(PHOTO 1: Howard G. Buffet, billionaire philanthropist and
self-appointed stakeholder in the African Great Lakes Region)
(PHOTO 2: Erstwhile CIA operative and US State Department official
Hank Crumpton, CEO of the Crumpton Group and pen-for-hire of Howard G.
Buffet)
***
Writing yesterday in the Kigali-based daily New Times, reporter
Eugene Kwibuka celebrated--no doubt as a vindication of the Rwandan
government unconvincing denial of its involvement in setting up and
micromanaging the M23 bandits--the polished hogwash, written by
lobbyists on behalf of billionaire Howard G. Buffet and his
foundation, that purports to give a more informed view on the crisis
in eastern DRC than the one given last year by the UN Group of
Experts.
(Source:
http://www.newtimes.co.rw/news/index.php?i=15316&a=65567)
The ridiculously laudatory piece by Kwibuka fails to point out that
this publication by the Howard G. Buffet Foundation (HGBF)--aptly
released on April's Fool Day--is a self-cannibalizing set of
plagiarisms lifted from a piece co-authored by Buffet and Tony Blair
titled "Stand with Rwanda: Now is no time to cut aid to Kigali"
published on Foreign Policy on February 21, 2013.
(I ranted on that nonsense here in a post of early March:
http://alexengwete.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-callous-buckraker-called-tony-blair.html?m=1)
Well, what else can one expect from a paper that has abandoned all
semblance of decent journalism to become the mouthpiece of the
repressive Kagame regime.
A more balanced assessment of the new dossier penned by Buffet's
mercenaries can be found on the blog
ethuin.wordpress.com (With Eyes
Wide Open) in a post titled "Putting things in perspective: Buffet
Foundation versus UN Group of Experts"
(
http://ethuin.wordpress.com/2013/04/02/putting-things-in-perspective-buffet-foundation-versus-un-group-of-experts/)
I won't be parsing the paid pro-Kagame informercial produced by Buffet
here, but I am rather marking it down as a benchmark: the dawn of a
new breed of Ugly Americans in the guise of roving global
self-appointed stakeholders.
These self-appointed stakeholders are even worse than the breed of the
new Africa scholars whose ambition, as I surmised in a post of June
2012, "is to make the traditional genre of Africa reporting extinct
and to replace it with something that is a cross between academic
hogwash and advocacy."
(See:
http://alexengwete.blogspot.ca/2012/06/laura-seays-view-from-goma-in-warscapes.html?m=1)
What makes Buffet and his ilk dangerous is, firstly, the tons of
monies they're waddling in. Secondly, some of them, such as Tony
Blair, have been top political leaders who currently enjoy instant
access to the world top influential people and decision-makers. And,
lastly, as this most recent endeavor of Buffet has shown, they are
well connected to former spooks turned contractors running their own
intel outfits.
What's more, unlike "unselfish" advocacy groups such as the
International Crisis Group (ICG) or Human Rights Watch (HRW) that
often offer paths to lasting solutions in conflict situations or
advocate on behalf of individual citizens or civil society groups
often oppressed by the powers that be, these new "Ugly Americans"
brazenly advocate on behalf of repressive regimes and oppressive
leaders such as Kagame.
These new Western moneyed self-appointed global stakeholders have now
come to shore on the African continent to stake out their claims and
carve out cartographies of interventions--no matter how idiotic or
terrible they might be.
They're now busy attempting to change, orient, and trim the future of
the African continent to fit and suit their narrow interests while at
the same time driving out, evacuating, dispossessing, disempowering,
and disenfranchising legitimate local, indigenous stakeholders.
In sum, these self-appointed stakeholders--mostly American
unfortunately--are bad news for Africa. Therefore Buffet, being one of
them, is very bad news for Africa in general, and for the African
Great Lakes Region in particular. And I don't care how much money
Buffet is funneling to the good causes at the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation or the WWF.
No one knows what made Buffet appoint himself a stakeholder in and a
savior of the African Great Lakes Region.
But this past December, Buffet baffled Congolese and others in the
region when he "boosted" the Kampala M23-DRC government with a
whopping $500,000 donation!
Why would Buffet invest so much money in "boosting" a group so
universally hated by the Congolese?
You only get an answer to such questions circumstantially--by turning
for instance to one of the two hired guns Buffet enlisted to patch up
an incoherent attack against the UN Group of Experts laced with an
embarrassing panegyric of Kagame and a blasting attack against the
government of the DRC for its malgovernance.
I'm alluding here to the Crumpton Group, headed by erstwhile CIA
spymaster and US State Department official Henry "Hank" Crumpton.
In an interview last May with CNN Suzanne Kelly at the launch of his
memoir "The Art of Intelligence," Crumpton said:
"If you look at the role of non-state actors overall both as
adversaries as enemies, as allies as potential allies, as citizens,
and institutions that we need to protect, I think that they are
increasingly a part of the landscape."
(Source:
http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2012/05/15/former-spys-memoir-gives-voice-to-the-frustration-that-comes-with-the-territory/)
Crumpton-qua-Buffet may therefore see M23 as part of eastern DRC
"landscape" for years to come and as actors to partner with in the
future balkanized Congo!
As I said before, in the ideal world of social and cartographic
engineering designs of these new self-appointed roving stakeholders,
local peoples and their imaginings don't exist. This ideal world has
no bearing whatsoever on the reality of Africa, having been hatched in
air-conditioned offices in Seattle, Washington, or in Arlington,
Virginia.
Postcolonial Africa has yet to start planning on ways of countering
the imperial forays of these colonists of the 21st century.
***
PHOTO CREDITS: PHOTO 1: Via
farmfutures.com; PHOTO 2: Via
cnn.com
