At around 8 PM (Kin time), I followed in quick succession--and attimes alternating between three radio dials--the new messages of threeheads of state: 1) Nicolas Sarkozy (France); 2) Denis Sassou Nguesso(Congo-Brazzaville); and 3) the Raïs (DRC). A captivating exercise incomparative speech writing...What was interesting between the three messages was that whereasSarkozy gave to French citizens a clear lowdown of the action hisgovernment will undertake in the upcoming year, with precisebenchmarks to be achieved, the two Congolese presidents' messages...
Friday, 31 December 2010
Thursday, 23 December 2010
There's no other way in explaining the BIZARRE renewed legal assaultby Zuma against South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapirothan by surmising that the South African president has gone Zulu onZapiro.I've previously said that by going after Zapiro, Zuma was on the pathof bringing South Africa down at the level of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. As ithappens, people are now being thrown in jail in Zimbabwe for callingMugabe a little troll or a gnome.But Zuma's (and incidentally Mugabe's) predicament, it now appears tome, is more fundamental and therefore...
Monday, 20 December 2010
I repost this June 2010 FAIR article to illustrate the hypocrisy,double speak and double standards of all those decrying today theflaunting of democracy by Laurent Gbagbo in Côte d'Ivoire.Alex Engwete***FAIR: Honduras Down the Memory HoleU.S. media ignore the aftermath of dubious elections they praisedBy Alyssa FigueroaA year after a military coup removed democratically elected PresidentManuel Zelaya from office, Hondurans are still living under arepressive government—but the U.S. is pushing Latin American countriesto join it in normalizing relations...
1. CNDP joins AMPKin was flabbergasted by the recent signing of an agreement at theheadquarters of AMP on Avenue des Huileries in Lingwala Communebetween CNDP, the former rebel movement once led by renegade generalLaurent Nkunda, and the Raïs' Alliance of Presidential Majority. Anunanticipated earth-shattering move by CNDP which thus joins the Raïs'cartel of 50-odd political parties--with the Tutsi movement proudlyhoisting its flag amidst the other flags flying in front of the AMPheadquarters.Radio-Trottoir pundits make a real hoo-ha about this...
Sunday, 19 December 2010
Yesterday evening, Congolese were glued to generator-powered TV sets(rolling blackouts demand them!) of ngandas (sidewalk bars) to watchthe final of FIFA Club World Cup 2010 in Abu Dhabi between Inter Milanand TP Mazembe of Lubumbashi (3-nil).Though a historic first for an African team and therefore a matter ofnational pride no matter the outcome of the match, Congolese fansproved to be sore losers.At the nganda in the Matonge neighborhood where I was watching thematch, the audience, mistaking the Japanese refereeing the match for aChinese, blamed...
Saturday, 18 December 2010
It now seems that during his failed mediation between AlassaneOuattara and Laurent Gbagbo in Abidjan, former RSA president ThaboMbeki offered exile with impunity in South Africa to Gbagbo, whoturned it down and instead came up with a crazy plan of his own: anamicable Kenyan-style arrangement, with Ouattara as Vice-president!According to Mbeki's scenario, Gbagbo could thus be joining deposedHaitian president Aristide in South Africa. Let's remember here thatHaitians, who were recently disenfranchised in rigged electionsmonitored by the UN and the...
Friday, 17 December 2010
1. Côte d'Ivoire: Instrumentalization of civiliansOnce again, African civilians are paying a heavy price for theirpoliticians' malpractice and turpitudes--this time around, in Abidjan,Côte d'Ivoire (photo above).Yesterday, northern politicians Alassane Draman Ouattara (recognizedby the international community as the president-elect) and hisPM-designate Guillaume Soro sent their "unarmed" supporters in thestreets to attempt and seize the buildings...
Wednesday, 15 December 2010
Richard Nixon: crook, liar, criminal, coup mastermind, and, in hisprevious (and latter-day incarnations), a comeback kid. Hence the nowclassic Checkers Speech. Hence his post-Watergate disgraceforeign-policy essays and his posthumous apotheosis of the pageant ofhis funeral attended by the exclusive club of all living formerpresidents as well as the then president in office--with CNN and othermajor networks wasting patriotic liturgical air-time on an unpatrioticdeposed president. Nixon's way of showing both of his middle fingersto his lifelong political...
Monday, 13 December 2010
Libération, a Paris-based center-left daily close to the FrenchSocialist Party, has just decided to host a mirror site of WikiLeaks.(I translate below the full editorial penned by Laurent Joffrin,director of Libération, to justify the move.)This is in defiance of the move by Industry Minister Éric Besson who,two weeks ago, announced that he was exploring juridical ways ofbanning the hosting of WikiLeaks on French sites and servers.A possible legal battle could be taking shape between Libération, amedia powerhouse, and Besson, a controversial and...
Sunday, 12 December 2010
If you believe politicos appearing on TV these days, Kin is ontenterhooks. And though Radio-Trottoir, with its permanent cynicismtowards the political class whose members it deems as irredeemablethieving thickos, is playing things down, some political jitters arenonetheless palpable in the Congolese capital.The headline is of course the return on Wednesday, December 8, ofÉTIENNE TSHISEKEDI aka LIDER MAXIMO aka TSHITSHI, the veteran leaderof the "Pavlovian" radical opposition. First slated for Sunday,December 5, Tshitshi's return was finally postponed...
Friday, 10 December 2010
Please do us a favor...Go to the nearest Starbucks, pick any coffee inthe panoply of coffees being offered, order one of the cup sizesexpressed in fake Italian, and send vibes of existential compassion tous Kin coffee-loving denizens criminally deprived of that dailyelemental pleasure.And don't you ever forget to drop something into the tip cup for thoseStarbucks heroes clad in green or black aprons. There was a red signat the now defunct "Ed's Bar"...
Thursday, 9 December 2010
The imperial chronicle of the Planetarchy. The First 100 Years or TheAmerican Century (concept of futurist George Friedman).Planetarch's Log...The Empire strikes back at Julian Assange: trumped-up double rapes,extradition to the US, life sentence without the possibility of paroleor more expendiently the American signature of Crime and Punishment:Death Penalty (trumped-up charge of "terrorism": guilty as charged bySarah Palin)...History tells us about the incredible reach of the Roman Empire (myfavorite books used to be the massive volumes of Gibbon's...
Monday, 6 December 2010
A source at the Agence Nationale de Renseignements (ANR), the DRC spyagency, tells me that high- and mid-level security agents went througha one-day anti-terrorism training module this past Friday, December 3,in the plush Binza neighborhood of Kin.The training module was given by American agents, though my sourcecouldn't tell which American agency was involved. The agent who gavethe PowerPoint presentation was one Julie.The module topic was WMD identification and detection. The sourcetells me that a suitcase detector device was given to the Congoleseby...
Sunday, 5 December 2010
1) I mistakenly characterized Régis Debray's quote in the previousquote as an aphorism, though I correctly defined the latter: "a terseformulation of a sentiment."Heraclitus, the master aphorist of all times, had coined some stingingaphorisms--like this one: "Bigotry is the sacred disease."***2) Festive Sunday at the Martyrs' Stadium in KinshasaThe first mass celebrated by the newly created Cardinal LaurentMosengwo Pasinya of Kinshasa is under way in the densely-packed Stadedes Martyrs of Kinshasa.The Raïs, the Prime Minister, and many other political...
Saturday, 4 December 2010
"Civilization might be defined as a slow effort destined to reduce thecosts of succession wherever possible, and the state of barbarism asone in which the passing of the torch is effected amid bloodshed orthrough a simple relation of forces" (Régis Debray).***With the exception of a handful of countries, in Sub-Saharan Africa,contentions, violence and bloodletting always mar the electoralprocess. It's a law of political "physics," as predictable as thefreezing of water at 0 degree centigrade.One has still to see the dawn of the day when an African...
Saturday, 27 November 2010
Yesterday afternoon I was following on BBC the live radio coverage inFrench of the trouncing then being administered by Manchester Unitedupon Blackburn Rovers (7-1) when I saw the Kinois Impersonator of SeanAylward (I introduced this character in a recent post), who wasplaying with two of his cousins of about his age, suddenly cough upviolently and vomit on an upturned plastic stool the 7-inch deadascarid featured on the BlackBerry photo above!Happy...
I must say off the bat that Prez Barack Obama is to be commended forhis ambitious 4-pronged plan aimed at eradicating the Lord'sResistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa.To all intents and purposes, however, the Obama Plan seems thin,impractical, unimaginative, and may as well be therefore deemed deadon arrival. For it bears, firstly, all the hallmarks of any number ofthose stillborn grand ideas on behalf of Africa the denizens of thecontinent are accustomed to seeing churn out sporadically and randomlyover the years from successive "planetarchs"...
Thursday, 11 November 2010
A slogan has now morphed into a mantra here. The mantra is taking theDRC by storm. It is repeated ad nauseum by stalwarts of the rulingmajority whenever they appear on TV talk-shows or at politicalgatherings.Never mind that the election is due to be held in October of next yearand therefore electoral campaigning is virtually by law out of boundat the present moment. Never mind that the Raïs hasn't privately orpublicly announced his intention of running for his own succession.These people aren't taking any chances. They've already launched apresidential...
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
As the Chief of Staff of the ground forces (infantry), Gen GabrielAmisi Kumba aka Tango-Fort is the number two most senior officer ofthe FARDC, after Gen Didier Etumba, the General Chief of Staff.With Laurent Nkunda, Gen Tango-Fort engineered the 2002 massacre inKisangani of civilians and police recruits then being trained by theex-MONUC. The massacre came in the wake of a failed uprising againstRwandan occupation of Kisangani. The uprising was carried out by aresistance group of the city's Mangobo Commune called "Etats-Unis"[United States].This...
Saturday, 6 November 2010
Friday, 5 November 2010
You'd think this little Kinois is an American kid. His tank-top reads:"What's not to love?" And his baseball cap, worn backward, has a big"S" written in front.More importantly, on the inside of the baseball cap, someone--the momof its first rightful owner undoubtedly--has inscribed with a blue penthe name: "Sean Aylward." In fact, this Kinois impersonator of SeanAylward is wearing from head to toe second-hand gear imported from theU.S.Second-hand...
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