Africa

Three stories caught my eye this morning, all of which fall into the category of disappointing, but not surprising.

1) The power-sharing talks over Zimbabwe have broken down over the question of what role Morgan Tsvangirai will play. The sides appear to have rather different conceptions of the role the Movement for Democratric Change leader will have in any new government. Mugabe’s people want him shuffled off to the post of third vice president, a post about as useful as teats on a bull. Tsvangirai wants to be the country’s Prime Minister with considerable powers. This news should come as a shock to absolutely no one. Mugabe does not want to share leadership. And without being forced to do so, he surely sees these negotiations as just another way to buy time and apply window dressing without actually yielding an inch on issues that matter.

2) In Uganda, the Baganda people are growing increasingly discontented with the rule of President Yoweri Museveni. Tired of feeling marginalised, the people of the ancient kingdom, and now state, of Buganda have a long list of grievances, beginning with seemingly ubiquitous contestations over land.  Museveni needs to find a way to compromise and to reach out to the Baganda, or else the stability of his country, not to mention his leadership, are in jeopardy.

3) The precarious health of Zambia’s President Levy Mwanawasa has led to fears of a power vacuum emerging in that country. Mwanawasa, who recently suffered a stroke, and whose rumors of death were premature but very real across Africa, has been silent and absent for more than a month, leading to unseemly but very real struggles for leadership in Zambia.

In a short “Editorial Notebook” piece in The Boston Globe Donald MacGillis explores the problem of brain drain in Uganda, which is a nearly universal problem across the continent, and what the west might be able yo do to stanch the flow of talented doctors (and others) without limiting personal freedoms of those who so often choose to leave their native lands for the lures of the West.

Zimbabwe is not the only African country in which journalists are under siege. Any place where the politics are constriced by authoritarianism or merely by the encroachments of paranoid leadership the members of the media run the risk of being jailed. Just the latest example comes from Uganda, where three journalists (including the editor) from the magazine The Independent have been arrested (and the magazine’s offices raided) for possessing seditious materials and for writing inflammatory articles. It is a truism that a free society needs a free media, which means the opposite is also true — unfree countries, or countries on the way to unfreedom, crush the free press.

The New York Times reports on a study indicating that a vaccination introduced five years ago has virtually eradicated a dangerous type of childhood meningitis. The authors of the study believe that 5,000 children’s lives a year will be saved as a result.