Results tagged “africa”

Robert Amsterdam is currently in Nairobi, Kenya, where he has just finished Day 1 of an administrative trial regarding the alleged wrongful treatment of a United Nations employee who had worked for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Harare, Zimbabwe.  This individual, who had the bravery to come forward to blow the whistle on a hidden cholera epidemic, was personally harassed and threatened to within an inch of his life by parties within the U.N. allegedly linked to dictator Robert Mugabe's political party, ZANU-PF as retribution.

Here is a link to a must-see documentary on the story, and below is a bit from an opinion column published just now by Marian L. Tupy in the Wall Street Journal on the case.  More news to come soon.

Mr. Tadonki claims that the U.N.'s refusal to rapidly move on cholera was not simple negligence but politically motivated. According to Mr. Tadonki, the U.N. didn't want to anger the host government, which was trying to convince the world in general and Africa in particular that all was well in Zimbabwe. The government's official line--spelled out by Mugabe as late as December 2008--was that there was "no cholera." According to Mr. Tadonki, his former superior, Mr. Zacarias, aligned the U.N. "behind a humanitarian situation analysis 'acceptable' to [the] government."

The U.N. rewarded Mr. Tadonki's criticism with a threat of dismissal, which prompted him to sue the U.N. for harassment at the U.N. Dispute Tribunal in Nairobi, Kenya. International lawyer Robert Amsterdam, famous for defending the Russian political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, is Mr. Tadonki's pro-bono legal counsel.

Did the UN fail to fulfill its mission to protect the people of Zimbabwe out of political considerations? Did it make matters worse by refusing to acknowledge the outbreak of the epidemic? Those are some of the questions that the trial may soon answer.

In his latest entry on the Huffington Post, Robert Amsterdam comments on the reactions to the attempted terror attack over Detroit by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and why the U.S. decision to place Nigerian passengers coming into the United States onto the terrorism watch list focuses on the wrong problem.

Consider what we know about the 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He is far from a typical Nigerian, and comes from an elite and prestigious family (his own father responsibly reported his concerns to the authorities). He studied engineering at the privileged and expensive University College of London, where many believe he was recruited, while he apparently obtained the relatively rare PETN explosive from Yemen.

In other words, Abdulmutallab couldn't be more different than most of his compatriots, yet the U.S. is punishing 150 million innocent Nigerians with this ill-considered policy. If the U.S. insists upon treating so many people like terrorists, perhaps in the future their wish might be granted. Besides, if anybody should be made to stand in a special line at customs, it should be those folks from the TSA, FBI, and CIA who failed to connect the dots with so much information to prevent this.

As someone who has worked in Nigeria on-and-off for more than 30 years and traveled there many times, I can tell you that the country may have problems, but it is not the world's next hotbed of extremism. Nigerian Muslims and Christians have forged a mostly harmonious co-existence that is rare and desirable, and culturally there exists the type of moderate Islam that is a beacon for the future. On a personal level, I have known many peaceful, honest, and hard working Nigerians, and it is disappointing to see them discriminated against because of this one errant individual.

Read the full article here.

Photo credit: A TSA officer screens airline passengers in Terminal C at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport December 27, 2009 in Dallas, Texas. Pre-flight screenings were stepped up after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, 23, of Nigeria was accused of trying to blow up a Northwest Airlines flight on Christmas Day. (Getty Images)

I was struck by an opinion article published today in the Washington Post by Lekan Oguntoyinbo, a U.S.-based Nigerian journalism professor.  In discussing the foiled terrorist attack of the young Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the media celebrity of the moment, Oguntoyinbo points to the much greater problem of corruption and security in Nigeria:

The problems at Nigeria's largest airport are symptomatic of issues plaguing the West African country. Once one of Africa's greatest hopes, Nigeria, a nation about the size of Arizona, California and Nevada combined, has become an embarrassment, a lawless country run by plutocrats. Nigeria has all the makings of a failed state: Less than half of its 148 million people have access to running water, the World Health Organization and UNICEF's Joint Monitoring Program for Water Supply and Sanitation have reported. Electricity is epileptic. The K-12 and public university systems are frequently beset by strikes. Roads are poor, often unpaved and unpassable. Crime is the order of the day. Nigerian police officers don't protect and serve; their uniforms allow them to exploit, extort and oppress. If victims are not from Nigeria's small protected class, they are sometimes murdered. Borders with neighbors such as Niger, which is known to host al-Qaeda cells, are notoriously porous.

In 1996 and 1997, Berlin-based Transparency International ranked Nigeria the world's most corrupt country. When Nigeria came in second behind Cameroon in 1998, some joked that Nigerians had bribed the Cameroonians.

Upon reading such a description, I can't help but think of Russia, and just in the old joke "Nigeria with rockets" comparison.  Petty corruption is a major contributor and facilitator to terrorism, a topic which was often raised following the second bombing of the Nevsky Express.  How much did it cost the terrorists who carried out the train bombing to gain access and intelligence?  What kind of bribe does somebody need to board a plane with 80 grams of explosive powder in Lagos?

Considering that in the last Transparency International corruption perceptions index, Russia actually ranked 16 points below Nigeria (146 and 130, respectively), Abdulmutallab could have easily come from Russia.

"Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where? Nowhere. Exactly. What we do, is if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Eleven. Exactly. One louder." - Nigel Tufnel

I hate top 10 lists. Really, I do. I didn't always. But really, it's so over. These days, whenever I see anyone put out a top 10 list, I think "well there's another unthinking lemming just following the herd who should probably be paying David Letterman some kind of royalty fee."

So without further adieu, following is my top ELEVEN list of nonsensical top 10 lists. I'm not going to concur with or object to any of the specific rankings or exclusions on any of these top 10 lists or even rank the lists themselves because, frankly, I'm above that. Here we go:

The following is an excerpt from my latest article published on the Huffington Post:

When a leader is ill and absent, a country cannot function, and for Nigeria, the costs have been very high. Yar'Adua's illness has prevented him from attending the United Nations General Assembly, where he would have had the opportunity to privately meet with President Barack Obama. His approval of the state budget has been repeatedly delayed because of health issues, while infighting and disobedience within state ministries has proliferated. Worst of all, the president's low profile has allowed for widespread abuses of power for personal enrichment and settling of scores.

Long before this current hospital visit, the president's illness had become Nigeria's illness. Since coming into power in May 2007 following the administration of Olusegun Obasanjo, the basic administration of public affairs has faltered, while the reform movement has been stamped out. Record high oil prices haven't made a dent in the poverty level, nor helped complete any significant public project of improvement. Numerous infrastructure projects for railroads and electricity generation were bungled and canceled, while discretionary spending was returned to the regional authorities (under Obasanjo, a centralized stabilization fund had been created to handle budget shortfalls).

"A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result." - Richard Avedon

The New Yorker Magazine is running a photo series entitled, "Portraits of Power", an interactive portfolio of portraits of 50 world leaders taken in September, when nearly all the world's leaders were in New York at the annual United Nations General Assembly opening. If you're as much a junkie for international politics as I am (which you probably are if you read this blog with any sort of regularity) I guarantee you're going to click on one of these photos, listen to the photographer's commentary, and then not stop until you've been through them all. The photographer, who goes by the name "Platon", calls Rwanda President Paul Kagame "perhaps his favorite picture". Personally, I thought Ban Ki-moon, Zambia President Rupiah Banda and Silvio Berlusconi were particularly interesting. Most compelling: without a doubt, Robert Mugabe. Or Qaddafi. Or Andry Rajoelina. Or Saakashvili. Look, just click here, ok?

I might also point out that in the print version of this, Medvedev and Victor Yushchenko each gets his own page and are positioned on opposing pages.

One of my favorite blogs, Business Monitor International's Risk Watchdog, had a post yesterday discussing the wider historical context of the Berlin Wall's fall. The discussion of the persistence of Communism and the comparison between 1979 and 1989 I personally found to be the most thought-provoking observations but the entire posting is worth reading, accessible here.

Observation 6: Communism did not entirely die.

China, Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and Laos all retain Communist leaderships, although in the former two countries the free market has largely prevailed. Many of the 'Communists' in Eastern Europe merely changed their names to 'social democrats' and returned to power, albeit in reconstructed form. Overall, the phenomenon of significant state interventionism in economies lives on long after 1989, and may have increased with the global credit crunch.

"History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain

David Satter, Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and visiting scholar at SAIS, has done an amazing thing to mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He has taken a topic which normally takes about 1,000 words just to introduce, and distilled one of its principal lessons for today's geopolitical arena into just about 1,000 words.

In particular, and very significantly, he closes in on what continues to be one of the defining struggles of our time: the challenge of engaging with an ideology that leaves no room for alternative discourse. Twenty years ago, that ideology was Communism. Today it is Islamic radicalism. In short:

Our response to the claims of totalitarian ideology is traditionally to defend freedom. By answering an ideology that claims infallibility and promises to create heaven on earth by defending "freedom," however, we immediately raise the question of "freedom for what?" We also leave the contents of the ideology completely unchallenged. The failure of the West during the Cold War to challenge the claims of communist ideology was always taken by the communists to mean that the West did not believe in anything.

If you can find 20 minutes to spare, Parag Khanna's presentation at this year's TED conference has some thought provoking moments. Among them:

2:45 - 6:00 - a discussion of the China-Mongolia-Russia space and how the de facto Chinese influence in the area echoes a prior point in history.

6:00 - 9:00 - the protrusion of commerce hubs in East Asia and their concurrent melding of national cultures.

9:00 - 12:00 - infrastructure investment as the key to peace in the Middle East.

CNN Money is running an interesting feature by David Goldman entitled "10 countries, 10 solutions" which details the particularities of the global economic crisis facing 10 key countries. In typical old-media fashion, the layout makes no sense from a user-friendliness perspective, so I'm going to take significant liberties in reposting their original content. They also have a single table layout of the 10 countries here. Time Warner lawyers, if you're watching this, get your editorial guys to put their content into a more sensible format that doesn't require constant clicking and I won't have to go such lengths to discuss it and in turn will actually drive more traffic to your site. Got that? Good. Now then, first some observations and then a full listing of the 10 countries in question.

I don't know why I'm so fixated on this but I just am - the FT is carrying the latest in the Guinea expropriate-the-expropriator saga. Amidst all the back-and-forth on taxes, rights, payments, "causes for concern", "worrying trends" and the rest of it, what I find most compelling is this simple single sentence from Rusal, as quoted in the FT:

"We have no doubt that we are the legal owner and we are going to prove it."

Let's back up for a moment. These are two nations who each have demonstrated a certain nonchalance - and that's putting it diplomatically - when it comes to rule of law, transparency and due process, among other things. What, then, can Rusal or Mr. Deripaska possibly mean by using the word "legal" to describe ownership?

I've finally gotten around to looking more closely at the World Economic Forum's annual Global Competitiveness Report, released last week. The report ranks 133 countries on the basis of 12 measures of an economy's competitiveness: institutions, infrastructure, macroeconomic stability, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labour market efficiency, financial market sophistication, technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and innovation.

Russia's overall rank dropped from 51 to 63, but as the country highlights discussion makes clear, this overall rank masks a more telling underlying story:

Russia has done a good job cementing its title as one of the world's leading resource nationalists, having effectively expropriated and stolen the assets of dozens of companies, including Yukos, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and probably ExxonMobil next at Sakhalin.

But when it happens in Africa to a Russian company owned by a Kremlin-friendly businessman, the government is up in arms in protest and threats.  I can sympathize with them given my international law practice area ... now that would be an interesting call to take.

From Bloomberg:

"Guinean authorities have attempted to expropriate Rusal's property," Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement on its Web site today, adding it hopes Guinea "realizes the possible consequences of such actions both for the overall climate of traditionally constructive Russian-Guinean relations and for the socio-economic situation in their own country."

The government sent Rusal a letter asking it to return the Friguia development, Mines Minister Mahmoud Thiam said in an interview yesterday. Camara said in April he had asked the justice ministry to consider legal action over Rusal's deal. Guinea was paid $19 million for the assets by Rusal, while consultants had valued them at $257 million, he said.

Right before Barack Obama's first visit to Moscow, I recall reading some interesting quotes from a Russian observer - unfortunately I can't remember where exactly - who speculated that although he didn't expect any kind of revolution in U.S.-Russia relations, he had hoped that the visit of the first U.S. President of African-American origin would prompt debate inside Russia:  Why can't we have a Tatar, Bashkir, or even a Chechen president some day?

As far as I know, that debate didn't happen, and the Russian authorities did eveything possible to dampen the impact of the visit (speeches were not widely televised).  But at least for one man, the message came through.  A few days back we linked to a story about Joaquim Crima (who now calls himself "Vasily Ivanovich"), a West African native from Guinea Bissau who has decided to run for district chief in a small village in Southern Volgograd.  He is Russia's first black political candidate for office.

In an interview with ABC, Crima says that he doesn't compare himself to Obama, but is grateful for "showing the world what black people could do. He made the dream of Martin Luther King real."  He continues, "Racism is everywhere, in some places more than others. It will disappear sooner or later."

But is Russia ready for this kind of change?  It appears that for right now, the cards are stacked against him in this election.  Crima is, however, a member of the United Russia party, a big Putin supporter, and his campaign adviser says that he has been promised a seat on the district council in 2011 - in that peculiar way in which the Kremlin can promise future democratic outcomes.  Even if his candidacy becomes a prop of the state, this is still a very interesting and positive development, and may succeed in driving that debate about race and politics that failed to occur during the Obama visit.

Alan Cowell has an interesting piece in the New York Times today:

In some of the same lands described by President George W. Bush as an axis of evil, the Obama administration confronts an arc of obduracy from Pyongyang to Tehran. The riddle persists for the new administration as much as a solution eluded its forerunner: how can America change the bellicose behavior those who do not wish to be changed, least of all at Washington's behest?  (...)

Regimes that tighten their grip on their people by invoking a threat from beyond their borders cannot survive by embracing that same perceived foe, even if the adversary offers a prospect of dialogue and benefit. The safer response is bluster and threat.

According to the new Moscow rules laid out this week, yesterday's enemies may become tomorrow's partners in the benign exercise of power. But then, as Mr. Obama quoted a Russian student as saying, "The real world is not so rational as on paper."

It looks like the unfortunately named joint venture between Nigeria and Gazprom is still causing some problems.  Luke Harding as a piece taking a look at all the reactions, while I found this eyebrow-raising quote at the bottom of a Reuter's piece:

"White people are making too much of this. As long as the Russians pay us, they can call it what they like," said one Nigerian in the commercial hub, Lagos, asking not to be named.

Problem is, I wouldn't count on that Russian money arriving any time soon.  They make this promise about once a year.

Everybody's been reading all the exciting news of President Medvedev's trip to Nigeria, and all the seemingly big energy deals he's been signing (we'll have more commentary on that later).

But I would respectfully point out that Gazprom really should have picked a better name for its joint venture with the Nigerians.  Let's hope this was just one of those accidents, but somehow I get the feeling that they will stubbornly stick with the name.

The following is a statement we put out today on the Nasir El-Rufai case in Nigeria.

Nigeria's El-Rufai a Victim of Trial by Headline, Say Lawyers

Crass tactics of intimidation and slander against Nasir el-Rufai reveal political persecution by the State, argue defense lawyers

LONDON, April 17 -- Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, the highly regarded former Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) of Abuja, Nigeria, has been relentlessly targeted in recent weeks by state-controlled media with aggressive slander and false accusations, prompting his international defense team to denounce this "trial by headline."

Here is a link to the press release on Reuters announcing Nasir El-Rufai's retention of Robert Amsterdam to defend against a raft of baseless, politically motivated charges by the Nigerian government.

Nasir El-Rufai, a popular Nigerian reformer who has faced nearly two years of investigations from trumped-up, politically-motivated charges has announced the retention of the well-known international lawyer Robert Amsterdam, of Amsterdam & Peroff. Mr. Amsterdam has a broad mandate to mount a vigorous legal defense of El-Rufai's reputation, person and property both in Nigeria and abroad.

Mr. A. U. Mustapha, prominent Nigerian counsel for El-Rufai, stated that, "the increasingly libelous accusations against former Minister El-Rufai and the ferocity of the campaign against him which violate Nigeria's commitments under international law prompted us to look for jurisdictions outside of Nigeria for additional arena for redress."

A few days ago, the CEO of the Italian energy group Eni told everybody he felt calm and "serene" with regard to Gazprom's decision to cut off all gas flowing through the Ukraine, leaving half a dozen countries freezing.  Naturally, Paolo Scaroni explained, Italy started to diversify its supply sources after the first cutoff in 2006 from places such as North Africa (Eni owns 98% of Italy's natural gas storage facilities).

However what the Italians failed to mention is that the Russians have already pre-empted the North African gas market - going so far as to develop cooperation agreements with both Algeria and Libya, and are even proposing to build a mega-pipeline up to Europe all the way from Nigeria. It seems that you aren't going to escape the grip of Gazprom no matter where you look.

One reason why Eni might want to diminish fears about Gazprom is because they have gotten so deep into bed with the company, and are relying on their joint venture with the Russian state firm in order to further penetrate Libya - which is about to receive its first American ambassador in some 36 years.  According to a story in the Washington Times, the Americans don't like it one bit that Italy is working so hard to help Russia control Libyan gas exports to Europe through their asset swap deal (which could put the pipelines to the continent under Russian control), as it reflects a decrease in competition and ever more political influence for Moscow over Europe.