Andrea BohnstedtAndrea Bohnstedt
Are Land Rights Upheld in Tanzania?
Last month, I stumbled over a small news item on a Tanzania security firm’s website. They noted that ‘an uneasy situation (had) developed in the Arusha area of Tanzania with the incursion of villagers onto privately owned land’. The reasons behind this were twofold: on the one hand, ‘villagers became increasingly distressed at the lack of grazing and water on their own smallholdings and began encroaching mai...
Sudan Conflict Puts China In A Bind
Southern Sudan and Sudan proper got a bit of a wholesale slap this week. The UN Security Council said to both North and South to stop it, right now, and to sit down and resume talks chaperoned by the African Union – again.Everyone has told everyone repeatedly to sit down and talk with limited success to date – hence the de-facto war situation. What made this latest admonishment slightly different was that there was an ‘or els...
Am I Bitter About Kenya, Or Am I Just Realistic?
A few weeks ago, I received an email from a Kenyan expatriate who lives in New Zealand and who says he follows news of his beloved home Kenya by reading online newspapers. This gentleman wrote to me to point out what he perceived as ‘bitterness’ towards Kenya in my tone. Incidentally, he also said that ‘many of your articles suggest the "The Star" is facing a serious lack of properly columnists.’ This may be a valid con...
African nations should put their money where their mouths are
It was both entirely expected and a massive let-down when the US government stuck to its first proposal, ignoring the widespread global support for Nigerian finance minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, and appointed Korean-American Jim Yong Kim as the new World Bank Director. The ever lovely and insightful Charles Onyango Obbo who’s thankfully finally started to blog regularly - the Nation Media Group really underuses his writing talen...
EAC Should Ease Labour Mobility
A couple of years ago, I was having drinks in Accra with a Nigerian friend and a couple of his buddies. The conversation turned to a mobile company in Nigeria and one of the guys complained about the corporation – a foreign investor – having brought in a ‘small white boy’ to run it. Then they looked at me sheepishly for a second. I shrugged my shoulders: I’m obviously neither small nor a boy. I remembere...
Okonjo-Iweala Best For World Bank Job
Occasionally, just occasionally, I can be a bit of a drama queen. And of course I have an opinion or five that I will defend, otherwise they are not opinions. So a while ago, I met up with a friend for a drink and for some reason I can’t remember, as soon as the drinks had arrived on the table, we started talking about the IMF. And clashed instantly, spectacularly, so much so that I pulled out some cash, threw it on the table for my drin...
Turkana Oil Talk Of The Week
I’m not entirely sure who ‘they’ are, but right now, ‘they’ are very very busy with ‘being at it again’. Neither Facebook nor Google, though. Someone else.Kenyan cyberspace is great: within moments of the oil find in Turkana being announced on Monday, the internet was flooded with spoofs: dancing Turkana babies, Turkana petroleum jelly, GEMA expanding into GEMAT, you name it. And I think it must have b...
There’s Nothing Odd About A Porsche In A Lagos Shop
So this has been bugging me a bit: Where in Nairobi do you find black, water-proof, lash-extending mascara (yes, I want the full, fake-it package)? Maybe I just didn’t search hard enough? L'Oréal, one of the high-street brands I love, have opened shop in Nairobi, but no make up, I hear, only hair products, and whilst I love hair products in principle, I don’t have much hair. So when someone travels, I usually ask them to pic...
Governments Should Protect Citizens’ Interests
As PR goes, this wasn’t ideal: In 2009, through portfolio company Concord, Egypt’s Citadel Capital signed a 25-year lease for 105,000 hectares of land in Gwit and Pariang counties of Unity State in Southern Sudan to grow maize and sorghum for domestic consumption. Given that Southern Sudan’s non-oil economy is largely subsistence-based agriculture, you’d think that anything that increases food production and introduces ...
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