{UAH} Gwokto; your broda's are up to no good!!!!Witch doctors hold sway in African football but even European teams dance to their dark powers - TalkUP! - nation.co.ke

http://www.nation.co.ke/sports/TalkUp/Witch-doctors-hold-sway-in-African-football/-/441392/2340430/-/esbc58/-/index.html

According to a local analyst, no president, however saintly, was going to survive the combined effect of corruption and hunger on the public mood.

The issue of mass hunger, in a country where only a few years ago food security had been achieved, is particularly striking and worthy of detailed discussion. One of the least discussed topics in African academic, policy and even media circles is the role agriculture, smallholder agriculture especially, played in elevating other previously poor regions of the world to enviable prosperity.

For example, it is not uncommon for discussions about why East Asian countries have done so well to dwell on the role Western generosity with aid played. Of course aid played a significant role, as did other factors, such as political stability, technology transfers, and strategic skills development.

However, there is a whole range of focused studies, some coming out of the University of Leiden's Tracking Development project, demonstrating that smallholder agriculture formed the base on which all that rested. First of all, it provided the food without which much-needed political stability would have been virtually impossible to guarantee.

East Asian leaders understood the real meaning of the dictum "a hungry man is an angry man." They therefore did what they could to ensure that the masses were well fed. That meant pumping financial and other resources into peasant agriculture.

Second, increased productivity meant that smallholder farmers could make money from tilling the land. Putting money into the pockets of millions of small farmers meant they could buy manufactured goods and guarantee emerging industries a market for their products, as well as jobs for the non-farming jobseekers.

Now compare that with the noises African governments make about the need to industrialise, while simultaneously merely paying lip service to investment in agriculture.

So what will it take for Africa's politicians to accord agriculture its due importance? No less than continent-wide political revolts of the kind that felled Dr Banda, it seems to me.

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Sent from my BlackBerry 10 smartphone.