No Money - No Food

 Just 15 per cent of its land is good enough to produce food or raise animals and now, for the third time in the past decade, drought has returned to Niger.

Aid agencies earlier this year revealed that tens of thousands of people died needlessly last year in the Horn of Africa because aid donors waited until people started dying to respond. Now agencies hoping to prevent a similar famine in the landlocked West African nation of Niger are having trouble getting aid donors to take notice. More than 5 million people in the Sahel region are facing famine and aid agencies want to move early before the dire situation becomes a crisis. Signs of the looming famine in the Sahel were first detected late last year - that is when aid organisations started issuing pleas for help.But selling the prevention message is never easy when there are not corpses to go with it.

 Denise Gibson, the World Food Program's country director in Niger, says the situation is urgent.
"What we've seen in over the past couple of months is a steady deterioration in the food security situation. The poorest people ... their situation is not getting any better, it's getting worse. People are still eating, they are eating wild leaves, they are eating wild berries, we don't want them to be eating that, but they are still eating," Ms Gibson said.

And when they run out of wild leaves and berries?

 Once again it is reported that there here is food in the markets in Niger, but people do not have the money to buy it.

In the predominantly rural economy, where 80 per cent of people rely on subsistence agriculture to survive, a succession of droughts has sapped the funds of most people. Oil has recently been discovered in the Niger and it is set to become the world's second-largest uranium exporter, but for the moment many of its people are struggling to survive.

Is this really the future for Africa farming?

“Basically this is disaster capitalism. The disaster of hunger and drought, climate change and policy-related, is now a profit opportunity for Monsanto and Syngenta..." Joan Baxter, a journalist who has spent years reporting on climate change and agriculture in Africa. Baxter sees a problem in how GM technology is being marketed, and slowly introduced, into African countries, under the guise of ending famine. With climate change becoming an increasingly influential factor in the GM debate, Baxter said companies claiming to help are only looking for profit. "The farmers [in Africa] may lose their own seeds, perhaps be given GM seeds for a year or two, then have to purchase them and be stuck in the trap and in debt,” she said.

In recent years, donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have invested millions of dollars into researching, developing and promoting genetically modified (GM) technology, including drought-resistant maize, within the country — and have found a great deal of success in doing so through partnerships with local NGOs and government bodies. Researchers and lobbyists argue that in a country so frequently stricken by food shortages, scientific advancements can put food into hungry bellies. Drought-resistant seeds and vitamin-enriched crops could be agricultural game changers, they say.

The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI), a semi-autonomous government research institution, recently announced that after years of trials, genetically modified drought-resistant maize seeds will be available to Kenyan farmers within the next five years. Trial GM drought-resistant cotton crops are already growing in Kidoko, 240 miles southeast of Nairobi. African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), a massive NGO working on GM research and development in partnership with KARI, Regulatory Affairs Manager Dr. Francis Nang’ayo says GM crops are “substantially equivalent” to non-genetically modified foods and should be embraced as a solution to persistent drought and hunger. AATF received a $47 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This partnership involved the Howard G. Buffett Foundation and American seed giant Monsanto. Gates Foundation claim that biotechnology and GM crops would help end poverty and food insecurity in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Gates Foundation had invested $27.6 million in Monsanto shares. Until 2008, South Africa had been the only country using GM technology. Now Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Mali, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Ghana are researching GM seeds and growing trial crops of cotton, maize and sorghum.

Monsanto-patented seeds are usually costly, which has led to numerous accusations of exploitation and contemporary colonialism. But how long will these particular strains of seeds last? What are the guarantees? Critics fear dependence on corporate fertilizers and pesticides, the emergence of super-weeds and pests that can no longer repel GM varieties, and terminator seeds that only last for one planting season.

AGRA Watch, a project of the Community Alliance for Global Justice, director Heather Day said  “Genetically modified crops actually haven’t been that successful,” Day added. “We’ve seen massive crop failure in South Africa, and farmers there couldn’t get financial remedies or compensation for their losses. There’s genetic resistance and super-pests, these things are happening now, and it’s not surprising. It’s what you would expect from an ecological standpoint."

In India, for example, farmers who purchased Bollgard I cotton seeds from 2007 to 2009 wound up spending four times the price of regular seeds, and paying dearly for it. It was believed that Monsanto’s patented GM seeds would be resistant to pink bollworms, which were destroying cotton crops across swaths of India, but by 2010 Monsanto officials were forced to admit that the seed had failed and a newer breed of far more aggressive pests had emerged. The solution? Bollgard II, an even stronger GM cotton seed. As of December 2011, Monsanto was actively promoting the latest Bollgard III cotton seed, stronger than ever before. Pesticide spending in India skyrocketed between 2007 and 2009, forcing thousands of farmers into crushing debt, and hundreds more into giving up their land. Some media outlets later drew a connection between the Bollgard debacle and a rash of suicides across farms that had purchased the seeds.

Agriculture dominates Kenya’s economy, although more than 80 percent of its land is too dry and infertile for efficient cultivation. Kenya is the second largest seed consumer in sub-Saharan Africa, and Nairobi is a well-known hub for agricultural research. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, farming is the largest contributor to Kenya’s gross domestic product, and 75 percent of Kenyans made their living by farming in 2006. Half of the country’s total agricultural output is non-marketed subsistence production — meaning farms where nothing (or very little) is sold and everything is consumed.

Kenya is a country where land-grabbing is all too common, be it on the coast to make way for new tourist resorts, or in Nairobi, where slum demolitions left hundreds homeless when the government bulldozed several apartment buildings to reclaim an area near the Moi Air Base.

Farmers here are skeptical of risking everything for a few seasons of higher yields.

Anne Maina, advocacy coordinator for the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), a coalition of 65 Kenyan farming organizations, said “Our public research institutions must shift their focus back to farmers’ needs,” she told The Indypendent, “rather than support the agenda of agribusiness, which is to colonize our food and seed chain. We believe that the patenting of seed is deeply unethical and dangerous.” Added to the potential problems with GM technology are health risks—the strains of maize that were illegally imported in 2010 had been deemed unsafe for children and the elderly. Maina also worries about animal feeding trials that showed damage to liver, kidney and pancreas, effects on fertility, and stomach bleeding in livestock that has consumed GM feed. A more recent study carried out on pregnant women in Canada found genetically modified insecticidal proteins in their blood streams and in that of their unborn children, despite assurances from scientists that it wasn’t possible. “Our key concern is that the development of insecticides and pesticides is primarily the emergence of companies getting farmers to buy highly toxic chemicals, which they will become totally dependent on. We don’t yet know the extent of the health risks posed, nor how we are expected to trust companies that have a record of putting small farmers out of business. It is time for sober second thought,” she said.

At the McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health in Toronto, researchers recently released a report titled “Factors in the adoption and development of agro-biotechnology in sub-Saharan Africa.”  and came to the conclusion that “poor communication is affecting agbiotech adoption,” and that “widespread dissemination of information at the grassroots level and can spread misinformation and create extensive public concern and distrust for agbiotech initiatives.” The report was financed by a grant by the Gates Foundation.

http://www.alternet.org/world/155376/frankenfoods%3A_why_is_the_gates_foundation_helping_monsanto_push_genetically_modified_food/?page=entire

Angola: food is available - people cannot afford it

Millions of Angola's poorest families are facing critical food insecurity as a prolonged dry spell across large parts of the country has destroyed harvests and killed off livestock. Up to 500,000 children are now thought to be suffering from severe malnutrition triggered by the collapse in food production after a lengthy dry season in the first three months of this year. Crop yields are down by as much as 70 percent in some places.

 There are reports of subsistence farmers abandoning their fields altogether in a bid to find other paid work in towns and cities so that they can feed their families, and large commercial farms are laying off workers because there is no harvest to gather.

  Koen Vanormelingen, the United Nations Children's Fund representative in Angola, explained
"This is not a famine, it is an issue of food insecurity. There is food available; the issue is that because people are not producing as much food, they must buy more. And because their production has gone down, their income has also gone down so they cannot afford to buy food, and as supply falls and demand increases, prices are going up - in some cases doubling."

 Despite Angola's enormous oil wealth and the International Monetary Fund's forecast that GDP will swell by 9.7 percent in 2012, nearly two thirds of rural households live on less than 1.75 dollars a day and one of the highest child mortality rates in the world, with 20 percent of youngsters dying before they reach their fifth birthday.

Poor diet is a major factor in the high death rates and according to the latest National Nutrition Survey, carried out in 2007, nearly 30 percent of children under five are stunted, more than eight percent are wasted, and close to 16 percent are underweight.

Vanormelingen explained that this year's weak harvest was already taken its toll on the most vulnerable children, who were showing elevated rates of malnutrition."These people were already living on the border line and were scraping by at the best of times," he said."But where they were once eating a varied diet three times a day, now they are having just one meal a day, maybe two, and they are restricted to a very poor selection of cassava and bananas. It is a very serious situation and we are very concerned because we are seeing a significant increase in malnutrition and malnutrition-related mortality in children," 

More land-grab in Malawi

The construction of an inland port at Nsanje meant linking land-locked Malawi with the Indian Ocean port of Chinde, 238 kilometres away in neighbouring Mozambique, through the Shire-Zambezi Waterway project. The aim was to reduce the high costs of importing and exporting goods by road via Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre and the Mozambican port city of Beria - a round trip of about 1,200 kilometres.

“There’s no evidence that Nsanje will ever be a big port city,” said Nsanje resident Rose Samuel  . “We’ve heard that down the river it’s so narrow that a ship can’t pass, so we don’t think [the port] will be in use anytime soon.” Samuel has more reason to be bitter than most. Her family was among about 300 that used to farm land now occupied by the port. “Those families affected had to uproot maize that was already planted,” said Samuel. “Some were old people who left crying - that was their only source of income.” Samuel’s family received a mere 5,000 kwacha (US$20) for one hectare of ancestral land, for which they had no title deeds. Her family now survive by doing piece-work and renting a small plot of land to grow food. Many others have yet to receive anything. “People are worried that if they can grab land without paying, what will stop them removing more people from the area.”

Townspeople have been told by the Traditional Authority not to build any new houses because the land has been earmarked for development, and Nsanje’s District Commissioner, Rodney Simwaka, told IRIN that his office has received 4,000 applications for land from developers who are banking on the port eventually becoming operational. Village headman Black Richman Khembo told IRIN, “Lots of land has been bought by rich people hoping to make money. So far they are letting people remain on the land, but someday they will probably kick them off.”

http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95438/MALAWI-Dream-fades-for-inland-port-project

Booming Africa 2

Following on from the earlier blog Booming Africa we read that the Africa Progress Panel found that African countries were growing consistently faster than almost any other region, with booming exports and more foreign investment. Ghana was the fastest growing economy in the world in 2011 and Ethiopia expanded more quickly than China in the five years to 2009.

 But it warned that there was a contrast between a growing yet still relatively small middle class and the Africans left behind. Although seven out of 10 people in the region live in countries that have averaged growth of more than 4% a year for the past decade, Annan's study found that almost half of Africans were still living on incomes below the internationally accepted poverty benchmark of $1.25 a day. The "trickle-down" pattern of economic growth was leaving too many people in destitution.

 "The deep, persistent and enduring inequalities in evidence across Africa have consequences," the report said. "They weaken the bonds of trust and solidarity that hold societies together. Over the long run, they will undermine economic growth, productivity and the development of markets."

Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan added: "It cannot be said often enough, that overall progress remains too slow and too uneven; that too many Africans remain caught in downward spirals of poverty, insecurity and marginalisation; that too few people benefit from the continent's growth trend and rising geo-strategic importance; that too much of Africa's enormous resource wealth remains in the hands of narrow elites and, increasingly, foreign investors without being turned into tangible benefits for its people."

Look out for ourselves

Africa is the only region in the world where agricultural production per inhabitant has fallen in the past 20 years, with productivity per hectare two times lower than the average for developing countries. Fertiliser use is only 13kg/ha, compared to 190kg/ha in East Asia, according to the FAO. Despite Africa's huge rivers and water resources, only 3% of the land is irrigated, compared to more than 20% in the rest of the world. Both the quality and quantity of food are wanting, with sub-Saharan Africa home to 239 million of the world's 925 million undernourished people in 2010.  Zimbabwe's agriculture minister Joseph Made announced in early March that 500,000ha of this season's maize crop – about one-third of the total area planted – has been written off because of erratic rainfall.

African governments have failed to keep to a pledge made in 2003 in Maputo to spend 10% of their budgets on agriculture. Spending hovers around 4%, compared to 11-14% in Asia.

International aid has also failed to materialise. In  2009, the G8 meeting at L'Aquila in Italy launched a three-year food security initiative with a $21.5bn pledge. Amid the sovereign debt crisis that followed, the money has not all materialised and the pledge will soon expire. Indian scientist M. S. Swaminathan – known as the father of Asia's green revolution – has lost faith in these global initiatives. "They've gone on making and making declarations. None of them really fulfil their promise. Countries, if they are going to depend upon assurances of this kind, will never make any progress. They must look out for themselves."

At the next G8 summit at Camp David on 19-20 May, aid agencies are mounting another campaign to prevent a looming crisis in the Sahel where 13 million people are at severe risk of malnutrition. Farmers are also sounding early warnings about failed harvests in the breadbasket of southern Africa.

According to the FAO's food price index of 55 commodities, the price of foodstuffs rose 127% between 2001 and 2011. For the urban and peri-urban poor living near the poverty line, price volatility in local markets injects a harsh uncertainly about where the next meal will come from. Urban families can spend 60-80% of their income on food, according to the FAO. Attempts to fix this problem have brought their own contradictions and imbalances. "The powers that be have deliberately privileged urban populations, and so imports, to the detriment of rural populations," says Mamadou Cissoko, honorary president of the Network of West African Farmer and Producer Organisations.

http://theafricareport.com/index.php/20120504501810768/frontline/how-to-feed-africa-s-two-billion-501810768.html

Booming Africa?

Africa is well known for its wealth of natural resources, which includes oil and gas, a variety of metals and minerals as well as huge tracts of agricultural land. These riches have attracted global investors, most notably from emerging market countries such as China, India and Brazil. Many of these investors have been seeking raw materials for their own economic development and markets for their industries.

More than a billion strong and with a median age of just twenty, the population of Africa is now viewd as a burgeoning market in itelf. Consumer spending in Africa rose at a faster pace than India and Brazil in the past decade as surging commodity prices, debt relief and a move to freer economies helped to boost economic growth. Household spending is set to expand 63 percent to $1.4 trillion in Africa by 2020, home to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population, according to a 2010 report by McKinsey & Co.

Teddy Muthusi goes to Kentucky Fried Chicken in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, for more than just fried food: it’s a status symbol. Muthusi gladly spends 1,870 shillings ($22), a quarter of the national monthly minimum wage, to treat his girlfriend at the country’s first U.S.-based fast-food company’s outlet that opened in August. He can afford what many can’t. About 45 percent of Kenya’s population live on less than $1.25 a day, according to the World Bank. “I’m willing to fork out more because it’s cool, it’s trendy, it’s a great place to be seen, and the food is good,” Muthusi, a 36-year-old creative manager at Easy FM radio station said in an interview , raising his voice above the pop music blaring through speakers. “Kenyans have that feeling if you can eat at KFC, you’ve made it. You want to be part of that KFC conversation with friends, on Facebook, in the office,” he said.

About 200 million to 300 million people in Africa earn $730 to $3,650 a year, according to Shantayanan Devarajan, chief economist for Africa at the Washington-based World Bank. “That’s a healthy market for consumer-goods producers,”

According to Devarajan, the potential for growth in consumer spending is greatest in Ghana, where an oil boom fueled economic growth of 14.4 percent in 2011. Nigeria, Africa’s most- populous nation of more than 160 million people and Kenya, East Africa’s largest economy that expanded an average 5.6 percent a year since 2007, will probably also see an increase in retail demand. Sub- Saharan Africa’s economy will expand 5.4 percent this year, the fastest-growing region after developing Asian nations, the International Monetary Fund said

A Done Deal?

Kipawa, a district of Tanzania's Dar es Salaam, used to be a lively neighbourhood, home to about 1,300 families. Many residents had lived there for most of their lives. More than 480 families protested against a proposed compensation package that, they said, undervalued their homes by 50% and was based on an obsolete land acquisition act dating from 1967. Nevertheless, in February 2010, the eviction was carried out suddenly. Teargas was used and more than 300 buildings were demolished within two days. Many people became homeless overnight, according to the Legal and Human Rights Centre, a Tanzania-based NGO.

Now, the area has been completely demolished and fenced in. A sign on the fence says a Chinese company, China International Fund, is to construct a terminal building here as part of a project to extend the country’s main airport. It is almost two years since the community was evicted to make way for the development, and yet there are no signs of construction in Kipawa. The displacement may turn out to be pointless, since the Tanzanian government has admitted the investment for its airport projects is not yet in place. The area has become a deserted field. Most former residents were relocated 36km to the west; they no longer have access to electricity, clean water, roads or schools, and they face long journeys.

 In March 2007 Chinese businessman Sam Po flew his private jet into Tanzania. Po represents the 88 Queensway Group, a body of companies – including the China International Fund (CIF) and China Sonangol International Holding. He offered to upgrade Julius Nyerere international airport and revive Air Tanzania, the national flag-carrier. Po promised six other projects.  A few months later  China Sonangol was granted licences to explore two oilfields in the Lake Rukwa basin in south-west Tanzania. It is clear the two deals were linked. Sonangol has been granted oil concessions outside normal procedure in 2009. A year later, the parliament forced the authorities to withdraw the oil licences granted to the Chinese company.

Meanwhile, the 1,300 families evicted from Kipawa are still struggling to rebuild their lives.

 http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2012/03/02/chinese-investment-in-tanzania-results-in-mass-evictions/

quote

"If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire." - George Monbiot

Growth goes up - so does hunger

You wouldn't know there's a food crisis in this country, one of Africa's wealthiest and most stable countries, because it's a silent one. This is not the doom and gloom Africa that we often hear sensationalised in the media as a place of coups, famines and corruption. No, Botswana is a model African state which has lived carefully within its means, had democratically elected governments since independence, and is the world's leading exporter of precious diamonds. Africa's resource rich economies continue to grow. In some regards, Botswana is a shining example of successful resource-financed development. It has carefully husbanded a valuable natural resource, diamonds, and invested the proceeds in infrastructure development and education. Botswana's literacy rate of 86 per cent is one of the highest in the world, and its road and hospital infrastructure is admirable. Its government is ranked as one of the least corrupt by Transparency International, it exports high quality, grass-fed beef and its high-end eco-tourism business is booming.

Yet food prices are up here dramatically since 2011, and the rural and urban poor are hurting badly. "Growth with hunger" could be the rest of continent's conundrum in 25 years time. Botswana imports 90 per cent of its food, which has made it particularly vulnerable to rising global food prices. In 2011, global food prices were the highest on average at any time since they began to be systematically recorded in 1990.

Despite consistent growth, the problem is that Botswana also has one of the most inequitable income distributions in the world, second only to Namibia. Resource-based economies are often undiversified and produce deep inequalities. As such, while Botswana is a prosperous middle income country, the median per capita household income in the capital city, Gaborone, is only $2 per day. With two-thirds of the city's population spending nearly half its income on food, rising food prices present a particular problem. Recent surveys suggest that 63 per cent of households in the capital are severely food insecure, and 21 per cent of households in rural areas sometimes go for a day without eating. Botswana does have ample amounts of food, it's just increasingly expensive.

Botswana, while largely rural at independence in 1966, has been urbanising at a phenomenal rate and now has 60 per cent of its population residing in cities and towns. Although Botswana is ahead of its neighbours on this front, the continent as a whole is the most rapidly urbanising region in the world. The poor are disproportionately dependent on agricultural activity. Even the urban poor often depend on food shared with them by relatives in the rural areas. Climate change, the changing macroeconomic structure of the country and liberalised food markets are killing subsistence, dryland agriculture, the long time safety net of the poor. No amount of good governance and welfare payments to the poor can seem to solve the resulting hunger if the price of imported food continues to rise.

The combination of expensive food and deepening inequality means that hunger will persist even if Africa's leaders do everything "right".

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/201254115536921635.html

Niger's shame

Niger is the worst country in the world in which to be a mother, according to a report by Save the Children. Save the Children has highlighted the vast differences between women's experience in Niger and the UK, with those in the former expecting having a one in 16 chance of dying from a pregnancy-related cause, against almost one in 5,000 in the UK.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/08/niger-worst-country-mother

bend down boutiques

A third of all globally donated clothes end up in sub-Saharan Africa. Nicknamed "junks" in Sierra Leone, hand-me-downs account for the majority of outfits in a country where seven out of 10 people live on less than $2 a day. The industry has ballooned to $1bn in Africa since 1990. Ivory Coast, where around 20 tonnes of secondhand clothes flooded the country last year. In neighbouring Ghana, 10 times that amount arrive in an average year.

Quite apart from the ethical issue of donated goods becoming tradeable commodities on which middlemen can turn a profit, there is the threat to local textile industries, swamping fragile domestic textiles markets to consider. 12 countries in Africa are among 31 globally that have now banned their import.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/07/europes-secondhand-clothes-africa

The wealthiest man in Africa

Aliko Dangote is the richest man in Africa. He dwarfs diamond kings, telecom giants and oil magnates, with his estimated $11.2-billion. Dangote's fortune comes cement.

 Dangote, built his fortune on Africa's prodigious hunger for infrastructure — and cement — expanding rapidly since 2000 despite his country's chronic bad governance. When the government drags its feet in laying a gas pipeline to service a factory, he builds it. When he needs a road, he does it. Faced with hopelessly unreliable state electricity, he constructs his own power plants for his factories. He clambered to the top by snapping up privatized state enterprises, then expanding and building his own cement factories and other plants, whose output includes such products as instant noodles and prayer mats.

In that sense, Dangote resembles Russia's billionaire oligarch class, which got rich when the state sold off assets. His close links with Nigeria's political elite gave him an inside line when state assets were privatized — a process that, like Russia's, has been criticized as opaque and corrupt.

Politician Junaid Mohammed said. "The question is whether he was entitled to the businesses at the price he got them and on the terms," he said. "Let us not be naive: A lot of everything that happens in life depends on connections. Your fortunes depend on who will be able to open the door for you."

He had traveled to the Republic of Congo the previous day, met the president, and donated half a million dollars in the aftermath of a munitions depot explosion that killed more than 200 people and flattened an entire neighborhood. (Dangote plans to build a cement plant in the country.)

Critics call Dangote ruthless, and accuse him of aggressive price cutting to drive smaller rivals out of business.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/apr/25/world/la-fg-nigeria-billionaire-20120426

What water shortage? What energy crisis?

Water is a saleable commodity underr capitalism. And, of course, the first thing is to declare that water is a scarce resource and that there exists a shortage of water, a water "crisis" that only capitalism remedies with a price-rationing. The fiction of water shortage in Africa has been a multi-million dollar business.

Much of the conquest of Africa by colonial powers was to reach the source of the Nile and always central to imperial objectives in Africa, requiring the water to support colonial mining, agriculture and industrial uses to the detriment of the vast majority of the peoples. Settler colonialists consumed vast amounts of water for irrigation, sprinkling elegant gardens and for their swimming pools while there was water shortage for the majority. Irrigation schemes had been established by the settlers to provide water for the farms and the political and economic power of settlers. During the period of apartheid, the minority government in cooperation with the World Bank invested in the Lesotho High Water Dam to dispossess the people of Lesotho for industries and big corporate entities in South Africa. As in South Africa, so all over Africa these schemes benefited the rich. And there the negative lessons from the old forms of capitalist industrialization, as witnessed the obscene waste of the Arab Sheiks in the Emirates who are building mega projects based on the salinization of water.

Today we are now being told the truth about the abundance of water resources in Africa."Huge water resource exists under Africa ... Scientists say the notoriously dry continent of Africa is sitting on a vast reservoir of groundwater. They argue that the total volume of water in aquifers underground is 100 times the amount found on the surface. The team have produced the most detailed map yet of the scale and potential of this hidden resource."

 In reality, the publication by the British scientists on the large underground supplies of water should not be news. The scientists collated their information from existing hydro-geological maps from national governments as well as 283 aquifer studies.  It is the kind of work that should have been undertaken by the Economic Commission for Africa and the commissions of the African Union.

The fact that Libya has the highest storage of ground water in Africa has been known by the people of Libya and the people of North Africa. It is for this reason that the government of Libya had embarked on the great water transfer scheme to harness the resources of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. The Libyan state had invested $25 billion in the Great Man-made River Project, a complex 4,000-km long water pipeline buried beneath the desert that could transport two million cubic metres of water a day. The objective of this, (up to 2011) the largest engineering project in Africa was to turn Libya - a nation that is 95 per cent desert - into a food self-sufficient arable oasis.

African policy makers and planners also know that in Africa there are abundant freshwater resources in large rivers and lakes such as the Congo, Nile and Zambezi River basins and in Lake Victoria, the second largest freshwater lake in the world. However, there are great disparities in water availability and use within and between African countries, because the water resources are so unevenly distributed. In regards to the nile , the mal-distribution can be traced back to colonial-dated water treaties.

This fabrication of water shortage had been successfully sold to the point where the idea of providing clean water for all in Africa is reproduced as part of ‘aid’ packages. reproducing the story about food shortages as the story of water risks provided a good foundation for the multibillion dollar aid industry. Food and water ‘security’ became interwoven. Under Millenium Development Goals,  number 7C to "Half, by 2015, the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation" that can only be reached by more neo-liberalism and by opening up African resources to international capital. The World Bank continues to promote the privatization of water resources and support giant water projects that dispossess the working peoples of the urban and rural areas. The World Bank have been at the forefront of the struggles over the ideas of whether water should remain a public good, shared by humans everywhere, or a commodity to be bought and sold on the market.  This same struggle over water has taken place elsewhere in the world and intensified in Latin America where the struggles of the Bolivian people are now legendary. There is deep dispute over water as a source of life for the common good, as opposed to water being understood as an economic "good"  – a commodity to be bought and sold.

The unification of the water resources of Africa is one of the primary bases for African unity with a system of canals linking rivers and lakes in the kind of infrastructure planning that ensures that all will have water. It is socialist planning at the Pan African level which can make water for all a reality. The Nile water shed,  the Congo River basin, the Mano River basin, the Niger River societies and the societies of the Zambezi and Orange rivers there is need for planning so that there is a new concept of integration and unity. These rivers, lakes and underground water resources are commonly owned by all of the peoples.

In the socialism the reconstruction and transformation of Africa will mobilize the energy, skills and talents of all Africans so that the peoples can believe in the ideas of African and World Unity. This vision of reforestation and healing the African environment by the Great Green Wall (a 15km wide and 7000km long swath of land from Djibouti in the east and stretching to Senegal in the West and passing through Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Chad, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania, can mobilize millions of workers, youths and engineers for a new sense of priorities for Africa. Advances in solar energy technology, harnessing the underground water resources, the electrification of Africa and an infrastructure of canal systems await Africa. Such projects places the concept of One People at the level where it touches concretely the lives of the people.

The management of water and water resources continues to be at the top of the list of re-construction. But also ready to be tackled by socialist democratisation are health, electrification and energy,  infrastructure (roads, bridges, rail, canals, and airports), education, agriculture and aquaculture, housing, and information and computer technology. It is time for a complete break from the old forms of "development" and industrialization that threaten to destroy the planet Earth.

The African continent has abundant supplies of water and energy. Among the ample renewable energy resources; hydraulic energy, solar energy, wind energy,  the tidal energy and volcanic thermal energy. It is now possible to plan for the mobilization of the physical and "spiritual" energy of people and with these abundant resources create a new world. The politics of transformation of Africa requires a new politics among the people.

Adapted from here

sex madness by the state

Prosecutors in Zimbabwe have dropped charges against three women accused of raping 17 men.

The women, aged in their 20s, and a male companion were arrested in November on charges of "aggravated indecent assault" amid allegations they lured men into a car and forced them to have sex at gunpoint, knifepoint or using drugged drinks to collect semen for tribal rituals. Police said 31 condoms containing semen were found in the car. The women denied the allegations, saying they had sex for money and did not throw out the condoms.

The women will now face prostitution charges.


http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/three-women-cleared-of-raping-17-men-16153701.html

madness of the market

The southern Senegalese region of Casamance produced 40 million dollars worth of cashews in 2011 – 40,000 tonnes – and employed more than 220,000 people, according to figures from the Chamber of Commerce in Ziguinchor, the regional capital. But as of April this year, production stood at only 8,000 tonnes, more than 15,000 tonnes less than at the same point last year. The sharp drop has been attributed to unfavourable growing conditions, a decrease in rainfall, conflict in Casamance – where anti-personnel mines have been laid on farms - and producers discouraged by low prices. Large-scale Indian buyers come to the capital, Dakar, and contract local traders to actually purchase cashews; these traders in turn dispatch freelance agents to the often remote villages where farmers have nuts for sale. "The Indians will never come to see us here. They pass the work on to intermediaries" Producers told IPS they faced numerous obstacles with respect to storage and transporting their crop from their villages to urban centres. They also said traders offered them laughably low prices for cashews, and argued that they were exploited by intermediaries who depress prices only to resell the nuts for far more to Indian exporters. The Indians will never come to see us here. They pass the work on to intermediaries
Idrissa Diatta, a farmer from Diattacounda, some 80 kilometres from Ziguinchor, said traders offer the equivalent of 60 U.S. cents per kilo at the farm gate, but are reselling it to exporters for nearly three times more, around 1.70 dollars. Abdoulaye Diatta, another planter, says traders sometimes claim prices are low because supply exceeds demand, or foreign currency exchange rates are unfavourable. "But if the dollar exchange rate has shifted, or there's really an oversupply, then we wouldn't see a single cashew nut plucked from the bush. But now every nut is sold. Right now, they're trying to swap us a sack of rice for two sacks of cashews: it's ridiculous."

Jean-Marie Badji, one of the much-maligned middlemen, says the price of unprocessed cashews varies according to changes in the world market, and traders are trying to make ends meet, not trying to dupe growers. "Look, we have to travel out to these villages to collect cashews. The roads are in terrible condition, and the truckers charge us heavily to transport goods over them. And we're talking about completely isolated villages. If we pay more than 250 or 300 CFA (less than a dollar), we risk going bankrupt," he told IPS.
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107653

THE TRAGEDY AND THE FARCE

"Tradition has it that whenever a group of people has tasted the lovely fruits of wealth, security and prestige it begins to find it more comfortable to believe in the obvious lie and accept that it alone is entitled to privilege." - Steve Biko

Despite celebrations of freedom on 27 April every year, severe and widespread poverty persists in South Africa. Our education system is in tatters, the future of many black kids has been declared futureless. Unemployment is sky rocketing, wasting the talents of many young people who are condemned to a life of permanent poverty. Many black people continue to lack access to electricity, clean water and proper sanitation. Many are under nourished.

All these things are happening when the elite and the government officials are living affluent lives. The president has just built a mansion in Enkandla to the tune of more than R400m. Malema has also built a house to the tune of R16m. Every weekend the elite host parties and weddings that cost no less than a million while the people they claim to represent go to bed on an empty stomach and live in absolute poverty. They do not find this morally troubling. They have no conscience, otherwise they would not shoot us with rubber bullets when we protest because they have neglected us. Power and wealth forms a hard shell around their consciousness so that they do not see that it is fellow human beings suffering in the poverty around them.

We live in a society where the unemployment rate is said to be 23% while the truth is different but the government is committed to falsifying figures. The real unemployment rate is closer to 40%. We live in a society where to be black and unemployed is held to mean only one thing - laziness and expecting too much from the government. We live in a society where to speak out against government injustice is said to mean that you are lazy and ungrateful. We live in a society where people that speak out against the injustice that we live with every day means that we are told that we are being used by someone else. We live in a society where the poor are denied basic health care because of our inability to pay. Every time the poor go to the clinics we are certain of getting a Panadol pill regardless of our illness. We live in a society where the affluent elite live in their fortress and bubbles and see nothing wrong with the excessive amount of poverty and inequalities. They see the poor majority as a threat to society. They do not see this society as a threat to the majority. Yes we live in a society where slavery, colonialism and apartheid were abolished and yet the majority of black people live below the poverty line.

Apartheid was only abolished on paper not in real life. What is the difference between the secrecy act of apartheid and the current protection of the information bill? What is the difference between the apartheid homeland leaders and chiefs and the current traditional courts bill? What is the difference between the death of Hector Peterson in  1976 uprising and the recent murder of Andries Tatane? What is the difference between the corrupt apartheid government and the current government that is corrupt beyond repair. Think of the arms deals and all the local municipalities that have become milking cows for the leadership of the ruling party, and then spot the difference. Think of Zuma’s mansion in Enkandla, paid for by the taxpayer’s money and think of the mud house that are surrounding his mansion, mud houses that are crumbling down.

Our leaders are part of the machine that is oppressing us today. They have become stooges of capital. They have not confronted white racism seriously. We are important as far as voting is concerned to them but all they see in us is that we are voting cattle. Our new elite has taken the old masks of the colonialists and is proudly wearing them. The new elite has nothing to do with transforming the nation except to camoflage capitalism.

This whole society needs to be transformed. It needs to be opened up to the participation of the people. Political power and control over resources must be shared. We need revolutionary change. Our unity has never been as urgent a necessity as it is today. The students and the youth, the rural and the poor, the Unemployed People’s Movement and other movements such as Abahlali base Mjondolo, Ilizwi Lamafama, etc. need to unite and form once progressive bloc. We are the agents of change not the new elite that has betrayed the struggle. We need to unite outside their movements because they have privatised our struggle. Like the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement did in the 1970s, we need to unite in our own space, define our own struggle and politics and shake the foundations of capitalism. Forging a real unity of poor people’s movements. The Unemployed People’s Movement was formed in August 2009 to respond to the crisis of unemployment and the commoditization of essential services in a society dominated by corruption and greed. As Steve Biko said, we blacks are tired of standing at the touchlines to witness a game that we should be playing. We want to do things for ourselves and all by ourselves. This is a realisation that we are the protagonists of our lives and nobody will free us but ourselves; we – the unemployed - will have to be our own liberators.

 “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” - Karl Marx. Apartheid was the tragedy, the post-apartheid economic divide is the farce.

Taken and adapted from
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81680

Comrades?

Freedom and democracy in post-apartheid South Africa has meant white minority rule being replaced by rich minority rule. People pretended as if they were freedom fighters while they were freedom robbers. They were wolves wearing the attire of the Freedom Charter and so we thought that they were lambs

Do we still call them "comrades" those who steal the money that is supposed to go the poor? How can we call somebody who got rich by stealing from the poor a comrade?

Why in such a good country are there people sleeping on the roads while billions goes missing from the money set aside to develop the people? Even now, even with everything that we have seen, with the mansions and sports cars and Johnny Walker Blue on one side and old ladies looking for rotting food in rubbish bins on the other side, when people are arrested for stealing from the people others will come with placards written 'innocent until proven guilty'. But at the time when that person was committing the crime he or she never thought anything about the people. Is politics now just about each little group supporting their own thief so that they can get something too?

Are we really free? Democracy has made some of us multimillionaires but these multimillionaires are not even willing to help those that are suffering. Was this country and its resources created for them? The Freedom Charter said that "South Africa belongs to all who live in it". It didn't say that "South Africa belongs to the whites now but in the future it will belong to the rich".

Those who have become rich are trying to redefine freedom and democracy to suit themselves. Those who have remained faithful to what freedom and democracy really mean, to what they meant when the people got united, are labelled as traitors of our new democracy. If you say in 2012 what you said in 1994 or in 1984 or in 1976 or in 1960 you are a traitor.

How on earth can they sleep peacefully when they know  that the people that elected them to improve their lives are sleeping on the road?

These people that are ruling us know they told us that there is not even one country in the world that has got such a good Constitution like our country. But now they are planning to amend it. They say that the Constitution is the reason why the poor are still poor! In fact the real reason is that poor people are using the Constitution to know the truth. We are using the Constitution to defend ourselves. They say that they want to change the Constitution and that they are the real custodians of human rights and the people's dignity. They say that they are the ones that really want equality. But where are the views of the people on the ground? Have they ever visited the people to seek their views?

Why all of a sudden is there this plan to amend the constitution? The government has been in power since 1994. Is it because corruption is escalating and because protests are escalating? They didn't start with the Constitution. They started with the newspapers. They wanted to make sure that the newspapers are not exposing their secrets. Some of these same newspapers exposed our struggles while we were under white minority rule but know that we are under rich minority rule they want to cut their wings. What is it that they are intending to do to us? Why do they want to ensure that we don't have all the information that we need to understand things properly? It was the newspapers that exposed how the bosses of Aurora Mines were getting so rich while they were not paying their workers. People on the ground must ensure that they oppose this autocratic thinking and that the stands as united as against the rule of the rich minority as they did against the rule of the white minority. Democracy is the rule of the people. It is not the rule of a rich minority instead of a white minority.

We have not forgotten that they told us that there will be nothing that they will do without the people. But when they say 'people' who are they referring to? Do they just mean the people like them, who are becoming richer as the rest of us become poorer? One thing is for sure. If you do not belong to a political party and you believe in a living politics, if you believe that poor people can think and that we should all make this country together then it means that you are not a human being. We thought that are our involvement in the struggle to liberate ourselves we would harvest the fruit of our toil. But it seems as if we were just wasting our time and energy for those who now think for us. These days it looks like the politicians think that they can do whatever they want. But we still remember that they were supposed to be taking our agenda forward. They were supposed to be working for us, not stealing from us and repressing us. While they are planning to amend the Constitution we are dying in shack fires, from floods and from AIDS. Many of us are looking for work every day and are becoming exhausted and depressed. Some of us that have work are not treated as human beings at work and still have to live in shacks because the pay is so bad.

During the World Cup so much money was wasted to make things for the visitors from all over the world. Our government loves to impress rich people from other countries but we don't count to them. They are ashamed of us. In fact we must be evicted so that we can be hidden away from international appearance. But of course when the elections come then these same people will be needed to vote.

We are still living under minority rule. The minority passes the laws that it wants, it uses its muscles to force the people to accept its domination. The rule of the rich minority is very similar in some ways to the rule of the white minority. Instead of trying to eradicate racism in South Africa the government is just making sure that no one will stand in their way so that they can do what they like. Whether we like to talk about it or not Africans are still regarded Africans, Indians are still regarded Indians and whites are still regarded as whites. The government is not looking for ways to change this so that we can all just be South Africans. We are still treated according to the colour of our skins. Some racists are using poor African security guards to do their dirty work. This is even happening in the shopping malls which are supposed to be places in which all that counts is your money. We really have a gift for ignoring things that are true but that will create division. Sithi ke thina za sithetha inyaniso ikrakra (truth is bitter).

Now is the time for us all to realise that there is a struggle inside every struggle. Now is the time when we must stop being used as the tools of the capitalists and make sure that what belongs to the people must go to the people.


Taken and adapted from here 
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/81688

When America and Al-Shabaab Agreed

When war-torn Somalia was also ravaged by a drought-induced famine last year, which killed tens of thousands and displaced over a million people, international media was quick to blame the Islamist Al-Shabaab for blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching its zone of control in southern Somalia.Although the group undoubtedly prevented assistance from reaching starving famine victims based on its claim that food aid was a Western conspiracy to drive Somali farmers out of business, Menkhaus, a specialist on the Horn of Africa, believes that was not the end of the sordid story. According to Ken Menkhaus, professor of Political Science at Davidson College in North Carolina, the United States’ counter-terrorism laws played an equally central role in obstructing assistance from reaching famine victims in desperate need of aid. Menkhaus said humanitarian organisations suspended food aid delivery to drought- struck areas controlled by Al-Shabaab for fear of violating the USA Patriot Act. Humanitarian groups were fearful that an accusation of "aiding terrorists’ could damage their entire organisation. In reality, the U.S. could have issued a waiver, protecting relief agencies from counter-terrorism laws; similar waivers have been issued for relief agencies in southern Lebanon and the West Bank of the occupied Palestinian territories, where Hezbollah and Hamas operate respectively. But in the case of Somalia, Menkhaus believes the U.S. administration did not want to give its Republican opponents any political leverage on the eve of upcoming presidential elections by appearing too "soft on terrorism". Instead, the U.S. government prepared a document that purportedly gave relief agencies protection from the law but which, upon close examination by legal experts, was found to contain no such protections, leaving those humanitarian agencies vulnerable to attack under the Patriot Act.

The tragic irony Menkhaus explained  "suspension of food aid into southern Somalia was the only thing that the U.S. government and Al-Shabaab could agree on, to the detriment of (millions) of Somalis" 




The humanitarian agenda is becomes secondary to the political agenda.
By 2008 Somalia was the most dangerous place in the world for humanitarian aid workers. "One-third of all humanitarian casualties occurred not in Afghanistan or in Iraq but in Somalia," Menkhaus said. The Kenyan refugee camp of Dadaab, with a population of 520,000, is now Kenya’s third largest city, and completely unsustainable. In addition, destitute nomads and farmers who can no longer find livelihoods in rural areas are drifting into urban centres. These people, who come with no technical skills into a barren employment landscape, are forming huge slums of several hundred thousand people in villages that previous housed only a few thousand residents.


http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107508

May Day Salutations

On the occasion of May Day, the day of the international solidarity and unity of the working class, the World Socialist Movement extends warm revolutionary greetings to the entire working class of the world. Every year on May 1st, workers around the world celebrate their victories, remember the fallen and commit themselves to the fight for a better life. May Day is a day to remind the world that the worker`s labour is the wheel around which our world revolves.

The challenge before us is to widen the unity of the working class and carry forward the fight against the exploitative system of capitalism and to struggle against those divisive forces which seek to divide the people on nationality, tribal or religious or by gender lines. On this May Day, workers must be resolved and say that no more shall we allow capitalists to use one of us against another and no more shall we be divided and diverted from championing our class interests and confronting our common class enemy - the capitalist.

Socialists fight against social oppression and champion the cause of the downtrodden. We celebrate this May Day surrounded by continued working class suffering  In the midst of the world economic crisis, employers and government lackeys, at their behest, endeavour to crush the collective resistance of the workers and trade unions in defence of their democratic rights and livelihood. In many work-places around the continent, even the initiative to form trade unions is attacked with victimisation. Workers are punished with dismissal and other punitive measures by employers for organising themselves into trade unions and even murdered by police or the hired goons of bosses.

The WSM  urges workers to step up the campaign against the further degradation of their working conditions and living standards and to recognise that the struggle to build a new and better Africa cannot be led by those who benefit from its poverty and inequality and pursue policies to entrench these very same injustices.

May Day is a day to urge all workers of the world to unite and break the chains of oppression and exploitation. Forward to a socialist future!

Malaise in Malawi

In Malawi, like most other countries in the region (with the exception of South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe), more than 60 percent of land is customary, meaning that it is mostly untitled and administered by local chiefs on behalf of the government, with local communities merely enjoying user rights. The system has led to many abuses, with some government officials and chiefs selling off customary lands and dispossessing smallholder farmers who are already competing for dwindling arable land as Malawi’s population increases.

“There’s nothing [they] can do because they’re not protected in any way by the law,” said Blessings Chinsinga, a lecturer at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College, who is researching the political economy of land grabs and land reform in the country. In a research report co-authored by Chinsinga, he notes that the issue of “land grabs” in Malawi dates back to Banda's transferring of large parcels of land from smallholder farmers to the estate sector, largely to the benefit of political elites who helped sustain his regime.

Dorothy Dyton, her husband and seven children used to make a living farming just over a hectare near the town of Bangula in southern Malawi’s Chikhwawa District. Like most smallholder farmers in Malawi, they did not have a title deed for the land Dyton was born on, and in 2009 she and about 2,000 other subsistence farmers from the area were informed by their local chief that the land had been sold and they could no longer cultivate there. They had already been removed once from the land during former President Hastings Banda’s regime in the 1970s and had not been allowed to return until Banda’s regime ended in 1994 and the cattle ranch established there by his political ally, John Tembo, had ceased to function. They continued to farm the land for another season. But in 2010, as they prepared to plant, they were met by a police van and the chief, Fennwick Mandala, who warned them not to come back. The next day, the farmers again set out for their fields, but this time they were met by tear gas and rubber bullets and that night six of them were arrested and charged with trespassing. With a game reserve on one side of the community and the Shire river and Mozambique border on the other, there is no other available land for them to farm and the family now ekes out a living selling firewood they gather from the nearby forest. The three oldest children have had to drop out of school to help their parents.The 2,000 hectares of land once farmed by Dyton and her neighbours is now owned by a company called Agricane, which is leasing it to Illovo for sugar cane production. Agricane’s country director, Bouke Bijl, explained that his company bought the land from a bank which had acquired it from John Tembo after he defaulted on a loan.  “Life has been very hard on us." said Dyton.

“People aren’t getting enough to eat,” said Isaac Falakeza, another community member. “Some are doing piece work on other people’s gardens, others are harvesting water lilies. You can see how malnourished the children are.”

Following the ousting of Banda and the transition to democracy, the government set up a Commission of Inquiry on Land Reform the findings of which formed the basis of a new land policy in 2002. The policy attempts to address smallholder farmers’ lack of security of tenure by allowing them to register their customary land as private property, but the legislative changes needed to implement the policy have not gone through parliament and the land reform process has effectively stalled.

“Politicians own massive tracts of land; they benefited from the previous system, so they’re reluctant to adopt a new legislative framework that would correct the land imbalances,” commented Chinsinga.

A 2010 report by Grain, noted that Malawi’s lack of land reform had resulted in increasingly inequitable distribution of land, with large tracts of farmland ending up in foreign hands. In 2009, the government allocated 50,000 hectares of farmland to the government of Djibouti. Another programme championed by Mutharika, the GBI aims to acquire 340,000 hectares of irrigable land along Lake Malawi and the banks of the Shire river with the goal of increasing agricultural production and national food security.
Several foreign companies have acquired land under the auspices of the programme which, according to Chinsinga’s paper, “views customary land as an unlimited reservoir that can be targeted for conversion for privatization”.

Chikhwawa District is already dominated by sprawling sugar plantations owned by South African sugar giant Illovo Sugar. According to several sources, Illovo is intent on expanding its presence in the area and enjoys government support because of the much needed foreign exchange it generates.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95363/MALAWI-Without-land-reform-small-farmers-become-trespassers

The resource curse once again

The largest mining investment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo should have brought jobs, growth and development to the surrounding community, but has instead brought poverty, according to a report by Southern Africa Resource Watch. The mine produced about 115,000 tonnes of copper and 8,000 tonnes of cobalt in 2010.

The US$2 billion investment by Tenke Fungurume Mining (TFM) in the copper and cobalt mine in Fungurume has resulted in a decline in the community's once thriving agriculture sector and the closure of many small businesses due to a drying up of money in the area. Since the mine's operation, many people had abandoned agriculture in an attempt to find jobs at the mine, which were ultimately not made available to locals. Furthermore, the 1,600 square kilometre concession area had meant that agriculture was no longer allowed in many areas, he said, adding that people were not told where they were and were not allowed to farm.

The company said that between 2006 and September 2011, it made social investments of $42 million. The few social projects that the company had carried out had "not brought value to the community" because the community was not consulted at all, Southern Africa Resource Watch director and co-author of the report, Claude Kabemba said. "It is like 'an elephant which passes through a village and does not pay any attention to the barking dog'." Kabemba said that as part of its social project, TFM had rebuilt some schools, although not as promised and without consultation with the locals, and had put a clean water supply into the community, although this was only at one point which was a far walk for most people. The few things that had been done had been done poorly and without any interaction with the community. "This reflects a lack of seriousness and attention to social responsibility," he said.

TFM's own report said that it contributes 0.3% of net metal sales revenue to the TFM Social Community Fund, and since the commencement of commercial production, these contributions have totalled $7 million. Claude Kabemba countered that the community could not access this fund and while the fund definitely did exist, it was not clear how it was being used.

While the company said that approximately 98% of direct TFM employees are DRC citizens, the report found that no Fungurume locals had been employed at the mine, and TFM had brought in workers from other areas. These workers stayed at a camp outside of Fungurume, and therefore had little exposure to the community. This meant that workers did not spend any of their incomes in the village and as a result, there was no money in circulation. Kabemba believed that the only reason the company would choose to find workers elsewhere was a "strategy to ensure the community does not have a say", and an attempt to avoid strikes or any community involvement. Also, many small businesses had to close because of a lack of money in the community, and the local economy had become "stagnant", he said.

Africa's sick record

Shedding more insight on global health issues, Luis Sambo, Director of WHO-Afro disclosed that while 59 million people died globally in 2008, 19 per cent of these deaths were in the African continent which attributes only 12 per cent of world population. He further pointed out that 63 per cent of these deaths were caused by communicable diseases of which about 16 per cent are attributed to Human immune Virus (HIV).

According to Sambo, "While developing countries especially those in sub-Saharan Africa face both communicable and non-communicable diseases, some of the health inequalities seen could have been averted through the adoption of relevant health and economic policies."

Samir Banoob, Professor of Health Policy and Management and President of International  Health Management, stressed the need for medical professionals to live up to public expectations and adhere to ethical  standards. "Public health saves thousands of live and professionals should serve the public without prejudice - not closing their eyes to victims of negligence, war and political unrest while people die unreasonably,"


http://www.businessdayonline.com/NG/index.php/entrepreneur/126-health/36708-world-health-congress-tasks-governments-to-global-health-equity

mining the rich but not for the poor

John Paul Getty, once quipped that the meek may  inherit the earth but not the mining rights.

This years' list of the who's who of world mining, metal and minerals billionaires recently published by the popular mining web site miningnews.com tells a story. Not unsurprisingly, not one of  the mining super rich is an African. The richest of all the mining plutocrats is Eike Batista, son of the former CEO of Vale, Brazil's largest mining company. Young Eike is  now worth USD 33billion and is the richest man in Brazil and the 10th richest in the world. As ever, being born rich, really helps if your aim is to make the super-rich list.

It is estimated that the net worth of the 40 richest mining billionaires is in the vicinity of USD 300 billion in 2011, roughly equivalent to about of 40 percent of Sub-Saharan Africa's GD (excluding South Africa). The theory has been that the state gets the mineral wealth and then shares it among the citizenry. The reality is more dismal  In the countries dominated by mining they have the most unequal distribution of income in the world. The three most unequal countries in the world are Namibia, South Africa and Botswana. The increasingly divided world of a few very rich individuals dominating the mining and metal sector and the host countries calling for greater equity in the distribution of benefits, unable to lift their own citizens out of poverty, is set to continue

A new "resource nationalism", as it has come to be called, has been spawned by this relentless accumulation of wealth. These new nationalist mining policies include local ownership eg Zimbabwe.  Zambia is about to cut new deals with its copper mining companies. Additional profits taxes are proposed in South Africa. These new taxes which are supposed to capture high profits when prices rise are becoming de rigeur. Yet the experience from countries like Papua New Guinea which have long had these taxes is that mining companies and their accountants will find clever ways to avoid them. In addition, governments challenged when it comes to implementing inclusive policies that lift the bulk of the population out of poverty.

Why Are Sudans at War?

Formerly a single country, Sudan has split in to two states.

It all looked so good just over a year ago. the Republic of Sudan's President, Omar el-Beshir, had visited South Sudan's capital Juba and promised to welcome and recognise a vote for secession, if this was, "the price of peace." Indeed, Bashir kept his promise and attended the independence celebrations and was the first to recognize the new state of South Sudan.

Today, however, the two countries are at war, in the border area of Heglig, as well as by proxy in Southern Kordofan and Blue Nile, and increasingly in the borderlands of South Sudan as well. Heglig oil wells may account for as much as 80,000 barrels per day of Sudan's 120,000-130,000 bpd output. Khartoum cannot afford to lose this. It simply does not have the foreign currency reserves to keep importing fuel to make up the gap, and there are fears the prices of basic good could rise.

Sudan's government has ordered its civil servants to donate part of their salaries to support the army, according to the official state news agency. Sudan's finance minister Ali Mahmud al-Rasul has also cut the petrol rations of government departments by 50%. Analysts say the measures are a sign that Sudan's economy has been badly hit, both by the loss of revenue from when South Sudan became independent last year, and by the recent clashes between the two nations.

While the decision by South Sudan to shut down oil production in January - 98% of government revenue - after Sudan impounded South Sudan's oil shipments amid a dispute over transit fees - its effects are being felt. There is the beginnings of a fuel crisis in Juba, and infrastructure projects and development are on hold.

 An all-out war would create great misery for all peoples, as all wars always do.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-17853074

Namibia and the Anti-Chinese Backlash

"22 years of independence and thousands of construction tenders worth billions of dollars have been awarded mostly to Chinese contractors, yet we find poverty, lack of housing, unemployment, dilapidated school buildings, hospitals and roads in our country... Chinese are robbing our people with their poor business practices, killing our local businesses and due to the working conditions most of our people working for Chinese companies are left with diseases, such as TB and skin diseases. These people are also not environmentally-friendly and are destroying our environment."

http://www.informante.web.na/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9833:poverty-and-the-chinese-way&catid=13:letters&Itemid=105

Socialist Banner has posted on several occasion upon Chinese expansionism, and has not shied away from describing it as a new imperialism and neo-colonialism. However, we must caution against racism and xenophobia. We must differentiate between the Chinese state and their corporations exploiting for profits and the Chinese migrant workers who, similar to the  African or Latino poor, search for a better life for themselves and their families. The solution is solidarity between Namibian workers and Chinese, uniting against their common enemy, the capitalist class.

The population problem

In a quarter-century, at the rate Nigeria is growing, 300 million people — a population about as big as that of the present-day United States — will live in a country roughly the size of Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada. In this commercial hub, where the area’s population has by some estimates nearly doubled over 15 years to 21 million, living standards for many are falling.

A typical apartment block is known as a “Face Me, Face You” because whole families squeeze into 7-by-11-foot rooms along a narrow corridor. Up to 50 people share a kitchen, toilet and sink — though the pipes in the neighborhood often no longer carry water.

At Alapere Primary School, more than 100 students cram into most classrooms, two to a desk. As graduates pour out of high schools and universities, Nigeria’s unemployment rate is nearly 50 percent for people in urban areas ages 15 to 24

Last October, the United Nations announced the global population had breached seven billion and would expand rapidly for decades, taxing natural resources if countries cannot better manage the growth. Nearly all of the increase is in sub-Saharan Africa, where the population rise far outstrips economic expansion. Of the roughly 20 countries where women average more than five children, almost all are in the region. Elsewhere in the developing world, in Asia and Latin America, fertility rates have fallen sharply in recent generations and now resemble those in the United States — just above two children per woman.

“The pace of growth in Africa is unlike anything else ever in history and a critical problem,” said Joel E. Cohen, a professor of population at Rockefeller University in New York City.

Nigeria, already the world’s sixth most populous nation with 167 million people, is a crucial test case. If this large nation rich with oil cannot control its growth, what hope is there for the many smaller, poorer countries? Nigeria made contraceptives free last year, and officials are promoting smaller families as a key to economic salvation, holding up the financial gains in nations like Thailand as inspiration. Some experts worry that it, and other African nations, will not act forcefully enough to rein in population growth. For two decades, the Nigerian government has recommended that families limit themselves to four children, with little effect. Nigeria, like many sub-Saharan African countries, has experienced a slight decline in average fertility rates, to about 5.5 last year from 6.8 in 1975. But this level of fertility, combined with an extremely young population, still puts such countries on a steep and disastrous growth curve. Half of Nigerian women are under 19, just entering their peak childbearing years. In a deeply religious country where many Roman Catholics and Muslims oppose contraception, politicians and doctors broach the topic gingerly, and change is slow. Posters promote “birth spacing,” not “birth control.” Supplies of contraceptives are often erratic.

“Population is key,” said Peter Ogunjuyigbe, a demographer at Obafemi Awolowo University in the small central city of Ile-Ife. “If you don’t take care of population, schools can’t cope, hospitals can’t cope, there’s not enough housing — there’s nothing you can do to have economic development.”

Parfait M. Eloundou-Enyegue, a professor of development sociology at Cornell University, said, “Many countries only get religion when faced with food riots or being told they have the highest fertility rate in the world or start worrying about political unrest.” In Nigeria, experts say, the swelling ranks of unemployed youths with little hope have fed the growth of the radical Islamist group Boko Haram

Sub-Saharan Africa, which now accounts for 12 percent of the world’s population, will account for more than a third by 2100, by many projections. Because Africa was for centuries agriculturally based and sparsely populated, it made sense for leaders to promote high fertility rates. Family planning, introduced in the 1970s by groups like Usaid, was initially regarded as foreign, and later on, money and attention were diverted from family planning to Africa’s AIDS crisis. As Nigeria urbanizes, children’s help is not needed in fields; the extended families have broken down. “Children were seen as a kind of insurance for the future; now they are a liability for life,”  Dr. Ogunjuyigbe said

Dr. Eloundou-Enyegue worries that Africa’s modestly declining birthrates reflect relatively rich, educated people reducing to invest in raising “quality” children, while poor people continue to have many offspring, strengthening divisions between haves and have-nots. “When you have a system with a large degree of corruption and inequality, it’s hard not to be playing the lottery because it increases the chances that one child will succeed,”

In Nigeria’s desperately poor neighbor, Niger, women have on average more than seven children, and men consider their ideal to be more than 12. But with land divided among so many sons, the size of a typical family plot has fallen by more than a third since 2005, meaning there is little long-term hope for feeding children, said Amadou Sayo, of the aid group CARE

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/africa/in-nigeria-a-preview-of-an-overcrowded-planet.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120415#

Rebellion of the Poor

Minister of Police Nathi Mthetwa informed Parliament of the number of "crowd management incidents" that occurred during the three years from April 1 2009. In 2010-2011 there was a record number of crowd-management incidents (unrest and peaceful) and the final data for 2011-2012 are likely to show an even higher figure. Already, the number of gatherings involving unrest was higher in 2011-2012 than any previous year. During the past three years, 2009 to 2012, there has been an average of 2.9 unrest incidents a day. This is an increase of 40% over the average of 2.1 unrest incidents a day recorded for 2004-2009. The statistics show that what has been called the "rebellion of the poor" has intensified over the past three years.

The Incident Regulation Information System classifies incidents either as crowd management (peaceful), during which the incident is managed in cooperation with the convenor and the police only monitor the gathering, or as crowd management (unrest), during which the police need to intervene to make arrests or need to use force when there is a risk to safety or possible damage to property. During 2007-2008 to 2009-2010, "the most common reason for conducting crowd management (peaceful) gatherings was labour-related demands for increases in salary or wages". For the same period, the most common reason for "crowd management (unrest) was related to service delivery issues".

The number of arrests that had occurred with crowd management (unrest) gatherings were given as 4 883 (2009-2010), 4 680 (2010-2011), 2967 (April 1 2011 to March 5 2012). These figures give the average number of arrests per unrest gathering as, respectively, 4.8 (2009-2010), 4.8 (2010-2011) and 2.7 (2011-2012).

Gauteng had the largest number of peaceful incidents and the largest number of unrest incidents, but it also has the largest population, so it is not surprising.

Government attempts to improve service delivery have not been sufficient to assuage the frustration and anger of poor people in South Africa. From press reports and our own research, it is clear that although service-delivery demands provide the principal focus for unrest incidents, many other issues are being raised, notably a lack of jobs. Service-delivery protests are part of a broader "rebellion of the poor". This rebellion is massive. South Africa can reasonably be described as the "protest capital of the world". It also has the highest levels of inequality and unemployment of any major country and it is not unreasonable to assume that the rebellion is, to a large degree, a consequence of these phenomena. There is no basis for assuming that the rebellion will subside. http://mg.co.za/article/2012-04-13-a-massive-rebellion-of-the-poor

Jacob Zuma celebrated his 70th birthday on Friday where Ngema and Zuma's three wives were on hand to help him cut a R12 500 birthday cake. The Sunday Times said the president's Nkandla homestead had been given a R64-million upgrade that included six new double-storey thatch rondavels for his wives and family

DRC blues

In Kinasha, DRC, things have got better for the few. The progress has mostly benefited the narrow elite - the number of new highrises, restaurants, internet cafés and bars is astounding (as are the prices on the menus). For the average citydweller, life has gotten harder, mostly because the cost of living has gone up. There is a big infrastructure improvement in Kinshasa and Lubumbashi ,but the rest of the country has completely been forgotten. For example, in BuKavu and Goma there is a housing boom and villas are spreading up like mushrooms but there is no more paved roads and public hospitals are in decay, even the hotel de ville (city hall) is a rundown building, once you live Kinshasa and Lubumbashi you start to feel that there is no government in the rest of the country.

Widening the gap in standard of living/lifestyle, between have's and have not's, in a country like Congo, can hardly be considered progress.

Another land grab

A prominent Saudi businessman announced last week that the Sudanese government agreed to give his country two million acres of land as a farming investment that would allow the Arab Gulf state to ensure safe and steady food supply.

The chairman of the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce Saleh Kamel told the Saudi-based al-Sharq newspaper that the project, if successful, may allow Riyadh to achieve a food surplus that can be exported elsewhere. Kamel disclosed that the Khartoum will make the farmland a free zone that is not subject to any form of taxation or duties and is not covered by Sudanese laws.

"The return [on investment] of agriculture in Sudan will reach 15% of the capital in the first year, a return that is more than good and better than investing in any another business sector" he said.

Plutocracy or Democracy?

It is fact that in many – if not all ‑ countries of the world, the dominant political discourse consists of ideas put forth by the ruling class. This discourse led Karl Marx to argue that in any society, those in charge have the power to propagandise their world-view. The term plutocracy is generally defined as the government by the wealthy and for the wealthy, and is usually used to refer to the rich who control the government ‑ often from behind the scenes. President Abraham Lincoln's that democracy “is a government of the people, by the people, for the people” remains utopian, as a global plutocracy now replaces it. If you believe the US is a democracy, if you believe in the rule of the many and not the rule of the wealthy few, then you will be in for some serious disappointment when you realise that the American model is not designed for the development and upliftment of the majority.

Marx never visited the United States, but nevertheless understood the country, because he understood capitalism. It has become common knowledge that there is no American ideology that is mightier than capitalism. Political scientist Michael Parenti comments; “American capitalism reflects more than just an economic system, it is an entire social and cultural order, a plutocracy, a system that is mostly by and for the rich.”

Equality, justice and the rule of law are all nice, but money speaks the language that all nations and people understand. If you have a lot of money and own a lot of property, then you have the power to propagandise your world-view. It is done to protect and promote your own interests and is the natural progression in the process of accumulation of wealth and exercise of power. As such, any talk of “democracy”, “rule of law” and “human rights” is packaged to promote and protect the interests of the wealthy in their exercise of power. According to EJ Dionne, a columnist in the Washington Post, “Capitalism works for the wealthiest and most powerful in the country, especially if they want to shroud their efforts to influence politics. “It just doesn’t happen to work if you think we are a democracy and not a plutocracy.” There is no way that the US can be interested in genuine democracy because that would fly in the face of the plutocracy they have worked so hard to achieve over the centuries.

In a genuine democracy, the people of any nation freely enjoy the resources that within their borders. Wars are not fomented to get their oil, gold and diamonds from them and they have the right to determine how exactly they use their resources, who they sell them to and what they buy from other countries in return. They are not forced to have particular leaders who are acceptable only to the West and they determine in which direction their leaders should lead them.

Sadly, true democracy is still very far away from visiting this world. Africans peoples must gird their loins and be ready to fight for it.

Extracted from here

Piracy: From Somalia to Senegal?

Recently fishing unions in Senegal in West Africa warned that if unauthorized fishing by foreign trawlers in their waters is not reined in, piracy could take hold in Senegal and it could end up becoming an international threat to shipping like Somalia. The economic losses resulting from pirate attacks in Somalia is estimated at ten billion dollars. The British newspaper Guardian in a detailed article on this topic on April 3 focused on comparing the warnings issued by Senegalese fishers with the past warnings by Somali fishers and it concluded that the current warnings about the influx of Chinese, European and Russian fishing trawlers in North, East and West of Africa should be taken seriously.

The FAO, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, maintains that all the aquatic resources of West Africa have been exploited to the full capacity and even beyond. And currently over one and half million local residents of the region, whose lives depend on these resources, are facing deep economic hardship. Statistics reveal that European fishing vessels catch over 235 thousand tons of fish between the waters of Mauritania and Morocco alone while tens of thousands of tons are also caught with giant nets in the waters of Sierra Leone, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau and other countries.

The origin of piracy in Somalia goes back to the 1990s when the Siad Barre regime fell from power resulting in the disintegration of the navy and coastal guards.

At that time tens of thousands of people whose lives faced dire difficulties due to severe droughts and poverty in Somalia turned to coastal areas and formed fishing communities to provide for their needs and thus fishing became their only means of survival. When civil war broke out in Somalia, foreign fishing vessels began entering Somali waters illegally and catching large volumes of rock-lobster and other warm water fish along the tip of the Horn of Africa. In 2006 Somali fisher-men described the way illegal fishing trawlers not only deplete natural and aquatic resources, they also use various methods to stop local fishers from their activities. According to Somali local fishers, foreigners had torn their nets and made permanent bases for themselves near the coast. Now Senegalese fishers are stating similar statements and saying that catches are already down by 75 percent since 10 years ago because foreign illegal fishers have extensively depleted their aquatic resources and they are very worried about the approach of a big catastrophe.

Somali coastal residents who saw their livelihoods threatened by foreign trawlers took up arms and became a kind of coast guard. This however led to the creation of piracy in these waters. In time, ransom payments to poor fishermen of Somalia by these foreign fishing vessels encouraged the escalation of pirate attacks. Recently a number of local Senegalese fishers have warned that they will attack foreign vessels to protect their vital resources and local economy. They maintain that within the next ten years people will become armed and fishers will go fishing with guns aboard.

Therefore illegal exploitation of the natural resources, degradation of the marine environment, poverty and war created a vicious cycle of corruption, theft and destruction in Somalia and now the same may happen off Senegal waters.

http://www.payvand.com/news/12/apr/1109.html

solidarity

The World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) has pledged support for Nigerian workers in their fight against anti-labour policies of government and private sector employers. Head of Communication Department of WFTU, Alexandra Libeli, expressed this view while addressing a delegation of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC) and informal sector workers weekend in Lagos. She reaffirmed the commitment of the federation of trade unions to campaign against imperialism and exploitation of workers under any capitalism rule.
http://allafrica.com/stories/201204090229.html

East African Poverty Rises Relentlessly

The number of East Africans living below the poverty line has increased from 44 million to 53 million people, according to a new report. The growth of poverty is more concentrated in slum areas like the one in Uganda's capital Kampala.

Amb Richard Sezibera said: “ Even as leaders and institutions, in both the corporate and political arena, embrace good governance and paying close attention to the dictates of sustainable development, poverty continues to persist.”

Climate Change in Malawi

Malawi has in the past six years enjoyed maize surpluses yet food production has been on the decline, a climate change study has indicated.

Rainfall distribution in Malawi has become more unpredictable to the extent that it has reduced crop production, Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Water Development hydrologist Henrie Manford Njoloma has disclosed in his research study of over 60 years of rainfall data in the sub Saharan country. “Rainfall distribution is no longer uniform and predictable as it used to be in the past,” he says noting that maize, the country’s staple diet has been drastically affected by the erratic rainfall patterns.

Maize is a highly politicized crop in Malawi because of its nature as a main food crop. As such, government interferes either directly or indirectly in its production and trade at all levels. The private sector also responds sharply whenever there is a maize shortage. Malawi faces food insecurity problems despite having a lot of water resources in sub-Saharan region. It has Lake Malawi, Africa’s third largest lake, which takes up 20% of its land mass and is mostly in the central and northern parts of the country. There are smaller lakes of Chilwa and Malombe in the south and many rivers across the country.

Njoloma observes that despite maize output increasing by 1.8% per annum between 1961 and 1991, the yields have been lower than the 5-year annual average of 2,192,634 metric tons in the first three years, albeit increasing to above the 5-year average in the later years. The hydrologist says that the rainfall pattern in these rainfall seasons were some of the worst, punctuated with many longer than normal dry spells. He also notes that the production of maize per unit area also had increased. Government documents suggest that about 75% of the estimated increase in total production resulted from the expansion in maize area but does not indicate the role of favorable climatic conditions. “Overall, yields appear to have increased at a small but significant rate of 0.4% per year,” says Njoloma adding, “The per capita maize production, however, declined over the past half century as production lagged behind an exponential annual population growth rate of over 3.0%”.

He observes that various water schemes gather dust on the drawing board while less than 1% of the country is irrigated. According to a 2004-2005 Integrated Household Survey (IHS) report, modern methods of irrigation are almost nonexistent in most households in Malawi. “There has been low priority in irrigation agricultural production despite the increased publicity the sector has been given over the past 15 years,” notes the hydrologist urging government to initiate efforts that would ensure that rainfalls into the country’s catchments are looked at to recharge water resources such as wetlands, rivers, dams and lakes. “With the right infrastructure and proper institutions in place, erratic rainfall trends could easily be mitigated and maize grain shortages would be avoided,”

http://www.newstimeafrica.com/archives/24855