Angolan envoy to Israel, Manuel Augusto Jao Diogo Fortunato, was one of two Angolan diplomats who were fired this week for attending a gala dinner hosted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to celebrate the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem.
Two senior Angolan diplomats were fired this week for attending a gala dinner hosted by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to celebrate the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem.
Manuel Augusto Jao Diogo Fortunato – a senior adviser and the number 2 figure in the Angolan Embassy in Tel Aviv – attended the 13 May event with the approval of Angola’s Director for African, Middle East and Regional Organizations, Joaquim do Espírito Santo.
Angolan media reports that on Monday, Angola’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Manuel Augusto, fired Fortunato and Santo for “failing to comply with procedures and harming Angola’s good reputation.”
Fortunato was one of twelve envoys from African countries to participate in the event. Other African countries that indicated they would attend were: Rwanda, South Sudan, Kenya, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Zambia, Tanzania, Nigeria, Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Nigeria denied that its representative attended the gala dinner.
Those African nations that did attend were heavily criticised for betraying Africa’s legacy of anti-colonialism and undermining the Palestinian liberation struggle.
“Kenneth Kaunda would be quite disappointed,” wrote Nigerian trade unionist and human rights activist, Owei Lakemfa, referring to Zambia’s presence. “Tanzania would make Mwalimu Julius Nyerere turn in his grave that his heirs would be clinking glasses and smiling sheepishly while Israel massacred Palestinians,” he continued.
“We are very disappointed at African countries which had celebrated the declaration of Jerusalem as the official capital city of Israel by the USA. That is the highest form of betrayal because us as Africans should know that colonialism and imperialism have no place in humanity,” Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader, Julius Malema, told South African media.
Angolan diplomats fired for attending Jerusalem Embassy Event
The Political Economy of the Youth Bulge
An age pyramid or age picture diagram, which is also called population pyramid is a graphical illustration that shows the distribution of various age groups in a population, typically that of a country or region of the world, which forms the shape of a pyramid when the population is growing. It is also used in ecology to determine the overall age distribution of a population; an indication of the reproductive capabilities and likelihood of the continuation of a species.
An excess in especially young adult male population is called youth bulge. Gunnar Heinsohn, a German sociologist and economist, argues that youth bulge or an excess in especially young adult male population predictably leads to social unrest, war and terrorism, as the “third and fourth sons” that find no prestigious positions in their existing societies rationalize their impetus to compete by religion or political ideology.
Heinsohn claims that most historical periods of social unrest lacking external triggers such as rapid climatic changes or other catastrophic changes of the environment can be readily explained as a result of a built-up youth bulge. Youth bulge can be seen as one factor among many in explaining social unrest and uprisings in society.
Youth bulge theory represents one of the most recently developed theories of war and social unrest, and has become highly influential on U.S. foreign policy as two major United States proponents of the theory, political scientists Jack Goldstone and Gary Fuller have acted as consultants to the United States government.
A recent data of the ILO indicated that between now and 2025, 600 million youth in the developing world will compete for just 200 million jobs. Much of this shortfall will occur in majority-Arab countries. Unemployed youths can easily turn into a risk to a nation’s and an entire region’s stability and security.
The median age in Yemen is 18.6 years, according to the CIA World Fact book. This means that, as of last year, almost half of the 26 million Yemenis were under 18 years of age. Yemen’s median age is 19 years below the United States median age and 23.3 years below that of the EU.
Yemen’s economy is small and under-developed. The country has depended for many years on dwindling oil reserves and was unable to provide enough educational opportunities or legitimate jobs for its young people. In addition, Yemen’s government has been weak for quite some time. As a result, the country has not been in a position to pursue suitable policies to address and mitigate the challenges associated with this stark demographic reality.
Now that a full-blown civil war has unfolded in Yemen and almost a dozen countries are currently participating in military operations in the country, it has become next to impossible to tackle the issue of the youth bulge in any meaningful fashion. Even before this recent turn of events, Yemeni children were at serious risk of enslavement and abduction for human trafficking, not just in Yemen itself, but also in neighboring Saudi Arabia and Oman.
Girls are kidnapped and forced into prostitution in Saudi Arabia’s hospitality and entertainment industry. Young boys are also at risk of being forced into domestic servitude or prostitution. They bear the additional risk of being forced to fight in Yemen’s national army, clan militias and terrorist groups that operate in the country.
The median age in Egypt is estimated at 25.1 years. That means half the country’s population of 87 million was born in 1989 or later. In contrast to their elders, those young Egyptians grew up during an extended period of peace following the 1978 Camp David Accords. The country’s armed forces also did not participate in any overseas military actions between the 1990-91 Gulf War and its 2014-15 intervention in Libya. However, the country’s army began major domestic deployments in 2011 during the Arab Spring, which continue to the present day.
Egypt’s economy has been stalling for some time. In part, this is due to the military’s long and deep involvement in the country’s business and investment affairs, choking market competition. Youth unemployment in Egypt which stood at 26.3% in 2010 rose by almost half to 39% in 2016, according to the World Bank.
The country’s large armed forces cannot indefinitely continue to absorb large cohorts of unemployed young men, as was the practice in the past. The government, after all, wants to escape its debt problems and grow the economy. For that to become a realistic prospect, the military will have to unwind itself from the economy and job market.
The years of civil war in Syria since 2011 and the extensive refugee populations displaced by it have made it difficult to reliably gauge Syrian population statistics. The median age of Syria’s 17 million people is estimated to be 23.3 years, according to the CIA World Fact book. The World Bank estimated Syria’s youth unemployment rate at 37% in 2016.
If and when the civil war ends, this issue along with other labor market problems is actually likely to worsen significantly. Not only will there be more people than jobs, but there will also likely be a mismatch between workers and required skills. The intensity and scale of Syria’s civil war have permanently altered the educational trajectories of many young people in the country.
While not a fully recognized state, Palestine, i.e., the Palestinian Arab populations of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem, has a median population age of about 20 years, although exact data are hard to come by. In 2016, about four in 10 Palestinians were no more than 14 years old, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. Meanwhile, a further three in 10 were between 15 and 29 years old. This means that 70% of all Palestinians in the three areas of the country were born no earlier than 1985, just before the First Intifada.
Similar to Egypt, 38% of Palestinian youth were unable to find work as of 2013, according to the World Bank. Without a peaceful and permanent resolution to the Israel-Palestine territorial dispute, most of these young people are unlikely to be able to find civilian work. The wars have destroyed infrastructure and buildings, while the border restrictions with Israel prevent Palestinian workers from crossing easily to fill Israeli job openings.
THINK, ORGANIZE & TRANSFORM
In a world dominated by adroit selfishness and deft manipulations of relations, social or otherwise, gullibility can be fatal. Unfortunately, we Africans don’t seem to grasp the imposed cruel reality that continues to play havoc in our collective lives. Flag independence didn’t bring much, as a more nuanced scheme that goes by the name neocolonialism, soon usurped collective thoughts and actions. Thanks to the numbing educational systems adopted in the early days of our independence (by our gullible leadership), our innate criticality was made to systemically vanish from serious discourse, giving way to the highly celebrated zombification of learned idiocy. All in all, our increasingly valueless societies have become clueless about all and sundry. Herein lies the grave danger to our very survival!
THINK. Critical thinking is one of the essentials of life. To be without it, particularly in the complex societies of out time, is to beg for chaos and destruction. Undermining this important facet of life (by almost all African countries) has allowed useless/unsustainable schemes to take over our existence, collective or otherwise. To be able to deconstruct the modern world system that is built on our continual impoverishment and chaos requires high caliber efforts. Internalizing the principles of the prevailing world order without being able to analyze its consequences will not take us far. To start with, the reigning global system is based on the irrational and brutal domination of both man and nature! The results of callous exploitation of life and life support systems are now clearly upon us and collective humanity is becoming acutely aware of this destruction. Hence, blindly following the dominant system is a non-starter. Not surprisingly, our learned zombies, or what we affectionately call our ‘Ivy Idiots’ and our ‘belly thinkers’ do not have what it takes to bring about transformative changes to our miserable situation. Neocolonial modernity, be it of the neoliberalism type or otherwise, is a dead end. Flogging a dead horse only results in the unsightly broadcasting of carcass and nothing more, so to speak. Africa must resort to its organic intellectuals, supported by its impoverished sheeple (human mass) to bring about genuine emancipation, per force! Here we are talking about an overall emancipation. An emancipation that is in a symbiotic relationship with nature, hence, necessarily spiritual!
ORGANIZE. People oriented organizations must be the new agents of societal transformations. Oligarchs worshipping at the pillar of accumulation cannot and will not bring fundamental changes, however much our compromised states preach about the ‘superhuman virtues’ these vultures. There is a whole lot to be learned from the experience of late & early 21th century ‘Oligarch Russia’. Organizations to transform society from what it is to what it ought to be must rely, first and foremost, on the emancipated sheeple and not on inhuman capital. The working stiff, not only traditional labor, but also the enlightened component of the massive peasantry, entrepreneurs (social, etc.), activist intellectuals and the likes should play leading roles. Africa’s once leading parties/entities that were vanguards of the liberation struggle are going the way of the Dodo, literally speaking! From ANC to EPRDF, from MPLA to ZANU/ZAPU, etc. these once progressive entities have failed to understand and cope with the aspiration of their sheeple, within the dynamically changing world. Their obsession to deeply get incorporated in the prevailing polarizing globalization has resulted in alienating their human base. These rudderless parties of old, with increasingly phony pretensions, have become only subservient to the global parasitic system and its criminally inclined oligarchs. It is time for change in the way the African people are organized!
Africans need to set up genuine movements that are aware of Africa’s predicaments in the existing world system. The ‘make believe’ world of our learned idiots is passé. See Hunt’s article next column and others on page 41 & 44. Blindly following the prescriptions of global dominant interests will only lead, at best, to impotency. After all, why should the African natives remain completely subjected to the whims of monopoly capital and its stealing oligarchs in cahoots with degenerate politicos at the service of polarizing globalization? We encourage the committed and kosher old guards, if they still have some energy left in them, to split from the visibly degenerated polity of their institutions and join the putative insurrections that are now in the offing. The youth must start its own independent analysis of what is brewing, with a view to channel its energy to the urgently needed transformation!
TRANSFORM. Transformation, continental or otherwise, needs the above two as preconditions, i.e., thinking and organizing. Without having these two prerequisites in place, Africa will only move from one blind alley to another. Economic depravation cannot be mitigated by mere obedience to the reigning diktat, reinforced by current neoliberalism. Capital investment, promoted by state-led principals of emerging states or by corporate-owned states of the old core countries, will not be sustainable if devoid of equity and empowerment! Moreover, climate change and other natural pestilences (to say nothing about man-made ones to come) that will be more pronounced in the years to come, promising a journey of misery and unmitigated poverty, require new paradigms of societal arrangements. The coming African liberation will require a determined approach that has yet to come to the fore, even in countries like Ethiopia, where the tradition of fighting injustice was once an honorable undertaking!
Here is a statement from an old revolutionary priest, one of the founding fathers of ‘liberation theology’ and a close friend of ours/Africa who passed away recently: “Never before has mankind so many material means and scientific knowledge, and never before so many humans have suffered from hunger and misery. The sources and causes of misery are not found in material or production problems, but in social relations, an aspect that must be analyzed with rigor.” François Houtart (1925-2017). Good Day!
Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) chairman Lencho Leta and other members of the ODF arrived in Addis
Oromo Democratic Front (ODF) chairman Lencho Leta and other members of the ODF arrived in Addis today May 23, officially for a discussion with the government, Lecncho was here back in 2014 unofficially to negotiate with the government but left the country without any luck.
