Julius Bosire
10 October 2004
Nairobi — An academic centre for human rights is to be established in Nairobi to train NGO personnel on operational skills, an international conference in Nairobi was told yesterday.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission chairman, Prof Makau Mutua, said the conceived centre would create a more sustained intellectual life for non-governmental organisations.
The centre would conduct workshops, research, publish a scholarly journal, receive visiting academics from universities around the world, and teach activists on human rights, he said.
"The KHRC hopes that through the Human Rights Institute, the NGO sector will have a forum to explore a multiplicity of human rights questions and keep up with emerging issues, scholarship and jurisprudence in other institutions and regions of the world," Prof Mutua said.
He was delivering the keynote address at the conference for the Human Rights in East Africa at the Windsor Hotel, Nairobi.
The conference, which was facilitated by Ford Foundation, drew participants from East Africa to discuss emergent themes, challenges and tensions facing human rights NGOs in East Africa.
Many NGOs in East Africa, the workshop heard, did not have organisational structures, giving all powers including financial management to their executive directors. Some were rendered non-operational in the absence of such officers, Prof Mutua said.
Several NGOs had no mechanisms of accountability apart from donors' supervision. "That is why self-policing through strong and ethical boards of directors is essential. Donors should also seek audits of internal management structures and procedures and initiate real and meaningful meaningful dialogue with donees," Prof Mutua said.
He said in many areas NGOs remained elitist - most of them based in capital cities - away from the people they intend to serve, accusing them of being undemocratic.
It was time that human rights NGOs started confronting the Government over its renege in election pledges.
The civil society in Kenya and Tanzania were urged to make use of the democratic space existing to critique, chastise and expose the state. "Its main aim is to remain confrontation of the state" Prof Mutua said.
Uganda human rights NGOs must be seen campaigning against a third term for President Yoweri Museveni, since if he contested and won in an election, he would be "king of Uganda".
In his open remarks, Dr Willy Mutunga of Ford Foundation asked human rights NGOs to be active in fighting human rights violation saying that for the past decades they had concentrated on documenting and publishing reports only.
He took issue on FM radio stations which were fanning hatred between religious and ethnic communities.
Other participants who addressed the meeting were Prof Chris Peter and Prof Joseph Kanywanyi both of Dar-es-Salaam University, former Ugenya MP and Nairobi lawyer James Orengo, Dr Tade Akin Aina of Ford Foundation and Prof Sylvia Tamale of Makerere University.
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