From fortresses to sustainable development: the changing face of environmental conservation in Africa, the case of Zambia.

Environmental conservation in many parts of Africa has for a long time been a centralized matter in which resource management was dominated by the application of the fortress conservation model which posits a sharp divide between people’s livelihoods and conservation. This highly centralised approach confined environmental decision making to bureaucratic circles and excluded local actors who live within or around conservation areas from participating in the resource governance process. In addition, environmental conservation was concentrated in areas designated as protected areas while human dominated landscapes were assumed to be of marginal ecological value. Over the past three decades, however, the rise of sustainable development as a new construct for environment and resource management has seen the emergence of new conservation strategies that challenge the dominance of the fortress conservation model. In Zambia, in contrast to the exclusionary discourse associated with fortress conservation, the embracing of policies derived from the sustainable development discourse has resulted in the adoption of new conservation strategies that emphasise local actors’ participation in resource management and extend conservation policy and practice to agricultural environments. In this regard, this thesis examines the changing nature of environmental conservation in Africa, using the case of Zambia. In particular, the research questions the way in which the new strategies are being contextualized and translated into practice at the local level. It examines the extent to which the new strategies represent the realities and interests of local actors who interact with environmental resources on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on political ecology and livelihoods’ perspectives, the research uses two local level studies from Chongwe district of Zambia to examine this shift in the direction of natural resource policy and practice. By combining insights from political ecology and livelihoods thinking, it links a critical review of conservation discourse and policy with field level studies and thus provides an enhanced understanding of processes of society-environment interactions. While the findings show a definitive shift in policy rhetoric from fortress conservation to sustainable development, the translation of sustainable development initiatives into practice is fraught with both conceptual and practical difficulties, such that the initiatives are far from representing the realities and interests of local actors

Language and embodied consciousness: A Peircean ontological justification for First Language educational instruction and the need for regional lingua-francas in Africa

Effective learning needs to be as existential (and, in a sense, as experiential) as  possible and that involves more the pragmatics rather than merely the semantics of words. The initial system of signification that enables one to process/grasp  concepts is crucial in whatever one will do with those concepts subsequent to their acquisition. Since students come to school from a background of conceptuality  informed by their First Languages, learning would be more meaningful and effective if it is carried out in those languages. During instruction in any language, effective learning will take place only when the experience behind the sign or word or what the word points to is emphasized more than merely the knowing of the word itself.  Nevertheless, the sign/word that initially points one to the concept determines the possibilities of what you will do with that concept afterwards, hence the importance of First Language instruction. My paper seeks to explore how the relationship  between signs/words and concepts impacts on conceptuality in general, and how this would be reflected in an instructional setting where a foreign language is used, specifically. Adopting Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic model of the organic relationship between the sign and the referent (in a pragmatic sense), the paper argues that the relationship between signs and referents is not as arbitrary as  Saussurean and some post-structuralist language theorists posit.Key words: First Language instruction, Existential /experiential learning,  signs/words and concepts, Saussurean and post-structuralist linguistics, Peircean linguistics

A Study of Select Decisions That Fostered the Growth and Development of Solusi University in Zimbabwe

Problem. Decision making is a practical day-to-day phenomenon. It manifests itself in various ways, such as choosing w/hat to do or not to do. in evaluating and fulfilling what is now and what is expected. Decision making is a cycle covering the time from when a decision is conceived to the time its outcome is visible. Because decision making appears so ordinary, it is often considered an ordinary activity. A good, well-thought-through decision can go a long way in the life of an organization. This study focuses on how Solusi went about the decision-making process, the implementation of those decisions, and the short-term and long-term outcomes of the decisions made. Method. To accomplish the purpose of the study, literature on decision making and decision-making theory was reviewed. This historical, documentary approach was combined with ethnographic methods to gather data and add life to the context of the study. Historical analysis of the documents obtained was used by validating the authenticity of the documents. Historical documents were the main source of information. Interviews and other sources of information were also utilized to provide flavor and enlighten in areas where the documents were vague. Findings. The founding of Solusi University resulted from the efforts of many individuals, including A.T. Robinson, who was the president of the South African Conference. He interviewed Cecil Rhodes, chair of the board of directors of the Chartered Company, and obtained from him permission for a possible land grant for the mission station. This was the beginning of the mission endeavor by many missionaries who went to Solusi and served as mission workers. Various factors, both natural and political, greatly impacted the development of Solusi. Making the services at Solusi available to individuals from other constituencies within the region served by the Southern Africa Division, including territories beyond the division, became a very significant factor in the internationalization of the school and impacted the politics of its development. The decisions made and the process for decision making were reviewed. They show that a combination of the decisions made and the political situation in Zimbabwe set the path Solusi followed. By placing an emphasis on the quality of higher education throughout its history. Solusi chose a course that culminated in its current university status. The Seventh-day Adventist Church has had a significant impact on the social and economic structure of the community that has been felt in the broader community. The full potential of Solusi was achieved by a consistent implementation of administrative decisions despite any negative factors that may have derailed the direction and growth of the University. The overarching needs of the school diminished all obstacles, internal and external, and kept a focus on the goals of the University

Savenda Management Services Limited v Stanbic Bank Zambia Limited and Gregory Chifire Selected Judgment No. 47 of 2018

The case of Savenda Management Services Limited v Stanbic Bank Zambia Limited and Gregory Chifire is significant in that it raises the question whether Zambian judges have virtually unbridled power to move on their own motion to punish for contempt of court any person who criticises their judgements. In addition, the case reinforces the traditional struggles associated with distinguishing civil from criminal contempt, the consequences of which are entirely based on the distinction. The case is also important as it exposes inadequate sentencing guidelines in Zambian contempt laws, the effect of which has led to excessive and unwarranted sentences. A six-year-old custodial sentence for scandalizing the court by the Supreme Court in this case was both excessive and unnecessary, albeit the Court’s wide jurisdiction

Post-Enlightenment theorising and global polity in the twenty-first century and beyond

In some sense, the period of scholarship we know as the Enlightenment, well-known for its individualistic, binaric and dichotomous theorising, could be largely to blame for the perceived schism between the humanities and the sciences – and, consequently, between humans and humans as well as between humans and the totality of their environment. My paper argues that, the philosophical and scientific achievements of the Enlightenment duly acknowledged (I have in mind here the positive central role that philosophical doubt plays in academic inquiry, for example), its destructive elements, epitomized by its dualistic, individualist, and, consequently, predatory subjectivity, have cast a long shadow on cordial human polity since the 17th Century. In short, strictly speaking, taken to its logical conclusion, the Enlightenment cannot yield us an ontology that would engender cordial relations among humans themselves or between humans and their environment. Post-Enlightenment (by which is meant post-Cartesian) ontological, epistemological and ethical postulations could redress the centuries-old disjunction (which characterises this shadow) between technological or intellectual development and amicable global living.Keywords: Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment, subject, object, dichotomous subjectivity, embodiedness, intersubjectivity, ethic

A case study on customs trade facilitation at Zambia's Kasumbalesa border post

The expansion of global trade, especially trade in intermediate products, compels goods to cross borders multiple times before assembly. This phenomena requires better trade facilitation mechanisms in conveyancing goods and people across borders. The World Customs Organization, among many other organizations, has been in the fore-front of promoting these trade facilitation techniques. This qualitative case study has an objective of analyzing the current trade facilitation techniques used at Kasumbalesa. It also aims at pointing out any outdated customs procedures. During the study, data was collected using questionnaires and oral interviews. Secondary data was also collected from publications of the World Customs Organization, World Bank and the World Trade Organization, among other sources. In addition, observational methods were also used to collect data. The case study focuses on Kasumbalesa as a representative entry/exit point in Zambia. Consequently, identification of challenges faced by goods and people crossing Kasumbalesa can help streamline operations at other Zambian borders

Falls and other geriatric syndromes in Blantyre, Malawi: A community survey of older adults

Background: The prevalence of geriatric syndromes (falls, immobility,intellectual or memory impairment, and incontinence) is unknown inmany resource-poor countries. With an aging population such knowledgeis essential to develop national policies on the health and social needs ofolder people. The aim of this study was to provide a preliminary surveyto explore the prevalence of falls and other geriatric syndromes and theirassociation with known risk factors in people aged > 60 years in urbanBlantyre, Malawi.Methods: This was a cross-sectional, community survey of adults aged > 60 years. Subjects were recruited at home or in the waiting areas of chronic care clinics. They were interviewed to complete a questionnaire on ageassociated syndromes and comorbid problems. The Abbreviated MentalTest (AMT) and Timed Up and Go (TUG) tests were carried out.Results: Ninety-eight subjects were studied; 41% reported falling in the past 12 months, 33% of whom (13% of all subjects) were recurrent fallers.Twenty-five percent reported urine incontinence, 66% self-reported memory difficulties, and 11% had an AMT score < 7. A history of falling was significantly associated with urine incontinence (p=0.01), selfreportedmemory problems (p=0.004) and AMT score < 7 (p=0.02).Conclusions: Geriatric syndromes, including falls, appear to be prevalent in older people in Blantyre, Malawi. Falling is associated with cognitive impairment and urinary incontinence. There is an urgent need for more understanding of geriatric problems in this setting to develop national policies on health and social needs of older people. It is likely that many of the contributory factors to falls would be amenable to multifactorial interventions similar to those found to be effective in developed countries

Effects of an agribusiness collapse on contract growers and their communities : a case study of Makeni Cooperative Society, Lusaka, Zambia

This study assesses the effects of an agribusiness collapse, on the contracted growers and their surrounding communities in Lusaka Province, Zambia. In 2004, Agriflora Limited, a Trans-Zambezi Industries Limited (TZI) agribusiness in Lusaka Zambia was sold off. Agriflora Limited was one ofthe largest fresh vegetable exporters in Africa. It had contracted almost 500 small-scale farmers with 1-4 hectares of land within 50 km radius of Lusaka to grow vegetables for export. Makeni Cooperative Society was one of the targeted groups of growers. It grew baby corn, mangetout peas, and sugar snap and fine beans for export. The case study relied on both primary and secondary data. I undertook two months of ethnographic fieldwork utilising observations, in-depth interviews and informal discussions with some community members in Makeni. I also reviewed the literature on contract farming schemes (documenting both the negative and positive effects for growers) in developing countries. The case study showed that the impact of the collapse of Agriflora on the growers has been severe indeed; there has been a significant reduction in production with only a few farmers producing for export. Those that are producing are limited to one crop, baby corn. The effect on the local labour market (farm workers) has been quite drastic with a drop in employment. A new agribusiness company, York Farm, was sourced by the government for the contract growers of Makeni. York Farm has signed a procurement contract under which only sale and purchase conditions are specified. This means that, services such as extension services are no longer provided. It was also found that despite the price for baby corn at York Farm being better than what Agriflora used to offer the farmers, farmers are not producing peas which have a higher turnover than baby corn because York farm does not buy peas from the farmers. However, the farmers are hopeful that they will soon start producing peas after they pass the Eurep gap requirements. Furthermore, the farmers are still interested in contract farming as they are convinced that it can lead to higher farm incomes. While the neoliberal critique of the pre- Structural Adjustment agricultural policies was based on the need to improve rural farming income and productivity, my study shows that the contract farmers are not the "traditional" peasant farmers but retired civil servants or former public sector employees who lost their jobs during the contraction of the sector. In conclusion, my field work revealed that the collapse of Agriflora has had negative effects on the growers of MCS in terms a significant decrease in crop production, decline in farmer income, lack of technical assistance such as extension services, transportation problems (to take produce to the new market-York Farm) and reduced contraction in employment opportunities for farm workers

My other/ My self : cartesian and objectivist ontologies, racial Darwinism and selfing the 'others' of the earth in David Malouf's Remembering Babylon.

Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2003.In this study I propose to examine some of the roots and implications of discrimination as illustrated in a novel by a contemporary Australian novelist, David Malouf, titled Remembering Babylon (1993). My choice of Malouf's novel is grounded in the fact that, in a narrative set in mid 19th century Australia dealing with an encounter between Scottish settlers and the Aboriginal people, the novel embodies various kinds of thought systems of a discriminatory Cartesian nature. The issues in the novel are against a background of a long history of discrimination dating from antiquity which reached probably its highest point with Anglo-Saxon imperialism. It is a well known fact that the contact between European colonisers and their so-called Others has been dogged by confrontation, discrimination, exploitation and domination. The latter's responses to these phenomena have been varied. But, as JanMohamed notes in his Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa(1985) these responses have been characterised by crisis - both conscious and unconscious, material and metaphysical. And ever since this contact/reunion both groups have existed in this state of crisis and conflict -at both the manifest and latent levels. The causes of this crisis are both exo- and endogenous in origin: endogenous in the sense of the majority of these peoples' incapacity to hold their ground and 'properly' analyse/synthesise the substance of their 'new' existence and defme themselves pushed to the wall as they are by exogenous factors of European imperial and neo-imperial agendas. Most of the behaviors of the colonised, even the most 'bizarre' of them, are expressive of this existential crisis and their tenacious will to survive and approximate to a bearable life in an extremely oppressive and confusing environment. Especially in the African context, this inability to 'properly' analyse phenomena may have been brought about by a psychotic disjuncture engendered by an exogenous (European) chimerical metaphysics that parcels out existence into rigid, airtight, dualistic compartments in religion and philosophy. In these worldviews existence is described in specular, dominating and oppositional rather than in inter-subjective, co-operational and synthesizing terms. One result is that, speaking generally, Europeans are seen to exist at variance with themselves, with one another, with their environment and with non-European groups of people. Existence is defmed not as 'in' and 'with' but as 'apart from' and 'against'. Even where 'cooperation' is engaged in among them, it is for purposes of discrimination, exploitation and domination. This is not only a skewed ontology even in all demonstrable rational circles, it is also a highly escapist, confrontational, unscrupulously competitive/exploitative, and brutally pessimistic one. Philosophically, perhaps the earliest signs of European pessimistic and disjunctive construction of reality can be seen in Plato's escapist theory of reality which parcels out existence into two rigidly distinct, yet somehow causally related, worlds: one of forms/ideas and another world of material phenomena. Aristotle, Plato's own pupil, disagreed with his master on this by arguing instead that forms or ideas arise from and subsist in the world of material phenomena and not apart from and independent of the latter. One notices that all subsequent debates on the origin, nature, and relations of ideas (self-consciousness) and material phenomena, have been variations and expansions on these two diametrically opposed positions. But the most favoured school for the dualistic ontologies is idealism/rationalism, especially that of Descartes who is regarded as the highest point of the Enlightenment. These seem to fmd resonance in the subsequent theorising of Darwin, Spencer, and the social philosophy of Nietzsche among others. In spite of dissenting voices even from within their own ranks challenging such a metaphysics, the general trend among Europeans has been to hold tenaciously onto these pessimistic and escapist illusions mainly for egoistic, exploitative and supremacist purposes. Malouf does question discrimination based on binary assumptions of natural superiority and inferiority by juxtaposing notions of the human and non-human, progress and degeneration, modernity and pre-modernity (Science/Culture) in the 'Cartesian' sense as well as in the social and racial Darwinian sense. It is the approach he adopts in this project inter alia which I seek to examine in my study

My other - my self: post-Cartesian ontological possibilities in the fiction of J M Coetzee

The central argument of my study is that, among other matters, in his works, J.M. Coetzee could be said to demonstrate that the known Self is an embodied being and is not autonomous. With regard to the latter contention, Coetzee intimates that any two Subjects are implicated in each other’s subjectivities in a reciprocal process that involves what Derek Attridge has called “irruptions of otherness” (2005: xii) into the Subject’s subjectivity. These irruptions, which happen during the encounter, lead to a double loss of autonomy for each Subject and this phenomenon renders the relationship between Subjects non-dichotomus or non-binaric. In other words, the Subject does not produce the contents of his or her consciousness in a sui generis and ex nihilo fashion, and his or her ontological indebtedness to the Other constitutes his or her first loss of autonomy. As for those Others that do possess consciousness, the Subject is implicated in their consciousness and this constitutes the Subject’s second loss of autonomy. These losses counter the near solipsistic Nagelian neo-Cartesianism and paves the way for imagining both intra- and inter-species “intersubjectivity”. It is my view that this double loss of autonomy accounts for the sympathetic and empathetic imagination that we encounter in Coetzee’s fiction. Following Coetzee’s intimations of intersubjectivity through irruptions of otherness, what I see as my contribution to studies on this author’s work through this study is the link I have established between the physicalist strain within the philosophy of mind (whose central thesis is that consciousness is an embodied phenomenon) and a modified Kantian “metaphysics”, especially Immanuel Kant’s conception of concepts as comprising form and content. I have deployed this conception in demonstrating the Subject’s ontological indebtedness to external sources of the content part of consciousness. And, through the Husserlian concept of intentionality, and Kant’s (1929: 27) observation that we cannot have appearances without something that appears, I have linked the Subject to the sources of his or her content and thereby also demonstrated that the Subject is not eternally separated or alienated from those sources. Instead, the Subject is not simply contiguous but coterminous and co-extensive, albeit in a mediated way, with the external sources of the content part of his or her consciousness. Thus, while accepting the thesis of the Other’s radical otherness, I modify the thesis of the Other’s radical exteriority. Ultimately, then, ontologically speaking, the Coetzeean project could be described as one of embodying and grounding the supposedly autonomous, solipsistic and freefloating/disembodied Cartesian Subject. This he does by alerting this Subject, first and foremost, to its embodiedness and, further to that, pointing out its ontological indebtedness to its Others and its implication in the Others’s consciousnesses and so prevent it from continuing with its imperialistic and ecological barbarities. However, ethically speaking, beyond the reciprocal ethics that arises from mutual ontological indebtedness and implication, it is the selflessness that characterises a cruciform logic that comes across as the epitome of Coetzeean ethics