Africa News blog
African business, politics and lifestyle
from Global Investing:
Africa’s property laws (or lack of)
Africa's emerging commercial real estate markets may look tempting from the outside, but will remain the preserve of those with the highest appetite for risk.
Even the CEO of Growthpoint, South Africa's largest listed property firm, feels the continent (excluding South Africa) is not for the faint-hearted.
"We're sceptical with those African countries further north. Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda etc ... you're never sure if the law protects your property rights. The law around property title is certainly nowhere near as advanced as you would get in South Africa."
But others are more optimistic. Knight Franks' head of Africa Peter Welborn told a Reuters Summit in June that Africa opportunities were just as good if not better than other emerging markets such as Asia and Latin America, promising hefty returns.
Growthpoint is the landlord for some 440 commercial properties in South Africa, but owns just two buildings in the rest of the continent, in neighbouring Namibia.
"We're not unhappy with our properties in Namibia, but we're not necessarily long-term holders," Sasse says, adding those were inherited as part of Growthpoint's past portfolio purchases. Instead, the company is casting its net much further afield to Australia, where he says its new property unit could spend A$2 billion on acquisitions over the next two years.
Was white Kenyan aristocrat’s conviction fair?
It’s been almost three years since the son of the 5th Lord Delamere, Thomas Cholmondeley, first hopped down from a police truck and entered into Kenya’s High Court to face murder charges over the death of a local poacher on his estate.
Cholmondeley sat as impassively this week as he did that first day in court as the judge convicted him of a lesser charge of manslaughter.
Although the death penalty is off the table, he still could face life in prison.
It appears to me that this trial was blatantly turned into a race issue by certain Kenyan politians and the Judge was under huge political pressure to ensure a conviction no matter what the evidence produced. For the Judge to completly deregard the defence was a scandal in itself. In my opion this man did not get a fair trial and reflects the deep seated corruption in Kenya. Possibly the politians are trying to distract from the fact that they themselves are partaking in a land grab of their own.
I, myself grew up in a country that is predominatly black and was once ruled by the white man, as Kenya was, and I find the black man always seems to dwell on the past. To which the black politicians, who rule, are only too happy to remind him mainly to hind their own greed and misgovernment.
I think Kenyans should be ashamed of their Judicial system and the trial this man received. SHAME ON KENYA.
Will Kenyan police be brought to book?
A U.N. investigator has castigated Kenya’s police force for hundreds of alleged extra-judicial killings and called for both its chief and the Attorney General to be fired immediately. In a scathing indictment of the east African country’s security forces, Philip Alston, the U.N. rapporteur on extradicial executions, said he had received overwhelming evidence during a 10-day tour of systematic, widespread regular and carefully planned killings by the police. He said they were “free to kill at will” and did so with impunity for motives ranging from private disputes to extortion, to shooting a suspect instead of making an arrest. “The Kenyan police are a law unto themselves and they kill often and with impunity, ” said Alston, a law professor from Australia. In a statement laced with angry sarcasm, he accused the police of failing to provide him with virtually any of the information he sought, including the number of officers in the force. He supported allegations that police had killed 500 suspected members of the notorious Mungiki crime gang in 2007 in an attempt to exterminate it and 400, mostly opposition, demonstrators during a post election crisis last year — as reported by an official inquiry. Army and police are also accused of torturing and killing at least 200 people in an offensive to suppress a rebel movement in western Kenya. Alston demanded the immediate dismissal of Police Commissioner Hussein Ali but did not stop there. He said long-serving Attorney General Amos Wako, who he accused of consistently obstructing attempts to prosecute those in high positions for extrajudicial executions, must also go, calling him the embodiment of a system of impunity. Alston added that Kenya’s judicial system was bankrupt and another obstacle to achieving justice. And he even attacked President Mwai Kibaki for remaining completely silent about impunity. Alston’s condemnation was perhaps the most high profile and powerful in recent years but it follows numerous reports by human rights groups about extrajudicial killings by the police. Ali, an army general who has led the force for five years, has survived numerous other controversies. The government spokesman, Alfred Mutua, who as a sideline produces a popular television cop squad drama, immediately rubbished Alston’s statement, saying he had not been in the country long enough to draw accurate conclusions. But Kenya’s biggest newspaper, the Daily Nation, noted in an editorial that this was a routine response from the government and the U.N. official’s report could not be dismissed so lightly, an opinion shared by the other big daily, the Standard. But the government appears set to ignore even such high profile criticism, as it has done with allegations against the police in the past. The case also underlines the divisions within Kenya’s unwieldy Grand Coalition government, set up almost a year ago to end ethnic bloodletting after the disputed election that killed around 1,300 people. Alston was invited to carry out his investigation by this very government, although it is not clear who did so. He said Prime Minister Raila Odinga and Justice Minister Martha Karua had expressed concern about his report. Odinga was quoted in the Nation as saying: “We must act on the report. No one will be spared. I am not willing to compromise on this one.” He doesn’t seem to have spoken to Mutua. But whatever Odinga says, nobody is holding their breath for a radical overhaul of the police despite wide public disgust over their tactics. A recent opinion poll showed that 70 percent of Kenyans surveyed felt the coalition government had achieved nothing since it was formed last April. Only 33 percent thought any political or business leader guilty of organising the election violence would ever be convicted. Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who led mediation to end the crisis, warned that political manoeuvres delaying the establishment of a tribunal on the violence threatened the country’s stability. Will Kenya ever tackle these fundamental problems? Will violent police ever be brought to book?
from Global News Journal:
Fighting graft in Africa. Or not.
A little while back, we asked who is and isn’t fighting corruption effectively in Africa. This week, a number of examples bring us back to the subject.
In Tanzania, two former ministers have been charged with flouting procurement rules over the award of a tender for auditing gold mining back in 2002. The pair, who deny wrongdoing, served in the government of President Jakaya Kikwete’s predecessor Benjamin Mkapa. One of them also served under Kikwete himself.
Tanzania’s pledge to fight corruption is under close donor scrutiny and given the level of aid that Tanzania gets - more than one tenth of GDP by 2005 figures - it has little choice but to show willing. There have been doubts in the past, however, about how serious the government really was about going after the most senior and the best connected.
This is a good article, but all this has to be put in a different context too. An entirely different context. See this article I co-wrote in The American Interest recently. It looks at the global context of all this.
http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2 /article-bd.cfm?Id=466&MId=21
What’s the verdict on Nigeria’s Yar’Adua?
Nigerian President Umaru Yar’Adua took office a year ago promising to pursue free-market reforms launched by his predecessor, Olusegun Obasanjo, vowing zero tolerance for corruption and listing seven national priorities including improving power supply and reducing food insecurity.
A year on, his critics say economic reforms are grinding to a halt, his anti-corruption efforts are just window-dressing and his cabinet is largely a collection of ineffective bureaucrats who are but a shadow of an all-star cast in the former administration.
His supporters say his efforts to entrench the rule of law are a vital opportunity for Nigeria to make a break after decades of corruption and cronyism, and that while progress may be slow, he is laying the underpinnings for much stronger institutions in the country.
Does Yar’Adua have the political muscle he needs to lead Africa’s most populous nation? Is his oft-repeated mantra of the rule of law a step change in Nigeria? Or has the country lost the momentum it built up under Obasanjo? What do you think?
Isolated tribes? What in heaven’s name is Mr Woodcock talking about? It seems he doesn’t know much about Nigeria beyond the usual western stereotypes of Africans.
