I spoke about reconciliation last night but we now turn to the other side of the coin. Accountability is the key contribution to transitional justice. It does say that if you do not have accountable peace, the violence will come back to haunt you. If the transitional process does not usher in accountable governance in the pilot schemes of social justice, also in accounting for the monies into and out of the government coffers, it makes a mockery of the values it promotes. Thus it follows that a nation can only be ready for a transitional justice experiment if it’s truly ready for democratic and accountable governance. Last week in the same room we launched the Afrobarometer results. Its part of a survey done across 34 African countries and we coordinated 10 southern countries. And what we launched specifically was the Lived Poverty Indicator. ‘How do people in Africa feel about poverty? Do they feel their situation has improved?’ We did it against the backdrop of the narrative of ‘Africa rising,’ that things are getting better. It seems interesting, Ahmed, that Kenya despite the growth rate of up to 5% in the last five years had the biggest discontent on the list. Which means what the citizens are saying is that our country is rich but the money is not seen on the ground. On what TJ ought to achieve, communities across 34 countries indicated that if the TJ process does not provide a dispensation that starts to reduce poverty then we are seriously going to have problems. The second thing I want to say is that you know I have often wondered about South Africa, Kenya, and Zimbabwe - whether the battle for transitional justice is not really the battle to control institutions? It’s interesting. I attended the induction of both the TJRC and NCIC in Kenya and it was interesting to note the difference between the two commissions. In the TJRC, the politics was thick in the air and you could just see people who were occupied with themselves. They had a three-year mandate. It was also more high profile, always in the media, controversial and so on. And then I attended the NCIC Commission and it was understated, calm but resolved and had an open-ended mandate, decided that they would start small and move systematically. We have gleaned a huge amount of knowledge from their work but the point is if you look at the two Commissions, which one has been more successful? I don’t think it’s difficult to conclude. And I would say the battle for transitional justice is crucial for the institutional independence. What we usually forget about the truth making process is that without the courts in South Africa we would not have had the TRC. The courts provided the expertise. We had judges sitting on the Amnesty Committee; it provided the credible threat for the perpetrators to come forward. It provided the powers of arbitration when the Commissioners actually had fights within their own ranks. And finally the courts also pronounced the TRC process “legal” with a very interesting ruling, which I 66 The Second International Conference on Transitional Justice in Zimbabwe