The Kinois impersonator of Sean Aylward vomits a 7-inch Ascarid!!!

Yesterday afternoon I was following on BBC the live radio coverage in
French of the trouncing then being administered by Manchester United
upon Blackburn Rovers (7-1) when I saw the Kinois Impersonator of Sean
Aylward (I introduced this character in a recent post), who was
playing with two of his cousins of about his age, suddenly cough up
violently and vomit on an upturned plastic stool the 7-inch dead
ascarid featured on the BlackBerry photo above!

Happy "genuine" Sean Aylward growing up in the worm-free habitat of
the United States where he won't ever live the horrid experience of
ascariasis--a tummy infestation with ascarides or some other nasty
worms, let alone deadly amoebas!

(At 11, I had a dreadful tapeworm episode in my hometown of Kisangani:
the dead tenia my mom patiently extracted from my anus measured not in
inches but in feet!)

"Infestation"!... Hmm... This means that the worm above left fellow
parasitic colonists inside the tummy of my poor Kinois Impersonator!
Colonists who'd no doubt be evacuated through the other orifice or
just thrown up again. The tummy as a rich biodiversity ecology...

The day before (Friday), a team of two UNICEF public health agents (a
woman and a man) stopped by to administer to the Kinois Impersonator 2
drugs: a tablet of a vermifuge called "Mebendenzol" (I'm not sure
about the spelling) and drops of vitamin A. No wonder the impersonator
parted with this worm...

I'm told that hundreds of these health agents go door to door
throughout the city every two or three months (my informant isn't sure
about the frequency of visits) for these much needed health care
interventions on children.

About a month ago, a WHO team dropped by to give the Impersonator oral
polio vaccine. The team left a circle with strange markings inscribed
inside traced with white chalk on the gate of the compound. No doubt
to let their colleagues know they've already been at the house where
they vaccinated one or more kids.

Talking of polio... about a week ago, it was reported that WHO teams
were scrambling across neighboring Congo-Brazzaville, Angola and parts
of the DRC close to these countries in order to urgently stymie a
strange outbreak of polio that had just crippled a couple of hundred
people in the port city of Pointe-Noire in Congo-Brazzaville!

(And the other night I got the heebie-jeebies from an uncannily vivid
nightmare: a major outbreak of Ebola was flaring up in Kin and I had
the hypochondriac's paranoid conviction of having contracted the
deadly virus!)

These free domestic health care interventions on children are critical
in this country devoid of any form of meaningful health care for
universally poor households... I can only wish that kids in remote
rural areas also get the same exposure to these international health
programs as do their urban counterparts.

As for the Kinois Impersonator, he readily resumed playing with his
buddies after briefly marveling at the strange creature that just
emerged from the unfathomable abyss of his tummy...

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Awaiting with bated breath Prez Obama's eradication of "Killers Without Borders"

I must say off the bat that Prez Barack Obama is to be commended for
his ambitious 4-pronged plan aimed at eradicating the Lord's
Resistance 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 dead
on arrival. For it bears, firstly, all the hallmarks of any number of
those stillborn grand ideas on behalf of Africa the denizens of the
continent are accustomed to seeing churn out sporadically and randomly
over the years from successive "planetarchs" at the remove of the Oval
Office.

Secondly, if Obama presented his Plan to Congress in the hope of
securing its funding, the hard fact remains that there's no way the
new Tea-Party-prone (and therefore domestically-inclined) Republican
Congress would entertain the fanciful notion of adding to the federal
deficit by disbursing taxpayers' dollars to fund a plan so far afield
of the traditional Republican purview and constituency of the US
national security interests.

Is the Prez really willing to waste so much needed precious political
capital on these elusive "Killers Without Borders" (Gérard Prunier)
moving in tiny predatory bands deeply burrowed under the canopy of a
"vast swaths of jungle the size of California," as one analyst
recently described the Central African region?

The answer is a resounding no. The Prez could have saved himself the
unnecessary embarrassment of a rejection by the new mercurial Congress
had he introduced his worthwhile initiative in the earlier part of his
term when he still enjoyed the backing of a robust congressional
majority.

Thirdly, since the LRA has gone international, why make Uganda the
cornerstone of the Plan, thus reinforcing with US taxpayers' dollars
an everlasting autocratic regime?

Last and not least, consider the Plan per se--its public version, that
is, for there's for sure a classified addendum.

Bizarrely, the Plan seems pirated from Yoweri Museveni's anti-LRA
book. To his credit, Museveni had been attempting for over more than 2
decades to deal with LRA killers--using carrot and stick.

For instance, one component of Obama Plan calls for incentivizing
defections in the rank and file of the LRA. Well, this had repeatedly
been attempted with limited results in northern Uganda, where former
LRA fighters were disarmed and given means to reintegrate their
communities. And President Museveni had often gone out of his way to
try and accommodate John Kony--even footing the bill of Kony's
mother's funerals!

Besides, how do you penetrate an impenetrable millenarian murderous
sect to incentivize its members for defection? Does the incentives go
hand in hand with a "de-programming" initiative?

More importantly, the military component of the Plan lacks local
communities' ownership, thus fails to integrate lessons (if there were
any) stemming from the past disastrous joint FARDC-UDF anti-LRA
military operations with the intelligence and logistical backing of
AFRICOM. In point of fact, the Plan bluntly tells these local
communities, "Step aside, folks, pray, cross your fingers, and await
the eradication of the scourge by the deus ex machina of the joint
military forces of the region under Ugandan command!."

Local communities' ownership I have in mind turns on its head the
received COIN (counter-insurgency) doctrine that's currently applied
in Central Africa--particularly in eastern DRC by MONUSCO and the
FARDC. And it's bound to achieve at low cost the major objective of
the Obama Plan: Protection of civilians.

It's so simple that I'm amazed it hasn't so far been seriously considered.

It has in fact been attempted in a northern DRC village by the border
with the Sudan, but without any follow-up capacity building.

In that village, in the wake of a particularly vicious attack by the
LRA, women and men spontaneously organized self-defense groups. The
one thing these bold villagers lacked was weapons. They made do with
clubs and machetes, even setting up surveillance perimeters and shifts
as well as protection posses to accompany people to their fields.

Why not take a cue from this out-of-the-box initiative much as is done
in development projects that integrate local initiatives? Isn't this
brilliant initiative in keeping with the very spirit of the Second
Amendment of the US Constitution?

The areas and villages under LRA threat are identified. The sensible
thing to do is to arm people in those areas for their
self-defense--with maybe two or three soldiers at each site to teach
handling of weapons and basic tactical skills. Had this kind of
pragmatic approach conceived and implemented in eastern DR Congo, I
doubt we'd be bemoaning today epidemic rapes occurring there.

There's simply no other way to deal with vicious killers of the likes
of the LRA and the FDLR. It's high time this approach be integrated
into the Obama Plan for the elimination of the threat posed by the LRA
in Central Africa. Failing that, people in threatened areas would
still be like lambs to the slaughter.

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The new universal mantra in the DRC: Reelection of the Raïs in the first round of the 2011 presidential election

A slogan has now morphed into a mantra here. The mantra is taking the
DRC by storm. It is repeated ad nauseum by stalwarts of the ruling
majority whenever they appear on TV talk-shows or at political
gatherings.

Never mind that the election is due to be held in October of next year
and therefore electoral campaigning is virtually by law out of bound
at the present moment. Never mind that the Raïs hasn't privately or
publicly announced his intention of running for his own succession.

These people aren't taking any chances. They've already launched a
presidential bid on behalf of Kabila and it's very ambitious: "To
ensure the reelection of the Raïs in the first round of the
presidential election of 2011." (With warlord Jean-Pierre Bemba likely
to be found guilty at The Hague and his party--the MLC--a ghost of its
previous self, the wishful mantra is likely to turn into a fact next
year.)

Members of the Alliance of the Presidential Majority (AMP)dragging
their feet in joining in chanting the universal mantra are looked upon
suspiciously. And hound dogs of the partisan press of the ruling
majority are unleashed upon those, like Kudura Kasongo--the former
spokesman of the Raïs--who question the wisdom of such a supremacist
agenda in a country just awoken from the nightmare of similar
supremacist agendas of Mobutu and Kabila-père.

Those--like Planning Minister Olivier Kamitatu--who choose to sit by
and watch events unfold from the sidelines aren't spared either. As
Kamitatu isn't taking a stand, he's undoubtedly a "traitor."

Last night I watched on TV MP Yves Kisombe--a turncoat who was thrown
out from the MLC for voting at every turn with the AMP in the National
Assembly--bemoaning the "deviationism" of an MP belonging to the
ruling majority who had the gall of voicing his intent of running for
president next year... They were right indeed, those MLC MPs who kept
accusing Kisombe of being an AMP mole in their midst!

At any rate, the word "deviationism" used by Yves Kisombe encapsulates
the authoritarian syndrome accompanied by its major symptom of
personality cult that has now gripped the country. You just don't call
the president by his name anymore. You refer to him as,"The President
of the Republic, His Excellency Joseph Kabila Kabange." Or if you want
to refer to him as the leader of the ruling political alliance, you'd
call him, "The Moral Authority." Or if you want to cut to the cheese
without risking what some sycophants might perceive as disrespectful
you simply call him by the Swahili word (derived from Arabic) of
"Raïs" (head of state). Political jokes à la Jon Stewart are simply
not viable here.

Just as under Mobutu, top and middle-level managers of parastatals
have to be members of the PPRD, the party of the Raïs, or at the very
least belong to one of the 56 parties making up the Alliance of the
Presidential Majority. And every single one of these managers has to
appear periodically on a TV or radio talk-show and repeat the mantra
of the "reelection of the Raïs in the first round."

It now seems that the mantra has reached a fever pitch. A petition is
now circulating among soukous musicians calling for the creation of a
"Union of Congolese Musicians for the Reelection of the Raïs in the
First Round." Paradoxically, the first signatory of the petition is
none other than the very same Papa Wemba who came out not so long ago
pretending to attack the corruption of the regime!

Pathetic!... Nevertheless, Papa Wemba, like any other Congolese given
the same opportunity, knows how to position himself in the field to
catch the multiple bags of wads of dollars about to start flying in
the direction of people humming early the mantra of the "reelection of
the Raïs in the first round." And pardon this mixed metaphor...

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The Joke of Mining Ban in Eastern Congo: Gen Gabriel Amisi aka Tango-Fort seizes a Gold Mine in Eastern DRC (BBC)

As the Chief of Staff of the ground forces (infantry), Gen Gabriel
Amisi Kumba aka Tango-Fort is the number two most senior officer of
the FARDC, after Gen Didier Etumba, the General Chief of Staff.

With Laurent Nkunda, Gen Tango-Fort engineered the 2002 massacre in
Kisangani of civilians and police recruits then being trained by the
ex-MONUC. The massacre came in the wake of a failed uprising against
Rwandan occupation of Kisangani. The uprising was carried out by a
resistance group of the city's Mangobo Commune called "Etats-Unis"
[United States].

This crime against humanity was contemporaneously documented by Human
Rights Watch, which put the death toll at more than 160.

The massacre was particularly barbaric, with troops led by Tango-Fort
and Nkunda--backed by Rwandan special forces flown in from
Kigali--going door to door killing civilians who had nothing to do
with the uprising. There are factual accounts of pregnant women
disemboweled with bayonets and of police trainees suffocated in
containers.

The massacre was also "streamlined" afterwards when the perpetrators
collected bodies, put them in sacs weighed down with stones and
thrown into the Tshopo River--in a lame attempt to cover up the
killings.

When the rotting bodies emerged from the waters of the Tshopo River,
triggering the wrath of the people of Kisangani, Nkunda and Tango-Fort
ordered their troops to fire in the air to disperse the outraged
bystanders, to collect the corpses, and to bury them in communal
graves...

In 2003, after the integration into the Congolese army of the
Rwandan-backed rebel outfit RCD to which he belonged, Tango-Fort was
"laundered" into the FARDC. And today this war criminal and profiteer
is the Chief of Staff of the ground forces of the FARDC.

Tango-Fort's appointment was unavailingly decried by human rights
groups and the civil society.

(This instance of outrageous impunity is by no means unique in this
country with a "fractionated sovereignty" of an "unhinged and
dislocated state": to name just two of these infamous war criminals:
Gen Jean-Bosco Ntangada who, despite an ICC arrest warrant issued
against him, is the deputy coordinator of a major anti-FDLR military
operation in North-Kivu where he continues to assassinate his personal
enemies [again, a BBC report commented in this blog]; and Gen Charles
Bisengimana, also from the RCD, who massacred civilians in the Kivu
provinces and who is the acting police boss of the DRC after the
suspension of Gen John Numbi pending the conclusion of Flori Chebeya
murder investigation [see one of my posts in this blog on this war
criminal]).

Anyway, according to a BBC report previewed today that will be aired
tomorrow in its "Assignment" program, Gen Tango-Fort strong-armed the
"Socagrimine" gold mining company into abandoning its venture at Umate
in February of this year.

In its stead, Tango-Fort placed at the mine "Geminaco," a company
owned by one of his associates, under the full protection of army
personnel. In exchange for his muscled intervention, Tango-Fort has
secured a 25-% share of the gold being extracted by Geminaco. Little
wonder then that this plunderer is building two high-rises downtown
Kinshasa!

In September, the Raïs banned mining in the three eastern provinces of
North- and South-Kivu and Maniema. But strangely, Geminaco continues
mining gold at Umate where its mine teems with FARDC soldiers who are
wont to beat up recalcitrant diggers, according to one of the latter
quoted in the BBC report!

Gen Tango-Fort refused to speak to the BBC "Assignment" reporter,
directing him to contact the army's spokesman who, in turn, told the
reporter he had no business investigating the profiteering general!

Well, as some had predicted, the ban by the Raïs on mining in the
three eastern provinces turns out to be a silly joke that just shows
what this land has become: the African version of the wild, Wild West!

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Erratum: Read UNDP instead of PNUD (Previous Post)

In the previous post, I mistakenly referred to the United Nations
Development Program (UNDP) by its French acronym PNUD (Programme des
Nations Unies pour le Développement).

The Human Development Index I mentioned is to be accessed by following
this link: http://hdr.undp.org/en/

***

(Sent via BlackBerry)

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The Kinois Impersonator of an American kid named Sean Aylward

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 mom
of its first rightful owner undoubtedly--has inscribed with a blue pen
the name: "Sean Aylward." In fact, this Kinois impersonator of Sean
Aylward is wearing from head to toe second-hand gear imported from the
U.S.

Second-hand clothes, shoes, bikes and an array of other
junk--including, oddly enough, in-line skates in paved-road-challenged
cities of the Congo--are imported from the U.S. in huge bundles that
are sold to Congolese retailers by Lebanese and Indian or Paki
wholesalers.

Second-hand clothes are called in Lingala "tombola-bwaka" (often
shortened as "tombola") or "pick 'em up-drop 'em down"-- an expression
that conveys the typical gestures of tombola shoppers who'd take up an
item, inspect it closely and thoroughly, then drop it back on stalls
where it was on display or buy it.

These "tombola-bwaka" are discarded clothes that American households
would drop for free at their local Salvation Army stores or some other
drop-points for charities dedicated to clothing the poor, the needy,
and the wretched of America. (In the D.C. area a charity run by
Vietnam vets ask donors to put clothes in trash bags to leave them by
the front doors for pick-up.)

But it seems that somewhere between the Salvation Army store and the
intended targets of charity, these clothes get somehow sucked into the
whirlpool of global capitalist markets.

Yesterday I watched on TV an opposition MP who was blaming the
government for the DRC's backward trend in the just released PNUD's
2010 Human Development Index. He keenly bemoaned the government's
indifference in the face of the steady impoverishment of the Congolese
who can no longer afford to properly feed their tombola-clad kids!

Well, I beg to disagree with the MP's take on tombola-bwaka. First,
these tombola-bwaka are sturdy. For instance, the tank-top worn by
Sean Aylward impersonator above would outlast any pirated brand new
GAP version of this kind of shirt sold in Lebanese stores downtown.

Second, almost every single Congolese-- including this Honorable MP, I
suspect--has tombola-bwaka jeans or t-shirts in their wardrobes.

But otherwise I also feel the pain and the anger of the MP. According
to PNUD's Human Delevopment Index the Congolese of 1970 were better
off than those of today.

DRC got the penultimate world ranking of 168, preceded by Burundi and
followed by Zimbabwe--the neighborhood of little trolls walking
backwards.

If this trend isn't urgently reversed, our Sean Aylward impersonator
will be 48 when he dies his natural death--to be exact, life
expectancy is 48.006--after spending about 4 years in a run-down
school (the mean years of schooling is now 3.758 here).

These staggering figures give indeed its full meaning to the economics
concept of "worth of life": by the time the real Sean Aylward reaches
college age, his parents' investment into his upbringing would be at
least one million dollars or more, whereas the life of his
impersonator in Kinshasa would be, well, worthless.

Also yesterday, I heard on Radio France Internationale (RFI) DRC
Communication Minister Lambert Mende bristling at PNUD for its
out-of-context-Congo-bashing Index--the proper context being,
according to him, that from 1970 to the late 1990s, the Congo was
under a Western-imposed dictatorship that sucked life out of the
country; then from the late 1990s to the present the same Western
predators hatched, planned and had their proxies carry out successive
invasions of the Congo and its plunder. Little wonder then that the
DRC would be worse off on that Index concocted by the very same rogue
entities who'd conspired to plunge this country into the abyss!

Well said, Your Excellency The Communicator, though you didn't even
start addressing the awful case of Sean Aylward Impersonator!

***

(Sent via BlackBerry)

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A cell site in the middle of C.S. Clessidra ain't frying kids' brains after all...

This photo shows Avenue de la Gombe, off Avenue de Libération qua
Avenue Mulele Pierre qua Avenue du 24 Novembre qua (simply) 24
straight ahead. Btw, Armand Tungulu pulled his ill-fated stunt at the
Raïs not far from here on that very artery.

Avenue de la Gombe, in the eponymous commune downtown, boasts the
Halle de la Gombe that houses the French Cultural Center, and is one
of the city's spots with the highest density of private schools per
meter square.

On the left of the photo above is just one such private school called
C.S. Clessidra, owned by an evangelical pastor, whose walls are
painted yellow.

"C.S." stands for "complexe scolaire" (school complex), which means
that the tiny school comprises a kindergarten as well as primary and
secondary schools.

What caught my attention and frightened me was the massive cell
station that towers over the small school and is even perilously next
to one side of the tiny walls of some classrooms.

Apocalyptic scenarios flashed through my "catastrophist"'s mind that
ran like this one: "OMG!, kids' brains are frying in that school!"

I even brought to the attention of some friends of mine in positions
of authority this odd photo, urging them to have the school shut down
for endangering students' health.

With a condescending smile, one of these friends told me that it was
the government, with the technical advice of cellphone companies, that
chooses where to erect those base stations or antennas according to
some determined grids.

These companies provide so much needed cash in taxes to city,
provincial and national governments that authorities would just invoke
eminent domain laws to override any objections by homeowners, property
owners, or concerned neighborhood groups.

But cellphone providers would often come to an understanding with
property owners, paying them rent for the section of the property
where the base station is built. (My guess is that they pay this rent
to avoid their cell sites be vandalized.)

A typical for one of these base stations would fetch between $2,000 to
$3,000 per month! Little wonder then many of these cell sites dot
Kinshasa residences.

What's more, my pal went on to tell me, cell sites are totally harmless!

When I doubted his claim, he googled the string "danger of cell
sites," got hits, and made me read the following:

"Measurements made near typical cellular and PCS [Personal
Communications Service]installations, especially those with tower-
mounted antennas, have shown that ground-level power densities are
thousands of times less than the FCC's limits for safe exposure. In
fact, in order to be exposed to levels at or near the FCC limits for
cellular or PCS frequencies an individual would essentially have to
remain in the main transmitting beam (at the height of the antenna)
and within a few feet from the antenna. This makes it extremely
unlikely that a member of the general public could be exposed to RF
levels in excess of these guidelines due to cellular or PCS base
station transmitters"
(http://www.cellphonesafetyguide.com/questions/cellular-pcs-towers).

I was wrong. That huge base station at C.S. Clessidra ain't frying
kids' brains after all...

But the "catastrophist" beast in me suddenly rears its ugly head one
more time: "What if... What if that info is just a spiel coming from
an industry lobby group?"...

Besides, why such a behemoth in a schoolyard?

***

(Sent via BlackBerry)

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