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Published 15th February 2008

Vol 49 No 4

South Africa

Divided House in Cape Town

Policy splits deepen within the governing ANC as Thabo Mbeki starts his last full year as the country's President

Pomp, ceremony, fashion parades and backslapping are the usual accompaniments to the state-of-the-nation address with which President Thabo Mbeki opens a session of South Africa's parliament. This time, on 8 February, the mood was sombre and the subsequent party, where journalists, diplomats and politicians once smooched late into the night, was cancelled. Several sobering national crises would have made that inappropriate. There might even have been a power-cut. Since African National Congress members rejected Mbeki as leader of the ANC at its national conference in December, it has seemed that the conflicting demands of Mbeki's and Jacob Zuma's supporters could paralyse the government, especially if economic conditions deteriorate. The ANC contains two centres of power, one around Zuma as head of the party, the other around Mbeki as head of state and government.

The safari talks

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

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Signs of progress, however elusive, are boosting hopes for a deal but the militias are rearming - just in case

The announcement of a political deal on 14 February at talks at a Kilaguni Game Lodge mediated by former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan boosted morale but may not chan...

Message from the wazungu

Image courtesy of Panos Pictures

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Outsiders have been belatedly increasing pressure on Kenya's feuding politicians as former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan moved the negotiating teams to the secluded K...

BLUE LINES
THE INSIDE VIEW

The information revolution would make the rigging of elections impossible, the technology evangelists claimed. Cellphones would enable observers to send information about abuse instantly to headquarters and digital cameras would record voting malpractice and violence. Opening the airwaves to private FM radio stations would allow local journalists to reach communities in their own languages. Internet technology would mean that this digitised data and voting information, along with better informe...
The information revolution would make the rigging of elections impossible, the technology evangelists claimed. Cellphones would enable observers to send information about abuse instantly to headquarters and digital cameras would record voting malpractice and violence. Opening the airwaves to private FM radio stations would allow local journalists to reach communities in their own languages. Internet technology would mean that this digitised data and voting information, along with better informed press reports and political blogs, could be instantly relayed across a country. All this should have led to more political accountability. There is no doubt that the new technology helped ensure better elections in countries such as Ghana, Senegal, Mauritius, Zambia and Botswana. But in the middle of Kenya’s current crisis, the picture looks rather different. Accusations of heinous, electronically-assisted crimes buzz across the internet: militias organising operations by text message via cellphones; hate speech propagated in indigenous languages on local FM stations; and blogs that preach a poisonous message of land seizures and score-settling. New technology may have made it harder to steal elections, but it is also making it harder to deal with the consequences of a disputed poll. Electronic pluralism is good but the judicial and political institutions will have to work much harder to catch up with it.
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