Nigeria - The Growing Desert

With about 14 million Nigerians in the northern part of the country and 43 percent of the country’s land mass affected by desertification, Nigeria is in danger and have an emergency at hand, the Permanent Secretary, Federal Ministry of Environment, Mrs Fatima Nana Mede, has said. She explained “Our greatest challenges is that the most vulnerable are the less privileged in our society who cannot on their own mitigate the emerging multifaceted problems of desertification”.

She also said, “The recommended forest cover for Nigeria is 25 percent but currently Nigeria has less than six percent forest cover meaning that we contribute to factors that can cause climate change and we know the implication of that in our lives and the future of our children. This is a clarion call for us to get up and do something, we must take concrete actions to combat desertification”.

Desertification threatens human security by depriving people of the means of decent livelihood and undercuts food production, access to water and means to economic activity.

http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/2015/06/14m-nigerians-threatened-by-desertification-says-govt/

Africa Rising – The Reality

For a number of years the spin has been that Africa possessed a blossoming middle-class to boost consumer spending and this would result in booming economic growth. But that is not the way Nestle, the world’s biggest food company, views it. It is to cut 15% of its workforce in sub-Saharan Africa. Nestle will reduce its product line by 50% and may close some of its 15 warehouses before September.

“We thought this would be the next Asia, but we have realised the middle class here in the region is extremely small and it is not really growing,” Cornel Krummenacher, chief executive officer of Nestle’s equatorial Africa (as sub-Saharan Africa is sometimes called) unit, was citedas saying by the Financial Times. Krummenacher also told the newspaper that Nestle would be lucky to reach yearly 10% sales growth in the region in coming years.

One law for you, another law for dictators and tyrants

The South African government has betrayed “the hundreds of thousands of victims who were killed during the Darfur conflict”‚ Amnesty International said. “By failing to hand President Omar al-Bashir over to the (International Criminal Court) during his stay in the country‚ the South African authorities‚ under the leadership of President Jacob Zuma‚ have through their inaction‚ aided Bashir in his quest to avoid justice‚” the human rights watchdog said. "It is completely unacceptable and shocking for South Africa‚ as a member of the ICC‚ to ignore its international obligations in this way and allow impunity free rein‚” said Amnesty’s research and advocacy director for Africa Netsanet Belay.

Bashir stands accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the conflict in Darfur‚ Sudan‚ which has claimed more than 400 000 lives and displaced more than 2-million. The ICC has two warrants of arrest against him issued in 2009 and 2010. He is facing seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity as well as three counts of genocide.

Al-Bashir was in this country for the 25th African Union (AU) Summit which was originally planned to be held in Malawi that then declined on account of the Sudanese president’s presence. Zuma and his cabinet knew full well that they did not have the power to grant Bashir diplomatic immunity when it stepped in to host the international conference. South Africa had an international legal obligation to arrest Bashir. UN secretary general Ban Ki- Moon made this explicit in his statement.

South African courts issued an order to prevent Bashir from leaving the country, applying the rule of law without fear or favour and upholding the constitution of South Africa. By permitting Bashir to depart‚ the minister of home affairs‚ Malusi Gigaba‚ and the government itself are in contempt of court. There must be consequences for such a serious disregard for the law unless the message that is to be sent is that South Africa does not believe in the due process of justice.  The rule of law is only as strong as the government which enforces it and the South Africa government have knowingly allowed a fugitive from justice to flee and aided and abetted the escape.

Of course, many will point the finger at the inefficiency of international law, the biased enforcement of it, and how Blair and Bush have never even been charged much less detained for their illegal crimes against humanity. But two wrongs don't make a right.

GM Cotton - The Issues

Genetically modified (GM) cotton has been produced globally for almost two decades, yet to date only three African countries have grown GM cotton on a commercial basis – South Africa, Burkina Faso and Sudan. A number of other African countries such as Malawi, Ghana, Swaziland and Cameroon appear to be on the verge of allowing their first cultivation of GM cotton, with Nigeria and Ethiopia planning to follow suit in the next two to three years.

Governments and local cotton producers have high hopes that GM technology will boost African competitiveness in the dog-eat-dog world that characterises the global cotton market. African cotton productivity is declining – it now stands at only half the world average – while global productivity is increasing. The promise of improving productivity and reducing pesticide use through the adoption of GM cotton is thus compelling. Scrutiny of actual experiences reveals a tragic tale of crippling debt, appalling market prices and a technology prone to failure in the absence of very specific and onerous management techniques, which are not suited to smallholder production. In Burkina Faso, the tide turned against GM cotton after just five seasons as low yields and low quality fibres persisted. In South Africa, GM cotton brought devastating debts to smallholders and the local credit institution went bust. Last season, smallholders contributed to less than three percent of South Africa’s total production. In Malawi, where Monsanto has already applied to the government for a permit to commercialise Bollgard II, its GM pest resistant cotton, Malawi’s cotton industry, the Cotton Development Trust (CDT), has publically voiced its concerns over a number of issues, including inadequate field trials, the high cost of GM seed and related inputs, and blurred intellectual property arrangements. In addition, CDT has expressed unease over the potential development of pest resistance and the inevitable applications of herbicide chemicals.

Experiments and open field trials with GM cotton have been running for many years in a number of African countries and are increasingly at a stage where applications for commercial release are imminent. However, there are many obstacles to the birth of a new GM era in Africa, chief among them the fact that this high-end technology is simply not appropriate to resource-poor farmers operating on tiny pieces of land. Africa’s cotton farmers are operating in a difficult global sector – prices are erratic and distorted by unfair subsidies in the North, institutional support for their activities is often lacking, and high input costs are already annihilating profit margins. Fighting for the introduction of more expensive technologies that have already proven themselves technologically unsound in a smallholder environment is deeply irresponsible and short-sighted.

Regional economic communities (RECs), such as the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) and the Economic Community for West African States (ECOWAS), are also key players in readying their member states for the commercialisation of and trade in GM cotton, through harmonised biosafety policies. Attempts by the biotech industry to impose policies that pander to investors’ desires at the expense of environmental and human safety may be easier to realise at the regional level, through the trade-friendly RECs. This is where many biotech industry resources and efforts are currently being channelled.

A farmer during a Malian public consultation on GMOs explained “What’s the point of encouraging us to increase yields with GMOs when we can’t get a decent price for what we already produce?”

http://www.ipsnews.net/2015/06/opinion-gm-cotton-a-false-promise-for-africa/

Nigeria's Over-paid Elite

In a country where 62% of the population lives in extreme poverty, a Nigerian senator takes home roughly £1.1m every year in salary plus benefits. MPs must make do with £900,000. In comparison, David Cameron earns £142,500 as UK prime minister. Nigeria’s lawmakers fly first class, lodge in the priciest rooms at the fanciest hotels and live in Beverly Hills-style mansions, all at the public’s expense. And they get away with this in a country where millions go to bed hungry. In Nigeria’s fiercely hierarchical and materialistic society, it is easy for top politicians to discredit criticism of their lifestyle from those below them on the social ladder: by simply implying that it stems from envy. It hardly helps that there have been numerous cases of members of civil society who used to lambast politicians’ earnings – only to be co-opted by the establishment and promptly reverse their views. Political power has always been associated with unfettered access to public funds and lavish lifestyles in Nigeria. Many Nigerians still wrongly assume that if you get to the top of the political heap, this somehow entitles you to a generous portion of the country’s wealth.

Rotimi Amaechi, a former state governor and director-general of Buhari’s presidential campaign, said in a TV interview last year that four years’ work as a governor is equal to the work an “ordinary man” puts in over 25 years. When asked how he came about his calculations, Amaechi retorted: “How many times does the ordinary man have to work till 2 in the morning only to be up by 6am to resume his duties?” http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/29/muhammadu-buhari-lavish-lifestyles-nigeria-elite

In 2010 the number of Nigerians living under poverty conditions stands at about 112.5 million and represents 69 per cent of the country’s total population, according to the last census figures. The vice president recently observed that over a million Nigerians die yearly of preventable diseases.

The Backway

Africa has never seen so many young men voluntarily heading for Europe. The number of migrants crossing by sea to Italy, a top entry point, nearly quadrupled from 2013 to 2014, reaching about 170,100. Sub-Saharan Africans made up a growing percentage of the total, with around 64,600 arriving last year. This year, the figure is expected to be even higher. Gambia, one of Africa’s smallest nations, is a big contributor to that flow. “The Western Route,” experts call the web of migrant trails from Gambia, Senegal and Mali that now lead to North Africa. But Gambians have a different name for the dangerous path to Europe: The Backway.

A growing number of Gambians are literate, but with “little chance at employment that matches their skills, just like China by the 1960s and India by the 1970s,” said Joel Millman, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. “So they do the rational thing and they leave.”

Twenty percent of Gambia’s gross domestic product now comes from remittances, according to the World Bank, one of the highest percentages in Africa. The first major wave of Gambians left villages in the 1990s, mostly for Spain. By 2010, there were 65,000 Gambians abroad, around 4 percent of the population.

Longtime dictator, President Yahya Jammeh, has preached a life of subsistence. He has created a bizarre mythology around himself as a man who could cure AIDS and threatened to personally slit the throats of gay men. He has brushed off the thousands of young men fleeing his country as failures and bad Muslims. “The only people who can make any money in The Gambia are those very close to the president. If not, you’re making $100 a month, if that,” said C. Omar Kebbeh, an economist and expert in Gambian migration, now at the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Tobacco Is Bad for Food Security

Namibia imports over 60% of required food items from South Africa and this makes Namibia a net food importer. The local food supply/the country's capacity to feed its population is deficient, because of inadequate investment in agriculture and lack of land provided for agricultural production.

Namibia’s health minister Dr. Bernhard Haufiku criticized theplanned tobacco plantation in the Zambezi Region, in the process calling on all health conscious Namibians to join the fight against it. The tobacco plantation project is being fronted by Swapo Party big shot Armas Amukwiyu and his Chinese partners through their company Namibia Oriental Tobacco cc. The company applied for 10 000 hectares in the Zambezi Region to grow tobacco and maize already. Amukwiyu is a close associate of President Dr. Hage Geingob, a relationship which could further boost his chances to get the land.

Villagers in the area expressed concern over the tobacco project saying the plantation will curtail the grazing land for their livestock.

Suspended Swapo youth leader Job Amupanda, together with George Kambala and Dimbulukeni Nauyoma, who started the Affirmative Repositioning movement which seeks to help address the land issue in the country, objected to the land being used for tobacco production.

In their objection, the trio said: “In 2005 the Namibian National Assembly unanimously ratified the World Health Organisation Framework Convention for tobacco control whose objectives include protecting present and future generations from the devastating health, social, environmental and economic consequences of tobacco consumption.”  They further said Namibia has a serious food problem. “It is our submission that to allocate more land for tobacco than for food is a deviation from the policy direction taken by the Namibian government through its ministry of agriculture, which leans towards eradicating the country's capacity to provide established food security and adequate levels of nutrition.” 

The three also objected the allocation of land to foreigners. Amupanda said: “It cannot be correct that our most fertile land is used to produce drugs and not food.”

He said it is also alarming that government is distributing land to foreigners even in villages, adding “that tobacco contains nicotine, correlated with a dangerous condition called schizophrenia”.  Amupanda said although government speaks of banning foreign ownership, “politicians are awarding land to foreigners under the table”. “We take this principled action on realising that our country is speedily and scandalously being sold while the future generation is tricked into singing songs and clapping hands, waiting for a fictional year called '2030' where all our problems will apparently be solved; probably by ghosts only known to the political elite,” he concluded. 

Africa's Health Prognosis - Poorly

More than 400 million people around the world don’t have access to essential health services, and many of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, where the resources are most needed.  Sub-Saharan Africa, bears 25 percent of the world’s disease burden but is home to just 3 percent of its doctors.

“Needless to say, poverty is a factor here,” says the report from the United Nations and the World Bank. 

Even within countries, more than 80 percent of women in the richest households have coverage while just 50 percent do in low-income families. While this has always been an issue, it was recently thrust into the limelight during the West African Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people.

“Generally speaking, these problems are perceived as a steady rumble of dysfunction and discontent, but from time to time there is a spike in awareness regarding health system inadequacy,” the report reads. “The recent Ebola outbreak in West Africa is a case in point, the severity of the outbreak being in large part due to weak health systems, including a lack of capacity in surveillance and response.” Because of Ebola, basic services such treatment for common conditions, vaccinations and maternal health are at serious risk, and officials need to enact serious reforms to make this happen.

But while the Ebola virus captured international attention and sent medical researchers scrambling to find a cure, sub-Saharan Africa is also home a many diseases not experienced anywhere else that still don’t get attention. A subset of illnesses known as neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) also continue to be overlooked, mainly for economic reasons. They are only a serious problem in some of the world’s poorest populations in tropical and subtropical regions.

Angola's Arms Spending

 Angola spent more on its military last year than any other sub-Saharan African nation even though it’s been at peace since a civil war ended more than a decade ago. Angola invested $1 billion on fighter jets and weapons from Russia in 2013. The country paid an undisclosed sum for surveillance drones from Israel. It’s also buying 45 Casspir armored personnel carriers from South Africa. Angola, with a population of 24 million, has an active armed forces of about 107,000, composed of 100,000 soldiers, 6,000 air corps members and 1,000 navy officers. Angola also maintains a “ghost army” of former combatants that bloat the payroll, to ensure stability after the civil war

The southwest African country, which is about twice the size of Texas, budgeted $6.8 billion on defense, second only to Algeria in continental Africa, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It’s more than the combined amount of Nigeria and South Africa, the region’s biggest economies that together have a population 10 times larger. Spending rose almost fourfold since the end of Angola’s 27-year conflict in 2002, the institute said. Even after Angola cut its budget by a quarter this year, reeling from a 40 percent plunge in oil prices, defense and security spending is set to rise, budget figures show. It will exceed the combined total allocated for health and education, according to Finance Ministry documents.

“What’s spectacular about this is that you essentially have a country that has been at peace over the last 13 years,” Ricardo Soares de Oliveira, author of the book “Magnificent and Beggar Land: Angola Since the Civil War,” said. “Just the numbers tell a crazy story.”

“These deals are handled by a handful of people that revolve around President Jose Eduardo dos Santos,” Paula Roque, a Johannesburg-based analyst with International Crisis Group, said by phone. The president has the discretion to spend a percentage of the budget “in any manner or form he wants, without accountability, fiscal transparency and without oversight of other organs of the state,” she said. Dos Santos, in power since 1979, ensures a portion of the defense budget goes to his military leaders and he appoints people who have no independent power base inside the ruling party so that they remain loyal to him

“It’s meant that the army is both extraordinarily mighty, at least in terms of its size in the sub-Saharan Africa context there’s practically no equivalent,” Soares de Oliveira said. “But it’s also been politically reliable and politically quietist; it hasn’t had aspirations.”

The country’s emphasis on defense spending leaves it with less cash available to alleviate poverty in a country with the world’s highest child mortality rate.

Managing Africa For Business, Not People

African leaders on Wednesday signed a potentially historic, 26-nation free-trade pact to create a common market spanning half the continent, from Cairo to Cape Town.
The deal on the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) is the culmination of five years of negotiations to set up a framework for preferential tariffs easing the movement of goods in an area that is home to 625-million people.
Analysts say the pact could have an enormous impact on African economies, which despite growth still only account for about 2% of global trade.

The deal will integrate three existing trade blocs – the East African Community, the Southern African Development Community and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) – whose countries have a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $1-trillion (€885-billion).

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The TFTA pact is to be unveiled officially on the weekend of June 14 and 15 at the summit of the African Union in Johannesburg.
The TFTA pact was launched at a summit in the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Members of the three blocs range from relatively developed economies such as South Africa and Egypt to countries such as Angola, Ethiopia and Mozambique, which are seen as having huge growth potential.
But hurdles remain, with the timeline for bringing down trade barriers yet to be worked out and the deal needing ratification in national parliaments within two years.

“What we are doing today represents a very important step in the history of regional integration of Africa,” Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said as he opened the summit.
World Bank president Jim Yong Kim told the summit that the TFTA would allow Africa “to make tremendous progress and move the entire continent forward”.
“Africa has made it clear that it is open for business,” he said.
“The geographical area covers Cape to Cairo ... the agreement paves the way for a continental free trade area that will combine the three biggest regional communities,” said Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn.
Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe said the deal would create a “borderless economy” that would rank 13th in the world in terms of GDP.

Negotiators drafted the deal this week at Sharm el-Sheikh and said they had addressed concerns such as management of trade disputes and protection for small manufacturers once the TFTA comes into force.
Officials said the agreement envisions the eventual merger of the three blocs.
“The ultimate goal is to ensure easy movement of goods in these countries without duties,” said Peter Kiguta, director general of the East African Community.

World business leaders have welcomed the TFTA, with experts saying that only 12% of Africa’s trade is between countries on the continent. 
The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development said in 2013 that if Africa is to boost its intra-continental trade, it must focus on creating “more space for the private sector to play an active role”.
Analysts say that although the continent’s growth over the past 15 years outstripped global GDP expansion by nearly three percentage points, falling commodity prices, power shortages, political instability and corruption are holding back its economies.
“What we have realised is that having one trade regime is better than the costly multiple trade regimes,” said Comesa secretary general Sindiso Ngwenya, who led negotiations among the three blocs.

from here

No mention of the workforce or consultation with any civil groups. 
We wish you luck, workers of Africa.

The Knock-On Effect From Ebola: Unemployment

Liberia’s Ebola outbreak has been over for a while, so what has happened to all those burial teams, contact tracers, Ebola Treatment Unit health workers, community mobilisers, ambulance drivers? What are they doing now?
The answer is not a lot. The majority of the estimated 20,000 or so workers and volunteers who risked their lives during the year-long fight are unable to find work, largely due to lingering stigma and fears about the virus.
Liberia was declared Ebola-free in May, but after almost 5,000 deaths and more than 10,000 cases, the country is still in trauma. Borders have reopened and trade is beginning to pick up, but the social and psychological scars take longer to heal.


“People are still afraid of us,” 44-year-old Morris Walker, who worked as a contact tracer, told IRIN.

“They don’t want to employ us because they feel we have some sort of disease and could infect them. But this is far from the fact.”
Before the outbreak, Walker had been working for many years as a waiter in a local restaurant. But when he tried to pick up again from where he’d left off, he was knocked back.
“The manager bluntly told me that my services were not needed because he heard that I was working with the burial teams,” Walker told IRIN. “The manager said that if he takes me back, most of his customers might not come back to the restaurant.” 
Walker has since applied for a number of jobs, but hasn’t had any luck. 
He is not alone.

There are no official figures, but several organisations, including local community service NGO Gratis, say that between 50 and 70 percent of former Ebola response workers are currently unemployed, particularly in and around hard-hit Margibi county. 

taken from here

The Brutality Of Profit Maximisation

Reams have been written about corporate land acquisitions around the world - land grabs, if you will. The hard reality is that there is a sound business case to be made for commercial interests to aggressively attempt to control the very foundation of the food chain, the land itself. Through direct control of suitable land it is possible not only to control food production but also to manage whatever else happens on, around and with the land. This extends further than simply the corporate control of the primary industry of agriculture - and thus food production. It represents the creation and appropriation of an entire new asset class, with serious implications for equality, governance, food security and the underlying democratic process. 

This is not a new development but rather the logical extension of a well-established trend. The previous wave of plantations was a colonial construct. The new model is distinctly corporate driven, neo-colonial in nature and controlled by the plutocratic corporate-political nexus. The past half-century has seen accelerated corporate control over various aspects of the food chain. 

The major brokers of food commodities, the ABCD companies (Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill and [Louis] Dreyfuss) now control between 75 and 90% of the world’s commodity crops like soy, maize and wheat, along with secondary crops such as sugar, coffee, palm oil and cocoa and their primary processed constituents such as ethanol, starch, corn syrup, oils and various animal feeds. In turn these are linked to the primary food processors; Nestle, PepsiCo, JBS & Tyson (the latter two meat processors) and hundreds of other transnational food corporations process these raw components into food for the retail markets. 

Without land this value chain becomes prone to risk. Out of this has emerged the increased focus on the control of land resources. Land and the farming component that goes with it was initially perceived by corporate interests as a messy, unpredictable and hence financially unattractive option. But the race to feed a growing global population along with risks like climate change, as well as political and economic uncertainty, makes control of land and agriculture a far more attractive investment opportunity today. Linking land to state of the art remote sensing and weather forecast systems has made farming more predictable. Couple this to high cost, energy intensive inputs – chemicals, fertilisers, hybrid and GM seeds, irrigation and supply chains – and a commercial package with measurable margins emerges. 

Of course investors are not just after any old land; the cheaper, the more suited to purpose, the more attractive and potentially profitable it becomes. Africa has been front and centre of many land grabs. Corporations have actively acquired land throughout sub-Saharan Africa, from Ethiopia to Liberia, right down to South Africa; everything inside this is in the triangle of opportunity. Land acquisition has become a major destination for private investment. This is not limited to Africa. Fertile agricultural destinations like Ukraine, Argentina, Brazil, even Australia have seen equally aggressive acquisitions by foreign capital.

 The brutality of profit maximisation sees important social issues such as land tenure for people with a claim to domicile as an investment impediment. People, even those with an established claim to tenure, are cast aside. This is how agricultural land has become a hard asset class. Combine the rigorous application of commercial principles and the utilitarian cynicism of market driven capital investment, externalise negative cost impairments like social and environmental impacts when and wherever possible and you have a recipe for profit generation. By following this model of land assetisation, agricultural land has become the single most attractive investment class, notably so in South Africa. Return on capital invested in agricultural land can run to nearly 25%, sharply outpacing returns on the JSE, on ordinary property investment and is less risky than international bonds. 

Researchers Antoine Ducastel and Ward Anseeuw explained at a recent BRICS and Agrarian Change in the Global South conference held by the Programme for Land and Agrarian Studies at the University of the Western Cape, how investment into farmland in South Africa has become, from a financial perspective, a sexy place to invest. They explained how the process of assetisation of agricultural resources follows three fundamental, business school 101 steps. 

Firstly, analyse the farm assets, the property titles, the water and biological value flows, and develop these into a portfolio of assets, usually held offshore (Mauritius is a common offshore destination for SA land assets). Farming is normally engaged at arms-length through contractors or managers. 

The second stage involves bundling these assets into corporate instruments, to maximise value creation through selection of suitable competitive strategies. Finally, all that is required is to produce and manage the farm as disembedded assets, divorcing the financial from the social and environmental realities and externalising these wherever possible. 

This model obviously raises concerns at several levels. First off is the policy level, where large, fertile farms are simply perceived to be a “good investment.” This has the potential to inflate the price of prime agricultural land, putting it further out of reach of developing farmers or restitution or redistributive budgets. Large commercial entities, backed by the likes of pension and insurance funds like Old Mutual and parastatals like the Industrial Development Corporation and the African Development Bank, with increasing numbers of other sometimes-rapacious offshore investors, consolidate landholdings through speculative purchases. 

These ‘assets,’ along with human and ecological value, are then threatened by asset stripping, extractive agro-commodity production and outsourced farm management, practicing by-the-book high input farming. Of course, from a commercial perspective this represents an undeniably positive narrative, ostensibly opening up agriculture to modernisation, increased credit lines, improved risk management and related corporate management tools. 

However from a social and ecological perspective there are real risks. Most healthy food we eat is grown by smallholders and family farms. Large industrial farms produce primarily commodity crops, typically dealt by the ABCD dealers. These, when turned into industrial food components, play havoc with our collective health. High carb, fat and sugar concoctions, fast foods, ingredients unrecognisable to anyone except a chemist become ‘food.’ 

Maize and soy are used as animal feed, making animals environmentally destructive but similarly profitable commodities. From a policy and governance perspective, equally serious issues arise. The embrace of the laissiez faire free market corporate model by South Africa has been instrumental in undermining and delaying land restitution and redistribution. We have become politically more focussed on market stability than social stability. So do we allow market forces to dictate social policy? 

We also live in an age of accelerating commodification. The unintended consequences are apparent everywhere – losses of rainforest, topsoil, biodiversity. We are pushing up hard against the planetary boundaries, significantly propelled by our agricultural exploitation of land, water and resources. Given these realities we must ask whether our human destiny is safe in the hands an unfettered free market that constantly seeks to maximise profit at any cost, including the earth that sustains us and the social structures that underpin our civilisation. Given the historical track record of corporate care of environmental resources, I would suggest that we need to carefully scrutinise how we manage democratic oversight over this relentless commodification of our natural resources.

by Glenn Ashton from here

Africa comes out

Mozambique will officially rescind “vice against nature” legislation in a few weeks time.

Of the 76 countries that still criminalise same-sex relationships and behaviour, 38 are African. Recent surveys also show that the overwhelming majority of people who live in Africa strongly disapprove of homosexuality. This is even the case in South Africa, the only country on the continent that has legalised same-sex marriage.

Dozens of studies show that same-sex practices in pre-colonial Africa were not generally taboo in the way that colonial administrations codified them. Many traditional societies in Africa, and elsewhere, developed ways of ordering and tolerating same-sex attractions and behaviour. Many tolerated some same-sex relationships among men, particularly in age-related cohorts or military units. Large numbers of men practised some same-sex activities while asserting their heterosexuality in other spheres of life. Among women, many different African societies record marriage or other kinds of recognised relationships between women, as well as different forms of cross-dressing and role-swapping. These include societies and cultures in Kenya, Sudan, Cameroon, Nigeria, Lesotho, South Africa and many others.

Only during the height of colonisation were precise definitions of sexual orientations developed and proscribed behaviours punished. The British in particular brought in legislation because they thought “native” cultures did not punish “perverse” sex enough. Like so many other colonial era laws based on Victorian prejudices, these laws should have been repealed as part of the decolonisation process. But, on liberation, most English-speaking colonies did not repeal colonial-era “sodomy” or “crime/vice against nature” laws.

More recently, some of the impetus behind new laws has come from conservative and often racist organisations based in the US. In the last 15 years, the Christian right, primarily charismatic right-wing churches from the US, has been very active in driving anti-homosexuality sentiment in parts of Africa, like Uganda. These groups have supplied their African allies with discredited junk science to bolster what is ultimately a narrow, imported set of ultra-conservative values. Similarly, the growth of a more conservative set of Islamic customs in some parts of Africa has seen the erosion of indigenous belief systems that have been historically more tolerant of non-heterosexual orientations.

In Uganda President Yoweri Museveni signed a law that contained harsh new punishments for “homosexual acts” and for what it calls the “promotion” of homosexuality. Implementation of that law is currently suspended by the Ugandan Constitutional Court. There are also new laws in Nigeria, homophobic changes to the constitution in Zimbabwe and discussion about possible new laws in a number of countries, including Kenya. A particularly dangerous aspect of new laws in some parts of Africa is that they are designed to criminalise those who advocate for LGBTI rights or campaign for better access to public health facilities. This impedes the work of NGOs and activists and wider dissemination of new science about sexual orientation.

Same-sex attraction is neither “un-African” nor a colonial import. Between 350 million and 400 million people globally are not heterosexual, about 50 million of whom live in African countries. It is time to transform the continent’s laws. 

Fleeing the Nightmares

WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE

Migration and xenophobia against those seeking a better life has dominated the news about Africa in recent months.

In a speech commemorating Africa Day on 25 May, African Union (AU) Commission Chairperson Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma expressed her concern about the migrants who have died in the Mediterranean. 'We must address the very circumstances that lead our nationals to leave our shores...' she said.

AU Commissioner for Social Affairs, Mustapha Sidiki Kaloko, in a recent interview with the Institute for Security Studies' Peace and Security Council Report. Kaloko says the AU realises  'We have to make the member states of the AU stable and friendly to the young people who are trekking out to the Mediterranean,' says Kaloko. 'In the 1970s, I was growing up in Sierra Leone and if you asked me to migrate to Europe, I would have said no, because my country was doing well, I was very comfortable.'

Eritrea is a small country and probably would not  attract much attention if it weren’t for the fact that Eritreans account for about a quarter of the migrants trying to reach Europe and are the second-largest group by nation, after Syrians. More than 300,000 people have fled the country since 2000 and 4,000 leave each month—incredible numbers for a country of just 6 million people, despite the government’s shoot-to-kill policy at border crossings.

The U.N. Human Rights Council released a report on abuses by the Eritrean government. The East African dictatorship’s practices, include the training of children to act as spies for the regime, an extortive “coupon system” that maintains government control over nearly every aspect of daily life, and the widespread use of gruesome torture methods against prisoners. “The commission finds that the use of torture is so widespread that it can only conclude it is a policy of the Government to encourage its use for the punishment of individuals perceived as opponents to its rule,” the report states. Isaias Afwerki’s government maintains a conscription system for government service that forces citizens as young as 15 into servitude that can be extended indefinitely. Taken together the policies are designed, according to the commission, to keep the population in a state of permanent anxiety. "It is not law that rules Eritreans—but fear,” the report concludes.

Eritrean migrants are willing to face from their own governments and from transit through war-torn neighboring countries, predatory human traffickers, and the perilous voyage across the Mediterranean. The UN report states that “to ascribe their decision to leave solely to economic reasons is to ignore the dire situation of human rights in Eritrea and the very real suffering of its people. Eritreans are fleeing severe human rights violations in their country and are in need of international protection.”

With the number of those making the perilous crossing regularly breaking records, it’s worth remembering what exactly is driving the exodus. 

Adapted from here 

Is "Real Sustainable Development For All and By All" Possible In a Capitalist System?

A report published last month by the Montpellier Panel – an eminent group of agriculture, ecology and trade experts from Africa and Europe – says about 65 percent of Africa’s arable land is too damaged to sustain viable food production.
The report, “No Ordinary Matter: conserving, restoring and enhancing Africa’s soil“, notes that Africa suffers from the triple threat of land degradation, poor yields and a growing population.
The Montpellier Panel has recommended, among others, that African governments and donors invest in land and soil management, and create incentives particularly on secure land rights to encourage the care and adequate management of farm land. In addition, the report recommends increasing financial support for investment on sustainable land management.

The publication of the report comes with the U.N. declaration of 2015 as the International Year of Soils, a declaration the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) director general, Jose Graziano da Silva, said was important for “paving the road towards a real sustainable development for all and by all.”
According to the FAO, human pressure on the resource has left a third of all soils on which food production depends degraded worldwide.
Without new approaches to better managing soil health, the amount of arable and productive land available per person in 2050 will be a fourth of the level it was in 1960 as the FAO says it can take up to 1,000 years to form a centimetre of soil.
Soil expert and professor of agriculture at the Makerere University, Moses Tenywa tells IPS that African governments should do more to promote soil and water conservation, which is costly for farmers in terms of resources, labour, finances and inputs.
“Practicing climate smart agriculture in climate watersheds promotes soil health. This includes conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, diversification, mulching, and use of fertilizers in combination with rainwater harvesting.”
According to the Montpellier Panel report, an estimated 180 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa are affected by land degradation, which costs about 68 billion dollars in economic losses as a result of damaged soils that prevent crop yields.

“The burdens caused by Africa’s damaged soils are disproportionately carried by the continent’s resource-poor farmers,” says the chair of the Montpellier Panel, Professor Sir Gordon Conway.
“Problems such as fragile land security and limited access to financial resources prompt these farmers to forgo better land management practices that would lead to long-term gains for soil health on the continent, in favour of more affordable or less labour-intensive uses of resources which inevitably exacerbate the issue.”
Soil health is critical to enhancing the productivity of Africa’s agriculture, a major source of employment and a huge contributor to GDP, says development expert and acting divisional manager in charge of Visioning & Knowledge management at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), Wole Fatunbi.



Fatunbi cites the land terrace system to manage soil erosion in the highlands of Uganda and Rwanda as a success story that made an impact because the systems were backed legislation. Also, the use of organic manure in the Savannah region through an agriculture system integrating livestock and crops has become a model for farmers to protect and promote soil health.


Meanwhile, a new report by U.S. researchers cites global warming as another impact on soil with devastating consequences.
According to the report “Climate Change and Security in Africa”, the continent is expected to see a rise in average temperature that will be higher than the global average. Annual rainfall is projected to decrease throughout most of the region, with a possible exception of eastern Africa.
“Less rain will have serious implications for sub-Saharan agriculture, 75 percent of which is rain-fed… Average predicated production losses by 2050 for African crops are: maize 22 percent, sorghum 17 percent, millet 17 percent, groundnut 18 percent, and cassava 8 percent.
“Hence, in the absence of major interventions in capacity enhancements and adaption measures, warming by as little as 1.5C threatens food production in Africa significantly.”

A truly disturbing picture of the problems of soil was painted by the National Geographic magazine in a recent edition.
“By 1991, an area bigger than the United States and Canada combined was lost to soil erosion—and it shows no signs of stopping,” wrote agroecologist Jerry Glover in the article “Our Good Earth.” In fact, says Glover, “native forests and vegetation are being cleared and converted to agricultural land at a rate greater than any other period in history.
“We still continue to harvest more nutrients than we replace in soil,” he says. If a country is extracting oil, people worry about what will happen if the oil runs out. But they don’t seem to worry about what will happen if we run out of soil.
Adds Rattan Lal, soil scientist: “Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root. In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil.”

from here

Power to Africans

Africa’s energy crisis seldom makes the headlines, yet 621 million Africans – two-thirds of the continent's population – live without electricity. The social, economic and human costs are devastating.  The toxic fumes released by burning firewood and dung kill 600,000 people a year – half of them children. Health clinics are unable to refrigerate life-saving vaccines and children are denied the light they need to study. And the numbers are rising.

A kettle boiled twice a day in the United Kingdom uses five times as much electricity as someone in Mali uses in a year. The latest Africa Progress Panel report, published this week, estimates that 138 million households living on less than $2.50 a day spend US$10bn annually on energy-related products, including charcoal, candles and kerosene. Measured on a per-unit cost basis, these poor households pay 60-80 times more for energy than people living in London or Manhattan. Nigeria is one of the world’s biggest oil exporters but 93m Nigerians depend on firewood and charcoal for heat and light. On current trends, there is no chance that Africa will hit the global target of energy for all by 2030.

The region’s power utilities are notoriously inefficient because utilities are vehicles for political patronage and, in some cases, institutionalised theft. US$120m went missing from the Tanzanian state power utility last year though a complex web of off-shore companies.

Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the world’s most abundant and least exploited renewable energy sources, especially solar power. With the price of solar panels plunging, there are opportunities for firms and governments to connect millions of poor households to affordable small-scale, off-grid systems. Bangladesh has installed over 3.5m off-grid solar power systems, and the figure is set to double over the next few years. In Africa, a vibrant off-grid solar industry is poised for take-off. The only thing missing in most countries is government action to support, encourage and enable this.

Supporting the development of large-scale renewable energy is not just the right thing to do for Africa. It is also the smart thing to do on climate change. One of the symptoms of Africa’s energy poverty is the destruction of forests to produce charcoal for rising urban populations: fewer trees means the loss of vital carbon sinks.

150 years after Edison developed the light bulb, it is time to spark an African energy revolution. We do not lack the technologies to do so: all that’s needed is the vital connection of cooperation and political will.

Adapted from here

UPOV91: The Apartheid Seed Law

Although political apartheid was dismantled by the 1994 election of President Nelson Mandela in South Africa, a new form of economic apartheid is now stalking the entire African continent.
 
This new economic apartheid refers to the seed convention known as UPOV91 (International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants), advanced by the European Union, the United States, and the World Bank to protect plant breeders’ rights under the World Trade Organisation. The EU is setting its implementation by African governments as a prerequisite for trading under their Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), scheduled for 2016.
 
The first apartheid characteristic of UPOV91 privileges formal sector plant breeders who work in modern laboratories full of expensive equipment to experiment with new plant varieties. The UPOV91 convention gives this breeder private ownership over the new strain, extending property rights beyond the seed, to the full plant, and to ‘essentially derived’ products (e.g. flour from wheat).
 
For this legal, individual possession, the new variety must be distinct, uniform, and stable (DUS), characteristics not found in farmers’ newly bred varieties after their experimentation in the fields. It means that farmers’ new varieties are not protected by the UPOV convention and remain free for the taking.
 
Farmer breeders do not desire seed traits that are highly stable, for they are looking for nuances in traits to choose the next seeds for breeding. As one farmer asked, ‘What do they mean by ‘heritage seed’? Aren’t the seeds changing all the time?’
 
During the 20 years of proprietary rights for the breeder of DUS varieties, no one can exchange, use, experiment or save the seed without permission, a prohibition eradicating farmers’ rights to work with any seeds. Because farmers have cultivated diverse food crops over millennia, two international laws protect farmers’ rights (International Treaty for Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture and the Nagoya Protocol to the Convention on Biological Diversity). For African governments to incorporate UPOV91 into national laws, they would have to violate these two treaties.
 
Farmers’ experimentation and freely sharing involve not only seeds but the indigenous knowledge embedded in them. Farmers, for example, know the hundreds of varieties of millet and sorghum or teff, grains more nutritious than maize or rice or wheat, and ones that are regaining interest on the continent because they grow well in semi-arid conditions, while the more familiar maize varieties are not standing up to climate change aridity. Smallholder African farmers grow 20-25 crops on one hectare, sharing knowledge — sometimes formally in farmer field schools but also daily in informal ways — about which variety grows best under another crop, where to place the various crops in terms of moisture percolation in the small field and, especially, variable planting times in case the rains come late, or start early. Farmers know the nutrition value of their biodiverse crops, encouraging children and mothers to partake more of one (e.g., pearl and finger millets) than of another (cassava). And nutrition includes feeding the living soil with leguminous plants rotated with grain crops.
 
Why would anyone want to destroy farmers’ experimentation and knowledge? For the same reason apartheid reigned too long: it is profitable. UPOV91 offers another way to privatise a living organism, accomplished more easily than the difficult job of enforcing a patent.
 
To demonstrate that this metaphor of an apartheid seed law is not a casual label, I have taken quotations about South African apartheid from a photography exhibit [1] in Johannesburg that chronicles what the daily abuses and humiliations were. They speak well to the segregation and abuse of all farmer breeders that UPOV91 will impose.
 
SEGREGATION WITH INFERIORITY
 
‘Apartheid’s social reality was not only the regime of law, but the construction of the necessary context in which the inferior status of Africans was established….It is by understanding the rituals of truth of apartheid (white entitlement and superiority) and how those rituals were translated by those who benefitted most from the rules.’ (Enwezor and Bester 2013: 24)
 
UPOV91 is trying to establish, by law, the inferior status of smallholder farmers who breed and do scientific experiments in the field. It privileges the formal sector plant breeders’ entitlement and superiority. The normative law translates back into profit for the corporations benefiting from PVP – plant variety protection. This constructed distinction between two different types of breeding becomes a ‘ritual of truth’.
 
AESTHETICS OF SEGREGATION
 
‘The visible and aesthetic aspect of this [apartheid segregation] would be that whites lived in manicured, well-tended, and organised neighbourhoods and houses with modern amenities, sat in first class, … ate in different and better restaurants…and on the other hand, Africans lived in substandard, crowded, squalid townships with deficits in modern amenities, travelled in the second-class cabin, and ate in different restaurants….
 
‘A park bench that has inscribed on it ‘for whites only’ defines a structure. But it is also a picture that reproduces the conditions that secure the image of a norm. …Over time, such an expectation becomes internalised as norm, as the reality of the difference.’
(Enwezor and Bester 2013: 24)
 
UPOV91 legitimises the view that ‘real plant breeders’ wear white coats and work in a sparkling laboratory with the latest instruments, while projecting that farmer breeders are barefoot, dirty, and semi-literate. They cannot produce DUS (distinct, uniform, stable) seeds and therefore, they are not breeders. The Gates Foundation’s Programme for African Seed Systems (PASS) call their seeds ‘weak’ and ‘recycled’, ‘used for decades’.[2] Like apartheid benches ‘for whites only’ in the parks and on the beaches, only a breeder of DUS seeds can sit on the laboratory stool as a recognised seed breeder; farmer breeders do not qualify.
 
LEGAL ENFORCEMENT OF APARTHEID
 
‘To be African is to know that your access to the city will be severely policed, and that the slightest violation of the rules of segregation will result in dramatic measures of police harassment.’ (Enwezor and Bester 2013: 24)
 
The pass laws, restricting the movement of Africans at all times, became a core impetus for organising against apartheid from the Defiance Campaign (1952) through ‘making the townships ungovernable’ (1980s). Any ‘non-white’ without a pass could be detained for 90 days, or more, without trial or notification of any lawyer. To emphasise the similarities, the above quote simply has farmers inserted:
‘To be [a farmer breeder] is to know that your access to the [UPOV protected seed] will be severely policed, and that the slightest violation of the rules of segregation will result in dramatic measures….’
 
Farmer breeders will not be summarily detained, but Canada has already made violation of its UPOV-based law a criminal act, not a civil offense. The U.S. courts have upheld Monsanto’s allegations against hundreds of farmers that they stole a ‘Monsanto gene’, when most often, pollen carried by wind fertilised the farmers’ crops. With these precedents, the economic apartheid of UPOV91 will most likely be strictly enforced by the courts.
 
RESISTANCE
 
Civil society and farmers across the African continent are organising against UPOV91, but the threat of the looming European trade agreements (EPAs) remains. Just as civil society resistance in the North changed the context for domestic apartheid, the international community needs to voice and organise rejection of this apartheid seed law.
 
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation recognises two seed systems: the formal one and farmers’, because all breeders are essential to cultivate new food varieties in this time of climate change. Further, farmers are even more advanced than formal sector breeders, for their new seeds are already ‘field tested’, whereas laboratory seeds often fail during field trials, not expressing the traits desired.[3] Let us not allow UPOV to gain any ‘sensibility of normalcy’ in segregating and denigrating farmer seed breeders:
 
‘Apartheid … transformed and maintained institutions for the sole purpose of denying and depriving Africans of rights and access…. [As does the UPOV seed law that deprives farmers of rights and access]. But the viability of such a system required more than the instruments of law….It necessitated a continuous process of socialisation and institutionalisation until it acquired a sensibility of normalcy….’ (Enwezor and Bester 2013: 25)
 
The international community’s vociferous and sustained rejection of this new economic apartheid would protect the future of food for us all.
 
by Carol Thompson from here

The Sham Of Elections In Ethiopia

According to the National Election Board of Ethiopia, the result of last week’s national election is that the EPRDF (Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front) has achieved a complete victory by grabbing all the parliamentary seats. The same board and the Ethiopian government qualified the result as a triumph of democracy, which leads one to assume that in today’s Ethiopia the progress of democracy is measured by the size of exclusion of opposition parties from parliamentary participation. In 1995, the process resulted in 75 seats to various opposition parties; then it evolved to one representative in 2010; until it has reached the present stage of advanced democracy with zero representative from the opposition. Bravo to the EPRDF! Be it noted that this novel interpretation of democracy seems to be endorsed by the American government through the authoritative voice of Wendy Sherman, the Under Secretary for Political Affairs (go to http://www.diretube.com/ethiopia/under-secretary-of-state-wendy-sherman-talking-about-ethiopia-video_851c48f3b.html) The only step remaining to achieve the apex of democracy is the banning of opposition parties, obvious as it is that they have become obsolete.
 
On a serious note, last week’s election appears very enigmatic to many observers. For one thing, in view of the creeping discontent in the country, which is even expressed outwardly here and there, in view also of the paranoia of the regime showing an unprecedented level of mobilization of its repressive forces to intimidate voters and stifle dissenting voices, a complete parliamentary victory strikes by its utter impossibility. There is only one possible conclusion: not only the election was not free and fair, but it was also subjected to fraudulent practices, such as stealing or eliminating votes supporting the opposition.
 
The question that comes to mind is the following: if neither the people and opposition parties give an iota of credibility to the official result, nor for that matter the officials and the cadres of the ruling party themselves––since they used all repressive and fraudulent means to eliminate the opposition––in a word, if nobody lends any credibility to the official outcome, why is the ruling party going through such a costly, time-consuming, and utterly useless exercise? What is the expected gain?
 
Can we say that the election serves the purpose of renewing legitimacy? But how can a government renew legitimacy by claiming an unbelievable victory? Who falls for a score of 100 percent? What about the international community? Perhaps, but again provided that you come up with something believable, and 100 percent is not believable. Accordingly, such a score defeats its purpose, if it is legitimacy.
 
This is what is most perplexing: a lesser score (say, for example, of 80 percent) would have gained some credibility without, however, endangering the hegemony of the ruling party. Indeed, why not leave some seats to the opposition? So long as the ruling party retains an overwhelming majority, the opposition does not present any risk. What is more, the presence of the opposition, however negligible, would give some sense to the voting process in the parliament.
 
There is more: in turning the election into a process of elimination of the opposition by all means necessary, the government and the ruling party are loudly telling the Ethiopian people that any hope of change through peaceful means is just an illusion. This is none other than forcing the people to seek other means, namely, violent forms of struggle, such as uprisings and armed struggle. It is hard to understand why a government would push its own people to violent methods.
 
If, instead of renewing legitimacy, a score of 100 percent only succeeds in cornering people to violent means, why on earth would a government adopt such a detrimental policy? We only saw negative sides. Where is the gain? The huge enigma here is that, unlike most dictatorial states, the regime in Ethiopia has recognized multiple opposition parties, even if it has restricted their activities to what it deems tolerable. While the general rule for dictatorial regimes is to ban opposition parties altogether, the Ethiopian regime recognizes them except that it does not want them in parliament. Since in both cases the result is the same, the behavior of the Ethiopian regime may become intelligible if we get hold of the reason why even dictatorial regimes that ban opposition parties organize elections.
 
Where no opposition parties exist, the purpose of election cannot be the achievement of victory. As there is no contest, the claim of victory would be simply surreal. By contrast, single-party regimes are concerned with the number of people who come out to vote, the issue being to get out the maximum number of voters by all means necessary. Clearly, the objective is not to gain the majority of votes; rather, it is to demonstrate force. Elections are meant to show the extent of the control of the government and the ruling party over the people. The less the people like the regime, the higher is its need to show the maximum electoral score, thereby displaying its invincibility. The message is then clear enough: even if you do not like the regime, there is nothing you can do about it. As such, it is a celebration of defiance, a parade, a showoff of political force.
 
It seems to me that the dominant party in the governmental coalition, the TPLF (Tigrayan People's Liberation Front), has perfected the meaning of election under dictatorial rule: unlike one-party dictatorships, it recognizes opposition parties, allows them some freedom of maneuver, only to deprive them of even one seat in the parliament as a manifestation of its absolute hegemony. This is none other than an extreme form of political bullying, as in the case when a child donates his toy to another child and takes it back after some time as a way of showing his dominance by aggravating the frustration of the other child.
 
The ultimate goal of this political bullying is, of course, the inculcation of submission through the sense of hopelessness. While in democratic countries, elections establish the legitimacy of states through the exercise of popular sovereignty, in dictatorial regimes, like that of the TPLF, they are periodical rituals displaying the submission of the people. To the extent that these elections raise and then dash hopes for change, they renew the sense of hopelessness of the people, and so deepen their resignation.
  
by Messay Kebede from here

The origin of apartheid

From the June 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

In spite of world wide condemnation of the policies of the South African Government, the Nationalist Party, particularly since the end of the last world war, have gone from strength to strength, crowning success with their own bigoted brand of success. This consolidation of the political power of the Afrikaaner pays a perverted tribute to his fanaticism. The Afrikaaner has at last won the Boer War. The tribal complexity of the Afrikaaner, his aggressive unity, his hatred of the Uitlander, must be seen against the economic history of the Boers in South Africa.

From the very first days of landing on the shores of Africa in 1652, the mainly Dutch settlers were an oppressed colonial minority. After having established a strictly Calvinist peasant community at the Cape, they were forbidden by the Dutch Government to allow its use to any ship of a nationality other than Dutch, a restriction that brought them economic hardship. Also, the Dutch Government enforced enactments and imposed taxes that rarely took local conditions into account. With the weakening of the Dutch Government in 1795, the colonists took over the Cape and proclaimed their right to own slaves. This autonomy was short lived, for in 1806 the colony was seized by the British.

During the first years of the 19th century, the Bantu tribesmen began infiltrating into South Africa, and clashes took place between the Boers and the Bantu which led to the first Kaffir War of 1834 in which many Boers were massacred. Also, during this first year, the British Government forbade the Boers to own  the slaves, most of whom they had taken from Asia.

In an effort to once again regain their autonomy, between the years 1834 and 1840 the Boers trekked north and established the Republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State. But still they had to carry on the wars with the Bantu, and now at the same time they had to fight the British who had declared their occupation of the interior "illegal". Eventually, the British came to the view that the cost of coercive forces was too high in relation to the return, and in 1852-53, they granted sovereignty to the Transvaal and Orange Free State.

The British Government immediately regretted their decision, for in 1853 gold and diamonds were discovered in the Boer Republics as well as great quantities of other minerals including coal, copper, manganese, chromite and asbestos. The friction between the British and the Boers was again renewed and culminated in the outbreak of the Boer War in which the Boers were "temporarily" defeated. 

This is the legacy of violence that history has bequeathed to the modern political situation in South Africa, a tri-partite enmity between Boer, Bantu and British. Its framework was that of economic rivalry and material struggle, the southward expansion of the bantu, the attempts of the Boers to maintain a mainly peasant community, the arrogant imperialism of British commerce. The social cohesion of the Boers, expressed in terms of religion, language and so-called race, became their mode of survival. This was the basis of Afrikaaner nationalism.

But Afrikaaner nationalism is no longer supported by a peasant economy struggling for survival. The Boers themselves are now integrated into capitalist farming, and distribute their products through both national and world markets. Increasingly, this capitalist form of agriculture uses mechanised techniques as well as the technology of a large canning industry. As well as this, Afrikaaners are increasingly involved in industrial capitalism. The further South Africa's economy develops, the more does Afrikaaner nationalism and apartheid become removed from the economic and historical background in which it was nurtured. Nevertheless, this body of prejudice is established as an ideological force in itself, impinging on the policies of the South African Government, even at a time when it can be shown—especially from the point of view of industry—that it is hindering development.

Apartheid or "separate development" is a bogus and hypocritical political contrivance. It caters for the emotionalism of nationalist nostalgia and is an electoral plank which covers the fears of most white workers. Most of the legislation brought in by the Nationalist Government in the name of "apartheid" is outrightly repressive and in defence of farming interests.

The battle that African workers wage in South Africa is beset by the most intimidating difficulties imaginable. They have no long-standing tradition of organisation. They suffer the "legal" hooliganism of police brutality, even to the extent of being shot down. There is a plentiful supply of cheap labour, making industrial pressure almost impossible, Even those who are employed live so near the borderline of starvation that strike action invokes the greatest hardship. The layout and siting of African townships is arranged to facilitate swift police or military reprisal. The machine gun or even air attack can be easily used without interference to the "white" population. Saracen armoured cars are frequently used to break up assemblies of African workers.

Ironically, the electoral support that maintains nationalist political power is what can only be regarded by tradition as an unholy alliance between voters of both Afrikaaner and British origin. It is political support that arises from the irrational fear of three and a quarter million Europeans in a country which also includes nearly fourteen million Bantu, Asiatics and Coloureds. Just as they were in the past, economic struggles in South Africa continue to be confused by and expressed in terms of "race" and "culture".

The tortured situation in South Africa is a direct product of its tortured past, but men should learn from their history, not continue to be burdened by it.

Pieter Lawrence 

"Exploitation of a Higher Kind" - G7 In Africa

Under the specious claim of delivering "aid to Africa," western governments are backing an initiative—described by some as another form of "colonialism"—that is effectively enabling the corporate takeover of African nations by some of the world’s biggest food and agriculture companies.
On Wednesday, as corporate executives, politicians, and G7 officials assembled in Cape Town, South Africa for a closed-door meeting of the G7’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, a coalition of small scale farmers, unions, workers, and food sovereignty groups released a statement condemning the program.
Though the public-private initiative has been championed by U.S. President Barack Obama, among others, as a means to combat poverty in Africa by bolstering "sustained, inclusive, agriculture-led" growth with the goal of raising "50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years," its critics say the New Alliance actually undermines the rights and food security of citizens of its partner nations.
In fact, some suggest, the rise of such programs signals a shift in the way the world is governed.

'Colonialism' continued

Under the New Alliance, ten African governments—Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, and Tanzania—have "committed to develop or revise policies that will facilitate responsible private investment in agriculture in support of smallholder farmers." However, the opposition coalition says, since its inception in 2012, there is little evidence of any positive impact. Instead, the policy changes have paved the way for corporate exploitation of local land and people.
According to the coalition statement, the New Alliance policies "facilitate the grabbing of land and other natural resources, further marginalize small-scale producers, and undermine the right to adequate food and nutrition"—all in the interest of courting large multi-nationals.
For example, at the urging of the New Alliance, a bill often referred to as the "Monsanto law," which criminalizes the saving and swapping of seeds, is poised for passage by the parliament of Ghana. A recent report put forth by international peasant farmer and food justice groups La Via Campesina and Grain notes that students and union groups who have been fighting the bill say it is a "precondition sought by transnational corporations as a requirement for operating in Africa."

Also, under commitments made by the governments of Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania, a seperate report (pdf) published on Wednesday by the international NGO ActionAid USA found that small farmers are being forced off their property as 1.8 million hectares of the countries' most desirable farmland has been offered to foreign investors, amounting to little more than what they call a corporate land-grab.
And in Tanzania, a New Alliance initiative threatens (pdf) to displace more than 1,300 people as the government works to recategorize village land to make it available for a Swedish-owned EcoEnergy sugarcane plantation.
While the benefits of such "investment" are tempting at first, many on the ground are now realizing what's at stake.

Josaphat Mshighati, head of programs and policy for ActionAid Tanzania, told Common Dreams that instead of increasing food security, farmers are losing access to the land in exchange for jobs laboring at an industrial agriculture plantation, whose sole crop is being raised for export.
"It is a form of colonialism," Mshighati said. "Small holder farmers are turned into labourers serving in big, private agriculture investments and some of them totally lose their access to productive land. Hence, they become much more dependent."
Further, he added that African governments including Tanzania are "being pushed to change their seed policies to allow for 'more modern seeds' that will definitely be supplied by big private companies. Thus, the indigenous seeds will perish in few years and all farmers will have to rely on seeds from the western companies."
Finally, the government policy changes that are forcing people off their land, he said, will ultimately "create disharmony between citizens and the government." All of these impacts, Mshighati concluded, "can be related to the previous history between Africa and the west—exploitation of a higher kind."
Doug Hertzler, senior policy analyst with ActionAid USA, also told Common Dreams: "Unfortunately G7 governments policies seem to be more about increasing corporate profits through access to African land and labor, and opening markets to sell patented seeds and pesticides rather than realizing the right to food."

On the other side of the New Alliance arrangement, private sector companies—which include some of the world’s biggest food and biotechnology corporations—have described through Letters of Intent how they plan to pursue allegedly "responsible investments in African agriculture and food security through models that maximize benefits to smallholder farmers."
These commitments have been made by food and agriculture giants including Syngenta, Monsanto, Nestle, Bayer CropScience, and Coca-Cola, among many others.

A model of corporate governance

After initially participating in the New Alliance Leadership Council, last year Oxfam International announced it was pulling out.
"The voices of farmer’s organizations, women’s producer groups and civil society organizations and CSO groups have, on the whole, been ad hoc and inadequately integrated into this policy planning," explained Tim Gore, head of policy, advocacy and research for Oxfam International's GROW campaign. This has lead to "serious concerns that the priorities of the Alliance reflect the interests of its more powerful members."
The New Alliance-backed changes in government policy have created an environment that threatens to "'tip the balance' of investment towards larger players, rather than small-scale producers and family farmers, and could harm the environment through the industrial, high-input model of agriculture," Gore said.
Finally, he warned, "this creates an acute risk that the members of the Alliance have created a form of global governance which is exclusive and potentially self-serving."

As critics note, the New Alliance model adheres to the same neoliberal ideology as 'trickle-down' economics, which has been increasingly discredited. 
Dan Iles, food sovereignty campaigner with Global Justice Now, described the New Alliance as "a branding exercise," under which western governments have funneled aid money previously committed to alleviating poverty in Africa and essentially channeled it into the pockets of big, international agriculture corporations.

The U.S. alone has committed at least $2 billion dollars for the effort.
Similarly, an August 2014 report (pdf) by the Global Policy Forum describes the New Alliance as "a political process designed to reserve corporate actors a seat at the table," where business is giving a role "almost equal to governments." The initiative, the report continues, "serves as an excellent example of a form of governance that is increasingly gaining importance on a global scale."
As writer and activist Martin Kirk explained to Common Dreams, while the New Alliance puts on a "very humanitarian face" it is part of a trend that is "actually shifting how we govern the world." The model, Kirk says, is also being followed by the World Bank, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum.
"In the public imagination, nation states are the main actors, when actually the corporate interests—which are not connected to the public world and whose primary purpose is to maximize profit—are now given equal weight," continued Kirk, who is a member of The Rules, a global network dedicated to tackling root causes of inequality and poverty.
The danger, Kirk continues, is that the New Alliance promotes this corporate concept as the only solution to overcoming hunger, when it fact it is "far from the only one."

A local answer

While most of the small scale farmers, villagers and other individuals directly impacted by the New Alliance initiative are unaware of upper-level mechanisms behind their forced relocation or intrusive growing restrictions, there are tremors of resistance.
Nearly 100 farmers organizations, social movements, and civil society groups from around the world endorsed the statement on Wednesday. Meanwhile, growing protests against pending policy changes, such as the "Monsanto law" in Ghana, are further spreading the word.

If outside actors want to help strengthen food security in Africa, advocates say that the solution must lift up the local community.
Small-scale farmers are currently producing 70 percent of the food in Africa, according to the coalition statement. "Addressing food and nutrition insecurity on the continent requires the full participation of those who are already producing, and promoting an agricultural system based on human rights and food sovereignty through local control over natural resources, seeds, land, water, forests, knowledge and technology."
Josaphat Mshighati said that the biggest hurdle for small farmers is a lack of rain, so directing funds to nation-based agricultural development programs, such as small and medium irrigation projects, would provide a huge boost for the local economy.
And Dan Iles added: "What small scale farmers need is investment in infrastructure that links them more locally and regionally...Where control and ownership over the means of farming, buying and selling food and the culture of food is held by farmers (and people)—not outside elites."  

from here