Kenya’s Ambassador to the United States, H.E. Peter Ogego issued a statement regarding the new constitution:

“On Tuesday, Kenya’s Committee of Experts, the body charged with steering Kenya’s constitutional review, released a draft of the new Kenyan Constitution. This represents a major landmark on Kenya’s path of political and constitutional reform, a process that was initiated after the 2007 election violence.
The new constitution is based on ten cardinal principles that will pave the way for a united and more democratic Kenya. Among these principles are: sharing of executive power among the president and prime minister, a decentralized government with constraints on executive power, a new two chamber parliament and a Supreme Court.
The Committee of Experts also proposes changes to the electoral process to avoid election disputes in the future.
President Mwai Kibaki and Prime Minister Raila Odinga are grateful to the Committee of Experts for their hard work. The release of this Constitution marks a new beginning for Kenya and an important opportunity for all Kenyans to participate in transforming their country in a democratic and transparent manner. There now follows a period of public consultation on the document with the final draft to be voted on by the Kenyan people in a referendum there after.”

This process strikes me as one that falls into the category of necessary but not sufficient if the goal is to emerge from the 2007 fiasco with a stronger sense of national cohesion. For whatever the constitution, the underlying causes of violence still exist, including the tendency of politicians to manipulate so-called ethnic issues when it suits them to do so.

The Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthata (formerly Umtata), in South Africa’s Eastern Cape has “opened a new exhibition that will form the centrepiece of the museum’s celebration of the life and times of Nelson Mandela.”

A new Contract Labour and Apartheid Museum (yes, the perhaps unfortunate acronym will be CLAM) will be opening in Walvis Bay in Namibia sometime in the (hopefully) not-so-distant future.

Finally, and perhaps tragically, Robben Island appears to be under threat. From rabbits. Or, dare I say it, wascally wabbits.

Fine. Democracy is not for all nation states, I guess. But at what point do we make these decisions and based on what? It is all well and good to assert, as Greenway does, “In much of Africa democracy has provided a shell under which gangsters plunder and beggar their people.” But in these cases is the problem really democracy? Or that Africans are somehow incapable of supporting democratic institutions? Or is there something else — much else — at work here?

Embracing defeatism hardly seems like a workable approach. Nor does abandoning principles behind democracy. So, yes, democracy might not be for everybody, but surely democratization could be, given the right approach, with local concerns and ideas at the forefront, with an understanding that changes won’t happen overnight, and with the realization that democratization needs to go hand-in-hand with development. Greenway’s is surely a call for a more realistic perspective on what can and should be done in Afghanistan, but at the same time it can be seen as a determinist or even an essentialist argument against even making the effort. Realism, whatever that actually means, is fine. Fatalism is not.

Look, it seems quite clear that we are willing to put up with English fans (and others) singing songs from the terraces which, if you are not a fan of the team is probably pretty annoying. The Wave, the Tomahawk Chop, marching bands, cheerleaders, chants, cowbells, thunderstix, booking bass drums, whistles — these things are all annoying to the outsider and, perhaps most to the point, to the visiting fan. College football in the US alone produces as many annoying traditions as there are teams (”Rocky Top” played incessantly in Nehlan Stadium, anyone?) but no one calls for banning these traditions.

The vuvuzela is a longstanding tradition in South African football circles. The world needs to deal with it. But hopefully all of the non-African teams and their fans are annoyed as hell by them. After all, if this is going to be Africa’s World Cup, let’s hope all of the teams benefit from the intolerance of the many.

But South Africa’s status breeds mixed feelings, ranging from pride to  jealousy to hostility. If the country throws its weight around, or benefits disproportionately from, say, bilateral agreements, it is resented. If South Africa does not act firmly enough, as, say, in Zimbabwe, it is accused of being feckless. The reality is that South Africa’s diplomatic power comes primarily in its power to persuade, which resides more in the known capacity of its economy and military and culture than in the actual leveraging of those things.