ZAMBIA WINS THE 2012 AFRICA CUP OF NATIONS
Congrats Chipolopolo
Archive for February, 2012
What a revolutionary initiative, I must say the idea of valuing the importance of preserving our heritage and history by introducing the teaching and learning of other African languages in academic institutes is very exciting. Although this is something that should have been done long ago, it’s never too late to start now.
Personally, I’m thrilled and hopeful that this implementation will give us back some sense of ownership, pride, self-respect and appreciation of our cultural wealth as a continent and as a people.
Countries involved in this project are Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Niger, RD Congo, Senegal and Mali. Kudos to these nations, hopefully this will result in some kind snowball effect.
ARTICLE:
Lancement à Bamako du projet ‘ELAN-Afrique’ pour la promotion des langues nationales africaines – Les ministres de l’Education de plusieurs pays africains et l’Organisation internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) ont procédé, mercredi, à Bamako, au lancement du projet Ecole et langues nationales (ELAN-Afrique), visant à faire la promotion des langues nationales africaines à côté du français, a constaté la PANA.
Le projet, qui concerne le Bénin, le Burkina Faso, le Burundi, le Cameroun, le Niger, la RD Congo, le Sénégal et le Mali, s’inscrit dans une démarche de promotion et d’introduction de l’enseignement bilingue au primaire s’articulant autour d’une langue africaine et du français.
Son objectif est surtout de contribuer à la mise en œuvre des plans d’actions nationaux en matière de promotion des langues nationales.
La cérémonie de lancement a été suivie par la signature d’un protocole d’accord entre l’OIF et les ministres de l’Education des pays concernés par le projet.
On précise que la concrétisation du projet a été rendue possible grâce à l‘Agence française pour le développement (AFD), au ministère français des Affaires étrangères, à l’OIF et à l’Agence universitaire francophone (AUF).
The song of the month is “Histoires Vraies” by Youssoupha ft. Corneille. The much anticipated album tittled Noir Desir, does not disappoint. My favorites from the album are “Dreaming,” “Noir” and “Esperance de vie.” Youssoupha seems to only be getting better and better, his mastering of the craft is always a pleasure to listen to.
Author – Katrina Manson
No matter how low the Democratic Republic of Congo’s reputation for corruption, contract expropriation and inefficiency sinks, mining companies keep on coming.
Its southern Katanga province is not only the political powerhouse of the vast jungled country, but home to critical reserves of copper and cobalt.
So important is the $2bn investment from Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold of the US into the world’s largest cobalt producer at its Tenke Fungurume mine, for example, that Congo makes it on to a US list of top 20 sites to protect from terrorist attack.
Yet the country has all the hallmarks of an ill-governed, corrupt state: despite vast mineral wealth, it has slipped to the rank of the world’s least developed country and is falling in the World Bank’s “doing business” indicators.
“The whole place is one big scam and everybody’s being paid off,” one investor told the FT last year.
Years of conflict and graft have limited any chance the mining sector might have to drive growth in a country whose 70m population is among the world’s poorest. Gecamines, the former state mining company is about $2bn in the red, equivalent to the amount of mining investment expected to come into Katanga.
Yet mining is really all the country has to rely on, comprising up to 80 per cent of export earnings and 12 per cent of gross domestic product in an economy that Matata Ponyo, the finance minister, says is set to grow at 6 per cent this year, down from 7 per cent in 2011.
The World Bank says that, were Congo to steward its “superb mineral resource” better, it could bring in revenues equivalent to about 20 per cent of GDP by 2014. Copper and cobalt production could rise to $4.4bn by 2020, from $1.3bn in 2009 and provide $1.2bn in revenues in 2020, up from a measly $177m in 2009.
Congo sits, after all, on the world’s largest reserve of cobalt, with 5m tonnes, and provides half the world’s cobalt every year. It is also the second biggest copper-rich region, with 70m tonnes in reserves.
“Even if the copper price goes down there is no danger for us,” says Moise Katumbi, governor of Katanga, citing its high average grades of copper, at about 3 per cent, easily outstripping Chile’s 1 per cent. “That’s why people are investing. There is more appetite than we were thinking.”
Mr Katumbi is keen to avoid a repeat of the 2008 commodity crash, which saw thousands lose their jobs and mines close almost overnight after copper prices plunged from $9,000 a tonne to $2,500. Export earnings fell by more than $3bn in a single year.
Prices have since recovered, and Mr Katumbi says investors are further buoyed now that the uncertain and sometimes violent election period is over. Disputed results late last year and heavy-handed state security saw rival candidates each proclaim themselves head of state, while dozens were shot dead.
The re-election of Joseph Kabila as president assures many investors of continued stability. Some told the FT they were relieved they would not have to spend time bribing a new regime with which they were not familiar. Others hope claims of a rigged election will ensure Mr Kabila is aware he has less legitimacy than before and takes a more cautious line.
Price recovery and a long-term view about large reserves has seen China and South Korea strike multibillion-dollar deals of late, in agreements that offer infrastructure in return for minerals, although the projects are slow to get going. India is pursuing a similar strategy.
Glencore, the commodities trading company, is among the groups that have invested directly in mines. South African money is coming in alongside dozens of smaller scale miners – buying and processing operations run by Lebanese, Indian and Chinese concerns.
Many that have already established themselves and are keen to increase production are also behind target, however. Freeport, the largest investor and copper producer in the country, which has paid $516m in taxes since 2006 and has 6,700 workers, says that it will invest $850m in a two-year expansion of its operation this year.
The company is expecting to produce 195,000 tonnes of copper by 2013, up from 127,400 last year and still expects volumes to “expand significantly over time”.
Yet, like many set on expansion, regulatory headaches and a dearth of energy have meant long delays. The company was among those snagged by the mining review intended to reassure the World Bank and others, but which instead targeted companies that failed to get on with the more weighty part of the political elite.
The most obvious victim of the painfully protracted review of 61 companies, which cancelled 16 contracts, put Freeport on hold, and talked of “renegotiating” the rest via a variety of payments, was First Quantum of Canada.
Once it had fallen foul of the political establishment, there was no holding back. First Quantum lost its contested Kolwezi tailings concession in a contract expropriation that sold the licence on to London-listed ENRC via Dan Gertler. Then it lost two more mines, including the biggest copper mine in the county, Frontier.
Analysts say that the $1.25bn settlement that First Quantum elicited for the mines serves everyone up a “win-win” deal, but they rather forget the effect on the country. Five thousand jobs were lost, production put on hold at a time when prices were high and a national reputation further buried in the dust, raising political risk premiums.
“It [the $1.25bn settlement] does serve as a lesson; it should be harder to do these deals that are so obvious and blatant,” says Eric Joyce, a UK MP who is head of the Parliamentary Great Lakes of Africa Group. “There is strong concern about the kind of people you do business with when something is so obviously corrupt.”
He released documents on the eve of presidential elections that suggest Mr Kabila’s government has deliberately undersold state mining assets, many in Katanga, to anonymous offshore shell companies, losing the country more than $5.5bn.
Contract wrangles persist, over China Minmetals Resources’ recent acquisition of Anvil Mining, for example, and even ENRC has yet to determine its right to mine. Two other of its former First Quantum properties – Frontier and Lonshi – belong to a Hong Kong-registered company whose owners and ultimate beneficiaries have not been declared.
“We are pretty confident that this relationship [with Congo] will have no problems in the future,” says Felix Vulis, ENRC chief executive. Mr Katumbi, a millionaire businessman himself, insists Katanga faces no downside risk. “People just have to be patient; if Congo were corrupt, we wouldn’t have gone to the arbitration court,” he says.
More info click —->> http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/17c40540-4e8a-11e1-ada2-00144feabdc0.html#ixzz1mCx2HweA
Traduction Française —->> http://www.ingeta.com/rdc-terre-opportunite-manquee/
Ivory Coast to face Zambia in final
Sunday ( 02/12/12) in Libreville
For more information click here —->> http://www.cafonline.com/competition/african-cup-of-nations_2012/
Author – Joe Mulumba
You can’t look in the future, if you can’t look in the past. These elections is a blip. Joseph Kabila is a blip. His father was a blip. Mobutu was a blip. Lumumba’s legacy will live on.
The concept of a nation: a community formed by its ethnic identity, religion, language, and culture is still new in Africa. 50 years. Just a toddler compared to other nations. The heritage of colonialism and of those pre nation times before colonialism still slow down to the process of building a nation. A lot of us young Congolese sometimes don’t realize our place in history and in the history of our country. It is necessary to pull back as far back as possible and as forward as possible to start thinking in terms of generations instead of our own personal career goals.
We are to embrace the fate of our nation on our shoulders. Doctors, engineers, soldiers, preachers, writers, poets, musicians, activists, entrepreneurs, political leaders, we all have a stone to place to build the nation. We have to be single minded in our pursuit, in our thirst, in our hunger, in our trials, in our wounds and in our deaths. The intellectual and bourgeois elite has to come to an understanding to be single minded in the destruction of oppositions forces to Congo and to the support of creative and nurturing endeavors for the Congo. The proletariat, the people has the hunger, the thirst for a leader, for resources to be available to take part in the fight, in the building of a different nation. It will take love, money, leadership, wounds, prayers, medicines, determination, sacrifice but it will happen. We may not see it. Our children may not see it. Our grand children may not see it, but our grand grand children will see it.
Congolese children born in the diaspora, Congolese studying abroad, Congolese with the pockets to go and come as they want should be bringing back home not just western delicacies, but essentials for deprived communities and critical minds to seemingly impossible situations on the ground.
We have to connect and keep alive the lines of communication between all Congolese seeking to build a better Congo. We have to recognize and promote the services, the talents, the people who will improve on building the Congo. There are thousand, nameless and selfless workers at different sectors of our nation in education, in religion, in politics, in science, in health, in military who are all in search of a better Congo.
We have to stop thinking that we are alone and if there’s a lesson to be learned from these past elections is that we are not alone. It’s a matter of organizing the ressources. If Kabila is to bring mercenaries, lets find mercenaries to deal with mercenaries. I am a writer and I deal with critical thinking in visual and written form. I don’t know how to handle and don’t want to learn how to handle a gun, but these times might call for me to leave my ivory tower and get down in the streets, but ultimately it’s not my primary role.
The identification of our skills and talents is a preliminary, but once that’s done, there’s no question as to what should be the purpose of our actions. As a writer, I intend to publish again and again and again against the atrocities, the corruption, the inaptitude of current Congolese leaders and celebrate those who fight selflessly to the peril of their lives to build a better Congo.
It will take time. It will take lifetimes, but the fight has to start now. Every morning. Every evening. Every day. Until we honor those who came before us and create a future for our children.
Ce message a ete prise a partir d’un groupe de congolais sur facebook. Que pensez-vous? un peu trop severe?
Nous sommes (NOUS DIASPORA ) autant coupables que nos frères du pays qui jouent les passifs par excéllence.
Pourquoi? Parce que nous avons été irresponsables pendant toutes ses années.Comment avons nous été irresponsables ? En envoyant aveuglement notre argent à nos familles. Nous avons contribué à les rendre passives.
Comment expliquer qu’une population à 80% chômeuse arrive à enrichir (quand nous nous appauvrissons) , les brasseries, les prêt – à – porter et les musiciens? Et bien mes chers voici à quoi sert notre argent : à acheter les primus, les jeep de nos musiciens,remplir les boutiques de prêt – à –porter.
Nous parlons de sacrifice? Voici le SACRIFICE à faire arrêter d’envoyer (AVEUGLEMENT) de l’argent au pays. Il faut réduire le flux monétaire dans ce pays et créer la rage . Nous aidons ce gouvernement irresponsable en envoyant chaque année plus que ce qu’il a comme budget. Je sais que beaucoup (SURTOUT CEUX QUI ONT L’ESPRIT CONSTIPE) vont me dire que c’est fou comme idée , qu’on ne peut laisser mourir nos familles et bla bla bla , To salisa pendant trop longtemps ,résultat eza que to za l’échec na monde. Notre aide n’est donc pas une solution pour notre pays mais un sérieux problème .
Ba ndeko prenons ceci au sérieux si on veut voir un changement .
So I came across this article a few weeks back on facebook. The topic is highly sensitive to many and controversial to some, however, I personally believe that it holds a lot of truth that many of us have not mustered the courage to say out loud just yet in fear of making it real. I advice you not to get offended but to be open minded and sensible to the subject.
With that said, I wish you all a good read!
They call the Third World the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous prefecture. In this realm people are sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and therefore indigent—totally penniless, needy, destitute, poverty-stricken, disfavored, and impoverished. In this demesne, as they call it, there are hardly any discoveries, inventions, and innovations. Africa is the trailblazer. Some still call it “the dark continent” for the light that flickers under the tunnel is not that of hope, but an approaching train. And because countless keep waiting in the way of the train, millions die and many more remain decapitated by the day.
“It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man next to me said. “Get up and do something about it.”
Brawny, fully bald-headed, with intense, steely eyes, he was as cold as they come. When I first discovered I was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. I associate marble-shaven Caucasians with iconoclastic skin-heads, most of who are racist.
“My name is Walter,” he extended his hand as soon as I settled in my seat.
I told him mine with a precautious smile.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“Zambia.”
“Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”
“Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.”
“But of course,” he responded. “You just elected King Cobra as your president.”
My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.
“I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba, Dr. Siteke Mwale, and many other highly intelligent Zambians.” He lowered his voice. “I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.” He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”
“Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.
“I have since moved to yet another group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will be in Lusaka to hypnotize the cobra. I work for the broker that has acquired a chunk of your debt. Your government owes not the World Bank, but us millions of dollars. We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and fly back with a check twenty times greater.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”
He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and stick.”
Quett Masire’s name popped up.
“Oh, him, well, we never got to him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to do.”
At midnight we were airborne. The captain wished us a happy 2012 and urged us to watch the fireworks across Los Angeles.
“Isn’t that beautiful,” Walter said looking down.
From my middle seat, I took a glance and nodded admirably.
“That’s white man’s country,” he said. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia.”
I grinned. “There is no Lake Zambia.”
He curled his lips into a smug smile. “That’s what we call your country. You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta is crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the Bwana and you are the Muntu. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians, Africans, the entire Third World.”
The smile vanished from my face.
“I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a racist. That’s how most Zambians respond when I tell them the truth. They go ballistic. Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and white crap, aside. Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and me?”
“There’s no difference.”
“Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits. After they
were all done it was clear that 99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the same.”
I gladly nodded.
“And yet I feel superior,” he smiled fatalistically. “Every white person on this plane feels superior to a black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu,muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff. Tell me why my angry friend.”
For a moment I was wordless.
“Please don’t blame it on slavery like the African Americans do, or colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatization. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me a better answer.”
I was thinking.
He continued. “Excuse what I am about to say. Please do not take offense.”
I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and prepared for the worst.
“You my friend flying with me and all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say,” I protested.
He was implacable. “Oh yes it is and I will say it again, you are lazy. Poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in the Lusaka markets and on the street selling merchandise. I saw them in villages toiling away. I saw women on Kafue Road crushing stones for sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the Zambian intellectuals? Are the Zambian engineers so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years of independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use? What is the school there for?”
I held my breath.
“Do you know where I found your intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. They were at the Lusaka Golf Club, Lusaka Central Club, Lusaka Playhouse, and Lusaka Flying Club. I saw with my own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates. Zambian intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for brainstorming.”
He looked me in the eye.
“And you flying to Boston and all of you Zambians in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to your country. You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and sisters are in Mtendere, Chawama, and in villages, all of them living in squalor. Many have died or are dying of neglect by you. They are dying of AIDS because you cannot come up with your own cure. You are here calling yourselves graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that—PhD my foot!”
I was deflated.
“Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those research findings and dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”
He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said and grinned. “As long as you are dependent on my plane, I shall feel superior and you my friend shall remain inferior, how about that? The Chinese, Japanese, Indians, even Latinos are a notch better. You Africans are at the bottom of the totem pole.”
He tempered his voice. “Get over this white skin syndrome and begin to feel confident. Become innovative and make your own stuff for god’s sake.”
At 8 a.m. the plane touched down at Boston’s Logan International Airport. Walter reached for my hand.
“I know I was too strong, but I don’t give it a damn. I have been to Zambia and have seen too much poverty.” He pulled out a piece of paper and scribbled something. “Here, read this. It was written by a friend.”
He had written only the title: “Lords of Poverty.”
Thunderstruck, I had a sinking feeling. I watched Walter walk through the airport doors to a waiting car. He had left a huge dust devil twirling in my mind, stirring up sad memories of home. I could see Zambia’s literati—the cognoscente, intelligentsia, academics, highbrows, and scholars in the places he had mentioned guzzling and talking irrelevancies. I remembered some who have since passed—how they got the highest grades in mathematics and the sciences and attained the highest education on the planet. They had been to Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), only to leave us with not a single invention or discovery. I knew some by name and drunk with them at the Lusaka Playhouse and Central Sports.
Walter is right. It is true that since independence we have failed to nurture creativity and collective orientations. We as a nation lack a workhorse mentality and behave like 13 million civil servants dependent on a government pay cheque. We believe that development is generated 8-to-5 behind a desk wearing a tie with our degrees hanging on the wall. Such a working environment does not offer the opportunity for fellowship, the excitement of competition, and the spectacle of innovative rituals.
But the intelligentsia is not solely, or even mainly, to blame. The larger failure is due to political circumstances over which they have had little control. The past governments failed to create an environment of possibility that fosters camaraderie, rewards innovative ideas and encourages resilience. KK, Chiluba, Mwanawasa, and Banda embraced orthodox ideas and therefore failed to offer many opportunities for drawing outside the line.
I believe King Cobra’s reset has been cast in the same faculties as those of his predecessors. If today I told him that we can build our own car, he would throw me out.
“Naupena? Fuma apa.” (Are you mad? Get out of here)
Knowing well that King Cobra will not embody innovation at Walter’s level let’s begin to look for a technologically active-positive leader who can succeed him after a term or two. That way we can make our own stone crushers, water filters, water pumps, razor blades, and harvesters. Let’s dream big and make tractors, cars, and planes, or, like Walter said, forever remain inferior.
A fundamental transformation of our country from what is essentially non-innovative to a strategic superior African country requires a bold risk-taking educated leader with a triumphalist attitude and we have one in YOU. Don’t be highly strung and feel insulted by Walter. Take a moment and think about our country. Our journey from 1964 has been marked by tears. It has been an emotionally overwhelming experience. Each one of us has lost a loved one to poverty, hunger, and disease. The number of graves is catching up with the population. It’s time to change our political culture. It’s time for Zambian intellectuals to cultivate an active-positive progressive movement that will change our lives forever. Don’t be afraid or dispirited, rise to the challenge and salvage the remaining few of your beloved ones.
Field Ruwe is a US-based Zambian media practitioner and author. He is a PhD candidate with a B.A. in Mass Communication and Journalism, and an M.A. in History.
To see the original post and comments on mind of malaka click —–>>> You Lazy (Intellectual) African Scum!.
mbokayabakoko 