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The recent and increasingly prevalent phenomenon of power-sharing in Africa raises questions about its value for state legitimacy, especially as far as elections are concerned. While there are various circumstances that may give rise to power-sharing, comparative insights from the case studies in this article highlight two trends: first, power-sharing following protracted violent conflicts that have been resolved through negotiated settlement; and second, power-sharing following electoral contests that went awry. In both cases, power-sharing has been employed as an instrument for conflict management. The article explores power-sharing experiments in both scenarios, investigating its utility as an instrument of democratisation. However, the results of power-sharing experiments are not uniform: the record is a mixed bag. Also, the context of, and peculiar circumstances in, each country have determined power-sharing outcomes. In post-war situations such as in Burundi and South Africa, power-sharing experiments have bolstered prospects for consociational democracy, institutionalised politics, and nation-building. Conversely, in post-election crisis experiments such as in Kenya and Zimbabwe, power-sharing arrangements have not really served the ideal of consociational democracy but, rather, the interests of political elites, especially their appetite for state power.
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Burundi at crossroads: tensions are rising ahead of the 2015 elections | Insight on Conflict
Once again, Burundi is at crossroads. As the 2015 elections approach, Jean Claude Nkundwa analyses the current political situation and the risks the country is facing.
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Kabila announces national reforms, a new government | Congo Siasa
Today President Joseph Kabila finally addressed the nation and a joint session of parliament in Kinshasa. It was his response to the conclusions of the concertations nationales, which had brought together the government, opposition, and civil society to debate the challenges facing the country. The concertations were a strange forum. Proposed by the opposition to deal with the legitimacy crisis following the flawed 2011 elections, then transformed to debate a wide array of challenges facing the country––except the 2011 elections––that would usually be addressed through traditional, constitutional means: parliament, or the court system. Nonetheless, the concertations produced a substantial list of recommendations, and Kabila seized on several.
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The Kampala imbroglio | Congo Siasa
President Joseph Kabila expressed the view of many Congolese when he said, during his speech to the country today, that the Kampala talks have dragged on for too long.
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There is a new scramble for Africa. Roads, railways and pipelines are being built or envisioned into the interior of central Africa from multiple directions. Africa’s geographic tragedy through the ages has been its isolation, which has been among the main causes of its poverty. Despite possessing a long coastline, Africa has relatively few natural deep-water harbors. Its great rivers are generally not navigable from the interior to the various seaboards. The Sahara Desert has acted as a barrier to human contact with the great Eurasian civilizations. Of course, electronic communications in recent decades have worked to dilute such isolation. But these new pathways may promise a further, pivotal leap in terms of connecting Africa to the outer world.
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Despite increasing attention to the scope and importance of child soldiering globally, there is still limited systematic research on the successes and challenges of reintegration programming for former underage combatants. While the importance of undertaking reintegration programming has been recognized as an important step for both reintegrating individuals into communities and promoting peace and security at a societal level, significant gaps in understanding how to implement sustainable and successful reintegration programming remain. This project uses DRC as a case study to examine the community experiences and attitudes around Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) programming to generate lessons learned for improving future programming for former underage combatants and at-risk youth.
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South Kivu: Identity, territory, and power in the eastern Congo | Rift Valley Institute
South Kivu: Identity, territory, and power in the Eastern Congo by Koen Vlassenroot outlines the historical dynamics behind the armed movements in South Kivu, focusing on the period before and leading up to the First Congo War. The province of South Kivu has been at the heart of the conflict in the eastern DRC. Since the end of the Second Congo War (1998–2003), the province’s potential to cause broader regional destabilization has decreased, but violent local conflicts have multiplied, fuelled by political opportunism and local struggles over land and power. The report concentrates on sources of local conflict but argues that these can only be understood when also concentrating on wider political, social, economic, and demographic processes at both national and regional levels.
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Tribert Rujugiro, homme d'affaire rwandais, a quitté le pays. Ses biens sont depuis gérés par Kigali. -
Rwanda and the ICC: Playing Politics with Justice – By Stephen A. Lamony | African Arguments
Rwanda’s stated position on the International Criminal Court (ICC) is highly critical. Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo called the ICC “a political court” and said that Rwanda has “never believed in its jurisdiction”. In 2008, President Kagame called the ICC a “fraudulent institution” that is “made for Africans and poor countries” who did not realize what they were signing up for when they ratified the Rome Statute. However, the clear-cut stance expressed in these statements seems to be blurred by Rwanda’s recent decision to facilitate the transfer of indicted militia leader Bosco Ntaganda to The Hague in March of this year.
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Rwanda’s Long Road to Justice | Lawdragon
In the nearly 20 years since the Rwandan genocide, domestic and international justice efforts have struggled to balance the demands for remembrance, criminal accountability and moving on. Our third in a series of articles examining transitional justice mechanisms for gross human rights violations.
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Overcoming the limits of institutional reform in Uganda | UNU-WIDER
This paper begins by noting that Uganda has been a public sector reform leader in Africa. It has pursued reforms actively and consistently for three decades now, and has produced many laws, processes and structures that are ‘best in class’ in Africa (and beyond). The problem is that many of the reforms have been limited to these kinds of gains—producing new institutional forms that function poorly and yield limited impacts. Various kinds of data showed—in various areas (civil service and public administration, public financial management, revenue management, procurement, and anti-corruption)—that laws are often not being implemented, processes are being poorly executed, and there is insufficient follow-up to make sure that new mechanisms work as intended. The paper suggests that government should reframe its reform agenda to address these limitations and close the gaps between what Uganda’s system looks like and how it functions.
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Is Uganda’s Growth Profile Jobless? | International Journal of Economics and Finance
We establish the relationship between economic growth and employment in Uganda (2006–2011). We obtained data from World Development Indicators, Uganda National Household Panel Survey (2011) and United Nations Statistical Data Base and we adopted the Job Generation and Decomposition (JoGGs) Tool of the World Bank for the analysis. The growth profile for the period 2006–2011 was jobless as evidenced by 36% change in per capita GDP emerging from a decrease in the employment rate. Agricultural sector registered the greatest dampening effect on overall value added per person and to the share of the employed in the population of working age by 31% and 6.5%, respectively. Manufacturing sector contributed positively to the change in per capita GDP by 8% but negatively to change in total employment rate by 0.2%. Positive contributions to the employment rate and per capita GDP were observed in the services and industrial sectors. It is further noted that productivity or output per worker contributed over 100% to the overall growth in value added per person. In terms of labor productivity, the lowest was in the agricultural sector and the highest was in the industry followed by the services sector. The inter-sectoral shifts positively contributed to labor productivity which implies that there was a relocation of labor from less efficient to more efficient sectors. The demographic transition is a promising source of increase in per capita income; the dependence ratio has reduced and this has clear dampening effect on poverty.
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‘Letting the Big Fish Swim’ report on corruption misses the bigger point | New Vision
The October 2013 Report jointly published by Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School and the Human Rights Watch misses the opportunity to add value to the fight against corruption in Uganda. This is because it not only reproduces worn-out legalistic solutions to the fight against sleaze but also exalts finality and tends to be judgmental, void of context and activist in nature. Straightway the report seems to suggest that being accused of corruption is the same as being guilty of corruption.
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Uganda: Free Pass on High-Level Corruption | Human Rights Watch
The government of Uganda has failed to hold to account senior officials implicated in the theft and diversion of public funds, Human Rights Watch and Yale Law School’s Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic said in a joint report released today. No high-ranking government official, minister, or political appointee has ever served a prison sentence despite investigations into numerous corruption scandals over many years and an impressive array of anti-corruption institutions. Activists fighting corruption face arrest and criminal charges.
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Joweri Museveni and his child soldiers | Rising Continent
This is what the Ugandan president Joweri Museveni says of child soldiers in 1985; he was still in the bush at the time
