Apartheid in Ferguson, Missouri

According to the 2010 census information on the web site of the city of Ferguson, Missouri, the overwhelming majority of the city is African American. However, as has been pointed out in the past, the overwhelming majority of its police force is white and its mayor is also white. This is very similar to what obtained in apartheid South Africa where the overwhelming majority of its population is black but the government was a white minority government. Even though apartheid means "separate development," as its initiators euphemistically called the racist system, the very idea has, over time, come to be associated with white minority rule. And white minority rule is what is going on in Ferguson. The Michael Brown murder should be understood within this context because it is this context that led to his death in the first place. People should be outraged by the murder and the apartheid regime that characterizes the city. The long term vision should be to change this system because it is a system that is inherently unjust. This apartheid flies in the face of democracy and human dignity, both important ideas to the social construct called America.

On Love and Religion

Can religion prohibit love? Should religion prohibit love? Falling with love with someone outside one's social stratrum has often been contentious matters that are the stuff of Cinderella stories. However, in many communities around the world, not only social strata but also religious cultures stand in the way of love. One would think that love should be something that should be encouraged but this is clearly not the case. Love, like a pond, is often circumscribed.

I was recently taken aback when, reading the prohibitions against marrying foreign women in Ezra and Nehemiah (Hebrew Bible), many of my students agreed that people should marry only within their religions. Many of my students thought that it would be unwise for a Christian to marry a Muslim or for a Buddhist to marry a Jew. They said that such marriages would confuse the children because children would be confronted with different moral traditions in their homes.

I recently read that it is anathema for a Muslim to be married to a Copt in Egypt. In fact, it is thought in Egypt that intermarriage is a means of poaching members of the other religion. The Copts fear that if a Copt marries a Muslim this would lead to loss of Copts while Muslims fear that if Muslims marry Copts, it would also lead to loss of Muslims. Thus it is that people's religious affiliations actively militate against love. In this scheme of things, love is controlled, it is made to stay within bounds, like a pond.

It is often assumed that religions teach that people should love each other. However, it is often the case that those who marry outside their religions (or ethnic groups) are often seen as rebels. Does religion teach love, then?

The Curious Case of a White President in Black Zambia

Can a White Zambian become President of the country? Perhaps former Zambian President, Michael Sata, thought the day would never come when he appointed White Zambian, Cambridge trained economist, Guy Scott, as the Vice President of Zambia. Well, the day came when President Sata recently died in office and the Constitution of the country states that the Vice President should become President upon the demise of the incumbent. That a White person has become President of this Black majority country, has however not gone well with some. Some see in it the return of colonialism. Now there are machinations to oust Acting President Scott. President Scott has therefore been fired from the position of President of his party, a rare case in Africa.

In Uganda, A Minister for Ethics and Integrity

When I learned that Uganda has a minister in charge of ethics and integrity, I wondered what the portfolio of such a ministry would be. The person currently filling the post is an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, Fr. Simon Lokodo. So far he seems to be more interested in questions of homosexuality and pornography, perhaps seen as the most heinous crimes in Uganda. It is an amazing sleight of hand for someone like Yoweri Museveni who has been in power for decades to turn around and set up a ministry for ethics and integrity that does not seem interested in the machinations of his government but on sexual mores of the people. It reminds me of Paul Biya in Cameroon, himself a former seminary student, who proclaimed that his reign would be marked by rigor and moralization, whatever that means. He seems to have since abandoned the idea. It is a strange thing that dictators often worry about questions of ethics. Do they ever worry about whether dictatorship is itself ethical? Perhaps the whole focus on ethics can often be diversionary. I wonder what Fr. Lokodo thinks about all this.

Ebola Aid as Diversion

When the Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo argued that aid has not done much good to Africa, some accused her of being antagonistic to aid, noting that the problem does not so much appear to be  with aid as it is with how aid has been used. This forced Moyo to argue for the usefulness of aid in emergency situations such disasters. The current Ebola crisis in some African countries has once again brought the question of aid to the fore as the governments of Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia have been begging for aid from the international community. America and Britain have sent soldiers and money to Africa to help build infrastructures to tackle the epidemic at its source. These infrastructures are however only temporary fixes suited for what it seen as the African situation.

In spite of all this move, providing aid to a country, under any circumstances, is still a bad idea and should be stopped. While I may allow that aid given to individuals may sometimes be a good idea, aid given to a country under any circumstance is quite a bad idea. I define aid as resources (monetary, infrastructural, or otherwise) that is given to a country at any time without any explicit commitment of said country to reciprocate in anyway. Aid may therefore be seen as resources freely given by one country or international organization to, and intended to benefit, the people of another country through their government or other bodies in said country. If aid as here defined does exist, it should be stopped.

Such aid should stop because it often happens as emergency measures and so help to mask the existence of structural injustices which we do not want to do the hard work to address. We therefore prefer giving aid rather than doing the hard work that is needed to overcome a global system that keeps some poor an others rich. It masks the fact that the poverty which many countries, especially in Africa, suffer is not an accident but is rather orchestrated by iniquitous national and international structures.

Take the case of the current Ebola crisis. NGOs are begging for money to set up temporary structures in the affected regions and some Western countries have sent their military there to help fight the outbreak of the deadly disease. Now, saying that aid should not be provided in the context of the Ebola crisis and other such emergency situations may sound heartless but that is actually not the case. In fact, calling for the abolishing of aid especially in such conditions is a way of demonstrating the structural injustices that characterize the world we live in. It is to force us to ask the question of why it is that aid always seem to be going to certain places in the world when there is a disaster but not to others when similar disasters occur. Rather than thinking about aid as a permanent regime in our world, emphasis should be directed towards abolishing it altogether. Abolishing aid altogether would be based on working on the structural weaknesses that exist in places like Liberia and Sierra Leone so that these countries may be able to address crisis that develop in them without the need to cry for international aid. Aid workers should therefore be seen as people who contribute to the present unjust social structures rather than those who are trying to help, as they tend to commonly see themselves. My goal here is not to disparage those involved in the aid industry but simply to suggest that the venture is not as benign as it might seem. Those playing leadership roles in any country have the responsibility of ensuring that their countries develop structures that may take care of their people. Those interested in aid work should shift their focus towards holding these leaders accountable rather than constantly putting band aid on the sufferings of people. Aid workers who do not focus on building permanent structures of justice only temporarily sooth the persistent pain of a nation like Sierra Leone or Liberia. After the current Ebola crisis is addressed, without such permanent structures, we will only be waiting for the next emergency.

Giving directly to individuals under distress is in a different category and will be addressed in a separate post.