Burkina Faso Uprising

Protesters have stormed Burkina Faso’s parliament and set its main chamber ablaze in the most significant challenge ever to the President’s 27-year rule in one of the world’s poorest countries. A vast crowd tried to storm the home of the President’s brother and overran other state buildings. Earlier, police had pushed the crowds back with tear gas, but they regrouped in larger numbers, surged past police lines and broke into the parliament building. Crowds also attacked the homes of government ministers in the country’s second-largest city, Bobo-Dioulasso.State television and radio went off air.

The demonstrators had wanted to block a vote in parliament that would have allowed President Compaoré to seek a fifth term. Demonstrators shouted, “It is over for the regime” and “We do not want him again”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/burkino-faso-protesters-shot-dead-and-parliament-set-ablaze-as-poor-call-end-to-president-blaise-compaors-rule-9829362.html

Independence for what ?

2010 is the year 17 countries celebrate 50 years of independence since colonial rule. Independence anniversaries in post-colonial countries used to be a time of celebration for those workers who believed they were commemorating their freedom. Africans resisted the colonialists on grounds of segregation, slavery, exploitation and domination. But today African countries still struggle with development and human rights issues and the governments in power have done nothing to change the situation.

Ghana was the first sub-Saharan country in colonial Africa to gain its independence on March 6, 1957. In Ghana 45 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day and 79 percent on less than $2 a day.

The Somali Democratic Republic received its independence from Italy on July 1, 1960 when they joined with their northern neighbour, Somaliland, who had gained independence from the British on June 26, 1960. In Somalia 60% population lives below the $1 per day poverty line. An estimated 40 percent of the population were in need of relief assistance in 2009 - the largest proportion of the population requiring relief of any country in the world. Somalia has the worst health indicators in Africa with less than 0.5 doctors and two nurses per 100,000 people.

On June 30, 2010, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) celebrated 50 years of independence. In Congo 70 percent of the population live in poverty. Congo was ranked 139 out of 177 countries in the 2007 UNDP Human Development Index. Life expectancy is 52.8 years and 49 percent of the population do not have access to an improved water source. Infant mortality rates are estimated at 93.86 deaths per 1,000 live births. In 2003 the adult HIV infection rate was estimated at 4.9%, with 100,000 deaths from the disease in the same year.

Burkina Faso received independence from France in August 1960. Burkina Faso is ranked by the World Bank as the 13th poorest country in the world in 2002. The UNDP's 2005 Human Development Index ranked it at 175 out of 177 countries. Life expectancy is 47.5 years.

Independence solved none of the problems resulting from exploitation. Independence for the vast majority has simply meant the exchange of one set of exploiters for another. Nothing changed except the personnel of the State machinery. Poverty in the midst of a potential for plenty remains a running sore, exploitation and massive disparities of wealth continue to exist. Environmental degradation continues virtually unabated. Independence will not solve the peasant or working-class problems, only the establishment of socialism can do that. The festering of tribalist, nationalist and racist sentiment are nurtured and sustained by the capitalist system of production which produces only for profits and not for needs. Religion, secessionist movements and nationalism are generally tools used by the ruling classes to perpetrate the status quo. But the only solution is to uproot the real cause of the problems – the overthrow of the unjust economic system in operation in today's world. Socialism will depend on contribution to society by individuals based on individuals' ability and individuals will take from society according to their self-determined needs. It's time for the people of Africa to discover the truth, that they need to unite and fight for socialism. The struggle remains the same – the class struggle. Masters are uneasy when servants are awake.

See also Financial wizards or great pretenders?

Water , water everywhere but not a drop to drink

An estimated 84,000 Ghanaians dying each year from diseases related to poor water quality . The Ghana Water Company says it is no longer able to supply even half of the 150 million gallons of water that people in the capital , Accra, require each day.

Accra could have an abundant water supply from the nearby Volta Lake, the world's largest manmade body of fresh water. But many of the pipes delivering the water to the city are cracked and broken and the government has done little to repair them. As a result many residents resort to polluted rivers and ponds, or hand-dug wells where the water is often unclean.

The government acknowledges the problem. “It’s about aging infrastructure, lack of investment and waste,” the minister for water resources, Boniface Abubakar Saddique told IRIN . To raise more capital for infrastructure the ministry restructured the way it managed water in 2006, handing control over to a private company, Aqua Vitens Rand Limited. Two years later, however, fewer people in Accra can access water than when the system was government-run .

A representative of the non-governmental organisation ISODEC (Integrated Social Development Centre) said , “Its sad politicians constantly spew rhetoric on providing potable water to citizens but never offer concrete alternatives.”

The government intends to purchase two executive jets at a cost of US$105 million . At least , the workers of Ghana now know the President's priority.

In Burkina Faso 5.7 million Burkinabes have no access to clean water and 12.6 million lack adequate sanitation facilities. In some parts of the country only 2 percent of the population has access to clean toilets .

The government said it will use the African Development Bank, World Bank and bilateral donor funds to install 617,000 new toilets around the country, build 520 new pipe networks in rural areas, fit water taps in over 100,000 homes and install thousands of water-pumps.
"Finally the international community is realising that any development initiatives introduced in Burkina Faso must include investments in water, otherwise the Millennium Development Goals will be doomed to failure." the non-governmental organization WaterAid told IRIN.

BURKINA FASO: Food riots

Riots over the cost of living hit three major towns in Burkina Faso this week.

Laurent Ouédraogo, secretary general of the Confédération Nationale des Travailleurs du Burkina (CNTB) told IRIN that the riots happened after anger welled up because of constantly rising prices for basics like food, cloth and petrol .

“Misery does not wait and you see people witnessing everyday rising prices and they do not know what to do. The situation is like having matches near cotton that can catch fire at any moment,” Ouédraogo said.

More details here

Market Madness

Even in a “good” year , around one million of the 12.8 million people who live in Burkina Faso do not get enough to eat every year, mostly due to poverty.
This year, grain prices are rising sharply, putting more at risk. Producers are accused of hoarding and merchants of price gouging. Despite government predictions of a national surplus overall, shortfalls are reported in key production areas – and internal markets and exports mean there may be shortages.

The price of millet, a staple product in Burkina, is up 5 percent, sorghum by 11 percent and maize by 23 percent compared to average prices for November. Traders at Sankariare market in Ouagadougou, one of the key cereal markets in the country, said prices are already up by 40 percent or more compared to the same time last year.

"Saying that there is a surplus does not mean in all villages and provinces of the country there will be food for every body," the Minister of Agriculture, Water and Fisheries, Salif Diallo said .

Beyond any drought

A new report discusses NGOs .

The Sahel has long been vulnerable to drought, impoverishment and food insecurity, as the droughts of the mid-1970s, 1980s and 2005 show.In the Sahel, shocks from drought and flood are inevitable, but unpredictable in terms of location and timing, andlargely uncontrollable. The people of the Sahel are thus intrinsically exposed to climatic shocks or hazards.This assumption equates vulnerability with inadequate food production as opposed to food access. The levels of malnutrition seen in Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso in 2005 were out of all proportion to the drop in production levels and could not be explained on the grounds of climatic variation alone, [not even in combination with the locust invasion] . Climate does not cause vulnerability. Since independence, development agencies and development programmes have been promising real change in these three incredibly poor countries. Why has this development been unable to break the cycle of poverty ?

Inappropriate aid policies are partly responsible for the Sahel region’s poverty according to a strongly-worded report issued jointly by 10 international NGOs to be released on Wednesday in London. The report, which is called ‘Beyond Any Drought', is supported by a network of high-profile international NGOs including Oxfam, the British Red Cross, CARE International, Save the Children and Action Against Hunger, breaks with the usual positive image of the work of aid agencies to say donor-funded projects in the region are often based on “shallow analyses” that ignore common sense.

More specifically, the report says that donor pressure means aid agencies focus too much on measuring the production of heavy, nutrient-scarce staples like millet and sorghum while ignoring basic economic issues such as whether people can afford to buy them. Nutrition appears as a medical issue rather than an issue of access and power. Food security is too easily seen as a set of technical questions, but is in fact based on profoundly political issues.

The most vulnerable households are highly dependent on the exploitation of common-property natural resources,particularly during drought years. Examples include firewood collection for sale, collection of leaves and other wildfoods for human consumption and for medicine. In northern Nigeria the dependence on wild products is an effective indicator of low levels of wellbeing at household and at community level. Households unable to access common property resources, such as wild foods, are more susceptible to draw on their assets and get into debt.The capacity for local communities to manage common-property resources, such as village forests and water sources,has been eroded through the expropriation of many of these resources by the state. Government agencies put in place to take responsibility for the management of these resources have largely failed. In practice, government departments were reluctant to pass on authority over resources (such as timber from forests) that often provided a valuable source of income, and communities were expected to assume responsibility with very few benefits

The American government’s aid agency USAID is singled out for specific criticism. It undertakes what the report calls “risky” policies including the dumping of thousands of tonnes of American surplus food stocks on the continent. the US Government allocates a budget of $1.2 billion annually to purchase surplus grain for food relief, with the overt objective of creating export markets overseas. This food may be distributed in kind or “monetized”, sold on local markets in exchange for cash to be spent on activities related to emergency relief and recovery. The process is hugely costly and inefficient once transporting and marketing is taken into account. Further, the risks of flooding local markets, depressing the price of grain and thereby undermining local producers’ livelihoods is well known.The report says that CARE, another of the NGOs behind the report, is going to stop accepting USAID food on “ideological and practical” grounds.

In spite of rhetoric around learning, NGOs find it very difficult to apply lessons on the ground. In five or six years there could be a complete change of staff in all the major development agencies, leading to institutional forgetfulness and a lack of profound understanding of the issues. Socialists have a longer memory and know that attempts to tackle Third World poverty will often be thwarted by the international market system and will frequently be foiled by the national ruling class appropriation of the local resources and wealth . The majority of aid organisations develop their programmes “on the basis of their own priorities and their own visions” the report says and when designing aid projects the views of locals are usually ignored . It will be the democratic empowerment of the workers by socialism that will begin to genuinely address the needs of the people of Africa .