The Migrant's Dream

Libya continues to be a gateway for thousands of undocumented African migrants who are willing to risk its violent militias, harsh detention centres and often fatal rides on overloaded, rickety boats to set sail for Lampedusa – for them the closest point in Europe. Even Asians have been found to use Libya as a transit point.

As they dream desperately of greener pastures, the migrants do odd jobs to earn enough to pay for the boat ride. Work is scarce and the competition severe due to the growing number of migrants gathering. The charge for a seat on one of the many boats leaving the Libyan coast is around 1,000 dollars. Even if an exhausting day of work is fully paid for, it could take years to save a sum like that.

 A human trafficker admitted to IPS of to earning around 20,000 euros from each successful trip to Lampedusa.

 Local fishermen know only too well the risk of getting into a packed, fragile, raft-like boat. As Abdala Gheryani, who works at the tiny fishing port of Gargaresh, says, “Every now and then I find corpses trapped in my nets.”

 A detainee at the Libyan detention centre, explains “We were around 50 in the same cell, but at least the guards never hit me. For the black guys, though, it was completely different. They would be tortured and beaten in the most brutal way and on a daily basis.”
Women, he adds, were asked for sex in exchange for their release.

His testimony is corroborated by an Amnesty International (AI) report released last June, where the human rights NGO called on the Libyan government to end indefinite detention of refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, including children, who had ended up there solely for immigration purposes. After visiting seven “holding centres”, AI also documented several cases where detainees, including women, were reportedly “subjected to brutal beatings with water pipes and electric cables.”

Mandela's Promises Broken

While Obama, Cameron, Hollande and Merkel cry crocodile tears for Mandela’s passing they will conveniently turn a deaf ear to many of his observations.

“Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times -- times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and wealth accumulation -- that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.
Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life. While poverty persists, there is no true freedom.” -- Mandela during a 2005 speech on global poverty at London's Trafalgar Square

It is a pity that Mandela and the ANC failed to address the poverty problem and inequality remains South Africa’s greatest issue.

White South Africans, who account for 8.7 percent of the population of 53 million, on average earn six times more than their black counterparts and still have access to better education, medical care and housing. Just 8.3 per cent of blacks over the age of 20 had some post-secondary education in 2011, compared with 37 percent of whites.  The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has risen to 0.63 in 2009 from 0.59 in 1993, making South Africa one of the world’s most unequal societies. Unemployment is around 26%. according to official figures  but is much higher.  Youth unemployment exceeds 50%. About 80% of unemployed young people never worked or had jobs longer than a year.

During the first decade of ANC rule, around two million South Africans lost homes. Another one million lost farms. Shack dwelling increased 50%.  One-fourth or more of South Africans have no running water or electricity. Around 40% of schools have no electricity.  About 50% of South Africans have inadequate sanitation. Around 40% have no telephones.

HIV/AIDS remains a major problem. South Africa has the world's largest number of affected people. Officially it's over five million. It's more than in North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe and Central Asia combined.

Post-apartheid, life expectancy declined by 13 years. In 2011, it was 58, according to the World Health Organization.

Mandela could have made a difference. He could have fought honestly for a genuine socialist society. He chose instead the policies of the IMF and neo-liberalism. He relegated millions of black South Africans to permanent destitution, unemployment, hunger, malnutrition, homelessness, lost futures and early deaths. Accommodation with capitalism trumped the 1955 ANC's Freedom Charterthat declared "South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority unless it is based on the will of all the people." and that  "The people shall share in the country's wealth!"  and "The land shall be shared among those who work it!"

Zambia: political differences

Political differences within the ruling PF have taken a new turn – the Bemba want Wynter Kabimba out of the PF. Tribalism still remains to be a deciding factor in Zambian politics.

Because the PF is wholly staffed with Bemba political cadres – it may seem disparaging to see political factions develop within the ruling hierarchy. More or less it has to do with political loyalties (fanaticism) measured against the political objectives.

It may seem that many recruits drafted into the PF by President Sala do not feel at ease with the political gravity of Wynter Kabimba (secretary-general and justice minister). Indeed, Mr. Kabimba as general-secretary of the PF seems to have overriding jurisdiction above everyone else. He is seen as the most powerful man in the government, second to Sala. Thus calls for the removal of Kabimba are spiced with careerism and opportunism. The political differences between Kabimba and Geoffrey Mwamba (Defence Minister) is jaundiced with political careerism – Mwamba is considered a political upstart. Mwamba is a wealthy businessman who only joined the MMD in 2011 and scooped the Kasama Central Parliamentary elections. Thus Mwamba is strongly supported by Bemba-speaking political cadres.

Wynter Kabimba is not a Bemba by tribe. He joined the PF in 2003 and became the first secretary-general. It is the case that Kabimba has moral grounds to tackle corruption from the PF. Why is it the case that when the former minister of foreign affairs Gwen Lubumba was slapped with a six-months suspension – people did not cry ‘foul!’. Lubumba is a Lozi by tribe, together with Kabimba and Guy Scott they are the well-known political trio of the PF whilst in opposition. But it is a tit-for-tat between Kabimba and from Mwamba supporters that have raised calls about tribalism.

Those who are calling for the dismissal of Kabimba do not know that political power has its own limits – and among these is tribalism, nepotism and corruption.

The strength of every political party is judged by a parliamentary majority. The PF has a large number of members in parliament when contrasted with the MMD and UPND.

Thus President Sala may find himself abusing political power even without knowing it.

By and large democracy is a heavy-handed word that is selectively used by Western capitalist nations to measure the degree of political freedoms and human rights that may obtain in any given country in Africa.

KEPHAS MULENGA
Zambia

Charity and aid doesn't stop poverty

For Nina Munk’s new book, “The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty,” she spent six years following the Millennium Villages Project. The brainchild of Columbia economist Jeffrey Sachs, MVP has over the past 10 years funneled more than $100 million into an ambitious antipoverty program in Africa. Munk’s book focuses closely on two villages — one in Kenya and the other in Uganda.

Extracts from an interview by her

“Jeffrey Sachs and his team, hoping to create a modern economy from scratch, introduce fertilizer and high-yield seeds, with the idea that people would grow and sell cash crops — tomatoes, soybeans, corn.  And sure enough, when you introduce fertilizer, you get extraordinary results. In Ruhiira, in a single season average maize yields increased from 1.8 tons per hectare to 3.7 tons. There was an enormous bumper crop.

The problem was what to do with the crop. No one had really thought of the next stage. There were no storage facilities for the surplus, and there was no market for it. Southern Ugandans don’t like maize, but the village was so far away that any profits would be wiped out by transport cost. Then there were rats and vermin who took over the town. Eventually the farmers threw up their hands and dumped the maize on the market and prices collapsed.

Ruhiira is a perfect example of what goes wrong with well-intentioned ideas. Providing fertilizer and high-yield seeds is a magnificent idea. It looks flawless on paper. But soon you face a whack-a-mole problem. You fix one problem but a whole host of others suddenly pop up.

 These big ideas imposed by outsiders can be breathtakingly arrogant. What, then, is the solution, if we care about the world's poor, as I hope most of us do.

If your goal is to help a limited number of people in a single village, you can do that. That's called charity. In the Millennium Villages Project many people's lives have been improved. There is less malnutrition, less malaria, more children in school in all of those villages. If you invest $5 or $10 million into an isolated African village, you are going to get results. Far too many nonprofits and NGOs boast about the sums of money that they're spending on big projects. That's no way to evaluate an antipoverty program.

Brand-new neonatal incubators sitting unused in the corner of a clinic because there was no electricity in the village. The skeletons of well-intentioned development projects litter the continent of Africa — bridges that lead nowhere, rusted tractors, broken water wells, schools that were never completed, maternity wards that are crumbling. One of the great hurdles of charity work in Africa is making sure that the work is maintained. In many places there simply aren't the tools or the knowledge to maintain projects built by outsiders. In Dertu, Kenya on the border of Somalia, there was a water well built by UNICEF in the 1990s. It's a life-saver for the area, one of few sources of water in an arid spread of land populated by nomadic camel herders. But every time the well pump breaks down, it can take months and months to fix it or for parts to arrive. And in the meantime, people just drop dead.

When the water well broke down, and the Millennium Villages Project decided to keep people alive by bringing in huge water tanks to supply water. But the supply of water simply wasn't enough to sustain the people and their camels. And before long fighting broke out, and a 16-year-old boy was stabbed to death because he was accused of cutting in line for water. The driver of the water tanker was beaten up by a mob. When you see desperate people fighting over limited resources you begin to understand how fragile human life is there.

One of the consequences of the Millennium Villages Project pouring a lot of money into this pastoral community is that more and more people gave up being camel herders and decided to settle instead in town. Thanks to the Millennium Villages Project, Dertu became an island of prosperity. There was a fully functioning clinic, a vastly expanded school, all kinds of new investments that encouraged nomads to become sedentary. I returned again and again to Dertu, and I saw this place that had been a sort of wide-open pastoral area begin to resemble an urban slum, with tightly packed housing, sewage running through the streets. It was, again, a horrible unintended consequence of good intentions. There is no economy to speak of in Dertu. The nomadic herdsman coming through trade or sell livestock. Some of them sell camel milk. Basically the only economic activity there has been gun-running and cattle raiding. This is the great failing of the Millennium Villages Project, and of so many other antipoverty efforts in developing parts of the world.

Jeffrey Sachs and his team came in and spent a great deal of money to lift people on what Sachs calls the “ladder of economic development.” Health care was improved, malaria went down, more children were in school. They had one success after another in basic indicators. But that doesn’t mean people had jobs. Nor was there is anything to suggest there could ever be industry in a place like this.

The lack of transparency is unfortunately the only way that many NGOs know how to operate. They are afraid that if they tell their donors about failures the flow of money will stop. In order to keep funding, nonprofits are forced to paper over and in some ways lie about some outright failures. Anyone who has ever worked in development knows perfectly well that maybe as much as half the money ends up being wasted.”

BOOM TIMES FOR MILLIONAIRES

The number of dollar millionaires in the Ethiopia rose from 1,300 in 2007 to 2,700 by September this year, according to New World Wealth, a consultancy based in the UK and South Africa.

That figure puts the country well ahead of Angola, up by 68%, and Tanzania, which had a 51% increase. Zambia and Ghana completed the top five.

The richest Ethiopian is said to be the businessman Mohammed Al Amoudi, who divides his time between Ethiopia and Saudi Arabia, where he now has citizenship.

South Africa is the top African country for millionaires with 48,700 in 2013, followed by Egypt with 22,800 and Nigeria with 15,700.

The Return of the French

France’s president Francois Hollande will host 40 African leaders in Paris for an ambitious two-day summit, as he looks to secure his nation's influence in the face of the growing clout of China and other developing economies. Hollande said ahead of the summit that the goal was to double trade with Africa, which he said would create 200 000 jobs if done within five years. More than 500 African and French business leaders were to take part in trade talks on the sidelines of the summit,

 France has played a crucial role in its post-colonial history, intervening militarily more than 20 times since the early 1960s. Of the about 7 500 French soldiers deployed overseas as of 1 December, more than 5 300 were in the continent, at a string of bases across western and central Africa, according to defence ministry figures. France's permanent military presence in Africa costs it upwards of $540m per year and that the budget was expected to rise.

http://www.news24.com/Africa/News/France-anxious-to-tap-into-Africas-growth-20131205

Less aid for the Congo

The UN World Food Program (WFP) said  that it has raised only 25 percent of its USD 478 million plan to feed 4.2 million people in Congo through December 2015. 

The agency has already been forced to reduce half of its food rations to people in North Kivu Province in eastern Congo, affecting 300,000 internally-displaced people. 

Without additional funds, the WFP will be “forced to start a significant down-scale of activities in the provinces of North Kivu, South Kivu, Equateur, Kasai and Orientale,” said agency spokesperson Elisabeth Byrs, adding that the reduction will hurt school children, refugees and people in food-for-work programs.

 One out of every 10 children in the country suffers from acute malnutrition, with about 10 percent of the people facing hunger and needing food assistance, the agency said. 

Congo has witnessed numerous problems over the past few decades, such as grinding poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and a war in the east of the country that has dragged on since 1998 and left over 5.5 million people dead. 

Since early May 2012, nearly three million people have fled their homes in the eastern Congo. About 2.5 million resettled in Congo, but about 500,000 crossed into neighboring Rwanda and Uganda. 

Where is the trickle down?

Nigeria is expected to announce that it is now the largest economy in Africa, surpassing South Africa. Nigeria is a booming market, and contains nearly one-fourth of the population of Sub-Saharan Africa. Its population is four times that of South Africa and its markets are more open to new investment than is South Africa.

Despite growing investment, the nation still is only meeting 20 percent of its current electrical power needs. Nigeria remains, to a considerable extent, a divided nation, of north and south, oil-producing states and non-oil producing states. Boko Haram and related groups remain a threat to its stability. According to the latest report by Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2013, Nigeria ranked 144th, out of 177 nations in the world.

Most troubling is the gap between rich and poor.  Despite its economic growth rate of about 7  per cent  over five years, Nigeria,  faces the failure of translating growth into poverty reduction and reduced social inequality. While there is purportedly a growing “middle class”, it is still dwarfed by the millions in poverty, living on less than $2 a day. The Minister of Health, Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, has said no fewer than 210, 000 Nigerians die of HIV/AIDS every year, saying Nigeria is the third largest population of people living with the disease in the World.

Climate Change has Arrived

Too many people believe that climate change is something that will affect humans in the distant future, if at all. But its effects are now.

Droughts, which are also becoming more frequent due to global warming, dry up water supplies, especially in rural areas of the continent, forcing poor families to drink dirty, sediment-and-parasite-laden water and neglect their personal hygiene. This leads to increased occurrence of maladies like lice infestation, scabies and hookworm. Natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods can create breeding grounds for infectious diseases such as cholera. Global climate change also has substantial negative impacts on people’s mental health and well-being. As people cope with the trauma of extreme weather effects, such as losing their homes or experiencing violence and ill health, they also suffer from forms of mental illness such as depression and anxiety.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 2004 report on the global and regional burden of disease, at least 150,000 people die each year due to the direct effects of climate change. Of those, three percent die of diarrhea, another three percent of malaria, and just under four percent of dengue fever. Climate change is expected to trigger increased movements of people within and across borders. The International Organization for Migration estimates (that by 2050, between 25 million and 1 billion environmental migrants will move within their countries or across borders). Rural to urban migration increases migrants’ vulnerability to respiratory diseases and HIV infection. Migration is also one of the key causes of tuberculosis (TB) in countries which in the past rarely saw the disease, which often creates a steep financial burden for these countries.

Additionally, the prevalence of new and re-emerging mosquito-borne diseases is increasing worldwide due to climate change. Rising temperatures in the highlands allow mosquitoes and ticks to survive longer, leading to an increase in mosquito-borne diseases and the emergence of new diseases. Malaria, dengue fever and Leishmaniasis, a disfiguring disease caused by sand flies, are good examples. New kinds of Leishmaniasis have been detected across Africa. This type of Leishmaniasis is resistant to all forms of available treatment.This stigmatizing skin disease, which afflicts the infected person with sores and lesions that can cause permanent disfigurement, is becoming one of the main reasons for school drop-outs in Northern Ethiopia.

Climate change also impacts agriculture and livestock, increasing the prevalence of malnutrition and negatively affecting the health of children and pregnant women. It is estimated that 30 percent children under the age of five in Ethiopia are malnourished. The International Food Policy Research Institute estimates that by 2050 an additional 25 million people will be malnourished as a result of climate change. This is particularly dangerous because malnutrition, which has negative health risks of its own (macronutrient and micronutrient deficiency is a leading cause of childhood death in Africa), also increases people’s susceptibility to infectious diseases such as intestinal parasites, tuberculosis and HIV.

Taken from here 

South Africa's Rich List

The top 100 richest people in South Africa have a collective personal wealth of R198.6-billion. This is equivalent to more than 6% of GDP.

Christo Wiese is the richest South African. The chairman of Shoprite and Pepkor, his personal wealth is R27.4-billion.

Patrice Motsepe of African Rainbow Minerals and Sanlam slipped from the 2012 top spot to second with a wealth of R22.5-billion.

Stephen Saad, founder of Aspen Pharmacare, moved from ninth to third with wealth of R10.5-billion.

From here 

Re-Writing History in Rwanda

In Rwanda, Hutu nationalists had come to power in the “Hutu rebellion” of 1959–1962, during the last years of Belgian colonial rule. They overthrew the traditional Tutsi kingdom and its ruling class, resulting in the death of around 20,000 Tutsi and the exile of another 200,000 to neighboring countries. Independence from Belgium in 1962 marked the establishment of a Hutu-led Rwandan government. The RPF was formed in 1985 by Tutsi nationalist exiles who demanded the right to return to their homeland. They attacked Rwanda from neighboring Uganda in 1990; though the invasion failed, Hutu fear of losing power paved the way for mass murder four years later. Pro-genocide propaganda ran in newspapers, dominated public gatherings, and was broadcast across the country.  On Aug. 3, 1993, when President Juvenal Habyarimana of Rwanda signed the Arusha Accords, which would have weakened the Hutu hold on Rwanda. Eight months later he was dead. On April 6, 1994  Habyarimana  was returning from a summit in Tanzania when a surface-to-air missile shot his plane out of the sky over Rwanda's capital city of Kigali. Hutu extremists in the National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development blamed the Tutsis for the assassination. From April to July of 1994, upwards of perhaps one million Tutsi were massacred by Hutu-led gangs and the country’s army. It ended when Tutsi exiles in Uganda, organized in the RPF, invaded the country, marched into the capital of Kigali, and defeated the perpetrators of the genocide. Some two million of the genocidaires, known as the Interahamwe, fled into the vast rain forests of the eastern Congo, from where they have periodically launched attacks into Rwanda. Since 1994, the RPF-led government has been dominated by a small clique of anglophone Tutsi who had been in exile in Uganda, and who blamed Belgium and France for having supported Hutu rule.

In 2010 Paul Kagame, president of Rwanda since 2000 and candidate of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), won a second term with 93 per cent of the vote, in an election marred by repression, murder, and lack of credible competition. Some potential opponents were disqualified or failed to enter the race, because they would have been charged with “divisionism.” References to “Hutu” and Tutsi” in public discourse is a crime, as part of  “unification” policies designed to create a national identity. Offenders can be prosecuted, newspapers shut down, and political parties banned. The government insists that all of the country’s citizens are simply “Rwandans.”

The history books have been rewritten to stress the “harmony” of its pre-colonial past. This form of what the sociologist Stanley Cohen, in his book “States of Denial,” refers to as “social amnesia,” is an attempt to allow the country to separate itself from its horrific past. According to the new historical discourse, prior to the arrival of, first the German, then Belgian, colonialists, the labels “Hutu” and “Tutsi” referred to wealth and social status, not “essentialist” ethnic groups, and hence they were fluid. Insofar as there was inequality between the royal court and ordinary Rwandans, both Hutu and Tutsi were equally victims of subjugation.  It is now claimed that it was the Europeans who introduced the “Hamitic hypothesis” — the idea that the Tutsi were actually immigrants to Rwanda from Ethiopia, whereas the “Bantu” Hutu were indigenous to the region. The Europeans thus elevated the Tutsi as the supposedly “superior race,” breeding resentment among the Hutu. They were the creators of ethnic dissension.

After 1934, the Belgian government introduced an identity card system, which identified each person as either a Hutu, Tutsi or Twa (a very minor ethnic group). And by having defined the Tutsi as more recent arrivals, the colonialists also allowed Hutu nationalists to argue that the country should be restored to its “original” owners. With independence, Tutsi could thus be portrayed as a foreign minority who were enemies of the country.

Hence it’s necessary to eliminate the colonial discourse about ethnic identity — which, by happy coincidence, also obscures the predominance of the minority Tutsi, now some 15 per cent of Rwanda’s 12 million people, and allows them to run the state without official reference to that fact, even though everyone knows it!

From here 

Africa can help itself

This article by the writer Paul Theroux is well worth quoting from at length.

" The desire of distant outsiders to fix Africa may be heartfelt, but it is also age-old and even quaint. Curiously repetitive in nature, renewed and revised every decade or so, it is an impulse Charles Dickens described, in a wickedly accurate phrase, as "telescopic philanthropy." That is, a focus from afar to uplift the continent: New York squinting compassionately at Nairobi.

Never have so many people, so many agencies, so many stratagems, so much money been deployed to improve Africa -- and yet the majority of the movers are part-timers, merely dropping in, setting up a scheme in the much-mocked "the-safari-that-does-good" manner, then returning to their real lives, as hard-charging businessmen, Hollywood actors, benevolent billionaires, atoning ex-politicians, MacArthur geniuses, or rock stars in funny hats. It's not hard to imagine the future tombstones of the Clintons and Bono and Gates, and many others bitten by the eleemosynary[gratuitous] itch, chiseled with the words, Telescopic Philanthropist. The farther away the donors are, the shorter their visits ("Chelsea Clinton took time out of her 10-day humanitarian trip in Africa to meet some of the kids that her AIDS work is benefiting…"), and the more passionate their feelings.

Never mind that Africa receives roughly $50 billion in aid annually from foreign governments, and perhaps $13 billion more from private philanthropic institutions, according to Penta's estimate. Never mind that Angola's oil revenues are around $72 billion, and Nigeria's $95 billion; that Africa boasts at least 55 verified and somewhat detached billionaires. I can testify that Africa is much worse off than when I first went there 50 years ago to teach English: poorer, sicker, less educated, and more badly governed. It seems that much of the aid has made things worse.

I am not alone observing this fact. In his new book, The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality, economist Angus Deaton questions the usefulness of all aid, and describes how the greater proportion of the world's poor are found not in Africa but in the booming, yet radically unequal, economies of China and India. Zambian-born economist Dambisa Moyo calls aid a "debilitating drug," arguing that "real per-capita income [in Africa] today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population -- over 350 million people -- live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades." The Kenyan economist James Shikwati takes this same line on aid, famously telling the German magazine Der Spiegel, "For God's sake, please stop."...

...The most recent example of a Westerner running amok in Africa appears to be the celebrity-economist Jeffrey Sachs and his $120 million effort to end extreme poverty there. Nina Munk documents in her book The Idealist how, among other things, Sachs' Millennium Villages Project poured $2.5 million over three years into a sparsely populated community of nomadic camel herders in Dertu, Kenya, and trumpeted its success.

In actual fact, the charity's paid-for latrines became clogged and overflowing, the dormitories it erected quickly fell into disrepair, and the livestock market it built ignored local nomadic customs and was closed within a few months. An incensed Dertu citizen filed a 15-point written complaint against Sachs's operation, claiming it "created dependence" and that "the project is supposed to be bottom top approached but it is visa [sic] versa."...

....I am not criticizing the humane desire to help. My modest point is that, for all the talk of "reinvention," aid to Africa has been discussed in exactly the same terms for 173 years... it's just nothing new....

....Years living simply on the ground in Africa convinced me that there was more for me to learn from Africans than to teach. I saw there were many satisfactions in the lives of people who were apparently poor; many deficits in the lives of the very wealthy. I saw that African families were large and complex and interdependent; that old age was revered, that Africa's link to the distant past -- to the dawn of the world -- was something marvelous and still intact in many places.

Most of all, I was impressed by the self-sufficiency of ordinary people. Without much in the way of outside help, the people in the countries I knew managed to endure, usually through the simplest traditional means, and finally to prevail. Africa has the schools, the money and the resources to fix its own problems; it's appalling to think of donors telling them otherwise, of the whole continent terminally indebted and living on handouts.

Full article can be read here 

Socialist Banner can sympathise with the essence of what Theroux writes but would simply add the caveat that for Africans to succeed they will require to change the system that at present dominates their economies and social relations and their daily lives. Africa has to struggle with the rest of the world to rid ourselves of capitalism.

Separatism or Socialism

 When the colonial powers divided Africa among themselves they did so with scant regard for the variety of language, religion or ethnicity that already existed. When independence came to most African countries in the 1960s, the continent's new leaders agreed to stick to these borders. Maintaining the status quo would have been in their interest for many reasons but mostly because it provided a way to prevent potentially damaging conflicts from erupting among themselves.

Since then, Africa's borders have remained largely unchanged. Aside from Namibia and South Sudan, the only other country in Africa that has won legal autonomy since colonial independence is Eritrea, which after a long and bloody war seceded from Ethiopia in 1993. During the same period, in other parts of the world, many apparently immutable boundaries have been challenged and changed. Since 1990 especially, more than 30 new countries have been created around the world, as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Balkan conflict led to the formation of new states that reflect ethnic, linguistic and nationalist divisions. Yet the map of Africa remains one drawn up by foreigners, ignorant of ethnic and religious realities. One example is Nigeria, a nation that is divided between religiously distinct Muslim and Christian populations along a clear north-south fault line.

The insistence on sticking to colonial borders is facing growing popular challenge. It is now argued that in  some of the countries, their current boundaries, just don't make sense and much of the dissatisfaction stems from lack of economic opportunity among populations seeking greater control over their natural resources. Across the continent, dozens of governments are struggling against rebel groups demanding either greater autonomy or full independence, movements, which span the continent from the Casamance region in southern Senegal to the Uamsho Islamists (the Association for Islamic Mobilisation and Propagation) fighting for independence on the already semi-autonomous Tanzanian island of Zanzibar. Somalia is now divided up among the autonomous regions of Puntland (which considers itself an autonomous state) and Somaliland (a self-declared but unrecognized sovereign state). In central Somalia, Galmudug is another regional entity that emerged.

Annette Weber, head of Middle East and Africa research at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs explains "What we have seen in Africa is a lot of centralised states where the leader is running the capital but not really reaching out to the periphery. The state is so distant that it doesn't feature in the life of those populations." These marginalised people, she explains, often feel that they would be better off with "one identity-based territory that binds them. Independence becomes a hope or an expectation for them."

The Mombasa Republican Council demands independence from Kenya. The Bakassi Movement for Self-Determination demands separation from Cameroon and re-unification with Nigeria. In Algeria Berber tribes in the northern region of Kabylie demand greater autonomy. In Zambia more than 70 separatists demanding independence for Barotseland state in the impoverished Western Province were recently arrested and are currently on trial for treason. The list of these conflicts goes on and on: from Sudan to Western Sahara, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Mali.

In discussing the newly independent nations Ms Weber explains "What is often overlooked is where these states come from. Where did South Sudan's new government learn the business of statehood? They learned it from Khartoum. And many systemic problems of neglect and exclusion that we see from the government of Khartoum are now replicated in South Sudan. Often separation results in a duplication of another failed elite..." Weber goes on to argue "I think there will be more separatist groups calling for separation because they believe it could solve their problem of neglect...”

Socialist Banner has often cautioned workers to be wary of simplistic nationalistic solutions when the only viable lasting option for peoples prosperity is world socialism.

Adapted from here 

Land-grabbing and Sex Inequality

Land scarcity and volatility of food prices on the world market have led richer countries that are dependent on food imports to acquire large amounts of land elsewhere to produce food for their domestic needs. Access to land is critical for small-scale food producers. Lack of it defines ‘landless farm workers’. Losing it and becoming landless is feared by many smallholders, as it will mean losing food security and opportunities for development. It is the most marginalised groups in society who are most susceptible to land grabbing – which makes preventing it a crucial issue for poverty reduction and human rights.

The new wave of land deals is not the new investment agriculture that millions had been waiting for. The poorest people are being hardest hit as competition for land intensifies. Oxfam's research has revealed that residents regularly lose out to local elites and domestic or foreign investors because they lack power to claim their rights effectively and to defend and advance their interests.

While some investors might claim to have experience in agricultural production, many may only be purchasing land for speculative purposes, anticipating price increases in the coming years (known as ‘land banking’). World Bank analysis in 2011 of 56 million hectares of large-scale deals concluded that nothing had yet been done with 80 per cent of the land involved, suggesting a significant amount of land banking.

All of the above is happening while the global share of land available for agriculture has peaked. It is, in fact, reducing, as the world loses agricultural land to urbanisation and soil degradation. Land is not just an important productive asset. Even for families who have stopped living directly off the land, it often serves as an important safety net to fall back on when other economic ventures fail or when the economy fails to provide opportunities. Land has multiple other (so-called) secondary uses as well, which are vital to family livelihood security. It can provide fodder, nuts, fruits, roots, medicinal and kitchen herbs, dyes, rope, timber, and roofing and fencing materials. Many of these resources are available on common lands, and are often especially important for women. Land also provides a space for social, cultural, spiritual, and ceremonial events, and as such is essential for sustaining the identity and well-being of a community and its members.

Many researchers have shown that secure access to or ownership of land is associated with significant reductions in hunger and poverty. For women all over the world, lack of access to and control over land is a major determinant (and outcome) of gender inequality. . In rural areas, lack of access to land forces many women to sell their labour on cash-crop producing farms, where they are paid less than men. Women farm workers may also suffer sexual violence and harassment, discrimination, and devaluation of their work. Rural women often end up with a double burden of providing for and managing the household when men migrate in search of work – another consequence of land shortages. Women also fare disproportionately in conflicts over land, where they face a number of challenges. Discriminatory legislation is compounded by the sexism of those implementing the laws, and women often have little opportunity to participate in decision-making processes regarding new legislation, projects, or contracts. Compounding this, gender-based violence is often a common feature in conflicts over land.

Evidence from research on land grabs in Africa suggests that women are getting a raw deal. To begin with, women’s land rights are less secure and more easily targeted. They also depend more on secondary uses of land, which tend to be ignored in large-scale acquisitions. Furthermore, although women comprise the majority of farmers, men effectively control the land and the income derived from it, even if it is the fruit of women’s labour. In practice, a new commercial opportunity often means that men assume control of the land at the expense of women’s access. Thus, new sources of income from the land are likely to burden women and benefit men. The new competition for land between biofuels and food crops, leading to less availability of food and higher prices, is also likely to affect women more than men, as women tend to take responsibility for feeding the family.

From here 

Shamed by the ANC

ANC stalwart Dr Frene Ginwala wept on Saturday when she talked about how the ANC had failed to reduce poverty while allowing corruption to eat into its moral fibre.

The former and longest-serving Speaker of the National Assembly said she was ashamed of how the ANC government had become.

“I’m ashamed that we have not reduced poverty and the tremendous damage it has caused. We should have done better. We don’t deserve to be elected after failing to listen to the people. Why are people crying? Why are we not listening? Why are universities not engaging in dialogue?” said Ginwala.

War - Economics by Other Means

Throughout the post-colonial period, internecine warfare—along with the poverty and underdevelopment that attend it—has been endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. The images are depressingly familiar: government forces fighting against armed rebel militias; terrorized, starving refugees fleeing for their lives; villages burned to the ground; women raped and men tortured.

Conflict seems to radiate from the continent’s heart. A 2001 Institute of Development Studies (IDS) report listed 28 sub-Saharan African countries that have been embroiled in some form of warfare since 1980, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Liberia, Rwanda, Somalia, and Sudan along with many others. Many have suffered fatalities in the hundreds of thousands along with the maiming and traumatization of countless victims. And then there is the broader toll. “Armed conflict,” observes the IDS report, “is arguably now the single most important determinant of poverty in Africa.”

In a 2001 study called The Political Ecology of War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflicts, researcher Philippe Le Billon analyzed the role of natural resources in armed conflict, both their scarcity and abundance. “The availability in nature of any resource is…not in itself a predictive indicator of conflict,” he wrote. “Rather, the desires sparked by this availability as well as people’s needs (or greed), and the practices shaping the political economy of any resource can prove conflictual, with violence becoming the decisive means of arbitration.” In other words, resource deposits themselves are not good predictors of conflict, but in an unstable political environment, resource markets can be.

In early November 2013, the militia group M23 surrendered after its defeat by the DRC army. Despite the general jubilation greeting this news, critics have warned that if no effort is made to address the root sources of violence in the eastern Congo—which include simmering ethnic tensions and a lucrative minerals trade—some other rebel group could easily arise in M23’s stead. In the DRC, the mineral that has up until recently fueled the war is called coltan, short for columbite-tantalite, from which tantalum is extracted. The tantalum capacitor is a stable and reliable component in smartphones, DVD players, laptops, hearing aids, and other devices. This has led critics of the mineral trade to lampoon smartphones as “blood phones,” a designation particularly aimed at the iPhone, although Apple is by no means the only guilty party. However, there are some indications that miners have switched to digging for gold, which has become much more profitable than the other so-called conflict minerals: tin, tungsten, and tantalum, known as the “three Ts.”

International markets for conflict commodities have often roped former colonial powers into resource wars directly. A case in point is Nigeria, where the entrenched hand of the British played a conniving role during the Nigerian civil war of 1967-1970. Charismatic Colonel Odumewu Ojukwu led the attempted secession of southeastern Nigeria, which was to be called Biafra. If successful, the breakaway would have cut the oil production of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in half. The military government in Lagos, headed by General Yakubu Gowon, was not the only one panicked over the potential loss of all that crude oil. So were the British, who went on to aid Gowon with a steady supply of weapons. Abetting Gowon’s food blockade of Biafra, the British contributed to the starvation of Biafrans. Images of skeletal, pot-bellied children shocked the world, but the position of the British was clear: “The sole immediate British interest in Nigeria,” wrote Commonwealth Minister George Thomas in August 1967, “is that the Nigerian economy should be brought back to a condition in which our substantial trade and investment in the country can be further developed, and particularly so we can regain access to important oil installations. While Britain supported Nigeria, France and other countries covertly supplied weapons to Biafra. Did oil cause the Nigerian civil war? No. But was it an important contributing factor? Certainly.

However, as much as the minerals may be in the thick of the conflict, they aren’t necessarily the immediate cause of these wars. Rather, complex social and political factors in the region, many but not all of them colonial legacies, create an environment ripe for the outbreak of wars in which the valuable minerals become a funding source for the combatants. Some of these factors include social inequality and ethnic rivalries (Tutsis and Hutus of Rwanda and the DRC); peacetime kleptocracy (Siaka Stevens of Sierra Leone); a lack of employment opportunities for young men; disillusionment with government; weak democratic institutions; and poverty itself.

David Keen, in the book Greed & Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars, makes the point that labels such as “ethnic hatred,” “mindless violence,” and “chaos” are applied chiefly by people who assume that the goal of any war should be victory. However, as Keen notes, sometimes the image of war serves as a smokescreen for the emergence of a wartime political economy from which rebels and even governments may be benefitting. Small wonder the warring factions may show little interest in negotiating a settlement. War for them is not just a continuation of politics by other means; it may be a continuation of economics by other means.

Full article here

Zimbabwe - Tony Blair's Invasion Plans

Former South African president Thabo Mbeki claimed that Britain had been prepared to use military force to overthrow Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe. Mbeki alleged that the former British prime minister pressured him to join a "regime change scheme" as Zimbabwe plunged into a political and economic crisis in the early 2000s.

Blair, who had made a triumphant military intervention in Sierra Leone, was determined that Mugabe should step down whereas Mbeki was ready to accommodate him.

Mbeki made reference to a retired British general, thought to be Lord Guthrie, who was chief of the defence staff during the first Blair government. In an interview in 2007 Guthrie recalled that "people were always trying to get me to look at" toppling Mugabe by force, though he did not mention Blair by name.

Mbeki,said: "There is a retired chief of the British armed forces who said he had to withstand pressure from the then prime minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair ... Tony Blair who was saying to the chief of the British armed forces, 'You must work out a military plan so that we can physically remove Robert Mugabe'. We knew that because we had come under the same pressure that we need to cooperate in some scheme. It was a regime change scheme, even to the point of using military force and we were saying no."

Mbeki condemned the way in which Britain presumed it could still meddle in Zimbabwean affairs. "You are coming from London, you don't like Robert Mugabe for whatever reason - people in London don't like him - and we are going to remove him and therefore it means we are going to put someone else in his place? Why does it become a British responsibility to decide who leads the people of Zimbabwe? So we're saying, 'No, let Zimbabweans sit down, let them agree what they do with their country.'"

After leaving office as prime minister, Tony Blair set up the Africa Governance Initiative, which currently has staff working in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Malawi and South Sudan.

Canada's expanding African Empire

According to Natural Resources Canada, a federal ministry, there were 155 Canadian companies with cumulative mining assets totalling more than C$31.6bn ($30.5bn) operating in 39 countries in Africa in 2011, the latest available figures. That was up from $26.9bn in 2010.

"Canada is a pretty large outward investor," says Pierre Gratton, president and chief executive of the Mining Association of Canada. "We're one of the larger players on the continent."

Canada's conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has negotiated investment promotion and protection agreements with a number of countries, including Benin, Cameroon, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania and Zambia.

In March 2013, Canada's government amalgamated the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the arm of the government responsible for international aid, into the rebranded Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development. But Stephen Brown, an associate professor of political science at the University of Ottawa, recently criticised the Harper government's move

“It does nothing to improve aid effectiveness," Brown argues. "It's really about rehabilitating the image of Canadian mining companies, distracting public attention away from their practices ... and transforming their image from resource extractors to humanitarian actors." Brown points out that 20 CIDA "countries of focus" have among the top 12 largest reserves of the six most important metals in the world.

Mining Watch Canada, an independent watchdog, cautions that there are very few laws governing the conduct of Canadian companies operating abroad. "In many instances, local governments simply do not have the capacity," Jamie Kneen, a coordinator for MiningWatch says. "There are serious risks for the environment and health of the nearby communities." While the Dodd-Frank legislation in the United States and the European Union's Accounting and Transparency Directives have put pressure on companies to disclose payments made to governments, no such legislation exists in Canada. For now, Canadian oil operations by firms including Canadian Resources and Sunco Energy in West and North Africa have remained largely below the radar.

African Farmers Neither Want Nor Need GMO Crops

Corporate voices and their allies are calling for the promotion of genetically modified seeds - and changes to African laws to enable their spread - as a solution to low food production and hunger in Africa. In October, the World Food Prize was awarded to three scientists, including two from agribusiness giants Monsanto and Syngenta, for their breakthroughs in developing GMOs. The editors of The Washington Post recently appealed to "give genetically modified crops a chance" in Africa and called for an open debate. The Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa, a network of small holder farmers, pastoralists, hunter-gatherers, indigenous peoples, citizens and environmentalists from Africa, is pleased to include the voices of African farmers in that debate.

The promotion of GMOs as solution is too often disrespectful to African culture and intelligence and based on a shallow understanding of African agriculture. It is based on the image that is held by many Westerners who see Africa as poor, destitute, starving, disease-ridden, hopeless, helpless that needs to be saved by a white angel from the West. That image allowed colonialists to rationalize their scramble for Africa, and that image is being used by neo-colonialists to rationalize their scramble for African land and natural resources.

Those promoting the false solution of GMOs are recommending that African farmers develop a long-term, perhaps irreversible, cycle of dependence on the interests of a small handful of corporate decision-makers to determine what seeds, with what genetic characteristics, and requiring what chemical inputs, will be produced and made available to Africa's people. This is a pathway toward profound vulnerability and centralized decision-making that flies in the face of the best agricultural evidence-based practices and sound policy making. The evidence and our experience with farmers clearly points to a more rational and appropriate path: investing in a transition toward more sustainable and agro-ecological farming systems that trust in the wisdom and capacity of tens of millions of African farmers to control, adapt and make decisions about their genetic resources, as the pathway toward greater well-being and resilience for Africa.

What is the story after 20 years of GMO cultivation in the United States? Farmers who took on herbicide-tolerant GMO crops are now struggling with the cost of combating herbicide-resistant super weeds. Some 49 percent of US farms suffer from Roundup-resistant super weeds, a 50 percent increase from the year before. As a result, since 1996 there has been a disproportionate increase in the use of weed killers - more than 225 million kilograms in the United States. Meanwhile, farmers who took on pest-resistant GMO crops are struggling with the cost of secondary pests unaffected by the built-in toxins. In China and India, initial savings from reduced insecticide use with Bt cotton have been eroded as secondary pests emerged.

According to the African Centre for Biosafety, in South Africa, single-trait Bt maize (meant to produce toxins to kill pests) has developed such complete insect resistance that it has been withdrawn from the market. In past seasons, extensive product failure meant that farmers were compensated for spraying insecticides on their crops to avoid economic loss. This failed technology will now be introduced to other African countries under the auspices of the Water Efficient Maize for Africa project being promoted by Monsanto and the Gates Foundation.

India has just placed a 10-year moratorium on planting its first genetically modified (GM) food crop. Mexico has banned the planting of GM maize, Peru has placed a 10-year moratorium on the import and cultivation of GM seeds, and Bolivia has committed to giving up growing all GM crops by 2015. Last year, China announced a move away from widespread adoption of GM crops for at least the next five years, in favor of developing more sustainable high-yield non-GM crops. Consumers more or less everywhere have been consistently hostile.

In the UN Conference on Trade and Development's 2013 Trade and Environment Report, titled "Wake-up before it is too late: make agriculture truly sustainable now for food security in a changing climate," the authors recommend that to meet future challenges, a "rapid and significant shift from conventional, monoculture-based and high-external-input-dependent industrial production towards mosaics of sustainable, regenerative production systems that also considerably improve[d] the productivity of small-scale farmers" is needed.
Genetically engineered crops have nothing to do with ending world hunger, no matter how much GMO spokespeople like to expound on this topic. African farmers should be supported in developing and spreading a proven, sustainable farming pathway to feed our people and achieve food sovereignty. Their voices should be given precedence in the debate above the propaganda of corporations, whose goal is to sell more GMOs and chemical inputs.

Million Belay, based in Addis Ababa, is the coordinator for the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
Bern Guri, based in Accra, is the chairperson for the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa.
 
from here

and read the previous article on SOYMB  'Socialism can feed the world, capitalism cannot  '

Another African tragedy neglected

Thousands of people are dying at the hands of soldiers and militia gangs or from untreated diseases such as malaria. Boys and girls as young as eight are pressganged into fighting between Christians and Muslims. The number of children recruited as soldiers in the Central African Republic (CAR) has risen up to 6,000, says an official with the United Nations Children's Fund.
There are reports of beheadings and public execution-style killings. Villages are razed to the ground. The average male life expectancy is 48, The CAR has sucked in thousands of mercenaries from neighbouring countries and, France warned, now stands "on the verge of genocide". Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN, noted recently that the situation in the CAR has been referred to as "the worst crisis most people have never heard of". The European Union expressed "very deep concern at the alarming situation" in the strife-torn country. "We are alarmed by the widespread violations of human rights which go unpunished and affect the whole population," said a spokesman for EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton in the Belgian capital Brussels. 

The US estimates that nearly 400,000 people have been displaced – many hiding in the jungle without access to malaria or HIV treatment.  In Bossangoa 34,000 people have sought refuge at the St Antoine de Padoue Cathedral.In  Bouca, to the east, haround 3,000 people – more than half of them children  are seeking sanctuary at the Catholic mission there. 68,000 have gone to neighbouring countries.

It is a country that stands as one of the most profound indictments of European colonialism, a contrivance that since independence in 1960 has endured five coups, infrastructure run on a shoestring and a self-declared emperor whose lavish coronation was inspired by Napoleon. Rich in gold, diamonds, timber and uranium, the CAR has proved irresistible to warlords such as Joseph Kony.

The latest eruption began in March when the unpopular president, François Bozizé, fled by helicopter with five suitcases after being overthrown by a loose coalition of rebels, bandits and guns for hire known as the Seleka, meaning "alliance" in the local language. One of its leaders, Michel Djotodia, declared himself president — the first Muslim to rule this majority Christian nation of 4.6 million people. What Médecins sans Frontières termed "a crisis on top of a crisis" for the population accelerated considerably in September when Djotodia officially disbanded the Seleka. Many of the rebels refused to disarm and leave the militias as ordered but veered further out of control, killing, looting and burning villages. What started as a political movement against the corrupt and autocratic Bozizé is now taking on an ominously religious character. Nearly all the Seleka are Muslim, including mercenaries from neighbouring Chad and the notorious Janjaweed from Sudan's Darfur region. An "us and them" mentality of mutual distrust and paranoia is taking root, with some Christians taking up arms in vigilante militias known as "anti-balaka" — meaning anti-sword or anti-machete — and committing atrocities of their own, giving the Seleka a pretext for yet more aggression. The spiral of violence has become a recruiting sergeant for thousands of child soldiers.

Father Frédéric Tonfio  is pleading for global intervention before it is too late. "I have only been able to count on my colleagues in the church. The silence of the international community is like they are accomplices allowing this to happen. It's almost as if the Sekela is stronger than the international community. Everyone knows what is going on here. Every day that we delay, more people die."

According to Lewis Mudge, a Human Rights Watch researcher on the ground, the Seleka: "These guys are not Islamic fundamentalists. They are Muslim-lite. They are here for prosperity and power; they are not here to change anyone's confession. The world needs to find the CAR on the map and start paying attention on humanitarian grounds. It's still early enough to avert a crisis in this country. It's not a genocide and it's not a civil war but it's certainly trending in that direction."

There are many mineral resources, including gold and diamond, in the Central African Republic.