It’s the 15th Non-Aligned First Ladies Summit this week!  (You knew that.) And guess which smooth-talker had this to say:

I participated this morning in the Summit of the Non-Aligned Movement. It was very important; I regard this Summit as even more important. I thank you for your leadership in enhancing the role of women in crisis management and I count on your continued engagement.

Yep, Ban Ki-moon is in the building!

I firmly believe that protecting women does not mean deciding what is right for them and then imposing it. Protecting women means letting them negotiate and respecting their decisions.

I can send numerous male mediators and peacekeepers to a war-ravaged country and encourage the leaders there to involve women in negotiations. But it is more effective when I staff my missions with many capable women, or choose a woman as my top envoy. That is what I did in Liberia. I also recently appointed another in the Central African Republic. I am very proud of them. They are demonstrating excellent leadership.

Has the SG employed Chris De Burgh as a speechwriter?

Last month I spoke about David and my report on institutions and climate change at a Feasta conference entitled The New Emergency: Managing Risk and Building Resilience in a Resource Constrained World, held in Dublin.  Here’s the presentation…

Alex Evans – Global Framework for Climate Change from Feasta on Vimeo.

- Over at Politico, Ben Smith has more news about the Secretary of State’s big foreign policy speech, to be delivered today at the Council on Foreign Relations. Placing the last six months of US diplomacy into perspective, it will also offer Hillary the chance to begin putting her own distinctive stamp on policy. As Smith comments:

Clinton appears increasingly comfortable expressing her views. State Department officials have suggested that she’s been a hawkish internal voice, pushing Obama toward more confrontational stances toward adversaries from Iran to Cuba.

- The NYT has an interesting article highlighting the importance of water, as well as land, to Middle East peace. “[W]hen it comes to water”, Stanley Weiss suggests, “every nation is in the same boat”.

- Elsewhere, the FT’s Brussels blog identifies five priorities for the next European Commission – defending the single market; reforming financial regulation; clarifying climate change and energy security policy; unifying a foreign policy voice; and finally the small matter of appointing a new President. Deutsche Welle, meanwhile, has an interview with Hans-Gert Pöttering, the outgoing President of the European Parliament.

- Finally, a veritable slew of polls – well ok, two – on British defence spending. A PoliticsHome poll suggests 66% of voters feel defence should be protected from inevitable cuts in public spending (79% among Conservative supporters, 64% for Labour supporters, and 49% among Lib Dems). Details here. The Guardian, meanwhile has an interesting ICM poll (pdf) indicating that 54% of British voters now support nuclear disarmament, with only 42% in favour of replacing Trident.

Pakistan, the observant among you will have noticed, has been having a tough time the past few years. This graph sums it up for me (March 2009, Pakistan public opinion survey):

There’s one hopeful sign, though – a new generation that is beginning to get its act together to agitate (often online) for change. So what’s the government done? Yes, you’ve guessed it: announced a crackdown.

An official announcement by the interior ministry said that the government was launching a campaign against circulation of what it called ill-motivated and concocted stories through emails and text messages against civilian leadership and security forces.

The announcement does not elaborate what is meant by ill-motivated e-messages, but it is believed that the ‘civilian leadership’ meant President Asif Ali Zardari, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, Interior Minister Rehman Malik and other politicians.

A senior official of the ministry said: ‘Sending indecent message is a crime under the Cyber Crime Act and liable to punishment.’

Isn’t that just fantastic? Pakistan’s government can’t get deliver universal primary education or reliable electricity to major cities. It’s fighting an insurgency against the Taliban with little clue how to win it. But yet it’s making it a priority to crack down on seditious text messaging.

And one other point – someone should ask where the monitoring equipment has come from. Specifically: was it supplied by the American or British government to help Pakistan fight the War on Terror?

Ban Ki-moon has given a long and enlightening interview to the Wall Street Journal (which duly responded by publishing a rather mean article about his time as Secretary-General).  It contains quite a lot of interesting stuff on individual crises and his leadership style.  But what dominates the conversation is his pessimism about the UN’s shrinking place in the world:

Mr. Ban: There should be a clear understanding what kind of a role do you expect, and what kind of a role the United Nations should play at this time, in the 21st century. Your philosophical views of the United Nations may be still like in the 1960s, ’70s or ’80s at the latest. Your view of the United Nations is not 21st century. During the Cold War era, the United Nations might have been the only and most universal organization in the international community. But you are still looking at the early stage of that time of the United Nations. Now you have the European Union, African Union and League of Arab States and many regional and sub-regional and quite big organizations. There are many actors now. It used to be the United States and the Soviet Union until lately. Now you have all the European leaders, Germans, French, the European Commission. Many other European powers with quite high economic development. The European Union has now emerged as a political player, a global player.

It used to be only the United States. Now the United States is still the global power, but still one of the global powers. The United Nations has become one of the global players, it’s not the only one. Therefore you cannot expect all from the Secretary General. Those days are over.

At this point in the interview a “senior aide” steps into point out that the UN is very busy with peacekeeping, aid delivery, etc. – which was not exactly the SG’s theme. What’s striking about this passage is that Ban seems to have a pretty strong analysis of the way the world is going (i.e. away from the UN) combined with a nostalgia for a time that never existed. There was never a moment where the UN was a sole, unquestioned source of authority in world affairs.  Yes, people talked like that in 1945 – and again, very briefly, in the early 1990s – but it was always rhetoric not reality.  Every Secretary-General has had to struggle against global divisions.  This is not new.

But Ban has not finished on the subject of his limited power:

Well, there are many areas where I can’t do, where even the Americans can not do. I’m not supposed to be responsible for anything happens in Afghanistan and Pakistan–all this political situation. But we are concentrating on how can we mobilize humanitarian assistance for all these affected people, displaced persons. We have no peacekeepers in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The whole dynamics have changed.

[ . . . ]

You have seen North Korea, you have seen Iran, you have seen many countries who have not implemented Security Council resolutions, which are binding. There really isn’t any forceful enforcement capacity of the United Nations, legally speaking. That’s why President Bush took that action by creating multinational forces in Iraq because the Security Council was divided. So all this kind of blame and criticism comes to the Secretary General, that the U.N. is not able to address these issues. I want you to understand.

I can see what Ban is trying to do here, showing that he is a realist. But even if the Secretary-General has a limited conception of his role, he should still have a strategy to make use of what power he has.  He needs to lay one out.

Despite being oil rich, Nigeria is desperately energy poor. Per capita electricity consumption is half that of nearby Ghana and even this limited supply is shockingly unreliable.

When the power shuts down – which it does all the time – people sit in the dark or, if they’re lucky, fire up generators that cost the country $140 billion to fuel (add a chunk more for capital and maintenance costs).

On Twitter, there’s an online demonstration going on at the moment against this crazy situation – with huge numbers of tweets using the #lightupnigeria hashtag. “I know a Doctor that once operated in moonlight because the generator refused to come on!” Olunfunmike writes, “Let’s make a change.”

Please join them – and spread the word. (Cool photo – courtesy plastiqq. Find me on Twitter.)

Update:  There’s a newish Facebook group too.

Update II: NEPA – Nigeria’s National Electric Power Authority – needs $3.4bn investment over the next five years. At present, however, it’s operating at a huge loss, in part because it only manages to get customers to pay for 60% of the electricity they use (as one customer puts it, “NEPA doesn’t give me light, but at the end of the month a bill would arrive and they would expect me to pay? I don’t think so.”)

President Obsaanjo has pleaded with the company to at least warn customers of impending power cuts (load shedding) before they happen, but many Nigerians believe that’s all he’s doing  - pleading for change.

Last year, a Parliamentary investigative panel claimed that $16bn has been spent on the power system, without delivering much increase in supply.

The House of Representatives investigation alleged that Mr Obasanjo’s government had paid millions of dollars to 34 “non-existent companies”. The committee visited the sites where power stations were meant to be built. It found no work had been done at some sites after several years.

Defending his record, Mr Obasanjo said his government had inherited 18 years of neglect in the power generation industry, and had done well to more than double power supply. Gas pipeline vandalism had hampered power generation. One damaged pipeline took two years to repair, he said. To “the uninitiated” it would seem like no work had been done on the power stations, but the reality was that millions of dollars had been “invested”, he said.

But he said the investigation into the power sector may actually hamper improvement, and jeopardise Nigeria’s development. Private partners were being chased away by the probe because they feared being “criminalised”.

Update III: There’s a logo now.

(more…)

The State Department announced at the end of last week that it plans to undertake a ‘Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review’, the rationale being that,

Our success in exercising effective global leadership depends upon a robust and effective State Department and USAID working side-by-side with a strong military. By using all the tools of American power, we can pave the way for shared peace, progress and prosperity. This comprehensive approach is the essence of smart power.

The final report will lay out:

The baseline: An assessment of (1) the range of global threats, challenges and opportunities both today and over the next two decades that should inform our diplomatic and development strategies; and (2) the current status of our approaches to diplomacy and development, with emphasis on the relationship between diplomacy and development in our existing policies and structures.

The ends: A clear statement of our overarching foreign policy and development objectives, our specific policy priorities, and our expected results, with an emphasis on the achievable and not merely the desirable.

The ways: A set of recommendations on the strategies needed to achieve these results, including the timing and sequencing of decisions and implementation.

The means: A set of recommendations on (1) the tools and resources needed to implement the strategy; and (2) management and organizational reforms that will improve outcomes and efficiency.

The metrics: A set of recommendations on performance measures to assess outcomes, and–where feasible–impacts.

The links: An assessment of how the results and recommendations of this review fit into broader interagency, whole-of-government approaches, and into the Administration’s larger foreign policy framework.

The review will be led by Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources Jacob Lew, and co-chaired by Director of Policy Planning Anne-Marie Slaughter and by the Administrator of USAID (still to be appointed).  All this is of course very much in keeping with recent National Security Council reforms that set up a new Global Engagement Directorate tasked with driving “comprehensive engagement policies that leverage diplomacy, communications, international development and assistance, and domestic engagement and outreach”.

It also raises the question: why can’t we have a similarly integrated strategy process in the UK? DFID’s just done a White Paper; the Ministry of Defence has announced a strategic defence review; FCO revised its strategic priorities last February; but at what point do all of these get melded together into a coherent overall strategy? Surprise: they don’t.

David and I argued two years ago that the UK government needed to undertake an overall global issues strategy - a goal that remains as distant as ever, it seems…

The last two weeks have seen a storm of insurgent activity in Nigeria: Shell’s onshore output has been halved to around 140,000 barrels a day, Chevron has lost about the same again (taking the aggregate output lost to over to a fifth of Nigeria’s total) – and for the first time Lagos has been attacked.  According to Africasia.com,

Fighters from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) attacked the facility, the first strike in Nigeria’s economic nerve centre since the oil insurgency was launched in 2006. Rescuers said five people were burnt beyond recognition in the blast.

“The militants went into open shooting with the naval officers guarding the facility but they were overpowered. They used dynamite to destroy the manifold,” said Geofrey Boukoru, a member of the emergency rescue team.

The militants arrived in four speed boats, exchanging fire sporadically with the navy for about three hours before hurling dynamite into the facility, said a senior official from the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company, an affiliate of the state-run petroleum corporation.

The Lagos attack took place just before the federal government’s planned amnesty release of Henry Okah, the head of MEND – a release that, in the event, still went ahead despite the attack.  MEND has since said in a statement that it “considers this release as a step towards genuine peace and prosperity if Nigeria is open to frank talks and deals sincerely with the root issues once and for all” – although as Abubakar Momoh of Lagos State University observes to AlJazeera, “What the government has done in the case of Okah is like treating the symptom and not curing the disease … there are issues that drove the militants to the trenches. Until those issues are resolved in a fair and just manner, there will never be peace in the Niger Delta.”

As David noted back in November last year, counter-insurgency expert John Robb has called Henry Okah ”one of the most important people alive today, a brilliant innovator in warfare”. Here’s Robb’s account of how Okah did it. (more…)

Prospect editor David Goodhart has an intriguing idea:

Sweeping schemes for constitutional reform and global salvation abound. Not to be left out, Prospect has a plan that neatly solves two problems in one—and doesn’t even need primary legislation. The idea is this: cap the number of government members drawn from parliament at 50 (down from the current figure of 124)—and draw the remaining talent from outside. At a stroke, this would create more competition for government jobs—not a bad thing in itself—and give a boost to the parliamentary career path. With fewer government jobs to chase, more of parliament’s brightest could focus on chairing select committees, improving legislation and keeping the government in check; all of which would strengthen the legislature against an over-mighty executive.

 

In his chaotic June cabinet reshuffle Gordon Brown brought in a record number of lords, seen by some as an indication of a government low on steam. Much better to start afresh with a new system where genuine experts and talented non-parliamentarians could fill the vacant slots—and thus strike a blow against the professionalisation of politics, where too few MPs have experiences outside Westminster. America stuffs its executive with able non-politicians drawn from businesses and charities. And just as in the US, this new breed could fairly easily be made accountable to the legislature. So why shouldn’t we? Go on Gordon—cut the ministers, not the MPs. A genuine government of all the talents is there for the taking.

Cross-border wars in Sub-Saharan Africa have been few and far between since the end of the colonial period. Instead, the continent’s disaffected have fought numerous battles with their own countrymen. Last weekend, however, Guinea’s new leader, Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup last Christmas, claimed that neighbouring Guinea-Bissau was amassing troops at the border in preparation for an invasion of his country.

This would be a remarkable move by Guinea-Bissau, which doesn’t currently have a leader (the second round of presidential elections is due on 26 July) and whose army is a disaffected ragbag of poorly paid, badly trained young men who have enough trouble keeping the peace at home (their chief of staff was assassinated in March) without contemplating an invasion of a much bigger neighbour.

Camara reckons the planned invasion is a plot by the region’s drug lords, from Guinea, Guinea-Bissau and Latin America, to remove him. Camara has been surprisingly thorough in his purging of those Guineans involved in the cocaine trade which has plagued the countries of the Mano River basin in recent years, and he believes those high up in the industry want him out so that they can maintain their freedom to operate.

A war between the two countries would be disastrous for both and for their region. Both are extremely fragile politically, dirt poor and surrounded by other historically unstable states (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal’s Casamance region). Guinea’s opposition parties are less worried, however. They see Camara’s warning as a ploy to entrench his power ahead of promised elections in October.  Given that he has also banned all political and union activities in his country, it seems that a false alarm of an invasion would indeed be in keeping with a strategy to stay in power, despite his promise to step down once elections are held.

From the Wasilla Frontiersman, Sarah Palin’s hometown newspaper:

To the editor:

I am a supporter of Gov. Palin from Staten Island, N.Y., and blog exclusively about her accomplishments, an activity I find particularly uplifting and inspirational.

 [Cue some stuff about N.Y. governors being rubbish.  Then...] 

I am compiling a master list of Gov. Palin’s 2009 accomplishments — a project that has taken several hours and is nowhere near finished. I had to build a team of authors on my blog just to cover her accomplishments. There are simply too many in volume, size, scale and scope to be covered by one person. Sarah Palin accomplished every goal set forth when she campaigned to be your state’s governor. Her staff remains and is on the same page with her. She is a textbook transformational leader — the type studied in MBA courses. She performed her service with honor, grace and to the highest of standards.

Free of gubernatorial limitations and unbound from the shackles of frivolous ethics complaints, Gov. Palin can and will accomplish even more for Alaska and for our nation. Everything she has done thus far will pale in (pun intended) comparison to what she is about to do.

Ron Devito

He’s not making it up. Check out Ron’s month-by-month breakdown of our next President’s accomplishments.