Winners and Losers

It is the case that Zambia is enjoying unprecedented high levels of economic development due to favourable (high) copper prices on the world market. There are massive investments in the copper mining industry, mostly from China. Thus we may infer without doubt that the death of president Levy Mwanawasa has caught overseas investors off guard in the sense that they know that a change in leadership will entail the change in economic priorities and political stability—more or less most people in Zambia have come to accumulate wealth through political alignments and ethnic loyalties (nepotism).

The entire MMD government is a superficial political arrangement…cabinet ministers and civil servants are mostly hand-picked close friends and relatives of Mwanawasa. It will be superfluous to analyse the political crisis without due regard to the intrinsic ethnic and tribal prejudices that have always determined political loyalties in Zambia. The New Deal MMD government under Mwanawasa was strongly dominated by Lenje- and Lamba-speaking tribal politicians. There is a predisposition to sideline Bemba-speaking politicians from the high echelons of the MMD party.

The voting patterns that emerged after the 2006 general elections revealed a marked change in tribal and ethnic loyalties in the sense that the Bemba-speaking tribes mostly voted for the Patriotic Front (PF) of Michael Sata (a Bemba-speaking politician). The MMD emerged as a Bemba-dominated political party under the leadership of Fredrick Chiluba. We have seen political factions emerge within the ruling echelons of the MMD in consequence of the death of president Mwanawasa.

It is a fact that the appointment of Rupia Banda as the vice-president was made in order to compensate the people of Eastern Province for having heavily voted for the MMD in 2006 . Let it be understood that Banda was a staunch UNIP politician and was never a member of the MMD.

It is outright impossible for a ruling political party to lose a general election in Africa, especially when the so-called 50 percent plus vote is not part of the constitution.

The workers and peasants of Zambia have opposed the simple majority formula because it gives room to corruption and manipulation. Article 95 (1) of the Munyomba Draft Constitution prescribes that a presidential candidate should win the elections by 50 percent plus one vote. The National Constitution (NCC) appointed by Levy Mwanawasa is currently debating and reviewing submissions of the Munyomba Draft Constitution that may pave the way for the creation of a new constitution. But there are those who have opposed the 50 percent plus one vote like health minister Ronald Njapau, who said it was not good for a country's safety. He said the majoritarian system will bring about a political crisis in Zambia as was the case in Kenya and Zimbabwe. And the former republican vice-president General Christon Tembo said the NCC should not be excited with the clause but be mindful of the political repercussions.

But home affairs minister Lwipa Puma believes that the 50 percent plus one vote will be a costly exercise and that it is inappropriate for a poor country like Zambia to spend money on unnecessary re-runs instead of spending it on building schools and hospitals.

As socialists we have something more to say to our fellow workers in Zambia and who are currently mourning for President Levy Mwanawasa. What we ask you to do in your own interest is to consider the case for socialism. If you do you will discover facts that may surprise you—socialism involves the abolition of the wages system once and for all. Socialism should be your concern as well as ours.

K. MULENGA, Zambia

Nations vy for Nigerian gas

The EU is proposing to help the Nigerian government develop a trans-Saharan pipeline which would take gas from Nigeria through Niger and Algeria, direct to Europe.

But Russia also has realised Nigeria's importance too .A week before the EU offer, the Russian gas giant Gazprom signed a deal with the Nigerian government for gas exploration and transportation, and has clearly stated its interest in the proposed pipeline. Gazprom can offer huge investment in infrastructure as an inducement to do deals.

Europe is increasingly worried about its dependence on Russian gas, especially after Russia's action in Georgia increased its influence over European energy supply routes through the Caucasus.

Watch this space as Nigerian resources once more becomes the focal point for world capitalism competition .

Nigeria has the world's seventh largest gas reserves.

Bush Meat

The report - Conservation and Use of Wildlife-Based Resources: The Bushmeat Crisis - says that many attempts to crack down on the hunting of bush meat are misguided and a blanket ban on sales of bush meat simply would not work.

The report argues it is important to distinguish between the rural poor, who hunt to survive, and those who engage in the activity purely as a commercial venture.

The authors argue that only by giving rights to local hunters to decide on what they want to hunt will they be encouraged to adopt sustainable practices - such as hunting for fast reproducing species like rodents instead of larger mammals.Consumption of bush meat in Europe and elsewhere is often blamed for driving up demand but this report points out that the most of it is consumed in local village areas.

Researchers estimate that more than a million tonnes of bush meat is killed every year. In some areas it provides 80% of the protein and fat consumed.

Child Mortality Rates

Promised reforms by Capitalism have a history of failing and it appears the progress in cutting the number of deaths among children under five is still "grossly insufficient" in some parts of the world, Unicef has warned.

The UN children's agency warns many poorer countries will not meet the 2015 Millennium Development Goal of cutting that figure by two thirds. The situation is worst in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia, it said .

Last year, 9.2 million children aged under five died across the world. It warns that malnutrition is now a contributing cause in around a third of deaths

Central and eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and the Pacific countries have cut deaths among under-fives by over 50% since 1990. But over the same period, deaths in western and central Africa have fallen by just 18%; in sub-Saharan Africa the figure was 21%, while in eastern and southern Africa it was 26%.

In Sierra Leone, the country with the worst under-five mortality rate in the world, 262 out of every 1,000 children die before their fifth birthday.The rate for industrialised nations is just six deaths per 1,000 live births.

Chad - Oil Curse strikes again

The curse of oil continues . In a supposedly ground-breaking agreement with the World Bank Chad was expected to use its oil revenues to benefit its peoples .

Alas the World Bank has cancelled an oil pipeline deal with Chad after a dispute with the government over failed pledges to use profits to tackle poverty. The bank said Chad had also failed to use revenues on health and education.

Instead the government had tapped more of the oil profits for military spending. Also President Idriss Deby over the past year has signed several decrees handing him personal control over the landlocked oil producer's finances and circumventing World Bank attempts to ensure a large share of oil profits go to social spending.

The bank had been warned by local and international development groups that the pipeline project had little chance of reducing poverty, said Ian Gary, senior policy advisor for extractive industries at Oxfam America.

Socialist Banner is not surprised .

Global warming threat to Africa

Failure to take urgent action to curb climate change is effectively violating the human rights of people in the poorest nations a report by Oxfam International says

Emissions, primarily from developed countries, are exacerbating flooding, droughts and extreme weather events. As a result, harvests are failing and people are losing their homes and access to water.

75-250 million people across Africa could face water shortages by 2020 . Agriculture fed by rainfall could drop by 50% in some African countries by 2020

Swazi King's Birthday

The media are having a field day exposing the hypocrisy of millions ,officially put at $2.5 million though widely believed to be five times higher , being spent on celebrating King Mswati III's birthday .

He will be 40 .

unemployment, 40 percent
HIV rates: nearly 40 percent among adults. Life expectancy has nearly halved since 1998 because of the AIDS epidemic and is now less than 31 years, according to the most recent U.N. figures.

70 percent live below the poverty line, and 20% depend on international food aid.

A new constitution took effect in 2006 maintains the ban on political opposition parties. The king appoints the prime minister and the cabinet. A previous king ,Sobhuza , declared a state of emergency in 1973 which Mswati has never formally lifted.

About 5,000 trade union members took to the streets Wednesday to protest against the expenditure

Tribes or Nations ??

From The London Times

" Siphiwe Hlophe, founder of Swaziland for Positive Living (Swapol) led a 1,000-strong demonstration in the capital Mbabane to protest that eight of his 13 wives, plus their children and an entourage of bodyguards, maids and hangers-on, had chartered a plane to Dubai for a shopping spree. English public-school-educated King Mswati III, whose personal take of the national budget is half the health budget, is estimated to have spent £2.2m on the trip and is planning a huge 40th birthday party.

Swaziland has the worst HIV infection rate in the world; 31% for women.
It is also pathetically poor, with nearly 70% of its people living on less than 50 US cents (about 27p) a day.

In Swaziland the king and the ruling elite refer to the Swazi nation but pretend that Swazis are a traditional tribe, utterly obedient to the king and his chiefs. The king misuses tradition to appropriate the country’s meagre resources, prevent development and keep the people subservient.

What is the difference between a tribe and a nation anyway? Tribalism describes a frame of mind all human beings suffer from: a pig-headed “my group, right or wrong” attitude. In Africa people are always referred to as members of tribes, but how can 25 million Yoruba or 33 million Hausa people be called tribes? If they are, then surely the English, Welsh and Scots must be British tribes. Does the media refer to former Yugoslavia as tribal or the Israel-Palestine conflict as a land dispute between two semitic tribes. That’s how it would be described if they lived in Africa.

Africa’s problem is not tribalism as such, but the utterly incoherent nation states cohabited by different ethnic groups bequeathed to Africans half a century ago. Africans had no part in the creation of their nation states. At the end of the 19th century, Europeans drew lines on maps of places they had never been to. Fifty years ago the filled-in spaces became Ghana, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon, countries that had never existed before. Suddenly pitched into independence, they had no sense of common nationhood. By contrast the ruling Europeans had always emphasised ethnic differences and suppressed any sense of nationalism.

Beneath the surface of Africa’s weak nation states lie old cultures, old communities, very different societies with their own laws and languages. Nigeria contains some 400 different ethnic groups. Uganda has more than 40. They lack what we take for granted: a common conception of nationhood and national citizenship. The unification of Africa remains a distant dream, and separatism is frowned on because it could lead to bloody disintegration..."

We also read that a meeting of more than 200 African kings and traditional rulers has bestowed the title "king of kings" on Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The rulers, wearing gold crowns, sequined capes and colourful robes met in the Libyan town of Benghazi. Sheikh Abdilmajid from Tanzania told the BBC that the traditional rulers could play an important role. "The people believe in the chiefs and kings more than they believe in their governments,"
While Col Gaddafi told the assembled dignitaries "We want an African military to defend Africa, we want a single African currency, we want one African passport to travel within Africa,"

Socialist Banner declares that only through democratic de-centralised world socialism can the African peoples become united but also Africa will be unified with the rest of the world and enjoy common ownership of the worlds treasury.

Political whores

In Kenya there is a proposal to pay hefty salaries to the wives of the prime minister and vice-president. A leaked document says the head of civil service Francis Muthaura has directed that they each be paid $6,000 (£3,000) every month.

A government memo leaked to the local media directs that Ida Odinga and Pauline Musyoka, wives of the prime minister and vice-president respectively, will be rewarded for their roles as hostesses.
The pay is also supposed to recognise their role for upholding national family values.

Socialist Banner believes it is more the rich and powerful feathering their own nests at the expense of the poor and vulnerable . We can only agree with Transparency International's Gladwell Otieno who said the move is a confirmation that Kenyan politicians are just a greedy caste, looking after themselves at the expense of poor Kenyans recovering from the effects of post-election violence.

Rich White Justice

A white farmer who threw the body of his fired black worker into a lions' pen has been freed on parole after less than three years in prison. Mark Scott-Crossley was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 for assaulting Nelson Chisale, a former employee, and throwing his body to lions at his game farm who devoured him. The Supreme Court of Appeal reduced the sentence to five years, saying there was no proof Chisale had been alive when he was fed to the animals.

Chisale had been fired from Scott-Crossley's construction business at the game farm and returned two months later to collect his belongings. When he did, he was attacked with machetes and tied to a stake, where he was left bleeding for six or seven hours before being thrown into a lion enclosure. Only Chisale's skull and some gnawed bones and bloody clothing were found.
Another farm worker was sentenced to 15 years for carrying out the assault, but the trial judge said Scott-Crossley was the mastermind.

The Confederation of South African Trade Unions slammed his release. "It is clear that those who are rich and white will continue to be treated differently to those who are poor," it said.

Rich White Justice

A white farmer who threw the body of his fired black worker into a lions' pen has been freed on parole after less than three years in prison. Mark Scott-Crossley was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2005 for assaulting Nelson Chisale, a former employee, and throwing his body to lions at his game farm who devoured him. The Supreme Court of Appeal reduced the sentence to five years, saying there was no proof Chisale had been alive when he was fed to the animals.

Chisale had been fired from Scott-Crossley's construction business at the game farm and returned two months later to collect his belongings. When he did, he was attacked with machetes and tied to a stake, where he was left bleeding for six or seven hours before being thrown into a lion enclosure. Only Chisale's skull and some gnawed bones and bloody clothing were found.
Another farm worker was sentenced to 15 years for carrying out the assault, but the trial judge said Scott-Crossley was the mastermind.

The Confederation of South African Trade Unions slammed his release. "It is clear that those who are rich and white will continue to be treated differently to those who are poor," it said.

Poisoning Africa

In August 2006 a local company hastily fly-tipped truckload after truckload of chemical waste at around 15 locations around the city.

Trafigura had chartered the ship carrying the waste, which unloaded the waste in Ivory Coast, after a failure to agree deals to get it treated in the Netherlands and Nigeria.It said it had contracted a local firm, Tommy, to handle the waste in good faith.

In an out-of-court settlement, Trafigura agreed to pay the Ivorian government around $200m (£100m) in one of the largest ever payments of its kind.

Thousands of victims say they have yet to receive compensation - or say that what they have been given - around $500 (£250) in the main injury category - falls short of the amount they have lost in medical bills and earnings.

Trafigura also disputes whether the chemical slops were the cause of the large number of medical cases.

The United Nations says the dumping of the 500m tonnes of waste led to at least 16 deaths and more than 100,000 other victims needing medical treatment.

Two years on it is still here.

The UN special rapporteur on the dumping of toxic waste, Professor Okechukwu Ibeanu, recently spent four days in the country speaking to officials and victims.

"After almost two years, these sites have still not been decontaminated and continue to threaten the lives and health of tens of thousands of residents, across different social spectrums in Abidjan.The government has informed me that it does not have the technical capacity to clean up and decontaminate the dumpsites in a timelier manner," he said in a statement."This should be an absolute priority."

Congo horror

A new report based on polling data carried out in eastern Congo by an international human rights group and the research centers of two prominent American universities entitled "Living With Fear," makes interesting reading .

Though rich in diamonds, copper, gold and other minerals, most of Congo's people remain poor and desperate.

80 percent of respondents said they had been displaced at least three times in the last 15 years. 75 75 percent said their cattle or livestock had been stolen.
66 percent said their home had been destroyed or confiscated.
61 percent of those polled in the east said they witnessed the violent death of a family member or friend
60 percent said one more of their household members had disappeared
34 percent said they themselves had been abducted for more than a week.
53 percent reported being forced to work or being enslaved by armed groups,
31 percent said they had been wounded in fighting,
35 percent said they had been tortured.
46 percent had been threatened with death,
23 percent had witnessed sexual violence,
16 percent had been sexually violated —
12 percent raped multiple times.

"Peace, social reconstruction, justice and reconciliation remain distant dreams in Congo."

islam and judaism

It hurts too much to lie on his back, so the 7-year-old has spent the past month stretched out on his stomach. His two grandmothers sit on the hospital bed beside him, fanning the pink flesh left exposed by his teacher's whip.

The Quranic teacher who did this to him is behind bars.

But what is most significant is that the boy's father — a poor farmer who sold part of his harvest to pay for the bus fare to the hospital — filed the charges against the teacher himself. In doing so, this man with cracked lips and bloodshot eyes braved the wrath of his entire village, including his own father, who considers all teachers in Senegal's Islamic schools to be holy .Even hospitals have become wary of treating beaten talibe, or Quranic students, for fear of retaliation from the religious community.

In hundreds of these schools in the mostly Muslim West African country, children are made to beg in the streets and are beaten if they don't bring back enough money. One 10-year-old was beaten to death with his hands tied behind his back and his mouth stuffed with rocks. Despite laws passed to protect children, the courts have convicted only a handful of Quranic teachers and quickly cave in the face of powerful clerics. The respect for Islamic schools comes from a centuries-old tradition of families sending their sons to study the Quran and till fields in exchange for food. In the 1970s, as drought devastated West Africa, schools moved to the cities and Islamic teachers sent children out to beg in the streets. These days, boys as young as 3 are beaten not for failing to master the Quran, but for failing to bring back enough money — a change families often are unaware of.

The boy also had to beg for food. Some days all he got was a discarded fish head, or a spoonful of rice.By the second week, he was hungry all the time. On July 2, he begged until dark and got the 50 cents, but spent part of it on biscuits. When the marabout found out, the boy says, he got whipped until the skin on his back fell off. Hospital officials believe the whip was laced with metal.With around 30 children in his care, the marabout was netting $430 a month, three times the salary of an average citizen and as much as a government official.

"Ask yourself, what is this money used for? The kids are not fed, so it's not for food. They wear rags, so it's not for clothes. They don't have mattresses, so it's not for their beds," says Paul Ndiaye, of the Swiss aid group Sentinelles, who has spent the last 10 years trying to get courts to take action against abusive marabouts. "This is a sham on a grand scale under the cover of religion."

In Senegal that the word for "to educate" — "yaar" is the same as the word for the stick to discipline students.

Meanwhile , Israel's Law of Return guarantees citizenship for any Jew in need, and these days the country is especially concerned about boosting its Jewish population to compete with the Arabs. But the Ethiopians have proved the hardest immigrant group to absorb, and the Falash Mura, some critics feel, is pushing the limits. As a whole they are poor, plagued by crime, violence and substance abuse, feeling shut out of a world very different from rural Africa. But despite all the preparations, most Ethiopian immigrants over age 35 go straight onto welfare after reaching Israel, according to the Jewish Agency.

That's no reason for shutting out the Falash Mura, says Mazor Bahyna, an Ethiopian in the 120-member Knesset, or parliament.

"I think Israel has an obligation to prove that it is not a racist state," he says. "If everyone was blond-haired and had blue eyes, they would bring them."

"There is no end to reunification," said the Jewish Agency's Konforti.

Israel has struggled for years to figure out which Ethiopians should be allowed in. Each time it has attempted to end the immigration by emptying the Gondar camps and airlifting their inhabitants to Israel, thousands more have flooded into the camps, scrambling to prove their Jewishness.The argument now seems to have come down to numbers: Israel says the last of the Falasha Mura who qualify for immigration arrived in Israel earlier this month, while the American groups say some 8,700 have been left behind.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has upheld the Israeli list, effectively marking the end

Salving ones conscience

Paleontologists hunting fossils of early man in the Rift Valley of southern Ethiopia call the area the cradle of mankind. This year it's bursting with life, especially in the fields where local farmers grow barley, potatoes and teff, a cereal used to make the flat, spongy bread injera. As a warm July rain falls on a patchwork of smallholdings half a day's walk from the nearest road, the women harvest yams, the men plow behind sturdy oxen and fat chickens, goats and cows roam outside mud huts. And yet for all the apparent abundance, this area is so short of food that many are dying from starvation.
It is reported that in the six weeks to mid-July, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) treated 11,800 Ethiopian children for severe acute malnutrition. At a tented hospital in the town of Kuyera, 50 out of 1,000 died, double the rate MSF expects for a full-fledged famine.
"It's very bizarre," says Jean de Cambry, a Belgian MSF veteran of crises from Sudan to Afghanistan. "It's so green. But you have all these people dying of hunger."

Over time, sustained food aid creates dependence on handouts and shifts focus away from improving agricultural practices to increase local food supplies. Ethiopia exemplifies the consequences of giving a starving man a fish instead of teaching him to catch his own. This year the U.S. will give more than $800 million to Ethiopia: $460 million for food, $350 million for HIV/AIDS treatment — and just $7 million for agricultural development. Why bother with development when shortfalls are met by aid?
Ethiopian farmers can't compete with free food, so they stop trying. Over time, there's a loss of key skills, and a country that doesn't have to feed itself soon becomes a country that can't.

Silent Harvest of Death

Democratic Republic of Congo, a country the size of western Europe, there is an acute lack of medical care. Functioning public hospitals and clinics are rare - and those that do exist are in an appalling condition. Yet there are Congolese doctors who recall that in the 1960s the Kinshasa General Hospital was one of the best on the continent. Patients would be referred there from South Africa. Now , the current head of the accident and emergency department at the Kinshasa General, Dr Mbwembwe Kabamba, says he has no medical stocks at all.

"I don't have any bandages," Dr Kabamba said, "my cupboard is bare...I have all these people, poor people, and they are waiting for treatment. Some of them will die for lack of an operation. That is the reality...I am watching a lot of people dying and it hurts me. These are innocent people, and the government is there with its big villas and cars. I cannot accept that."

The International Rescue Committee which estimates that over the past decade an astonishing total of 5.4 million Congolese have died from easily preventable causes.

That is 5.4 million deaths over and above the "normal" mortality figure that would be expected in a poor African nation.

Only a tiny proportion - a fraction of 1% - died from violence. Most died for mundane reasons associated with malnutrition, simple diseases or childbirth.

The politics of markets

Socialist Banner is not innocent or naive enough to not suspect that the following story is one purposefully planted in the media by American propaganda psy-ops to discredit Sudan .

However, we know that many nations find that the world market for food-stuffs is more profitable than the the home domestic market and that the export of food while people starve is a well-documented phenomena and therefore feel that the essential elements of the story is more than probably true .

Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.

Sudan is growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army.
Last year, the United States government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, and that is about the same amount that Sudan exported. This year, Sudanese companies are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur. Many European countries which can buy relief food locally bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum last year but United Nations officials said they would like to buy more , however Sudanese suppliers could make more money with exports.

Professor Eric Reeves, an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly described Sudanese government’s strategy as one to manipulate “national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty.”

Sudan has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated.

“Sudan could be self-sufficient,” said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Sudan. “It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa.”

French War Criminals

France played an active role in the 1994 Rwanda genocide, a report unveiled Tuesday by the Rwandan government said, naming French political and military officials it says should be prosecuted. The 500-page report alleged that France was aware of preparations for the genocide, contributed to planning the massacres and actively took part in the killing.

It named former French prime minister Edouard Balladur, former foreign minister Alain Juppe and then-president Francois Mitterrand, who died in 1996, among 13 French politicians accused of playing a role in the massacres.Dominique de Villepin, who was then Juppe's top aide and later became prime minister, was also among those listed in the Rwandan report.The report names 20 military officials as being responsible.

"French forces directly assassinated Tutsis and Hutus accused of hiding Tutsis... French forces committed several rapes on Tutsi survivors," said a justice ministry statement

"The overwhelming nature of France's support to the Rwandan policy of massacres... shows the complicity of French political and military officials in the preparation and execution of the genocide," the statement said.

The military and humanitarian Operation Turquoise carried out by the French in Rwanda between June and August 1994 abetted the killings perpetrated by militia.

The 1994 genocide in the central African nation left around 800,000 people -- mainly minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus -- dead, according to the United Nations.

Socialist Banner has previously reported on ther blood stained hands of Mitterand and more background to the actual events of the genocide here

Poisoning the Poor

Greenpeace is calling for an end to what it calls "poisoning the poor". It wants electronics manufacturers to stop using hazardous materials and to take responsibility for the whole lifecycle of their products.

In Ghana the piles of old computers are increasing every week even though the trade is illegal.

As we upgrade at an ever faster rate, campaigners are calling for action to prevent toxic, electronic or "e" waste being dumped on poor countries.

The United Nations believes we generate between 20m and 50m tonnes of e-waste around the world each year. Agbobloshie dump site in Ghana's capital, Accra, is a computer graveyard. But PCs are not given a decent, safe burial - they are dumped on this expanding, toxic treasure trove. Many of the well-known brands are there: Compaq, Dell, Gateway, Philips, Canon, Hewlett Packard.

Environmental campaign group Greenpeace took soil and water samples from the scrap market and found high concentrations of leads, phthalates or plastic softeners and dioxins that are known to promote cancer.

"Chemicals like lead are very dangerous especially for children. They affect the brain when it is developing and therefore cause a lower IQ when they grow up," Greenpeace's Kim Schoppink says."Other chemicals we found cause cancer or disrupt your hormone system."

There are international laws banning the export of computer waste but people are getting round this by labelling the shipments "usable second-hand goods".

"My research shows that about 90% of the computers are just junk. They just don't work. This is dumping."

Zambia : Political Crisis

President Levy Mwanawasa suffered a head stroke on 29 June whilst attending the African Union Conference in Egypt. It was announced by the South African president Thabo Mbeki that Mwanawasa was dead (30 June). The following day Mbeki apologised to the Zambian High Commission to revoke the previous statement. But all the same the damage was done—there was an outcry among Zambian society that Mwanawasa was dead and the government was only hiding the real fact.

It is sad to note that Mwanawasa is hospitalised in a military hospital in Paris and his relatives and friends are refused permission to visit him. It is a fact that Mwanawasa is seriously sick and this has created a political crisis within the ruling MMD. Many prominent Zambians are waiting to know about what the ruling MMD has in store for the Zambian people in case Mwanawasa becomes physically incapacitated. Why is the MMD so discreet about Mwanawasa’s sickness?

The problem with African politics consists in the so-called political misconceptions people may have about leaders. Many ordinary people in Zambia believe that Mwanawasa is a charismatic political leader—just like his predecessors Chuluba and Kaunda. There is deep reverence mixed with fear concerning the sickness of President Mwanawasa. There is a feeling among many ignorant Zambians that there isn’t anyone within the MMD who can replace him.

Recent revelations by local government deputy minister Teta Mashimbo that there is a successor crisis within the ruling MMD has caused consternation across the entire political fraternity. Mashimbo gave a political speech in which he alleged that the senior officials were divided concerning the possible successor Mwa Nawasa. More or less his pronouncements have been strongly repudiated from within the MMD. There is a prayer mania and calls for reconciliation ever since Mwanawasa became sick.

However, the unrepentant PF president Michael Sata has come out in the light and told the MMD government to put matters straight. Basking in the honeymoon of his political reconciliation with President Mwanawasa—Sata has advised the MMD to convene a medical board that will tell the nation the facts about Mwanawasa’s medical proceedings. Sata said there is a clause within the Zambian constitution which allows the creation of a medical board whenever the president becomes physically incapacitated. There are calls for political reconciliation during the sickness of Mwanawasa and it is believed that to start talking about a successor is an act of witchcraft. It is an act of witchcraft in the sense that the MMD without Mwanawasa at the helm is doomed to destruction.

We in the WSM do not enter into political reconciliation nor participate in national prayers—we have remained convinced that capitalism will for ever create social, economic and political problems for the workers in every part of the world and we advocate the creation of a socialist and co-operative world in which poverty and fear will give way to plenty and happiness.

Kephas Mulenga

Broken promises , as usual

FROM THE BBC
When the Kenyan government promised to provide free secondary education last year, many parents were elated. Rolling out the programme in January, President Mwai Kibaki said free education would ensure that children from poor homes acquired quality education.

But seven months after the programme was supposed to take off, the government has provided only a quarter of the funding schools need to make it work. Some school administrators have been forced to run the institutions on a credit line while others have opted to reinstate tuition fees to avoid closing down.

Key ministries - among them medical services, roads, education and finance - have already had their budgets slashed to accommodate the increased government expenditure. The free secondary school education programme may just be one of the casualties.

Chinese imperialism at work again

For centuries Africa has failed to gain much benefit from its enormous mineral deposits; they were plundered by colonisers and during wars.

A multi-billion dollar oil deal between China and the west African state of Niger has been denounced by unions and transparency campaigners.
Civil rights groups in Niger are calling for a parliamentary inquiry into the $5bn (£2.5bn) contract and for scrutiny of how funds will be spent.
China's state oil company was given oil exploration rights in Niger in June.
There is widespread concern that the people of Niger will not benefit from the country's oil wealth.

A mining union in Niger said the deal with China took place in the greatest of secrecy and with contempt for regulation.
It is not easy changing the way such deals are struck - political and business elites often have a vested interest in avoiding transparency.
Even when a company or investor wants to disclose the details of a deal, it risks losing its license to a less scrupulous competitor.
There are plenty of examples where governments have failed to do business in the interests of the people they serve.

White collar international fraud

The Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo are losing at least $12m annually in tax avoidance by logging companies, Greenpeace says.

The environmental group says it has evidence showing how firms like German-owned Danzer group have set up "elaborate profit-laundering schemes". In its report, Conning the Congo, Greenpeace alleges the amount of tax lost each year is 50 times the DR Congo's Ministry of Environment's annual operating budget.Greenpeace says it has documents showing that Danzer's Swiss subsidiary company (Interholco AG) buys timber from its African sister companies (Siforco and IFO) at below the market price and then makes up the shortfall by depositing money in offshore bank accounts. In so doing, the group evades paying big corporate tax and export duties.

Environment Minister Jose Endundo told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme."What I can say about forestry, is that the commission in charge of setting the minimum export prices for timber has not met since 2000. So the logging companies took advantage of the situation to export timber at a price under its real value. It means that the Congolese government has suffered losses in terms of foreign currency earnings and taxes."

Sony Playstations and the game of war and death

"Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms," said Ex-British Parliament Member Oona King.

Has the video game industry dug up its very own blood diamond?

According to a report by activist site Toward Freedom, for the past decade the search for a rare metal necessary in the manufacturing of Sony's Playstation 2 game console has fueled a brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

At the center of the conflict is the unrefined metallic ore, coltan. After processing, coltan turns into a powder called tantalum, which is used extensively in a wealth of western electronic devices including cell phones, computers and, of course, game consoles.

Allegedly, the demand for coltan prompted Rwandan military groups and western mining companies to plunder hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the rare metal, often by forcing prisoners-of-war and even children to work in the country's coltan mines.

So where's the connection to Sony? According to Toward Freedom, during the 2000 launch of the PS2, the electronics giant was having trouble meeting consumer demand. To pump out more units, Sony required a significant increase in the production of electric capacitors, which are primarily made with tantalum. This helped drive the world price of the powder from $49/pound to a whopping $275/pound, resulting in the frenzied scouring of the Congolese hills known for being ripe with coltan.

Sony has since sworn off using tantalum acquired from the Congo, claiming that current builds of the PS2, PSP and PS3 consoles are sourced from a variety of mines in several different countries.

But according to researcher David Barouski, they're hardly off the hook.

"SONY's PlayStation 2 launch...was a big part of the huge increase in demand for coltan that began in early 1999," he explained. "SONY and other companies like it, have the benefit of plausible deniability, because the coltan ore trades hands so many times from when it is mined to when SONY gets a processed product, that a company often has no idea where the original coltan ore came from, and frankly don't care to know. But statistical analysis shows it to be nearly inconceivable that SONY made all its PlayStations without using Congolese coltan."

Black and White Unite

The head of South Africa's governing African National Congress, Jacob Zuma, has said he is shocked and embarrassed about white poverty in the country. Mr Zuma was speaking after visiting the Bethlehem township near the capital, Pretoria, where white families live without running water or electricity.
A new report by the charity, which helps poor white communities, says more than 130,000 white people in South Africa are homeless. South Africa's Helping Hand says the number of homeless white people has increased by 58% since 2002.

The trade union Solidarity, whose membership is mainly white said "For a long time whites have been seen as rich and and blacks poor... Talking about white poverty has been seen as politically incorrect. The emergence of this scourge has left everyone looking for answers."

Well the answer has always been socialism . Not the ANC version of what they believed socialism is and what they then jettisoned but the socialism which means "the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind, without distinction of race or sex."

The hate and distrust that exists in society today is a direct result of the nature of societies past and present. A society in which we must compete to survive, in which our jobs are threatened by other workers, in which we do not feel secure, is fertile breeding ground for racism, sexism, nationalism and all the other hatreds that abound.

Even today, while this hatred is sometimes used to pit one worker against another, it appears that overall, these hatreds are being rooted out and made socially unacceptable. This is particularly noticeable in countries like South Africa where there is a shortage of white workers, and black workers must be brought into previously "white" workplaces without the major disruption that is caused by overt racism.

No society can meet our human needs as long as there are different classes of people. Every person has abilities that differentiate them from others, but we are all equal in our humanity. We all have strengths and weaknesses. What we need is a society that allows us to use our strengths, and that accepts and accommodates our weaknesses.

Socialism will be a society geared to meeting human needs, and the need to be accepted for what we are is probably the most basic of human needs. When the breeding ground for these hatreds has disappeared, people will naturally be able to eradicate them with all the other negative leftovers of capitalism.

Africa - The Power-house of Europe

Rationally organised , African natural resources can provide world-wide solutions to the energy crisis .

Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said it would require the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts to meet all of Europe's energy needs.A tiny rectangle ,an area slightly smaller than Wales yet scientists claimed it could one day generate enough solar energy to supply all of Europe with clean electricity. The scientists are calling for the creation of a series of huge solar farms - producing electricity either through photovoltaic cells, or by concentrating the sun's heat to boil water and drive turbines - as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.

Scientists argue that harnessing the Sahara would be particularly effective because the sunlight in this area is more intense: solar photovoltaic (PV) panels in northern Africa could generate up to three times the electricity compared with similar panels in northern Europe.

A New War for Oil

Gordon Brown will offer British help to the Nigerian government – to fight rebels in the oil-producing Niger delta.
The Prime Minister's official spokesman said the focus will be on providing training for the Nigerian military. He said: "Oil supply from Nigeria has been undermined by insecurity in the Niger delta...and to achieve levels of production that Nigeria is capable of"

Major unrest in the impoverished Niger Delta region has cut the country's capacity to pump oil by one-quarter in recent months, helping to drive oil prices to the record high of $145 per barrel.
A series of attacks on installations and the kidnapping of oil workers by the main militant group, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend), has cut Nigerian oil production by one-quarter. The group is demanding a greater share of oil revenues be given to local people as the Niger Delta is among the poorest regions in Africa, despite the immense oil wealth it produces. Britain is one of the largest investors in Nigeria. About 4,000 Britons live in the west African country, many working for large companies, including the oil and gas companies Royal Dutch Shell and BG Group

A spokesman for Mend, Jomo Gbomo, told The Independent that the UK offer was tantamount to a return to colonial policies of divide and rule:
"They ought to know better than any other country [not] to involve themselves in any other area aside from development. They [the British] are getting frustrated and we will continue frustrating the oil-dependent markets until justice is offered."

Mandela pleads for charity

Seems rather than seeking political and social solutions to poverty , Nelson Mandela is now making moral appeals to the benevolence of the capitalist class .

“There are many people in South Africa who are rich and who can share those riches with those not so fortunate who have not been able to conquer poverty,” Mandela said.

But he is certainly 100% correct when he stated "If you are poor, you are not likely to live long,"

a better life for all

"We don't have houses, we don't have jobs, we don't have anything," said Cyril Mthembu, a 42-year-old unemployed father of three who has lived in Alexandra for 28 years. "So, we are fighting over the little we have."

When apartheid ended in 1994, Mbeki's African National Congress estimated it needed 3 million homes. Housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu told parliament earlier this year 2.6 million homes had been built since 1994. But with population growth, migration to the cities and other factors, the housing backlog stands at 2.1 million.Sisulu's department has said it needs to double the rate at which it is delivering homes if it is to reach the goal of ensuring all South Africans — native and newly arrived — have adequate housing by 2024. But the department acknowledges it lacks technical and management skills and that it has been plagued by supply shortages and poor construction.

The frustration among poor blacks has played out in attacks against foreigners, who often end up in squatter camps in Alexandra and elsewhere. South Africa draws immigrants from war-torn Somalia, from Zimbabwe with its political and economic chaos and from Nigeria, where corruption and military rule have blocked growth.The anger has also led to riots over the lack of electricity and running water, and complaints that the houses the government has managed to build are shoddy.

In South Africa, most blacks are the product of an apartheid system meant to ensure they did not gain the skills to compete with whites, with black schools under-equipped and staffed with teachers who in some cases had not finished school themselves. The post-apartheid government has not done enough to reverse that legacy, Gelb , an economist at Johannesburg's University of the Witwatersrand, said.

"What people are looking for is not a handout, but something that points the way to the future," Gelb said.

Mbeki is credited with spurring growth in South Africa with free market policies, but the boom has yet to trickle down. Unemployment is more than 20 percent, and now a downturn due in part to rising global food and fuel prices — and a dire electricity shortage resulting from poor government planning — will make it even harder to deliver.After several years of growth of about 5 percent, the International Monetary Fund predicts growth this year for South Africa at just 3.8 percent, and cautions even that may be too optimistic.

The "better life for all" the African National Congress promised during the campaign for South Africa's first all-race election 14 years ago was the same promise that capitalism all over the world promises in its attempts to delude workers - a promise rarely fulfilled and invariably broken .

Diplomatic Hypocrisy

Socialist Banner has no sympathy with the false socialist Mugabe but we can agree with much of this story .

"...Nigeria. Rwanda. Uganda. Ethiopia. Gabon. Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe has plenty of competitors for the title of "least democratic in Africa."

But while he has been singled out for condemnation by the West, leaders of other autocratic states in Africa have largely been able to avoid sanctions and isolation. Many have friends in Western capitals. Or play a strategic role in the war against terrorist groups. Or sit on oil...How many African leaders can point a clean finger at him? How many held a better election than his one-man runoff that followed a campaign of violence against his foes that induced the opposition leader to quit the race?

"It seems Washington and European governments will accept even the most dubious election so long as the 'victor' is a strategic or commercial ally," Kenneth Roth, executive director of New York-based Human Rights Watch said

Among countries he singled out as sham democracies are oil-rich Chad and Nigeria; Uganda, whose President Yoweri Museveni's friendship with President Bush has shielded him from criticism; and Ethiopia, a major U.S. ally against Islamic militants.Other oil producers that have managed to avoid international condemnation include Angola, which hasn't held a presidential election since 1992, and Gabon, where President Omar Bongo seized power in a 1967 coup and now reigns as Africa's longest-serving leader.

"Countries that have made a point of overtly aligning themselves with U.S. narratives and policies regarding terrorism appear to have benefited not only from financial and military support but seem successfully to have diverted attention away from their internal poor governance and human rights abuse," said Akwe Amosu, senior analyst at the Open Society Institute in Washington.

We are minded of that oft quoted statement of diplomacy and real politic.

"He might be a son-of-a-bitch---but he is OUR son-of-a -bitch"

Only sheep need leaders

From the Independant

"Do you find yourself staring at the television and pining for a good leader – a person who will rise and make the world right again? Do you long for a Mandela, a Churchill, a Gandhi? Then grow up. Our political debate – what passes for it – increasingly focuses on a search for an elusive Messianic leader who will show us the way. This is the opposite of rational politics...

...Apartheid was not just a system of laws; it was an economic system where a tiny white elite owned almost everything. By 1990, the elite realised they could no longer maintain the laws – but they fought desperately to maintain economic control. They demanded that the land and resources they had stolen from poor blacks be recognised in the constitution as theirs, and never redistributed. They demanded that the new democracy pick up all of apartheid's debts, making spending to lift up the poor majority impossible. They demanded the recognition of "intellectual property rights", making the distribution of cheap Aids drugs unaffordable. They demanded their apartheid finance minister and head of the Central Bank continue in position. Western governments, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank piled in behind them in support.

Mandela agreed to it all. He discreetly buried the ANC's Freedom Charter, with its commitments to clean water, free healthcare and land for all. The result is that today whites own 70 per cent of the South African economy, despite being only 10 per cent of the population. Mandela believed this deal was the only way to prevent white flight and increase poverty. But he was wrong. Since the fall of apartheid, average life expectancy has fallen by 13 years. The black unemployment rate has doubled. This isn't because white ruled ceased; it is because it continues today, with a new black corporate logo..."

Socialists have always been wary of placing our faith , more importantly , placing our political power into the hands of individuals . The American socialist Eugene Debs who several times stood for the presidency of the United States tried to make workers aware of the danger of trusting leadership .

" I never had much faith in leaders. I am willing to be charged with almost anything, rather than to be charged with being a leader. I am suspicious of leaders, and especially of the intellectual variety. Give me the rank and file every day in the week...I would be ashamed to admit that I had risen from the ranks. When I rise it will be with the ranks, and not from the ranks. "

and again more poignantly he also said:-

"I don't want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into this promised land if I could because if I could lead you in, someone else could lead you out."

Today , the World Socialist Movement doesn't have a leader, and nor do any of the Companion Parties, because leadership is undemocratic. If there are leaders, there must be followers: people who just do what they are told.
In the World Socialist Movement, every individual member has an equal say, and nobody tells the rest what to do. Decisions are made democratically by the whole membership, and by representatives or delegates. If the membership doesn't like the decisions of those it elects, those administrators can be removed from office and their decisions overridden.
Only when people have real, democratic control over their own lives will they have the freedom that is socialism.

Fishing Again

Ivory Coast is calling on the United Nations to lift an arms embargo that it says has prevented the defence of its waters from illegal fishing boats.Under the embargo, the government says it cannot buy the spare parts needed to repair two navy boats that used to patrol the country's waters.

Fishing unions say catches have declined by three-quarters to 40,000 crates a year since the start of the conflict because of illegal fishing.

"It's a vital sector," says Jeanson Djobo, the government's director of fish production."Fish is a staple food, so if the fishing sector dies, it'll create lots of problems for Ivorians."

African ministers are meeting in Namibia to discuss how to stop illegal and unregulated fishing.The meeting in the capital, Windhoek, aims to encourage governments in Africa and beyond to register fishing vessels and their activities.Illegal and unregulated fishing is estimated to cost Africa $1bn (£500m) a year in lost revenue.

The ecological cost may, in the long run, be much higher.

"The immediate ecological impact is damage to habitat, because they are using trawls, and trawls are not always good for the ecosystems - they damage habitat for fish," says Dr Diallo ,programme manager for the environmental group WWF's West Africa office, and a former fisheries officer."The second thing is pollution, because they are discharging at sea, and they can do anything they want."

Nigerian government's health neglect

In Nigeria , 59,000 women die during or soon after childbirth every year.

Nigeria's maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the world, after India -- 1,100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The country is home to 2 percent of the global population, but 10 percent of all maternal deaths take place there.

The Center for Reproductive Rights places blame squarely on the "government's lack of political will" to implement policies and allocate funds to improve women's health and prevent maternal deaths.

It also points to widespread corruption in the oil-rich country as a fundamental problem undermining health care for women.

For example, one study found that 42 percent of Nigerian health care workers went unpaid for as long as six months, although the funds had been provided by the federal government. As a result, these workers began demanding "contributions" from women seeking maternity-related care.Similarly, the report notes that public health facilities demand that women seeking care provide many of the needed supplies (disinfectant, bandages, etc.), and require the women to purchase a particular brand.Women who deliver in hospitals must pay immediately or risk detention. One informant told CRR researchers of a woman who fled the hospital in the night after undergoing a birth by Caesarian section, even before her stitches were removed.

"I have seen women who after delivery had to come round the wards begging for money."

The government has also failed to provide access to information on family planning and contraception, two issues very closely related to maternal death. Early marriage is common in Nigeria, and young women are often required to conceive immediately and frequently, endangering their health.This failure, CRR charges, means that the government "violates its duties under international human rights law, namely its obligation to ensure the right to health, the right to access family planning services and information, the right to decide on the number and spacing of children, and the right to equality and non-discrimination."

African youth don't matter to Tobacco barons i

A British tobacco giant is breaking its own marketing code covering the sale of cigarettes to young people in Africa.
An investigation for the BBC has found evidence in Nigeria, Malawi and Mauritius of rules being broken.
The World Health Organization (WHO) predicts that the number of smoking-related deaths in Africa is 100,000 a year, but that that figure is set to double in the next 20 years.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7475259.stm

.

Profits before democracy

London-based mining giant Anglo American has defended plans to develop a platinum mine in Zimbabwe. The project in the central district of Unki would be worth about $400m (£200m) and would be Zimbabwe's largest foreign investment

Analysts said that Anglo American's move was driven by a desire to boost profits, as demand for commodities grew and rivals stepped up competition for resources in Africa - including firms from China. The increased demand for platinum, used in the electronics industry and in catalytic converters for cars, has caused world prices for the metal to soar.

We have reported previously on Anglo-Americans greed and are not surprised they ignore political advice
"Where businesses are helping the Zimbabwean regime, they should reconsider their position now," Prime Minister Gordon Brown told MPs on Wednesday.

A Whale of a Lie

Socialist Banner has previously reported on hw fishing crisis around the African coast and another story has come to our attention .A coalition of conservation groups and a leading fisheries scientist have accused Japan of damaging the fisheries interests of poorer countries.
They say Japan promotes the argument that whales are responsible for declining fish stocks in order to boost support for whale hunting.

Daniel Pauly, director of the University of British Columbia Fisheries Centre, said there was abundant evidence that whales are not behind the decline in fish stocks.
"Blaming whales is an issue that is not only false - whales are no more responsible than the Martians - but which prevents the very small resources of West African countries from being devoted to understanding the real reasons why their fisheries are declining," he said.

Some developing countries, notably along the west coast of Africa, have seen stocks fall abruptly as fleets from Europe and East Asia have moved either legally or illegally into grounds that had previously been the preserve of small scale local fishermen. But some of these countries evidently believe the fish are disappearing largely because whales are eating them , diverting from the real cause of he depleion of fish stocks .

The Pew Environment Group said Japan has been raising the issue "to scare and recruit countries into supporting its move to end the whaling moratorium."

Marketing Poverty

From the fraternal blog Reasons to be Impossible

So according to the FAO:
Per capita food production has declined in Africa for the past 30 years and farm productivity in Africa is just one-quarter the global average. Today, more than 200 million people are chronically hungry in the region, and 33 million children under age five are malnourished.and we hear from the BBC, Kofi Annan:
Attending the Rome conference in his new role as the chair of Agra, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, he said the African farmer was the only farmer in the world that still took all the risks, often operating without financial support, expertise or safety nets. AGRA makes an interesting point:
Markets can play an important role in improving the incomes of poor farmers. However, markets in Africa are generally poorly organised and volatile, and often inaccessible to small-scale farmers. Also lacking is the market information that farmers need to negotiate good prices for their produce. Even such basic information as current wholesale and retail prices is rarely available. Therefore, building efficient and well-integrated input markets (through which farmers can buy supplies), and output markets (enabling farmers to sell their harvest) is key to encouraging farmers’ adoption of sustainable agricultural technologies.

All of which is to highlight two things - firstly, that most of the world does not play by market rules when it comes to food - food security is national security, and security of food prices stabilises labour markets (food soars, we strike).

Secondly, the state of Africa's markets shows that people left to themselves do not just create functional markets.

Now, I seem to recall reading one African post-liberation leader, discussing how traditional African nmarkets were inherently socialist (I can't remember who) - but the fact of the matter is that the sharing of information is a necessary prelude to socialism - if, as I heard on the radio last night, after a bit of investment Malawi has trebled its food output, there is reason to hope that this programme will work, and the horror of starvation may be obliterated. but, mark you, it isn't sponanteous markets that will be doing the work, but conscious investment, and co-operation. The capital markets have failed in Africa.

Ethiopia

"There's not enough food and everyone's starving and that's all there is to it."

From a Zambian comrade

Two contributions from comrade Kephas Mulenga in Zambia:

SOCIALISM AND TRADE UNIONS

Becoming a member of the WSM entails the acceptance of the class struggle—political
consciousness envisages working class political solidarity. But must a member of the
WSM participate in trade unions?

It is empirically justified that a working class person must join a trade union in
order to improve his working conditions.

The moral principle of trade unionism is labour arbitration and not class antagonism
as such. Trade unionism intensifies economic and labour reforms and this restrains
working class political solidarity. It is the case that a member of the WSM needs
not to participate in a trade union or labour movement…because trade unions restrain
working class political solidarity. Because the working class has not yet achieved
its emancipation from the limiting conditions of wage employment, we must expect
that a member of the WSM may find it socially unjustified not to participate in a
trade union in the sense that the moral principle of trade unionism is labour
arbitration and not political revolution as such.

We are of the opinion that trade unions are not vehicles of working class political
solidarity otherwise than as movements of labour arbitration.

In Africa trade unions have become a vital source of class pressure. It is a fact
that trade unions in Africa are controlled by political charlatans—they tend to be
more politically vocal. It is my contention that a member of the WSM in Africa must
not underestimate the significance of racial and cultural prejudices (nationalism)
that remain to transcend all political and class barriers.

SOCIALISM AND REVOLUTION

The political subject of scientific socialism is conceived as an intellectual and
theoretical detachment. Thus the definition of class struggle and revolution remains
so much exaggerated in situations where the political subject of scientific
socialism remains so far removed from the entrenched political and academic
conventions. It may come to pass that working class political consciousness is not
so much politicised in Africa today. What I am trying to emphasise is the fact that
working class self-consciousness has not yet attained its political and social
emancipation from the limiting cultural and tribal prejudices (nationalism).

Nationalism is a cultural and political limitation in as much as African economic
underdevelopment comes to presuppose racial and cultural antagonism between Africa
and Europe. Thus the dilemma of African economic underdevelopment comes to be
conceived through racial prejudice—black consciousness is the language of African
nationalism. The extent to which the working class in Africa can achieve its social
and political emancipation may come to depend upon the existing historical
conditions. Socialism can only be realised in conditions where the working class has
achieved its emancipation from the limiting political and cultural limitations.
Though we may take it for granted African economic underdevelopment is a direct
product of European neo-colonialism, yet we are ready to point out that nepotism,
tribalism and corruption are also contributing to African economic underdevelopment.
Political independence in African was a hybrid of bourgeois black nationalism and
not of peasant revolution as such.

The fact is that Africa will never attain its economic development from within the
existing mode of capitalistic economic and production relations based upon the
exploitation of man by man.

your child's health report

The report, "The State of Africa's Children 2008," was launched on May 28 at the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in Japan.

The facts are shocking.

Although Africa accounts for only 22 percent of births globally, half of the 10 million child deaths annually occur on the continent. Africa is the only continent that has seen rising numbers of deaths among children under five since the 1970s.

Many of these children die of preventable and curable diseases.

UNICEF's report says malaria is the cause of 18 percent of under-five deaths in Africa. Diarrheal diseases and pneumonia -- both illnesses that thrive in poor communities where sanitation is severely compromised, and where residents are often undernourished and exposed to pollution -- account for a further 40 percent of child deaths. Another major killer is AIDS.

sub-Saharan Africa is unlikely to achieve any of the health-related Millenium Development Goals by 2015; the continent lags behind on progress towards eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, improving maternal health, and halting and reversing the spread of HIV. One in every six children in sub-Saharan Africa will still die before his or her fifth birthday. The region is described by UNICEF as the most difficult place in the world for a child to survive.

In South Africa, 250,000 children under 15 are HIV-positive -- a huge proportion of the estimated 400,000 children under 15 who have been infected with HIV in Africa. Despite the expanded provision of anti-retroviral drugs, 64,000 more children contract the virus in South Africa each year. Across the southern African region, under-five deaths have risen by 17 percent between 1990 and 2006; these deaths are mostly attributed to HIV/AIDS.
In West and Central Africa, there were more people without access to clean drinking water in 2004 than in 1990. Unsafe drinking water can cause diarrhea, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases.

It needn't be like that !

There can be expanded immunization programs, the increased use of insecticide-treated bed nets, and the provision of vitamin A supplements to children.
Other interventions in Africa include exclusive breast-feeding practices up to six months and the prescription of anti-retroviral medication to prevent mother to child transmission of HIV.
In Ghana, all pregnant women are now covered by an intervention program that includes iron and folic acid supplementation and preventative treatment for malaria. All children between six months and five years of age are vaccinated against childhood diseases like measles and polio.
In Malawi, the government has rolled out immunization programs as well as micronutrient supplementation -- small amounts of vital minerals like iron, cobalt, chromium, and copper. The government is also building wells to improve access to clean water for people living in remote towns and villages.
Rethinking the supply and management of water systems is also crucial. In Ghana, a water reform program introduced in the 1990s has met with huge success. Responsibility for water supplies was transferred to local governments and rural communities and by 2004 access to clean water sources had increased to 75 percent from a low 55 percent.

Just imagine if there were no financial budgets acting as restraints on peoples needs and that the labour hours spent on wars and State oppression were re-directed to constructive and not destructive purposes.

Don't Die for Oil

The Sudan government and rebels from the south signed the accords making up a peace deal to end 21 years of fighting. The agreement included a permanent ceasefire, and protocols on sharing power and wealth. The conflict - Africa's longest-running civil war - had pitted the Muslim north against Christians and animists in the south, leaving some 1.5 million people dead.

Yet was it all to do with religion and Sharia Law ? The latest news from south Sudan describes scavenger birds picking through the charred remains of houses and shops in the central Sudanese town of Abyei, four days after violent clashes between troops from the North and South of the country ended. tens of thousands of people fled from the town and surrounding area to escape days of sporadic fighting. Looters steal what they can , the northern soldiers who now control the town stand looking on.
"We have been to the centre of Abyei and it doesn't exist any more," said the head of the UN mission in Sudan, Ashraf Qazi.

Border demarcation and the status of Abyei were at the heart of the problems.

Both North and South are desperate to have Abyei inside their borders because of the oil fields that surround the town.

Once again , war comes down to the mundane competition for resources and religion used as camoflage to justify rivalry and delude people into dying for oil .

Capitalist Markets and Food Shortages

From the BBC we read that six million children in Ethiopia are at risk of acute malnutrition following the failure of rains, the UN children's agency, Unicef, has warned. The WFP estimates it needs to raise $147m (£75m) to tackle Ethiopia's needs. Aid workers say the money just is not arriving, with donors concentrating on the disasters in Burma and China.

Ethiopia for most of the past three decades has survived on millions tonnes of donated food and millions of dollars in cash. It has received more emergency support than any other African nation in that time. Its population is increasing by 2m every year, yet over the past 10 years, its net agricultural production has steadily declined. Even in good years, some 5m people need food aid just to survive.

Why, with so much international support, have things gotten worse and not better?

Foremost is that any large-scale intervention by definition distorts local economics.
"We import huge amounts of grain from abroad. So this will inevitably affect the internal production and markets," said the Deputy Prime Minister Addisu Legesse.
When foreign aid lands, local prices collapse, and farmers who have managed to produce a surplus find their crop is virtually worthless. They have no money to pay for seed or fertiliser for the following year.

One Class , One Struggle

Companion bloggers The World Socialist carries an article that has been often commented upon here on the Socialist Banner - the rise of xenophobia in South Africa - the search for scapegoats for the failure of the ending of the apartheid era and the ANC government to satisfy the material needs of those who put their faith in the promise of change .

"...it depends on your ability to pay…"

"We have a water problem"

You have to buy water or you have to draw water yourself… We get water from far away, because if you are getting it from up there at Chemichemi springs…everyone is at that place… It is just a ditch and that ditch used by all the people in this area. Everyone has to form a line and it takes many hours...If you do not have water, you have to pay 300 shillings and that represents school fees, so we have a water problem. There are those people who have dug wells and there are those who have taps, so it depends on your ability [to pay]… If you have money, about 10,000 shillings, you can connect pipes to your house.The tap water comes on in one area at a time. For example, it may be available in the part with the hospital, but there is none this side [of Kimana] - but we understand… I have neighbours whom God has helped and they have tap water and also pumped water. They sell it. One container is 2 shillings. You are forced to buy it - if you do not want the water from the ditch you have to buy it.

African health worker gap catastrophic

Socialist Banner has previously reported upon the African brain drain and especially in the health service sector ( here and here ) . Freedom Press have produced an article which is worthy of a re-post .

Rob Ray looks at claims that a brain drain to West is crippling healthcare across the African continent, for Freedom Press

It has been revealed that the global shortfall in healthcare professionals has reached four million people – with one million needed in Africa alone. The figures were voiced at the Global Forum on Human Resources for Health, which opened in the Ugandan capital of Kampala on March 3rd.
Poor working conditions in Africa, along with heavy incentives from the West, are drawing a heavy proportion of newly-trained health professionals out of the continent. Some 57 countries, especially in Africa and Asia, are particularly affected and unable to effectively provide health services for the population, which also hampers prevention and information campaigns, drug distribution and other life-saving interventions.

Africa has been particularly badly hit as measures from wealthy countries to encourage skilled workers to emigrate have stripped African countries, particularly in sub-saharan regions, of up to 75% of their physicians (Mozambique) and up to 82% of nurses.

"They seek better employment and quality of life. Income is an important motivation for migration [as well as] better working conditions, career opportunities and more job satisfaction," Sigrun Mogedal, one of the conference organisers, said.

Across the continent, Africa has 11% of the world population and 24% of the global burden of disease, but only 3% of the world’s health workers. Nine countries, including Britain, the US, France, South Africa, Belgium, Spain, Canada, Australia and Portugal, received the vast majority of all migration from Africa – 92.4%, amounting to over 65,000 people in the year 2000 (the most recent figures available).

Britain has been particularly active in Kenya, recruiting the vast majority of the 51% of healthcare workers which have left the country, leaving many of those injured in recent fighting around the elections unable to find medical help.

At the conference, Ugandan health minister Stephen Malinga said that wealthier African countries, particularly South Africa, had been poaching healthcare workers as their own emigrate – around 5% of South African health professionals leave the country. The effect created is of a feeder chain, with the wealthiest countries buying in doctors and nurses from African countries, wealthier African countries copying the tactic to draw people away from weaker neighbours, and the poorest and most vulnerable populations left with the least protection.

Uganda is facing an acute shortage as there is only one doctor for every 15,000 patients, far below the recommended 1.5 per 10 patients. Last October, the Ugandan Ministry of Health reported a staggering shortfall of 2,290 nurses out of the required 5,568 in government funded hospitals alone.

While money is often sent back to the country by healthcare workers abroad, the absence of proper healthcare is contributing to a catastrophic fatality rate. The Global Health Workforce Alliance said one in four doctors trained in Africa was working in western industrialised countries.

MAYDAY 2008

Mayday belongs to the workers. Although that means admitting that the rest of the year belongs to the capitalists , it also means that we know who we are – the first step to changing our condition.

Mayday belongs to the workers – we have a world to win, and we can win it.