This interview with Mr. Yoweri Museveni, the sit-tight president of Uganda and the proud champion of "No-Term-Limit" Presidential System never ceases to rankle. What do these leaders in Africa really think they are? Mini-gods? Well, it is left for Ugandans to go on tolerating him or resolve NOW to let the wind of change blowing across North Africa and the Middle East to reach Kampala also. The task of freeing the whole of Africa from "presidents-for-life", corrupt incompetent dictators and even psuedo-democratically imposed pretenders is an important and urgent one. It is a shame for any African to ask to be excused from it.
Following the adoption of the memorandum of understanding (MOU) by the NEPAD Heads of State and Government Implementation Committee in March 2003, the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) was instituted. The APRM is a mutually agreed instrument voluntarily acceded to by the member States of the African Union (AU) as a self-monitoring mechanism.
Like all other policies informing the institution of various treaties in the plethora of regional, sub-regional and global organizations in the world, the APRM has lofty ideas that make it look promising on the paper it is couched in its secretariat.
Essentially, the APRM is meant to operate based on self-assessment questionnaire developed by its secretariat. Here, Governments that have subjected themselves to the review mechanism will assess their performances in the areas of democracy and political governance and socio-economic development, as well as checking their compliance with wide range of African and international human rights treaties.
As at the end of 2010, interestingly about 20 countries have signed the MOU agreeing to come under peer review. It would appear African leaders are leaning towards the idea of credible governance by this gesture, even though a number of them are sit-tight undemocratic despots.
But the APRM is not going to solve the problems of the African people. That is why they are beginning to look for a way out in recent times. What people hitherto had not thought possible is becoming very popular. The African people are beginning to realize that true power and political will reside in them, and results are being recorded promptly.
A new APRM (African People Review Mechanism) was established when the Tunisian people told erstwhile dictator Ben Ali that they had had enough and he quickly tucked his tail and fled into exile after massive protests and demonstrations. The review has started and it is spreading.
The youths of Egypt, embracing this rude awakening started demonstrating against the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak whom no one could stand up to formerly.
Before our eyes their numbers swelled and daily they thronged the streets of Cairo, converging on the Liberation Square telling Mubarak that time was up. It is worthy of note that it took only eighteen days for this Egyptian revolution to mature. The heat became too much for Mubarak to handle.
The African Peer Review is segmented into four namely: Base Review, Periodic Review, Requested Review, and Crises Review. However, it has been suspected that it is only the Base Review that may be practicable for now and the least time this has taken for the first four countries to go through it is eighteen months!
It is therefore apparent that the People Review Mechanism yields result with the speed of light. This movement has no patience for cheap talk and intergovernmental bureaucracies. With one strong voice the people shouted and the despots were forced to oblige.
If the African Union, NEPAD, and even the APRM were serious about good governance, what business do they have condoning the many dictators that parade themselves as leaders in Africa? As I look at the list of countries that have submitted themselves for review in APRM from 2003-2010, I thought the joke is on the leadership of the AU that set up the APRM. Surely, Algeria, Gabon, Uganda, Egypt, Sudan are a laughing stock on any kind of ‘good governance review’.
It is apparent that this People Review Mechanism will not stop with Tunisia and Egypt. It has quickly crossed to the Middle Eastern monarchical Bahrain where they are calling for widespread political reforms and I have no doubt they will get what they want.
And now it is back in Africa and Libya is under review. Muammar Gaddafi has turned Libya to a fiefdom. For forty two years now he has ruled the country with an iron fist. But like his counterparts he did not see this coming, and his best response was to station mercenaries and snipers with automatic weapons to take down protesters. Gaddafi does not understand that this type of movement has only one outcome, and that is victory! He also does not understand the Arabs. The people just don’t give up.
While, the protesters get gunned down, and Gaddafi is spitting fire and hailstone that he would rather die in power(as the villain that he is not a martyr), it is certainly only a matter of time before he gets kicked out of power or killed in the process according to his utterances.
It is profound when one thinks of the happenings in leadership in Africa. There seems to be that inherent tendency to want to remain in power for life like any monarchy.
Perhaps, Africans are wired genetically to do so. Or else, how does one explain the shameless clinging onto office endlessly in a charade of democracy by African leaders?
The saying that all it takes for ill intentioned people to take over society and poison it is for good people to stand aloof and do nothing is now tested in these societies under review. Only in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other climes, the people had stood aloof for too long.
But this current review has come to stay. It is reminiscent of the renaissance movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s that swept the whole of Africa heralding the independence of many African states from colonialism.
As this piece is written, Libya is still under review by the same people who have groaned under the heavy hand of its leader and who has now turned the weapons he purchased with the money of tax payers on those same tax payers. The rest of North Africa and indeed the rest of Africa , the Middle East and every cranny of the world where dictators have held sway should warm up for their own review. African people are simply fed up with bad governance.
In the case of Algeria, it was the rising cost of food items that sparked off the riots in 2010 that eventually ousted the president. In Nigeria, the people would have myriads of reasons to choose to protest about- electricity, bad roads, unemployment, rising prices of food commodities, fuel of all description, health care issues, housing , as well as the general hijacking of decent living conditions by a callous few.
As this revolution sweeps through Libya, we can only watch with bated breaths, anticipating which country will take it up until ultimately the whole of Africa will be free from economic and political oppression.
The end members of passive continental margins are characterized as non-volcanic or volcanic depending on the nature of the transition zone. Differences between these two types are usually reflected by the differences of the physical properties of the Ocean-Continent Transition (OCT). Gravity, magnetic, and seismic data used to investigate the crustal structure of a portion of the northern Gulf of Mexico. Six 800-km long, crustal cross sections have been constructed across the study area with 70 km spacing. Two-dimensional crustal models, comprising 7 layers have been developed to simulate the observed Free-air gravity anomalies. The density of each layer has been kept constant and the geometry of the individual layers modified to obtain a good match to the gravity data. Where possible the gravity models have been constrained by available seismic and magnetic data. Interpretations for the boundaries between different crustal types are delineated by modeling. The magnetic anomalies were used to define the extent of the transitional crust and interpreted as the effects of subaerial flood basalts. For this study OCT was defined as the region where the crustal thickness is greater than 9 km and less than 25 km. The average width of the OCT in the models is 250 km which is greater than that found in previous studies at other volcanic margins. To satisfy concerns that some magnetic anomalies may be due to sea-floor spreading, an alternative model with a narrower transition was constructed which matched the data equally well. In order to reconstruct the pre-extension position of Yucatan the stretched continental crust and transitional zone (restored back to 32 km thickness) across the northern margin, 15° of rotation about a pole south of Florida and 9° further rotation for southern Gulf of Mexico is required. Results from previous studies suggest that the Yucatan Block underwent an additional 20° of rotation due to sea-floor spreading along the restoration arc (total amount of 44° counterclockwise rotation). The results of this thesis supports some previous studies that concluded: (1) the nature of the margin can be classified as being volcanic passive margin and (2) plate reconstructions require counterclockwise rotation for the opening of Gulf of Mexico.