the Commonwealth poetry prize for his collection Christmas in Biafra, was a finalist for the 1987 Booker prize for his novel Anthills of the Savannah, and in 2007 won the Man Booker international prize. Chair of the judges on that occasion, Elaine Showalter, said he had "inaugurated the modern African novel", while her fellow judge, the South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, said his fiction was "an original synthesis of the psychological novel, the Joycean stream of consciousness, the postmodern breaking of sequence", and that Achebe was "a joy and an illumination to read".

Nelson Mandela, meanwhile, has said that Achebe "brought Africa to the rest of the world" and called him "the writer in whose company the prison walls came down".

The author is also known for the influential essay An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1975), a hard-hitting critique of Conrad in which he says the author turned the African continent into "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril", asking: "Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?"

According to Brown University, where Achebe held the position of David and Marianna Fisher university professor and professor of Africana studies until his death, this essay "is recognised as one of the most generative interventions on Conrad; and one that opened the social study of literary texts, particularly the impact of power relations on 20th-century literary imagination".

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Nkrumah's dream yet to be reached