The slave wars

In Mali Tuareg rebels are capitalising on fighting in Mali to reacquire former captives whom they regard as their property from birth.


Anti-slavery groups say the conflict and ensuing political chaos in Mali has worsened the situation facing the 250,000 people who live in conditions of slavery in the west African state. The MNLA leadership and parts of the Ansar Dine Islamist group, which fought for control of the north last year, come from Tuareg noble families, some of whom are responsible for continuing the practice of slavery in Mali. The Malian anti-slavery organisation Temedt has reported cases of slave masters profiting from the chaos of the past year to recapture former slaves, including at least 18 children seized from one village last September.
Although slavery is a crime against humanity in Mali's constitution, it remains deeply ingrained in the culture. For centuries, descent-based slavery – where slavery is passed down through the bloodline – has resulted in "black Tamasheq" (the Tuareg's language) families in Mali's north being used as slaves by nomadic Tuareg communities. Generations of children have been considered the property of the Tuaregs from birth. Despite the constitution, slavery is still not illegal in Mali, making it difficult for anti-slavery groups to launch criminal prosecutions.

In 2008, Raichatou escaped slavery in the northern desert town of Menaka, heading for the relative safety of Gao. Raichatou became a slave at the age of seven when her mother, also a slave, died. "My father could only watch on helplessly as my mother's master came to claim me and my brothers," she says. She worked as a servant for the family without pay for nearly 20 years, and was forced into a marriage with another slave whom she didn't know.My master only wanted me to have children so that he would have more slaves in the future. My opinion did not count. I had to live with a man I had not chosen for three years. They told me that the only way I would get to heaven was to obey my master. My instinct for liberty was telling me to grab every opportunity to be free, but my slave mentality was telling me the opposite" she says.

No Choice

In Uganda, Rwanda and Kenya the opposition had either been totally smashed or is rotting in jail. Alternatively, it has ceased to exist. Elections are fights between corrupt politician A and corrupt politician B, both campaigning along ethnic lines and on behalf of their vested mercantile interests who ‘compete’ over who will be the one to get his snout into the trough at the end of the ‘democratic electoral process’. Politicians do not use the rhetoric ‘Socialism or death!’ (whatever they take to mean socialism to be.) Nor do they campaign on the promise of ‘Let’s liberate our people from misery!’ The accepted political agenda is the more modest: ‘It’s our time to eat!’


In the recent Kenyan elections, not one single Presidential candidate dared to raise the essential issues exposing the neo-colonialism of the muli-nationals. Nor did any candidate protest being a military proxy for other powers.
In Rwanda, where the regime is co-responsible for the loss of millions of human lives in DR Congo, there is, at least, no charade about democracy. It is courted by ‘world leaders’ like Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. The most prominent opposition leader in Rwanda, Ms. Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, is in prison. Her name much lesser known than Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi when she was in detention. Ingabire considers herself relatively lucky because many other Rwandan opposition figures have already been murdered.
Museveni, the President of Uganda, has held the reigns of power since 1986. He wears a cowboy hat which is indicative of his personality - a cowboy. Brutal civil war is raging in the north of Uganda. There, according to countless reports, the military are ordered, periodically, to rape but that is not preventing the West using Ugandan troops as ‘peacekeepers’ all over Africa, particularly where their interests lie. He is another loyal mercenary of the West in the region, Uganda is deeply involved in Somalia, Sudan and above all, in DR Congo. For the West, Museveni has been a very effective ‘buffer’ against Sudan. He is, of course, very useful for US interests in DR Congo. US gives Uganda money and they give them the bodies that they want removed.
Museveni hates gays, and he occasionally threatens them with capital punishment. To give the credit where it is due, there actually is, at least, some opposition in Uganda. Its members periodically protest; they write books and articles, arrange demonstrations, and even end up in prisons. But they too are also very careful not to alienate the West.

In these African countries, as elsewhere, there is very little talk about alternative political and economic systems.

one world - one people - workers united

Over two million families solely depend on Lake Malawi for their livlihoods. The 29,000-square-kilometre tranquil lake is a tourist spot, source of revenue and food for local populations. But since July 2012, it was discovered that the lake could potentially be a lucrative oil and gas source, and it rekindled a border dispute between the southern African neighbours over who owns the lake. Malawi claims sovereignty over the entirety of the lake that straddles the borders of Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania. Meanwhile, Tanzania says 50 percent is part of its territory. In October 2011 Malawi’s late President Bingu wa Mutharika, awarded a contract to British Surestream Petroleum to start gas and oil exploration on the eastern part of the lake, and then a second exploration licence in December 2012 to a subsidiary of South African firm SacOil.

Richard Kilumbo, a resident from Kyela district, which borders Lake Nyasa, told IPS that he could not understand the reasons for the dispute explained “We have relatives from Mzuzu, Malawi and were going to attend a wedding (there last year). We are shocked and panicked to find we are making preparations of war against our neighbours. We do not know why this is such big thing amongst our leaders. We heard people were talking, we thought we were free to walk and enjoy life...There really is no trouble on the ground, none at all. Fishermen from Tanzania are carrying on as usual, and although we know it’s in the news, we’ve no idea why,”

“There’s no border dispute among the local community, it is a dispute among politicians, a political performance at higher levels, eying elections in Malawi in 2014 and Tanzania in 2015. Unfortunately, the local communities are pawns. They lack access to information and education to understand the implications and seriousness of this,” local environmental journalist who has followed the story for many years, and writes regularly on it for Swahili newspapers Felix Mwakyembe, told IPS. “This lake should be used to improve the lot and livelihoods of local people, on both sides. The lake is a resource – instead it’s being used as part of a political game to further political careers,”

We can feed ourselves

Ton Dietz, the director of the Afrika Studie Centrum, based in Leiden, Netherlands, one of Europe's leading think tanks on Africa, questions the image of Africa so commonly seen as a hungry continent. His research showed that total basic food production in Africa has actually not only kept pace with population growth, but has increased proportionally faster than has the population. Overall Africa produces more than enough food to feed itself.

Research has shown that the amount of calories consumed per person had actually increased in all of west Africa, but had decreased in all east African countries between 1961 to 2009 despite the region having some of the most fertile agricultural land available on the continent.
In 1961 every nation in Africa produced domestically more than 100 percent of its domestic food supply. Now most African countries produce less than its domestic supply and therefore are becoming more dependent on food imports, even though they grow enough food to feed themselves.
In Benin, Mozambique and the two Sudans all show large drops in the portion domestically produced, and large increases in imported food and stock variations. Sudan and Mozambique can be partly explained by the wars that plagued both, but during the first part of this century Mozambique has had a domestic peace in a nation with extraordinary agriculture potential. The research showed that post-harvest loss is the major problem in the Sudans and not weather conditions. The same is true for Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda and Mozambique. Africa lacks infrastructures for adequate storage and refrigeration.

Somalia's drought was man-made

 Global warming may have contributed to low rain levels in Somalia in 2011 where tens of thousands died in a famine, research by British climate scientists suggests.  Between 50,000 and 100,000 people died from the famine.

 Peter Stott of Britain's Met Office said that the evidence is "very strong" that the planet is warming due to an increase in greenhouse gases. He noted that the study indicates that both natural causes -- La Nina and the short rains -- and man-made causes contributed to Somalia's drought. Between 24 percent and 99 percent of the cause of the failure of the 2011 rains can be attributed to the presence of man-made greenhouse gases, Stott said.

Global warming is caused by the burning of fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- which sends heat-trapping gases, such as carbon dioxide, into the air, changing the climate, of which the contribution of Somalian people is negligible yet they bore the brunt of the consequences.

Kenyan Election

The majority of Kenyans live in misery. Two thirds of the population of the capital lives in slums. People want change. All of them are talking about change. "Change" is on the lips of the people forming those endless queues. But what kind of change?

In a state where the majority of people live on less than US$1 a day, the local MPs enjoy some of the highest take-home salaries paid to politicians anywhere on earth –more than US$123,000 a year. For comparison, British MPs earn the equivalent of US$99,000. Why would the rich want to change anything?

The elections have been described, in advance, as ‘democratic’, by both the local and Western mainstream media. In the case of Kenya, elections are also ‘democratic’, because there are eight Presidential candidates, and countless candidates running for MP, Senators and governors. It does not matter that not a single Kenyan Presidential candidate has been truly ready to represent the interests of the people. In the language of Western propaganda, democracy is measured only by the number of political parties and candidates; and not by their agenda. Change is definitely not on any candidate’s list. Their allegiances are to their tribes and to their business interests, to their deep pockets, neither to ideals nor to the nation.

 The two main Presidential candidates, Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta and Prime Minister Raila Odinga, belong to the two most powerful political dynasties. Uhuru Kenyatta, is the son of Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president. Raila Odinga is the second son of Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, one of Kenya’s Independence heroes, and the nation’s first vice-president. No real changes to the system have been proposed by either candidate.  None of the essential issues have been discussed in the pre-election campaign such as the brutal capitalist system that is destroying the lives of millions.

While the Kenyan elites are harvesting millions of dollars from their collaboration with former and present-day colonizers, In many parts of Kenya, people are dying from hunger and disease.  If Uhuru wins or if it is Raila who wins, what difference does it really make? There is no change. The war against the poor goes on.

poverty amidst plenty

Despite food production increasing by over 35% between 2011 and 2012, due to good rains, improved cultivation practices and expanded area under cultivation in addition to the 40% population of South Sudan already at risk of food insecurity, the report anticipates more than one million people are likely to be severely affected.

At least 4.1 million people in South Sudan are likely to be food insecure this year, a new report released by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) reveals.

The Wabenzi Election

According to the World Bank, almost half of Kenya's 41.6 million people live below the poverty line of $1.25 a day. 20 percent of Kenyans suffered from food poverty, such that their entire income is not even enough for purchasing food. Between independence in the 1960s and the 2007 election, Kenya's constitution was amended around 30 times, each time bolstering the power of the presidency at the expense of the judicial and legislative branches of government, and, ultimately, at the expense of the Kenyan people.

"Wabenzi" is Swahili  slang for those who own a Mercedes Benz. Fifty years after independence, the Wabenzis in Kenya are still in a class of their own. They can afford a decent meal in the upmarket restaurants in Nairobi's leafy suburbs; take their kids to schools abroad or in the local exclusive £20,000 term academies. When sick, they can jet out to Europe and the US for treatment and skip the crowded Kenyatta National Hospital. Although it is Kenya's largest referral hospital, it is under-funded and sees queues for hours on end of patients seeking medical attention. For the last three months, nurses in public hospitals have been on strike, and nobody seems to care. Shortly after independence in a swift and seamless transformation, the new public servants became flashy tycoons. They had the money and political power. Some of them had just arrived from the world's top universities or had managed to enter into the boards of blue-chip companies as a thank-you note for being loyal to the colonial regime. The Wabenzi and their children are party animals. In their parking yards, one can spot a wide assortmant of vehicles, such as Jaguars, Range Rover Sport, Land Rovers, Escalades, Mercedes Benz, BMWs and Hummers. These are the signature status symbols of Kenya's nouvelle generation. Some even own private helicopters, vintage vehicles, and real estate. And that is besides the thousands of acres of plantations that are cultivating either tea, coffee - or even simply lying fallow. Some are into the stock market and own major shares in leading companies.

They use taxpayers' money to live large. They love the thrill that accompanies this power status - motorcycle outriders, menacing soldiers, and ministerial Mercedes hurtling at speed. Kenya's political elite cling to their pay and to their allowances. For the lesser Kenyans it is austerity, but not the Wabenzi. Kibera is one of Africa's poorest slums. And yet last year, the country could afford to refurbish parliament with 350 seats, each costing about $3,000. That is the kind of opulence that the Wabenzi love. Only 10 percent of Kenyans lived in opulence, 33 percent barely eked a living while 57 percent live below the poverty line and in squalid conditions. It is the poor that  become pawns in a political chess match when the 10 percent return every five years in search of political power and might in the general elections. The country's leaders line their pockets while Nairobi's slums swell with the desperately impoverished.

 Kenya's capital streets are awash with red and orange. Red: The colour of TNA candidates Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto. Orange: The CORD coalition of Prime Minister Raila Odinga and his allies. A small fortune is being spent to buy votes. "We have never seen a campaign like this," a taxi driver said. "There is so much money being wasted."

After the 2007 electtion as many as 1,400 people died in the span of 59 days, while 600,000 people were displaced from their homes. Kenya slipped dangerously close to outright civil war. Gangs of youths roamed through many of Kenya's slums, torching homes, as riots spread across the country. Adding fuel to the fire of unrest, news reports emerged showing police officers shooting unarmed protesters amid the chaos. a church in the northern Eldoret district was burned to the ground. It was packed with women and children. 17 were burned alive.

 "By this time, there was a great resentment and dissatisfaction among the people about having a leadership underwritten by corruption and corrupt networks," Kiama Kaara, a political analyst with Kenya's Debt Relief Network, told Al Jazeera. "There was a realisation among people that the leaders were not any different [from one another] and wanted to control, and to benefit from controlling the nation's resources for their personal benefit and their personal gratification. This built frustration for Kenyans across the board."

Source

Land grabbing - Ethiopian style

Despite the defence of land-grab by the Ethiopian embassy in a recent issue of the Indian newspaper, The Hindu, the  prime focus of the policy of the government of Ethiopia is NOT ensuring food security of its citizens but faciliating the export of food to accrue profit. Nor is the land being leased unused and mostly inaccessible. Nor is the re-location of people peaceful.

Over 80% of the 85 million population of Ethiopia live in rural areas, in settlements and villages, and work in agriculture. Many are small-scale farmers who, according to government figures, farm “eight percent (about 10,000,000 hectares) of the national land area”, and traditional pastoralists who have, for generations, lived simple lives. Huge tracts of agricultural land with water supplies are being leased to foreign companies for food export. The Oakland Institute, a US- based policy think-tank and leader in the field, have produced in-depth reports on worldwide land sales stating that, between 2008 and 2011, “3,619,509 hectares were transferred to domestic investors, state-owned enterprises and foreign companies”. Amounting to a third, if government figures are correct, of the land farmed by Ethiopians themselves, an area the size of a small country, e.g. Holland. The government proclaims land sales are part of a strategic, long-term approach to agriculture reforms and economic development, that foreign investment will fund infrastructure projects, create employment opportunities, help to eradicate hunger and poverty and benefit the community, local and national. What growth there will be will benefit onl the rich, privileged minority, mainly members of the ruling party.

With the coming of industrial-size farms in Ethiopia, local people, villagers and pastoralists deemed superfluous to the government’s, economically-driven development plans are being threatened, and intimidated by the military; forcibly displaced  their homes destroyed and herded into camps. Along with vast agricultural complexes, dams are planned and constructed, water supplies re-directed to irrigate crops, forests burnt, natural habitats destroyed. Dissenting voices are brutally silenced.

In Ethiopia, land sales are occurring in six key areas. Oromia and Gambella in the south, Amhara, Beneshangul, Gumuz, the Sidaama zone, or SNNP and the Lower Omo Valley – an area of outstanding natural beauty with acclaimed UNESCO World heritage status. Genocide Watch considers the Ethiopian government’s conduct in Omo and Oromia “to have already reached stage 7 [of 8], genocidal massacres” It is a regime whose loyalties rest firmly with investors, corporations, multi-nationals and the like, and who cares little for the people living upon the land, or indeed in the cities.

Conditional within land lease agreements is the requirement that the government will clear the area of ‘encumbrances’, meaning indigenous people. The national Villagisation program aims to move people from their ancestral homes, over four states, into large settlements is well under way, as these 2010 figures from Cultural Survival show, “by February 1987, 5.7 million people (15 percent of the rural population) had been moved into 11,000 new villages. By the end of this year, 10 million rural inhabitants (25 percent of the population) are expected to be villagized in 12 of Ethiopia's 13 provinces.” This mass movement is being carried out without consultation or compensation, contrary to federal and international law, which requires the free, informed and prior consent of the people, no matter the official claims to the contrary.

“Fear and intimidation” is endemic, not just in areas associated with land sales, but throughout the country; suppression is common and freedom of expression greatly restricted. The media – TV, radio, press as well as print companies, are state-owned, so too the sole telecommunication company, restricting access to the internet, which is monitored. The judiciary is simply an extension of government, lacking credible independence, the political opposition marginalised and completely ineffective. International media are frowned upon and, in some areas (e.g. Ogaden) completely banned.

What about the bumper benefits promised, particularly the numerous employment opportunities? The Oakland Institutes states, “the basic facts and evidence showing growing impoverishment experienced on the ground”. It turns out industrialised farming is highly mechanised and offers few jobs; overseas companies are not concerned with providing employment for local people and care little for their well-being, making good bedmates for the ruling party. They bring the workers they need, and are allowed to do so by the Ethiopian government, which places no constraints on their operations.


Full story here

Legalities in Kenya

The Berlin Conference of 1885 imposed formality on Europe's Scramble for Africa, designating the 250,000 sq miles chunk from the Indian Ocean to beyond Lake Victoria as British East Africa. Today, it forms Kenya and Uganda. The Scottish ship-owner William Mackinnon set up the Imperial British East Africa Company and established trading activities. High taxes, low wages and hardship after the First World War politicised a generation of would-be Kenyans. By the Second World War, Kenya was of strategic importance for campaigns against Italian forces. Nearly 100,000 black soldiers, askaris, fought for Britain in the King's African Rifles. At the end of the war they wanted to keep their improved status, and became a vanguard for African nationalism. Jomo Kenyatta demanded a political voice for Africans. He would go to prison for leading the Mau Mau uprising which began in 1952 and in 1963 Kenyatta's Kenyan African National Union formed the first government.

Trade between the Kenya and the UK grew to £1bn last year and the UK is the largest single foreign investor with projects totalling £2bn and around 70 companies involved. Britain's strategic alliance with Kenya extends not only to trade but also to ever-closer military and security links. Kenya is the centre for security operations by the UK against the Islamist al-Shabaab group in neighbouring Somalia. The British military teams sent to train Somali forces (as part of the strategy to build up security in countries facing insurgencies) will have their logistical support base in the country. One of the British Army's main exercise areas overseas used by 10000 personnel a year is also in Kenya and is used by brigades in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan.

The coming elections in Kenya are causing major consternation in London. Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo, is running neck and neck with Raila Odinga, his main opponent, in the polls. Kenyatta has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity being accused of orchestrating the violence which left 1,300 people dead during the last elections in 2007. The UK's position is that it will have nothing but the most "essential" contact with someone in that position. The British Government, itself, is embroiled in a legal case for gross violations of Kenyan human rights before Kenyan independence in 1963 which it does not reject but a case they tried to evade on legal technicalities.

Wasteful capitalism

Food grown by Kenyan farmers is rejected by UK supermarkets due to cosmetic imperfections. Some of this unwanted produce is sold on the local market or donated, but the quantities are so large that local markets cannot handle the volume and so much of it is either left to rot or fed to livestock - prompting resentment amongst Kenyan farmers who must bear the costs themselves.

 "It's a scandal that so much food is wasted in a country with millions of hungry people; we found one grower supplying a UK supermarket who is forced to waste up to 40 tonnes of vegetables every week, which is 40 per cent of what he grows," protested Tristram Stuart, food waste author.

In industrialized regions, almost half of the total food squandered, around 300 million tonnes annually, occurs because producers, retailers and consumers discard food that is still fit for consumption. This is more than the total net food production of Sub-Saharan Africa, and would be sufficient to feed the estimated 870 million people hungry in the world.

A maize small-holder farmer in Southeast Asia may lose up to 30 percent of his crop each year to mold, rodents, and insects due to a lack of dry storage equipment. A vegetable farmer in India may lose the same percentage of her crop due to deficiencies in cold storage infrastructure, such as facilities to sort out the food and store it and keep it fresh. A rice farmer in Vietnam may lose grain at multiple steps between harvest and market. That person may lose a bit at harvest, a bit more at storage, and even more during transportation. Each of these steps may lead to only a small percentage in grain loss. But those losses add up. The rice farmer may be looking at anywhere between 10 and 37 percent in losses by the time the grain reaches the marketplace.

You have farmers in developing countries that often do not have a fast and dependable way to get food to the consumer. You have inefficient transportation due to lack of roads or poor quality transport vehicles that pose numerous challenges for moving fruits, vegetables, and other perishable food from farm to market. In most of the world, in fact, refrigerated vehicles are not available or practical. You have produce moved in open, un-refrigerated trucks, leading to food loss, infestation, and contamination well before it reaches its destination.

Access to processing and storage equipment is also lacking. Unless equipment is manufactured locally, farmers can have a hard time finding what they need in the domestic market. Processing equipment that can dry high protein beans and legumes or turn soy beans into soy milk greatly transforms and extends the life of a product, as well as to increase its value, but is not always available or even affordable to smallholder farmers. In many developing countries, even if equipment is available, without accessible maintenance services and spare parts, this equipment may not be useful long-term.

South Africa's Capitalism

An excellent analysis of South Africa and the ANC from the anarchist organisation Zabalaza
The African National Congress represents primarily the interests of both the emergent black capitalists and of the (largely black) state managerial elite. Despite the myth of common black interests, the black elite is anti-working class. The ANC is undeniably full of factions but these conflicts have nothing to do with real political divisions or principles; they arise from vicious elite competition for access to the wealth and power provided by high state office itself, like access to tenders. Given the powerful hold of (largely white-run) conglomerates in the private sector, naturally the emergent black elite must rely primarily on state office for enrichment and accumulation. But the state has only so much space – thus the viciousness of the conflicts, paralleling the viciousness of corporate clashes. The ANC is key to getting office, so this translates into a struggle within the ANC. The system generates the ANC factions, and the factions are no threat to the system: these are tertiary contradictions, equivalent to boardroom fights in private companies.

At the heart of the new South Africa is a balance between two ruling class sectors based on mutual dependence: the (largely black) state elite and the (largely white) private corporate elite, allied against the (largely black) working class (as well the Coloured, Indian and white working class). The state elite needs capital accumulation to fund and arm itself; the private elite needs the state’s power to maintain capital accumulation. The ruling class has two wings: private capitalists centred on means of production in corporations, and state managers, centred on means of administration and coercion in the state. The two are bound by common interests, but neither the mere tool of the other.  The mutual interests of the two ruling class sectors are profound. They are concretely expressed in a shared programme of South African expansionism, working class containment and neo- liberalism, exemplifying the primary contradictions between the ruling class and the working class.

Each wields highly centralised resources, via the state bureaucracy, including state companies on the one hand and large private conglomerates on the other. In South Africa, by 1981, the state and eight private companies held 70% of the total assets of the top 138 companies; today, 10 companies control 50% of Johannesburg Securities Exchange capitalisation, matching state monopolies in electricity, rail and so on. There is also a powerful, wealthy black elite centred on the state, wielding an Africanised army and police; and the state bureaucracy, perhaps 30% of the economy through the state, which owns banks, Eskom, harbours, rail, transport, mass media, the weapons industry and South African Airways, plus 25% of all land (including 55% in the provinces of Gauteng and the Western Cape).So “inseparable” are they that the corporate elite uses its private wealth to access state power, and the state elite uses its state power to access private wealth. Both ruling class wings share lives of privilege and power: for example, the top 15 earners in South African state companies got R103 million annually (2010), in a country where 50% of the people get 8% of national income. The ANC government is allied to big business, and the state elite does not represent “the people”, but its own class interests.

Despite (white) corporate hesitancy on BEE, around a quarter of JSE-listed company directorships are held by people of colour, with the proportion of senior managers in the private sector at 32.5% (2008). The top 20 richest in South Africa (using disclosed share data) include old white money, like the Oppenheimers, and new black money, like billionaires Tokyo Sexwale, Cyril Ramaphosa, Patrice Motsepe and Lazarus Zim. Combined with the 25%+ of the economy under state control, it is clear the black elite is far from economically powerless, and it is a myth that the “means of production” are all in white hands, or that the ruling class is mainly white. The ruling class is more than just the capitalists, and not all capitalists are white. However, as the JSE figures show, the private sector remains dominated by white capitalists, just like the state sector remains dominated by black state managers. This is the basic division in the ruling class, generating secondary contradictions.

Not every black is poor; not every white rich. Class is the fundamental mediator. Obviously all whites – including the white working class – benefited from apartheid, and this has had long-term effects. But white South Africa was (and is) deeply divided by class, often violently: consider the strikes of 1913, 1922, 1942, 1979. Meanwhile, under apartheid there was a powerful, if subordinate, black elite with state power, notably through the homelands: consider Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana and Bantu Holomisa of Transkei. Today, hundreds of thousands of poor whites live in squatter and trailer camps, while state-led BEE means that a small black elite trades on its race “as a means of justifying entitlement”. No country, not even South Africa, has ever featured universal white privilege and universal black oppression.

The ANC state, despite its talk of national liberation, is an obstacle to the full emancipation of the working class because, first, the state/corporate elite can only exist through the domination/exploitation of the working class in general, through perpetuating poverty, subordination and authoritarianism. And secondly, the conditions of the black, Coloured and Indian working class are deeply marked by an apartheid/colonial legacy in education, housing, health, transport and land that cannot be removed within capitalism or the state system, but only through a society of self-managed, participatory, planned production and distribution for needs, not profit and power, and the abolition of social and economic inequality.

The black elite have achieved their national liberation with the capture of state power; it is now an obstacle to the complete national liberation of the black, Coloured and Indian working class – and of the full freedom of the white working class too. Black nationalism, the official ANC ideology, speaks of a single black interest; it covers the reactionary black elite in the flags of suffering and of struggle. It is mistaken to keep reverting to the easy (but always flawed) black nationalist politics of the 1980s to try and understand the 2000s. Black (like white) nationalism was always flawed, was always an obstacle to completing the national liberation struggle of the black, Coloured and Indian working class. To continue to use nationalist politics is disempowering, confusing and positively harmful. It ignores class, creates illusions in the ANC and disguises the true nature of the black elite. And most dangerously, it easily translates itself into direct racism against the minorities – Coloureds, Indians, whites and immigrant blacks – who make up at least 25% of the population. Cosatu suggests that the ANC is the party with a “working class bias” and the opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) a party of “big capital”, but the ANC openly backs “big capital” and its leaders include billionaires like Ramaphosa and Sexwale, and multi-millionaires like Malema and Jacob Zuma. Moreover, “big capital” contributes heavily to the ANC coffers because, as Zuma admits, “investing in the ANC … is good value for your money”. The DA is really a coalition of minority voters, small business and white conservatives, with no serious buy-in by “big capital” outside the Western Cape. The ANC has no “working class bias”, as Cosatu insists but is a party of the ruling class and its “class bias” is against the working class.

Some Trotskyists claim  the ANC government is the tool of big business, either by being bribed (the “sold out its principles” theory), or by having no choice (the “victim” theory). The “sold out” theory’s flaw is that the ANC has never been anti-capitalist, nor for radical change; it has betrayed nothing. Its aim was only the end of apartheid, not socialism. The victim theory’s flaw is that the ANC state wields enormous power through its control of the armed forces and state bureaucracy. It is precisely because of its autonomous power base that it enacts measures (violation punishable by law) like affirmative action/tendering and other BEE measures, and defies private corporate opinion on a host of issues such as foreign policy. The ANC often blames “globalisation” for unpopular choices when speaking to the unions, but let us not conflate useful alibis with the facts.

The ANC is a top-down party, run by small cabals of the rich and powerful with enormous state and corporate resources, the prospect of Cosatu calling them to account is less than zero. Rather the ANC uses Cosatu (and the SACP) to extend the power of a hostile state against the working class itself. Measures to undermine the working class include the direct co-optation of leaders into top ANC government positions, institutions that systematically bureaucratise the unions like the corporatist National Economic Development and Labour Council (Nedlac) and political manipulation through a pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric that presents the ANC as a movement of the black poor. Two examples suffice: former Cosatu general secretary Sam Shilowa rocketed through the ANC to become a wine-collecting multi-millionaire [33]; SACP general secretary Blade Nzimande was rewarded for his Zuma support with a ministerial job, immediately buying a R1.2 million German luxury car.

The ANC retains a mass working class base; let us have no illusions, nor engage in the fantasy that widespread township protests over the last 10 years are a “general urban uprising” against the government. True ANC membership is only 700 000, compared to five million in unions, and true, only 25% of the eligible voting age population votes ANC. However, the ANC faces no serious political rivals. Low votes are mainly due to people not voting in ANC township strongholds, not widespread political opposition. Where left-wing movements run candidates, like Operation Khanyisa Movement (OKM), these are regularly defeated. So long as the political subordination of the working class to the ANC, and therefore to the ruling class, continues, the working class is trapped. It is necessary to reject the notion that spontaneous and militant actions are inherently radical, or that a revolution can happen spontaneously. This is not true. Unless the masses have a revolutionary vision, they will simply repeat the errors of the past years, the error of putting our fate into the hands of new masters. That is precisely why Malema could use the poor’s frustration to promote an elite agenda, precisely why Zuma could ride Cosatu frustration to the presidency. No revolutionary ideas, no revolution.

The legacy of apartheid cannot be eradicated under capitalism and the state in present conditions but as part of the project of constructing a self-managed planned economy, a universal and international federation of humanity. 

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Africa - Bread-basket - not Basket-case

Africa’s classic depiction in the mainstream media is a giant basketcase full of endless war, famine and helpless children creates an illusion of a continent utterly dependent on Western handouts. In fact, the precise opposite is true – it is the West that is reliant on African handouts.

The role for which Africa has been ascribed by the masters of the Western capitalist economy is as a supplier of cheap resources and cheap labour. And keeping this labour, and these resources, cheap depends primarily on one thing: ensuring that Africa remains underdeveloped and impoverished. If it were to become more prosperous, wages would rise; if it were to become more technologically developed, it would be able to add value to its raw materials through the manufacturing process before exporting them, forcing up the prices paid. Meanwhile, extracting stolen oil and minerals depends on keeping African states weak and divided. The Democratic Republic of Congo, for example – whose mines produce tens of billions of mineral resources each year – were only, in one recent financial year, able to collect a paltry $32million in tax revenues from mining due to the proxy war waged against that country by Western-backed militias.

Countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo are ravaged by armed militias who steal the country’s resources and sell them at sub-market prices to Western companies, with most of these militias run by neighbouring countries such as Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi who are in turn sponsored by the West, as regularly highlighted in UN reports. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, are the pitifully low prices paid both for African raw materials and for the labour that mines, grows or picks them, which effectively amount to an African subsidy for Western living standards and corporate profits.

Developing Algeria as a major natural gas exporter is an economic and strategic imperative for EU countries as North Sea production of the commodity enters terminal decline in the next decade. Algeria is already an important energy supplier to the Continent, but Europe will need expanded access to natural gas to offset the decline of its indigenous reserves. British and Dutch North Sea gas reserves are estimated to run out by the end of the decade, and Norway’s to go into sharp decline from 2015 onwards. With Europe fearful of overdependence on gas from Russia and Asia, Algeria – with reserves of natural gas estimated at 4.5 trillion cubic metres, alongside shale gas reserves of 17 trillion cubic meters – will become essential

Paying Royalties

A government official confirmed South Africa’s 10 kings are each getting a salary of R1m a year as well as many other benefits and subsidie.

 10 kings, 829 senior traditional leaders and 5 311 chiefs had been paid over R650m over the past year. Each province determined what benefits and other subsidies were paid in addition to that.

 KZN last year paid R59m for Zulu king Goodwill Zwelithini and his royal household, which included 27 children. Zwelethini also asked for an additional R18m to build a palace for the youngest of his six wives. He and his entourage spend more than R800 000 a month on travelling, for the hire of private jets and helicopters when the king was criss-crossing the province to perform his duties.

The Eastern Cape’s four kings each got a brand new Mercedes-Benz ML 320CDI of about R703 000 in the past year.

Sweet Profits

Associated British Foods, one of Britain's biggest multinationals, whose brands include Silver Spoon sugar, Twinings Tea and Kingsmill bread, Primark clothes and Ryvita, is avoiding paying millions of pounds of tax in an African state blighted by malnutrition. It contributed little corporation tax to the state's exchequer between 2007 and 2012, and none at all for two of those years (between 2008 and 2010).  Zambia Sugar,  recently posted record pre-tax profits and its huge plantation is increasing its capacity to produce more sugar for markets in Europe and Africa. Yet it paid less than 0.5% of its $123m pre-tax profits in corporation tax between 2007 and 2012.

The company benefits from generous capital allowance and tax-relief schemes in Zambia including one obtained by taking the Zambian government to court, but the investigation also found that it funnels around a third of its pre-tax profits to sister companies in tax havens, including Ireland, Mauritius and the Netherlands. Tax treaties between Zambia and some of those countries mean the state's revenue authorities are unable to charge their normal tax on money leaving their shores. The tax haven transactions of this one British headquartered multinational deprived Zambia of a sum 14 times larger than the UK aid provided to the country to combat hunger and food insecurity. There is an annual $2.6m payments to an Irish sister company whose accounts have stated that it has no employees. The firm also pays $3m a year to a sister company in Mauritius for access to "trade contacts with customers in the European sugar market, transportation of sugar to Europe, foreign currency management and the availability of cost effective credit terms". Yet when an ActionAid investigator, called the director of the Mauritius holding company and asked how many employees they had, he was told: "One … it's me." ABF says that the fees to Mauritius and Ireland are rolled up into their tax liability in South Africa, where they are taxed at 28%. Yet accounts show that in 2011/12 the entire tax liability in South Africa was $308,000 – the equivalent of just 4% of the $7m fees paid by Zambia Sugar to Ireland and Mauritius.

Its Nakambala Sugar plantation in the Mazabuka district are vital to local livelihoods. The plantation and factory made record profits in 2012 and is expected to exceed 400,000 tonnes of sugar production this year for its Europe and Africa markets. To fund its expansion last year, Zambia Sugar borrowed $70m from two commercial banks. The loan is in the Zambian currency kwacha and secured on Zambia Sugar's estate and assets in Mazabuka, and it is repaid via a Lusaka branch of Citibank Zambia. Yet, on paper, the loan is actually to the Irish subsidiary. Why? ABF told ActionAid: "Interest on loans to Zambia Sugar from such banks would have been subject to [Zambian] withholding tax. The banks would therefore have increased their interest charge to compensate for this."

Zambia Sugar's immediate owner is a Dutch co-operative. The owners of Dutch "cooperatiefs", in this case companies in Mauritius and Jersey, are classed as members rather than shareholders so the income they receive is not classified as taxable dividends. And under this structure Zambia can only apply a 5% tax on the cash leaving its shores, a smaller rate than normal because of a tax treaty between the Netherlands and Zambia.

 Mazabuka's Nakambala Urban health centre say two malnourished children die every month with it. At the school, 1,200 children fit into 12 classrooms in shifts taught by 20 teachers. In Zambia 45% of children are malnourished and two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day.

The total loss to tax avoidance by multinationals in the developing world is estimated to be around £70bn a year, enough to save the lives of 85,000 children under the age of five in the world's poorest countries every 12 months, campaigners say.

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Mali: the background

What is now Mali has a long history. The Malinke empire ruled the area from the 12th century to the 15th century. Then, the powerful Songhai empire ruled over the Timbuktu-Gao region. In 1591 Morocco conquered Timbuktu and ruled the city for two centuries. In the 19th century the land became a colony in 1904 (named French Sudan in 1920). In 1946, the land became part of French Union.

Mali, situated in West Africa, lies in the Sahara region. It has a land area of 1,240,000 sq km, which is four-fifths the size of Alaska in the USA. Mali is land-locked and shares a border with Algeria, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast,  Mauritania, Niger, and Senegal. The north has a porous soil and dry weather, while the only fertile soil is in the south where river Niger and Senegal provide water for irrigation. Its natural resources are: cotton, maize, millet, and groundnuts. these crops are mainly produced from the south because of irrigation system around them.

It is estimated that Mali as of 2012 is 15,000,000 people. (growth rate is 2.6 percent) (birth rate is 4.6 percent). Infant mortality rate is 11.36 percent. Life expectancy is 52.1. Density per sq km 10. Mali has about 51 tribes such as Madinka, Bambara, Kunta, Soninke, Arabe, Pere, Sarahule, Bobo, Bozo, Kado, Sawraye Tamachec, Kroloboro, Tuareg, Arabs, etc. As to religion, 90 percent are Muslims, 7 percent Christians and 3 percent animists.
 
The capital is Bamako with 1,325,300 metropolitan area and the currency is the CFA franc that is used among francophone countries in West Africa.

Mali became independent on 20 June 1960 under the name of Sudanese Republic. This Republic was joined by Senegal in the Mali Federation. However after two months Senegal seceded. As a result the Sudanese Republic changed its name to the current Republic of Mali.

The first President of Mali, Modibo Keita was born to a Madinka Moslem family in Bamako. He took over power as an elected President on independence in 1960.  Keita  introduced a single party state and Pan-Africanism, like other presidents that promoted Pan-Africanism in their various countries:  Azikiwe in Nigeria, Nkrumah in Ghana, Sekou Touré in Guinea-Conakry, Nyerere in Tanzania, and Kenyatta in Kenya.

On 19 November 1968 General Moussa Traroré removed President Keita in a bloodless coup d'état.  He spent some weeks in detention in Kidal in the northern of Mali and died in May 1977. Keita’s death attracted demonstrations that were violent. These were organised by his party and the Madinka ethnic group that felt humiliated and maltreated by General Traroré and his cohorts.

Mali has been on a barrel of gun powder for years since independence. The northern part of the country which is comprised of cities like Timbuktu, Kidal, Gao, Sevare, Tesalit, Djabali, Konne, Mopti, etc, has been protesting to Bamako government about the lack of development in their region. They feel marginalised by the government. Each time they rise up against the government, they are decimated.

In the 1980s the Tuareg rebels were the only force confronting the Bamako government, demanding their independence in the north. But, because the rebels lacked sophisticated weapons to go into full offensive against the Mali regime, the Mali government did not bother to counter them. Northern Mali has been the zone of terrorists for years. There was no border control in the north. Ansar-Dine was formed by a Tuareg rebel called Iyad Ag Ghaly in July last year in order to bring in more jihadist fighters into their region for support to invade northern Mali.

In 2006 the Tuareg rebels looted weapons from the army depot in the town of Kidal for their struggle, but that did not send a signal to Bamako that trouble was on the way. The regime in Bamako has been on soft pedal with the Tuareg because of a lack of weapons to confront them. And the rebels, noticing that the regime was handicapped and incapacitated to confront them, started seeking support from other jihadists from other countries like Boko Haram of Nigeria, Al-shaabab of Somalia, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. These terrorists have the common goal to achieve Sharia law in Islamic religion. They are better organised than the government because of their belief in sharia.

In January 2010  an offensive was started by the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA). The movement assumed momentum after the fall of Gaddafi in Libya in 2011. These terrorists stole many sophisticated weapons from the Gaddafi regime and crossed the desert to start a rebellion in the northern Mali. So these weapons, sold to Libya government by the French government, ended up into the hands of bandits and terrorists.

And to worsen the situation, on 22 March 2012, a group of angry army officers led by Captain Amadou Sanogo did a coup d'état and appeared on television to announce that they had seized control of the country. They said their reason for taking over the country was because, President Dioncounda Traoré was not handling the conflict in the north very well. The coup d'état did not succeed as the military only controls the south of Mali, leaving the north known as Republic of Azawad to MNLA, Ansar-Dine and Al Qaeda terrorists to control. Dioncounda Traoré, who had been forced by the junta to go into hiding, was re-instated. The Tuareg rebels that used to be in control of the north were chased out by MNLA, Ansar-Dine and Al Qaeda Maghreb as they had no weapons to hold on the region.
 
French and African military intervention
In January the Islamist fighters decided to take more cities from the south in order to build a well-balanced Azawad republic. They captured the central town of Konna and planned to push further south to Bamako. The government of Bamako had no other choice than to ask France for help and Paris responded as a colonial father by sending 550 troops and tanks, at the same time carrying out air strikes on rebel positions in the north.

A rebellion that could have been crushed within one week of its existence stayed ten good months before French intervention and other allied forces such as Nigeria with 1200 soldiers. Other African states such as Benin republic, Niger, Togo, Chad,  and Burkina-Faso also sent troops. Other western countries like USA, Britain, Germany and Belgium are supplying the logistics.

In April 2012, when the jihadists took the north of Mali, they committed human right abuses by amputations, flogging, stoning to death those who oppose their interpretation of Islam. All these severe pains inflicted on innocent people could have been avoided if UN have done their work well. But it is a waste of time for any nation in crisis calling the UN for intervention.

Malians are nice and hardworking people with beautiful music and culture. They welcome and respect people. Malians have nothing, but the little they have are shared among people that is around them, even to a piece of bread. It is callous and total negligence by the entire world that resulted in Malians facing the brutality of the Islamic jihadists.  I am convinced that if Mali had an oil in their soil, a lot of capitalist powers could have gone to Mali a long time ago without waiting for UN security council approval.

On 25 January France promised to give $452 million to the Mali government. How is this money going to help an ordinary citizen of Mali from south to north? A lot of millions have been donated to African leaders by the West. And this money ended up in pockets of individual leaders while the masses are left to rot. If the money given to Mali government passed through the village Alkalis, or village heads, of every community this would help ordinary Malians and mean that they would reject every offer coming from jihadists, be it food or cash.

The jihadists donated some food items to some people in order to win support and it worked for them. They used that trick and won the hearts of some parents who voluntarily gave their children to jihadists as child soldiers. But those that refused to give their children, their children too were forced to join the rebels.

Whatever the French government’s motives for intervening, there can be no doubt that most Malians welcomed it. The spokesperson for Malians living in Orleans, France, Habib Doucouré,  said that were happy with French and African military intervention as it saved Mali from Al Qaeda destruction.

Cebiloan HYACINT, 
France.
 

We can feed ourselves

 Henri Josserand, a consultant for Food Across Borders, declared the West African sub-region was food self-sufficient despite critical deficit in some regions. He said the sub-region had been able to feed itself over the last 50 years, with no serious increase in the volume of food imported. “Although the population in the region has increased tremendously over the last half-century, so has food production also increased to commensurate the increasing population,” he observed. Josserand is an expert with over 30 years of work in economic development, agricultural and food policy, food security, vulnerability analysis, and early warning systems.

 Food Across Borders is an initiative driven by sub-regional body Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

 40 percent of Nigerians do not have sufficient food on daily basis asserts Professor Babatope  Alabadan of the Federal University of Technology, Minna. The professor of agricultural engineering blamed the food shortages in the country on huge food losses due to inadequate storage facilities. Despite the favourable natural condition for food production in the country, food is still being imported into the country to meet up demand because of huge food losses.

Not all gold glitters

There is no refuge from the blistering heat at this artisanal gold mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Any trees that might have provided shade have been consumed by the mine, which covers an area the size of five or six football fields. About a thousand people - men, women and some children - swarm across the open-cast mine near Iga-Barrière, about 25km east of Bunia, the administrative town of the Ituri Region. Local NGOs put the numbers of artisanal gold miners in Ituri between 130,000 and 150,000. Women, some with babies strapped to their backs, form human chains to pass plastic basins of mud from men excavating the shafts. They all work 13 hour days, six days a week. Some earn as little as US$0.21 a day.

It can take up to three weeks to dig, by hand, an 8m-deep shaft to where the gold-bearing sands lie at Iga-Barrière. Narrower shafts requiring less work carry greater risks.

A stake at the artisanal gold mine costs about $250, or five grams of gold, and is paid to the Société des Mines d'Or de Kilo Moto (SOKIMO), a public company. SOKIMO is a relic from Belgium, the former colonial power. Created in 1926, the company enjoyed boom years during the 1960s and 1970s, employing about 6,000 people and providing housing, clinics and schools for its employees. However, its nationalization in 1966 by then-Zaire's President Mobuto Sese-Seko, who used the company to support his lavish lifestyle, eventually took a toll. By the late 1980s, the company's only source of revenue was the taxing of artisanal and small-scale miners. Makuza Boniface, SOKIMO director at Iga-Barrière, told IRIN the company imposes a 30 percent tax on all gold produced at the site by the artisanal miners. Gold is being smuggled across the borders by gold dealers exploiting a tax loophole, Kitene said, to maximise profits.

Lobho Faustin, 30, cannot afford his own claim. He is part of a group of eight diggers, earning a wage to support his three children. "It's a job to live and survive on. How much money you make depends on how lucky you are. Sometimes I get $50 in a week and sometimes nothing. You can work for weeks and not get paid. I work for someone else. But it all depends. If we find gold then we get paid. There is nothing else to do," he said.

Artisanal miners face an array of occupational hazards, including: mercury inhalation while extracting gold from ore; tunnel and open-shaft mine collapses; women experiencing spontaneous abortions due to heavy labour; and the complete absence of water and sanitation facilities. "Health and safety is set down in the Mining Code, but most miners don't seem to care. It is very difficult to prosecute people as most are not educated and many were in militias during the war," Toto Bosingaka, the chief of the Service d'Assistance et d'Encadrement d'Artisanal (SAESSCAM), told IRIN.

As elsewhere in the eastern DRC, Ituri encountered a succession of international and local conflicts, and a variety of militias and foreign national armies imposed their own taxation system on the artisanal gold miners. Ndele Tanzi, coordinator for the Bunia-based NGO Honesty and Peace, told IRIN gold mining was a major threat to peace and stability. "The Ituri war was cast as an ethnic war, but if you look carefully it was about resources."
Although Ituri has returned to relative peace, gaining access to Iga-Barrière requires passing through numerous roadblocks staffed by security forces and government officials, who impose random "road taxes" on vehicles and pedestrians alike. The peace dividend has not provided any respite from a culture of backhander payments.

"While the exploitation of artisanal and small-scale miners continues, the identity of those responsible has now changed. They are no longer warlords and militia leaders but government administrators, members of the government's military and security organizations, and many regional traders," A November 2012 report, Conflict Gold to Criminal Gold, published by Southern Africa Resource Watch, said.

Louis Bedidj Fuarwingo, coordinator of the artisanal miner organization the Association Exploit dans Mineur Artisnal pur le pacification et reconstruction Ituri (AEMAPRI), told IRIN, "Sometimes authorities harass miners and make them pay for small things to let them work. They can make people very angry and demand as much as $750. "They ask for non-existent certificates, like 'scientific training' and 'expertise in mining'. They just create such lists to pick money from the miners. Police come to the mining camp and go to the mine boss and then all the miners have to contribute."

From here

Why Mali

At issue in Western interventions in Africa's wars is the scramble for Africa's resources. They're vast. They're some of the world's largest and richest. They include oil, gas, gold, silver, diamonds, uranium, iron, copper, tin, lead, nickel, coal, cobalt, bauxite, wood, coltan, manganese, chromium, vanadium-bearing titanium, agricultural lands, and offshore fishing.  

Mali is strategically located. It's West Africa's largest country. It's more than double the size of France. It borders on seven nations. They include Algeria, Niger, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Guinea, and Cote D'Ivoire (Ivory Coast). Its northwestern area is largely arid desert or semi-desert. The Sahel runs through its central region. Rainfall and rivers make southwestern territory marginally more lush than the rest of the country.The Niger River is its most important geographic feature. It traverses the Sahel and southeastern region. It's a major transportation artery. 

 Mali's resources comprise of gold, diamonds, phosphates, bauxite, lignite, kaolin, salt, limestone, gypsum, granite, marble, diatomite, hydropower, iron ore, manganese, tin, lead, zinc, copper, oil, gas, and uranium. Mali is Africa's third largest gold producer after South Africa and Ghana. It's rich in uranium. It has an estimated 5,000 tons or more. It's neighbor Niger is the world's fourth largest producer. In 2007, Algeria's state oil company Sonatrach and Canada's Selier Energy signed oil and gas exploration deals. In mid-2012, drilling began.

Pretexts are easy to invent and the war on terror is just another piece of camoflage for  serving French, British and American business interests.

Hunger - the death sentence for many

More than 12million South Africans will go to bed hungry tonight.  The hungriest people are in Cape Town (80%) and Msunduzi, in KwaZulu-Natal (87%). It found that, in Johannesburg, 43% of the poor faced starvation and malnutrition. Researchers believe the figure could be higher.
A five-year study by the University of Cape Town's African Food Security Unit Network has exposed a food crisis that constitutes a "death sentence" for many

 Dr Jane Battersby-Lennard said the University of Cape Town study explained  the problem was access to adequate nutrition, not the availability of food.

"This is because of poverty. People are simply too poor to buy food."

The Princess of Angola

Eldest daughter of Angola's president Isabel dos Santos, dubbed 'princess', has been named Africa's first female billionaire. President José Eduardo dos Santos, the continent's second longest-serving leader at 33 years and an autocrat accused of enriching his family at the expense of ordinary Angolans. Forbes found that Isabel dos Santos's shares in several Portuguese firms, including a cable television company and an Angolan bank. According to Forbes, Dos Santos is the biggest shareholder in Zon, a Portuguese media conglomerate, with 28.8% of the stock, worth $385m; she also owns 19.5% of the Portuguese bank Banco BPI, worth $465m; and 25% of Angola's Banco BIC, worth an estimated $160m. In addition, she is said to be a 25% shareholder in the Angolan telecoms company Unitel. Most of her businesses in Angola are approved and transferred by her father. The investments in Portugal, De Morais added, were made first by the state firm Sonangol, which manages Angola's oil and gas reserves, with Dos Santos receiving shares. Dos Santos married Sindika Dokolo, Congolese art collector the son of the tycoon Sanu Dokolo, founder of Bank of Kinshasa. The couple, who have three children, divide their time between Luanda, London, Lisbon and Johannesburg,

When someone shows up with a billion dollars you have to ask what is the origin of the wealth? This is not explained. Peter Lewis, an African studies professor at Johns Hopkins University in the US, told Forbes: "The source of funds and corporate governance are very murky. When you tease out the ownership and controlling interests in Angola it reads like a Who's Who of family members and party and military chiefs."

The anti-corruption organisation Transparency International recently ranked Angola 168th out of 178 countries in its corruption perception index.

Source

The farm workers fight

Unions and charities supporting the Western Cape's 500,000 farmworkers say pay and conditions are so bad that South African wines, grapes and Granny Smith apples have called for a boycott of them. Of the Western Cape's fruit production, 58% is exported and, in Britain, one of the main importers is Tesco. For world socialists those calls to boycott South African produce is deja vu of the earlier anti-apartheid campaigns. This may help in this particular case but will not lessen the class struggle in South Africa.

The farmers' "vindictive" response to the latest two-week strike in the £850m-a-year fruit and wine sector is sacking workers by the truck-load.

South African farmworkers  called off the latest round of a strike for a daily wage of 150 rands (£10.65), their union said but warned of a new flare-up in the Western Cape.  Portia Adams, a spokeswoman for the employers' organisation Agri SA, said many farms had continued to operate using non-unionised labour from outside the farming areas.

 "The government should be forcing the farmers to the table but it is not," said Nosey Pieterse, secretary general of the Black Workers' Agricultural Sector Union, (Bawusa). "Our only weapon left is for the foreign retailers to pledge that unless the conditions are addressed, they will no longer import South African products." The government has been silent on the issue, tacitly pointing to ongoing annual minimum wage talks. Pieterse, a lifelong activist for farmworkers' rights, said: "The farmers are intransigent, vengeful and arrogant. Yet they are the beneficiaries of post-apartheid South Africa. In the first 10 years of democracy, the wine industry grew tenfold, from 20m litres output before 1994 to 220m litres. The farmworkers' conditions went the other way. Tenure rights laws were not accepted by the farmers. More than 1  million farmworkers were evicted. They remain slaves on the land of their birth."

 Most farmworkers are not unionised, many are illiterate and face the risk of eviction because they live on their employers' properties.Poorly enforced labour rights and tenancy laws as well as the pitifully low statutory minimum daily wage in the sector – 69.39 rands (£4.92) – perpetuate a culture of paternalism. To go on strike, workers have to stand up to employer.  A 2011 report by Human Rights Watch found widespread exposure to pesticides, lack of access to drinking water or sanitation, and failure to pay sick leave. While the system of dop – payment in alcohol – has largely been abolished, the Western Cape still has the highest rates in the world of foetal alcohol syndrome.

The haves, the have-lots and the have-nots

When Apartheid ended in 1994, South Africa moved from an era of institutionalized racial separation to what many believed was an equal society. But today, the rich-poor divide is starker than ever before. What has been happening is that as businesses have pushed down wages, profit margins have been increasing. The World Bank showed the country to have a Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) of 63.1 –  which is among the worst globally.

 South Africa is now ‘‘the most unequal country on earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid,’’ said a Oxfam report released just ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Oxfam predicts that if nothing is done at both government and the international level to address the situation, in South Africa alone one-million more people could be pushed into poverty by 2020.

The Liberian Land grab

Liberian farmers who survived a 15-year civil war are now fighting lucrative property deals with Indonesian and Malaysian palm oil companies that threaten the land they live on, if not their sacred burial sites. Thirty hours by car from the capital Monrovia, the green and yellow flag of Golden Veroleum Liberia, an Indonesian palm oil giant, floats over deforested hills in Sinoe County, southern Liberia. In 2010, GVL acquired a 63-year lease on 220,000 hectares of land to produce palm oil. It pays annual rent of US$1.50 per hectare for virgin forest land and US$5 per hectare for cleared terrain in the lease, renewable for 30 more years. Palm oil is used for cooking in parts of Africa, Brazil and Southeast Asia, and is an ingredient in soaps and washing powders.

“The Indonesians came here for the first time in September 2010,'' resident Benedict Manewah explained. “They said: ‘We have a concession agreement, your president has sold it to us.’ Three months later they came back... and they started to destroy the properties, farmlands, crops, livestock and houses.’’ Manewah listed the crops he had planted. “I had rubber trees, cassavas, breadfruits, orange trees, cocoas, coconuts and palm trees,’’ for his family. GVL workers uprooted his crops to produce palm oil exclusively, and “they ship everything to their people, at home,’’ in Indonesia, he said.

Saydee Monboe pointed out that farmers now had no choice but to work under contract for GVL, charging: “This is not development, it's modern slavery.’’

Alfred Brownell, a lawyer who founded the organization Green Advocates, added:“The way they operate is almost as mob gangsters; threats, intimidation, illegal arrests,''

Fact of the Day

South Africa more unequal than in 1993.
 http://business.iafrica.com/news/838087.html

Namibia child poverty

One in three children in Namibia still grows up in households that are poor.

 Long-term impacts on children, especially if poverty starts at an early age or persists over several years. These impacts include a higher risk of low birth weight and child mortality, stunting and poor educational outcomes. Poverty can also impact on children's emotional and psychosocial wellbeing as the daily struggle to make ends meet can increase stress and tension within a household.

The struggle to live in Mali

While world media attention is focused on the French military intervention to thwart militant Islamist rebels, it is easy to overlook that for most Malians, to just stay alive is, in itself, an everyday struggle.

The country’s birthrate and infant mortality rate are the second highest in the world. Infant mortality exceeds 10 percent. Life expectancy at birth is among the shortest in the world.

With climate change and the Sahara desert creeping ever southward, life for rural and nomadic populations in the north is getting worse; even at the best of times. Drought is now a common reality. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about a quarter of the population faces severe food insecurity.

The current conflict makes the misery worse. Very often the popular response is flight–to anywhere else. Oxfam estimates that 30,000 so far have fled since the French began their campaign last week. They join some 345,000 previously internally and externally displaced persons due to the ongoing unrest. The Catholic Information Service for Africa estimates that the number of displaced persons could reach 700,000. Already it estimates that about a third of Mali’s population of more than fifteen million is affected by the interrelated crises involving food availability, nutrition, and military conflict. This extreme privation plays a major, if often hidden, role in refugee flows and the availability of children to fight as soldiers as the only means of obtaining a meal.

Poverty Facts

Most people in the world are poor.  There is no part of the world where traces of poverty do not exist. Poverty is a situation where a person lacks basic needs such as food, clothing and shelter as well as access to healthcare and education or where the access to these basic needs is unsustainable. Relative poverty is more of a social definition which tends to measure inequality, social exclusion and dependency.  Poverty is indicated by economic and human development indices such as GDP per capital income, life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy rate, employment, gender inequality as well as level of democracy or political participation. Other indicators of poverty by the World Bank  include precarious Livelihood, physical limitations, lack of security, misuse of power by those in authority by creating dis-empowering policies, institutions and structures as well as weak community self help organizations. The World Bank recent quantification of extreme poverty defines poverty as one living on less than $1.25 (PPP) per day and moderate poverty as one living on less than $2 per day. Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) simply refers to the equivalent of local currency needed to obtain what $1.25 can purchase in the United States. The United Nations regards poverty as a violation of human dignity.

 The greatest negative outcome of poverty is hunger and disease. Hunger results from under nutrition as well as malnutrition which increase the incidence of diseases such as malaria, headaches and a general decrease in body immunity and susceptibility to disease. In both humans and animals, hunger leads to anger, aggression, hatred and even violence. Food insecurity, another expression for hunger as a manifestation of poverty is a situation where persons lack adequate food of the right quality (balanced diet) quantity as well as at the desired time.

In 2008 about 1.345billion people mostly in developing countries lived on less than $1.25 a day and 1 .02 billion people where under nourished.  World Bank reports also show that out of the world population of 6.8 billion, 925 million or 13.6% are hungry most of who live in developing countries especially Asia, the pacific and sub - Saharan Africa. Children are the most unfortunate victims of under nutrition as evidence has shown that children who are under-nourished encounter about f60 days of illness within the 365 days of the year and accounts for six million deaths every year or 17000 deaths per day. Malnutrition affects 33% of children in developing countries. Africa accounts for 26% of the world’s malnourished children which stems from their, mothers during pregnancy. It is estimated that undernourished mothers deliver one out of every six under weight babies with high incidence of neonatal death as well as other health problems leading to disabilities, mental retardation, blindness and poor life time health conditions.

The poverty situation in Nigeria has been described as a paradox — poverty in the midst of plenty. The high poverty level in Nigeria which stood at 74.2% in year 2000 was unjustifiable as the country is endowed with rich natural resources. Poverty level in Nigeria rose from the minimal of 15% in 1960 to 28% in 1980, 66% in 1996 giving 76.6 million poor persons while the United Nations Human Development Poverty Index rated Nigeria among the 25 poorest countries in the comity of nation. In 2004, the poverty rate for Nigeria however declined to 54.4% compared to the figures for Malaysia with 12.3% and Kenya 40% during the same year. Life expectancy is 48 years, infant mortality rate per 1000 is 90.4 and literacy rate 65.3%, though the poverty is said to be estimated at 34.1%, this still gives a poor population of about 55 million persons in absolute figures. In Nigeria, less than 40% have access to good drinking water while less than 30% have access to good toilet facilities.

Over $300 billion oil and gas wealth which is in abundance in Nigeria is controlled by about 0.1% of the population.

the Mali mess

Only last month, asked about intervention in the strife-torn Central African Republic, the French President François Hollande replied: “Those days are over”. But apparently not. France (and Britain) appear to be embroiled in yet another war. French planes attacked targets,  The mayor of Konna, says the dead included children who drowned after they threw themselves into a river in an effort to escape the bombs. Britain has provided transport planes. Americans provides intelligence and logistical support, Niger, Burkina Faso, Senegal and Nigeria agreed to send soldiers to join hundreds of French troops. France, the only European country still to have a permanent military presence in Africa with several major military bases. French involvement in Mali dates back more than a hundred years. The current unrest erupted in Mali after President Amadou Toumani Toure was toppled in a military coup on March 22, 2012. The coup leaders said they had mounted the coup in response to the government's failure to contain the Tuareg rebellion in the north of the country, which had been going on for two months.

A secular separatist Tuareg, National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad,  wants an independent state in northern Mali called Azawad. National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad. The group which once controlled the cities of Gao and Kidal has largely melted back into the population awaiting its next chance. The MNLA is generally disregarded and underestimated because it has receded and allowed al-Qaeda-linked groups to take over the field. But it's important to remember the genesis of this crisis was an action by the MNLA to take over northern Mali, and all that is happening can be seen as a kind of reaction. The aspirations of the MNLA are deep-rooted going back to the first Tuareg rebellion in 1963. Their demands are not going to go away and those demands will continue to be the deep root of the northern Mali crisis.

National Front for the Liberation of Azawad is an Arab group loosely allied to the MNLA which wants the people of northern Mali to have the right to self-determination. They want northern Malians to be able to decide whether they want to be autonomous, independent or to be a part of Mali, possibly through a referendum similar to what happened when Southern Sudan voted for independence. The FLNA is not asking for the implementation of Sharia law.

Ganda Koy (Masters of the Earth) is a Songhai ethnic self-protection militia which has been around since the second Tuareg rebellion in the 1990s. Ganda Koy has in the past fought alongside the Malian Army against Tuareg rebels. They have allegedly committed massacres against Tuareg civilians. Human Rights Watch recently put out a report warning that ethnic self-protection militias like Ganda Koy and Ganda Izo are compiling kill lists of members of MNLA, Ansar al Din, other groups and their collaborators.

Ganda Izo is a Fulani ethnic militia that was formed in 2008 to perform a similar function to Ganda Koy—providing self-protection to the local Fulani populace and countering Tuareg rebellion.

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is a mostly Algerian and Mauritanian group that has been present in northern Mali since 2003 and which has kidnapped and held more than 50 European and Canadian hostages for ransom in the last ten years earning what is estimated to be well over $100m. Niger's foreign minister Mohamed Bazoum recently said that AQIM's presence in northern Mali was part of a deal between the group and the deposed President of Mali Amadou Toumani Toure. Hostage ransom money from European governments was allegedly spread around to Malian officials while AQIM was given free rein in Tuareg areas, with a wink and a nod from the Malian Army. AQIM is currently holding at least nine European hostages in northern Mali. Over the last decade a few local Ifoghas, Tuaregs and Arabs joined AQIM in Mali, and their members also inter-married with the community. However now that AQIM are openly circulating in the main cities of northern Mali, and thanks to its association with local groups like Ansar al Din, the group has become more mainstream. Now youths from southern Mali, Senegal, Niger and other countries have come to join them under the rubric of the Islamic Police which AQIM has a direct hand in running.

Ansar al Din is a group of local Ifoghas Tuaregs, Berabiche Arabs and other local ethnic groups who want Sharia law implemented everywhere in Mali and across the Muslim world. The founder and head of Ansar al Din is Iyad Ag Ghali, a Tuareg former leader from the 1990s. Over the past ten years Iyad worked closely with the former president to try and put an end to simmering Tuareg rebellions and to negotiate hostage ransom deals with AQIM. Ansar al Din's spokesman is an Arab from the Timbuktu area named Sanda Ould Boumana who was incarcerated in Mauritania in 2005 for being an alleged member of al-Qaeda. The majority of Ansar al Din fighters are Tuaregs from Iyad Ag Ghali’s Ifoghas tribe and Berabiche Arabs from the Timbuktu area. Ansar al Din avoids fights with the MNLA and FLNA so as not to shed blood of relatives and tribal cohorts which would be de-legitimising. They tend to leave that job to MUJAO and AQIM. Although Ansar al Din denies any links with al-Qaeda, it effectively functions as a local umbrella under which members of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) can operate. The relationship between the two groups is analogous to the association between the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghainstan, with Ansar al Din playing host. The two groups work together running the religious police, for example. Ansar al Din keeps its membership Malian, thus keeping their future options open within Mali. Ansar al Din can be found in all three main cities of the north: Gao, Timbuktu and Kidal.

Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa is the most opaque of the al-Qaeda-linked groups in northern Mali. It is supposedly a dissident group which split off from AQIM, but they told Al Jazeera that they're proud of working with AQIM in Gao to fend-off mutual enemies. MUJAO says like Ansar al Din that they want Sharia law everywhere in the world. Unlike Ansar al Din the group incorporates both locals and foreigners from the Sahel region and North Africa.  MUJAO has been the most aggressive in attacking MNLA elements as well as Arab groups who want self-determination for northern Mali. When the MNLA gain a foothold in a region, MUJAO are known to harrass them until they leave. Tilemsi Arab drug lords from the Gao area are alleged to be involved in funding MUJAO and some of their young people have joined.

The trade routes of the Sahara once made the region now called Mali among the world’s richest. But for the past century, it has been marred by instability and conflict.

Source

Ethiopian Migrants

In the last six years around 250,000 Ethiopians have made the dangerous journey into Yemen, gateway to the Gulf, a very poor, deeply divided country besieged with internal problems, which has limited resources, the second highest rate of chronic child malnutrition in the world and where 45% of the population live in poverty.

Djibouti city is the first major stage in the harrowing journey to Yemen, here or at sea all possessions, including mobile phones, cash and clothes are stolen, by smugglers, corrupt police or border guards. The journey to Djibouti’s capital is harsh and dangerous, in which many Ethiopian migrants die of starvation, dehydration or are killed by bandits. The Danish Refugee Council report, ‘Desperate Choices’, states, and wait for days or weeks for favourable conditions to cross the perilous waters of the Gulf of Aden, in flimsy boats manned by vicious criminal gangs. The ordeal of women begins in Djibouti, DRC report an Ethiopian man recounting the sea passage when “four Yemeni smugglers were on board the boat. They raped the girls in front of us, we were not able to move or to speak, and those girls were already sold to Yemeni traffickers.” Many are abducted and held captive, sometimes for months on end, their experiences are harrowing in the extreme.

On arrival in Yemen men and women are separated, wives taken from husbands, daughters from Fathers brothers from sisters. Trafficking and multiple rape of women is widespread, IRIN 12/03/12 state “the majority of the approximately 3,000 women held by smugglers in Haradh [on the border with Saudi Arabia] over the past year were raped, many of them repeatedly.”

 Corruption is endemic, with security officials coordinating with smugglers on the border with Saudi Arabia, “a climate of collusion and low political will to apprehend and prosecute smugglers is allowing the trade and abuse of migrants to flourish” (Reuters). The country is run, a military officer on the payroll of the smugglers to the tune of $2,000 a month says, “by tribes not policemen: these people are my friends.” ‘These people’ are turning a bind eye to the murder, rape and trafficking of innocent migrants seeking work to feed their families.

The innocent men women and children from Ethiopia making an impossible choice, with they see no alternatives, are not the villains in this ongoing human tragedy they are the victims trapped in a terrifying nightmare.

Full article here

The World Bank

At the World Bank, we have made the world’s most pressing development issue—to reduce global poverty—our mission,” the bank proclaims. Why, then, did the IFC give a Saudi prince’s company an attractively priced $26 million loan to help build the Mövenpick hotel in Accra, Ghana. The five-star Mövenpick hotel opened in 2011, fits the model of a modern international luxury hotel, with 260 rooms, seven floors, and 13,500 square feet of retail space displaying $2,000 Italian handbags and other wares. It was financed by a combination of a multibillion-dollar investment company largely controlled by a Saudi prince, and the poverty-fighting World Bank.

The investment company, Kingdom Holding Company, has a market value of $12 billion, and Forbes ranks its principal owner, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, as the world’s 29th-richest person, estimating his net worth at $18 billion. The World Bank contributed its part through its International Finance Corporation (IFC), set up back in 1956 to muster cheap loans and other financial support for private businesses that contribute to its planet-improving mandate.

The IFC likes to work with huge corporations, funding projects these companies could finance themselves. Its partners are billionaires and massive multinationals, from oil giants like ExxonMobil to Grupo Arcor, the huge Argentine candy-maker. Its projects include not only glitzy hotels and high-end shopping malls, but also gritty gold and copper mines and oil pipelines, some of which end up benefiting the very corrupt, authoritarian regimes that the rest of the World Bank is urging to change. Nearly a quarter of the IFC’s paid-in capital from member governments—now standing at $2.4 billion—came from U.S., and every president in the World Bank’s 69-year history has been an American.
The World Bank’s internal watchdog sharply criticized the IFC’s approach, saying it gives little more than lip service to the bank’s poverty-fighting mission. The report, a major 2011 review by the bank’s Independent Evaluation Group, found that fewer than half the IFC investments it studied involved fighting poverty. “Most IFC investment projects generate satisfactory returns but do not provide evidence of identifiable opportunities for the poor to participate in, contribute to, or benefit from the economic activities that the project supports,” the report concluded. In fact, it said, only 13 percent of 500 projects studied “had objectives with an explicit focus on poor people,” and even those that did, the report found, had a “limited” impact. The IFC did not dispute the conclusions.

Ghana's per capita GDP ranks in the bottom third of the world, with life expectancy in the bottom 15 percent and infant mortality in the bottom fourth. The IFC committed about $145 million in loans and equity in Ghana just in fiscal year 2012. Yet Takyiwaa Manuh, who advises the Ghanaian government on economic development as a member of the National Development Planning Commission, told me she doesn’t think of the IFC’s investments “as fighting poverty. Just because some people are employed, it is hard to say that is poverty reduction.”

In Accra, Mary-Jean Moyo, the IFC’s in-country manager for Ghana, told me the new hotel fights poverty by creating jobs. To illustrate, she recalled how the Mövenpick’s manager “noticed that a few boys roller-skate on Sundays outside the hotel. The manager decided to hire them to work at the pool. That is development and helping local people.” How many were hired? Six, Moyo responded. There is no hotel school and no vocational training in the country. As a result, all the top staff members among his 300 employees are foreign.
The IFC’s booming list of business partners reads like a who’s who of giant multinational corporations: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Mitsubishi, Vodafone, and many more. It has funded fast-food chains like Domino’s Pizza in South Africa and Kentucky Fried Chicken in Jamaica. It invests in upscale shopping malls in Egypt, Ghana, the former Soviet republics, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. It backs candy-shop chains in Argentina and Bangladesh; breweries with global beer behemoths like SABMiller and with other breweries in the Czech Republic, Laos, Romania, Russia, and Tanzania; and soft-drink distribution for the likes of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and their competitors in Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mali, Russia, South Sudan, Uzbekistan, and more.

But the IFC’s money-generating strategy has at least one benefit: It sustains the jobs of the people who work for it. The “more money the IFC makes, the more the bank has available to invest,” says Griffiths, the director of Eurodad. “Staff is incentivized to make money.” The IFC sets annual targets for the number, size, and types of deals employees should complete, and it awards performance bonuses for reaching these targets, according to several current and former IFC staffers. “If you don’t reach the target, you don’t get a bonus,” says Alan Moody, a former IFC manager

Francis Kalitsi, a former IFC employee recalls of his time at the IFC. “The IFC is very profit-focused. The IFC does not address poverty, and its investments rarely touch the poor.”

R. Yofi Grant, executive director of Databank, one of Ghana’s largest banks, told me that the IFC’s practice of providing loans at attractive terms to multinational companies “crowds out local banks and private-equity firms by taking the juiciest investments and walking away with a healthy return.” The IFC recently organized a $115 million financing package for global telecom giantVodafone to expand its operations in Ghana, even though six telecom companies already operate in the country. Despite such robust private investment, the IFC’s loan package for Vodafone was its second in two years. “That is not poverty reduction, and these are not frontier investments,” Grant says, referring to the IFC’s refrain that it invests where other financiers might not. “The IFC says all the right things and does all the wrong things.”

The example of Chad and Cameroon, however, offers a more complicated picture. In 2000, the IFC invested roughly $200 million with ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others, along with the governments of Chad and Cameroon, to support the construction of a nearly $4 billion oil-pipeline project that experts estimate will generate more than $5 billion in revenue over the 25-year life of the project from wells mainly in landlocked Chad to a port in Cameroon.

The two countries are even poorer than Ghana to the west. Per capita income in Chad ranks 193rd in the world, compared with 185th place for Cameroon and 172nd for Ghana. Life expectancy at birth in Chad, at 48.7 years, is the world’s absolute worst, and the country has been ruled for the last two decades by heavy-handed dictator Idriss Déby.  The bulk of the oil revenue was supposed to be set aside for food, education, health care, and infrastructure. But in the face of attacks from rebel groups supported by neighboring Sudan, and asserting a need to defend the pipeline, Déby instead channeled substantial chunks into arms purchases.

Just in 2012, the IFC announced investments in mining projects for gold, copper, and diamonds in places like Mongolia, Liberia, and South Africa, as well as investments in oil and gas projects in Colombia, Ivory Coast, the Middle East, and North Africa.

In Accra, not far from the new Mövenpick, the IFC’s posh offices—sporting a lawn, flowers, and private parking—sit amid a slum, surrounded by an imposing concrete wall topped by coils of barbed wire. The only paved part of the road to the IFC is directly in front of the guarded complex, which has no sign announcing its identity. The rest of the road is a winding, dusty dirt path filled with potholes and surrounded by hovels erected out of battered metal or wood. Barefoot children sit amid goats and roving chickens, on ground dotted by garbage and litter. Women cook tiny fish strung onto sticks over an open fire, ignoring the near-100-degree temperatures. Some of them said they had lived there for 15 years. When asked whether they knew what the World Bank is, they said no. When told that it fights poverty, many of them laughed.