 Hi and welcome to People's Dispatch. We're here from the International People's Assembly in Solidarity of Bolivarian Revolution and against imperialism. We're with an activist from Kenya. Can you present your name and your organization? Hi, my name is Ruth Nyambura. I am from Kenya, Nairobi, Kenya, and I am part of the African Ecofeminist Collective. The African Ecofeminist Collective is a collective of feminists working on the intersections of ecological justice. Various intersections such as issues to do with mining, challenging the spate of multinational corporations in the agrarian sector, for example, in Monsanto, they're trying to take away people's food, land and seeds and just doing a lot of research and organizing with various social movements on the continent on these intersections. Can you tell us a little bit about the current political context in Kenya right now in the region? Okay, so we are sitting at a very interesting time in the country. We had a heavily disputed election in 2007, in August 2007, where the presidential elections were disputed, and the Supreme Court annulled the results, and then we had another election which was boycotted by more than half of the country. And the incumbent actually won it. I leave that to everyone's imagination when over half of the country boycotted an election, but still the incumbent wins. So we are basically in a country that's in midst of a serious crisis. We have a huge debt crisis. We've been borrowing left, right and center from China, from Western countries. We have corruption, which of course corruption has to be put within the context of neoliberal capitalism actually facilitates corruption. So it's not just an African phenomenon where Africans are corrupt. Capitalism facilitates corruption. And other than that, we're also in the midst of a femicide crisis. Thus, this past weekend, human rights defender Caroline Muatha was buried. The police say she died in the midst of a botched abortion, but we are disputing that narrative and saying that she was murdered because of her work, and everything is literally falling apart in many ways. The privatization of services. Of course it started in the 1980s because of structural adjustment programs, but now we seem to be back into the hold of another austerity push because the country is basically broke. We are paying off debts. We have corruption, and basically public services, little that we have, are not working. So this is basically the context of the country. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why you're here, why you're participating in this International People's Assembly against Imperialism and Solidarity of the Bolivarian Revolution. So I think, this is my second time actually in Venezuela. So the first time I came in 2014 was for the People's Climate Justice Forum, which is organized, co-organized by the government of Venezuela, and social movements working on climate justice across the world. And we know very well that Hugo Chavez famously said that if the climate was a bank, it would already have been saved. And he was a great thinker and pioneer on these destructive impacts of the climate crisis, especially on people of color and people in the global south, and holding Western countries and governments to account for the historical emissions. And in the various ways the climate crisis manifests itself in land grabbing, whether it's land grabbing, pollution, whether it's the murdering of indigenous activists or black activists across the world, resisting the onslaught of sort of grabs, various types of grabs. So that was my first time and I have always, I mean, I'm a leftist. So it has never been a question of being in solidarity with the people of Venezuela. So when this opportunity presented itself to come back to Venezuela second time, in the midst of such a trying imperialist crisis, because it is an imperialist crisis. It's not a socialist crisis. It is an imperialist capitalist crisis. I was happy to be back here on behalf of the African Ecofeminist Collective to show solidarity to the people of Venezuela, but to also, not just to show solidarity, but to continue to affirm that the Bolivarian Revolution, the People's Revolution still continues, still thrives, because we have seen from the visit in the communes yesterday, if it wasn't for the communes, the great organization and mobilization that is there amongst different communes and different people of Venezuela, the men, the women, the children, the intellectuals, they would not be able to survive this particular onslaught. They would not be able to survive the economic sanctions, legal and evil economic sanctions led by the United States but the West. So this is why I am here. I am here to affirm that as a black woman in Africa, as a black woman and as a woman from a continent that fully understands what colonization means, what imperialism means, what the afterlife of colonization means, that I am in perpetual solidarity with the people of Venezuela and their fight is my struggle. And I cannot call myself free if Venezuelans are not free, and I definitely know that with the kind of international solidarity that Venezuela continues to offer, whether it's to the people of Palestine who shall be free, you know, whether it's the wonderful work that they do with social movements across Africa, I bear witness to the kind of solidarity, for example, that the Venezuelan Embassy in Kenya, in Nairobi, offers to social, grassroots social movements in the model that they operate with, not working with NGOs but actually social movements. So I can bear testimony to the internationalism of the Bolivarian Revolution and their project. So I am Venezuela until Venezuela is free, and I know that the Venezuelan revolution is the African revolution until we are free and all of us are free. Thank you so much for sharing with us and keep tuned to People's Dispatch.