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The complexities of Zimbabwe

Chido Makunike

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/47799

Chido Makunike looks at the various competing interests in Zimbabwe, the MDC, ZANU PF, Mugabe and the West in relation to what the Zimbabwean are hoping to get out of democracy.

A month after Zimbabwe’s March 29 elections, the winner of the presidential poll remains unknown. The delay adds considerable additional complexity to the many undercurrents of the country’s problems.

By virtue of the suspicious, poorly explained delay in announcing who won the presidential poll, the authorities in Harare have ensured that the only outcome that will be widely believed by a sceptical world would be one in which main opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai emerged the winner. Any other result would be widely dismissed as “fixed” by the authorities to produce a favourable outcome for President Robert Mugabe in the time since the election.

Even a close result requiring a run-off election between Mugabe and Tsvangirai would be seen by many as engineered to give the ruling party a second chance to mobilise the state machinery to do whatever it took to ensure the “right” result for him. The results delay and whatever other gambits the authorities are likely to serve up arguably can no longer serve to impart even the veneer of electoral legitimacy on Mugabe.

It would be one of many recent defeats in which Mugabe resorts to out rightly thwarting the electoral will of the people. But he does nevertheless need a façade of democracy. He has often responded to his Western criticism by saying they have no authority to chide him on the basis of his democratic credentials. “We brought democracy at independence in spite of Western support for the racist, anti-democratic government we replaced” has been his argument. He points out that by the measure of regularly held elections, Zimbabwe is far more democratic than many other countries that are in much better books with the Western world than it is.

Mugabe makes this point to bolster his argument that Western opposition to him is not because of any concern for the welfare of Zimbabweans, but is due to his stinging criticism of the double standards of the West, as well as his refusal to be compliant with Western expectations of how an African leader should conduct himself. It is precisely Mugabe’s fearlessly expressed, hard-to-fault arguments about the West’s relations with the rest of the world that makes him such a hero to many in Africa and beyond, even as Zimbabweans have suffered steep economic decline and increasing repression at home.

If the veneer of democratic legitimacy such as that imparted by regularly scheduled elections, no matter how flawed, has always been so important to Mugabe, why would he seem to risk throwing it all away now? Whatever the presidential results will show when released, the opposition MDC’s unprecedented win of a majority in the concurrently held parliamentary election is a convincing indication of the level of disaffection with the rule of Mugabe’s ZANU-PF. His actions since March 29 do not at all suggest a man who respects the right of the voters to choose their leaders.

For the three election cycles up to the mid 1990s, Mugabe’s desire for the perception of a strict adherence to at least the forms of electoral democracy, if not the substance, was relatively easy to achieve. Independence-era euphoria and “gratitude” may have been lifting with every election, but until about then, Mugabe could count on genuine popularity to make his party’s re-elections a foregone conclusion. Mugabe has now shown that his dedication to those electoral forms is not quite so strong after all, now that the evidence suggests a likely majority of the electorate want him gone.

Merely conducting an election cannot bestow democratic legitimacy when it is clear that the only results that will be respected are those in which the incumbent wins. By so awkwardly making this obvious, Mugabe’s government has trapped itself into the equally unhealthy situation in which much of the Zimbabwean electorate and the world would now only believe a result which showed Mugabe losing. This has made “the Zimbabwe crisis” take on a dimension far beyond what can be resolved by the much anticipated release of the results of the presidential poll.

The desire to hold on to power and privilege, and fear of prosecution for past crimes are the usually discussed reasons for Mugabe and ZANU-PF conducting themselves with so little dignity in the face of evidence of an electorate earthquake of rejection against them. But genuine revulsion at what Tsvangirai and the MDC are perceived to represent is no doubt also part of the intransigence of Mugabe & Company in conceding defeat.

There is a self-serving element to Mugabe’s painting of the MDC as stooges of the West who are bent on reversing the efforts to have Zimbabwe’s political independence also have economic teeth for its citizens. Yet Tsvangirai and the MDC have ineptly only fuelled these suspicions in their words and deeds over the years. Mugabe and ZANU-PF in turn have largely failed to convince a majority of Zimbabweans that the claimed slavishness of the MDC to their Western backers is the reason their country is in such poor shape. Mugabe & Co. may genuinely worry that Tsvangirai and the MDC wish to “sell out” the country to the West and “reverse the gains of the revolution” by restoring the economic dominance of whites in commercial agriculture and other sectors of the economy.

But if so, electoral democracy required that Mugabe sell that message to the electorate more convincingly than the MDC’s pitch much needed change and renewal. The MDC has arguably won that battle for the hearts and minds of Zimbabweans, helped considerably by the country’s desperate economic state under Mugabe.

Instead of accepting his failure to sell his message of “Things are bad because we are besieged by powerful external foes, stick with me while I work out a plan to thwart them and improve things,” Mugabe has instead arrogantly chosen to accuse the electorate of not fully understanding what is at stake. His stance is essentially that the electorate are mistaken to buy the Tsvangirai’s message and reject his. And if he can get away with it, he seems inclined to “correct” the misguided electorate by hanging on in power regardless of the popular will!

Yet the price one must pay for accepting a system of electoral democracy is to respect the will of the people even if one believes that will to be wrong. You then revert to opposition, sharpening your message for the next election. The current impasse is partly because of the refusal of Mugabe & Co. to respect this rule of the game because for the first time its result has been unfavourable to them.

The MDC had begun to make inroads into reversing the suspicion with which it was regarded in many African capitals by a belated diplomatic outreach to them. Those efforts have in recent weeks become compromised again by the over-the- top eagerness of the Western political establishment and media to take sides in the Zimbabwean election. In the days leading up to the election, and since then, the Western political and media establishment abandoned all pretence of merely being onlookers who were just interested in seeing that Zimbabweans were able to freely exercise their vote. Zimbabwe’s economic, political and humanitarian problems are severe enough, but the Western media, particularly that of ex-colonial master Britain, went into an absolute frenzy to depict the country as a virtual war zone.

Whether or not it was a coordinated campaign to give the Mugabe a decisive final push out of power, in their shrillness the Western political and media establishment only served to give credence to Mugabe’s long-held claim of a Western conspiracy to depose him for not being pliable in the mould of most African leaders. Britain had kept a relative distance in the months leading up to the election, correctly fearing that any unusual interest would be used by Mugabe as proof of its dishonourable neo-colonialist intentions. But at the time of the election and immediately after, Britain seemed to smell Mugabe’s blood and lost all self-restraint in the excitement of the prospect of seeing its old nemesis gone. It was almost as if Britain were so certain of Mugabe being deposed that it no long felt the need to maintain the façade of being a neutral observer.

Western shrillness has only grown since the election, with the Zimbabwean authorities also feeding it by the astonishing games over the election results, as well as the jailing of some Western journalists for slipping into the country to report on the election without getting accreditation - under the country’s tight media laws. But the effect of all this has been to justify the paranoia of the Zimbabwean authorities about a claimed coordinated Western “regime change” agenda.

Such an agenda could not justify the flouting of the popular electoral will, but it is not much of a stretch to guess that the unseemly eagerness of the West to interfere in and influence the election against him would only have made Mugabe and his whole political machinery feel inclined to dig in even in defiance of the voters. It is therefore quite plausible to speculate that the Western eagerness to “help” the MDC ensure Mugabe’s exit may in the short term have done the exact opposite.

In the immediate term the desire of the West to see the back of a troublesome-to-them-Mugabe probably overlaps with the wishes of many Zimbabweans who put the blame for the political repression and economic hardships in their country squarely at Mugabe’s door. But it is not at all certain that those similar desires perfectly coincide. Neither Britain nor the US have an honourable history in regards to Zimbabwe, so their posing as great champions of democracy and defenders of its peoples’ best interests have a hollow ring.

Mugabe has indeed degenerated into a despot who has refused to accept any responsibility for his country’s mess. But he is no worse a ruler than many others who dare not point out the West’s double standards and who are quite happy to have their countries be client states in return for being absolved of scrutiny over their governance records. Therefore the West and the Zimbabwean citizenry want a change from Mugabe for likely very different reasons.

If Mugabe somehow survives the electoral and diplomatic onslaughts against him and hangs on for several more years, the ill-advised Western intervention on behalf of the MDC would provide him considerable ammunition against the opposition party. This may make little difference to the voters’ feelings towards him if economic decline and hardship continue, as is likely to be the case in a situation where the Western world would be even more resolute in closing doors to Mugabe’s government. Yet if Mugabe were able to stem the slide, say by paying serious attention to improved agricultural productivity, he might well be able to say “you saw how the Westerners behaved during the 2008 election; their conspiracy against me was not a figment of my imagination.”

With the economy continuing on its present slide, few outside his immediate circle and the die-hards in his party would listen to this argument. But with even modest stabilization, his idea of radical land redistribution remains popular enough amongst even his opponents that the argument could gain political currency to his benefit and at the expense of the MDC.

Even if Tsvangirai and the MDC assume office, their doing so with such open support for it as the West has shown will be a double edged sword. If the expected massive Western financial support flows in a way that quickly results in a stabilization of the economy that is widely felt at the grassroots, the whiff of the suspicion of the MDC having agreed to be “stooges” in return for Western support would be neutralised, at least in the short term. The need for a return to economic stability is probably the one issue that unites people across the country’s criss-crossing political divides.

But in the absence of either quick or widely-felt economic recovery, the tag of “Western stooge” around the necks of Tsvangirai and the MDC could remain a potent political weapon in the hands of a ZANU-PF that no longer dominates parliament, but nevertheless has only a handful fewer seats than the MDC. This assumes that ZANU-PF adjusts to being a minority party without disintegrating, which in turn also depends on how successfully they can choose a leader to fill Mugabe’s very large shoes. Without dramatic economic recovery, ZANU-PF in opposition could remain a formidable thorn in an MDC government’s flesh, with its Western backing becoming more of an albatross to it than a blessing.

Having won a majority, the MDC has not spent much time contesting the legitimacy of the parliamentary results. If they are considered to be a true reflection of the electoral will, it is astonishing that the ruling ZANU-PF did as well as it did, winning almost half of the popular vote and the number of parliamentary seats. With the rate of inflation said to be close to 200,000% and virtually every other economic index being strongly negative, one would have expected the ruling party to have been electorally wiped out.

Herein lie some of the nuances of the Zimbabwean crisis that much of the media we are exposed to is either oblivious of or simply not interested in relating. Mugabe has increasingly become repressive, he has been a brilliant ideologue but a very poor manager and he has simply stayed in power longer than was advisable for his own legacy. But his broad message of an unapologetic, assertively expressed desire for African empowerment retains its appeal and has led to a sea change in how black Zimbabweans think about what their independence should mean.

To say many and probably most Zimbabweans want Mugabe to step aside is not the same as saying his ideas have been largely rejected by them. For example, most would want his flawed land reform effort to be fixed to work, not for it to be reversed. The MDC was slow to understand this and other nuances of Mugabe’s complex legacy, losing it precious time and early support in Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

Now the opposition party is careful to say it would not return land to its previous white occupiers, but would make sure it was productively used by the new black landholders. It remains to be seen if the MDC’s Western backers understand these nuances and would let it negotiate the minefield of balancing the need for reviving the economy with the political imperative of a strong desire for African empowerment that will remain one of Mugabe’s strongest legacies despite his failure to translate that desire into concrete, practical reality.

There has been talk of a Kenya-like ‘government of national unity.’ Both sides naturally posture against it. It may still be emerge as the immediate way out of the present crisis. But as in Kenya, such a compromise solution robs whoever the winner is of the spoils of electoral victory. When the game is played, all the participants are fully aware that they could lose by a mere handful of votes.

Whether in Kenya or Zimbabwe, another potential flaw of a GNU is to rob the electorate of two or more competing visions of how their country should be ruled. It may avoid conflict in the short term, but it also effectively allows political parties to put aside their competition for power because the GNU allows all of them a chance at the feeding trough. There is also the potential of them collectively ganging up against the citizens they usually claim are their whole reason for being.

Resolving the current impasse is undoubtedly the most urgent order of business in Zimbabwe. But the country’s tortured and violent history, the cynical external interests seeking to exert their influence for their own ends, the huge ideological gulf between the two main political parties and the closeness of the results announced so far suggest that whichever way the immediate crisis is resolved, there are long term difficulties ahead in getting Zimbabwe back on the track of political stability, psychic healing and economic growth.


*Chido Makunike is a Zimbabwean social and political commentator.

**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The time for Food Sovereignty has come!

Henry Saragih

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/47801

In this open letter to the Secretary General of the Food and Agriculture organization (FAO), Henry Saragih argues that the food price crisis exposes the instability of liberalized agricultural markets and calls for concrete measures that will strengthen peasant and farmer-based food production.

OPEN LETTER To : Mr Jacques Diouf Secretary General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Mr. Yasuo Fukuda, Prime Minister of Japan, President of the G8, Mr. John W. Ashe, Permanent UN representative, Antigua and Barbuda's Permanent and Chairman of the Group of 77

Dear Mr. Diouf, Mr. Fukuda, and Mr. Ashe,

Our movement, La Via Campesina, consists of millions of small farmers and landless workers in more than 60 countries around the world. Although we are the ones producing food for our families and communities, many of us are hungry or living in poverty. Over the last months, the situation has worsened due to the sudden rise in food prices. We are also severely hit by the crisis because many of us do not have enough land to feed our families, and because most producers do not benefit from those high prices. Large traders, speculators, supermarkets and industrial farms are cashing in on and benefitting from this crisis. This current food crisis is the result of many years of deregulation of agricultural markets, the privatization of state regulatory bodies and the dumping of agricultural products on the markets of developing countries. According to the FAO, liberalized markets have attracted huge cash flows that seek to speculate on agricultural products on the “futures” markets and other financial instruments.

The corporate expansion of agrofuels and the initially enthusiastic support for agrofuels in countries such as the US, EU and Brazil have added to the expectation that land for food will become more and more scarce. On top of this in many southern countries hundreds of thousands of hectares are converted from agricultural uses in an uncontrolled way for so-called economic development zones, urbanization and infrastructure. The ongoing land grabbing by Transnational Companies (TNCs) and other speculators will expel millions more peasants who will end up in the mega cities where they will be added to the ranks of the hungry and poor in the slums. Besides this, we may expect especially in Africa and South Asia more severe droughts and floods caused by global climate change. These are severe threats for the rural as well as for the urban areas.

These are highly worrying developments that need active and urgent action! We need a fundamental change in the approach to food production and agricultural markets!

Time to rebuild national food economies!

Rebuilding national food economies will require immediate and long-term political commitments from governments. An absolute priority has to be given to domestic food production in order to decrease dependency on the international market. Peasants and small farmers should be encouraged through better prices for their farm products and stable markets to produce food for themselves and their communities. Landless families from rural and urban areas have to get access to land, seeds and water to produce their own food. This means increased investment in peasant and farmer-based food production for domestic markets.

Governments have to provide financial support for the poorest consumers to allow them to eat. Speculation and extremely high prices forced upon consumers by traders and retailers have to be controlled. Peasants and small farmers need better access to their domestic markets so that they can sell food at fair prices for themselves and for consumers.

Countries need to set up intervention mechanisms aimed at stabilizing market prices. In order to achieve this, import controls with taxes and quotas are needed to avoid low-priced imports which undermine domestic production. National buffer stocks managed by the state have to be built up to stabilize domestic markets: in times of surplus, cereals can be taken from the market to build up the reserve stocks and in case of shortages, cereals can be released.

Regulating international markets and supporting countries to strengthen their food production

At the international level, stabilization measures also have to be undertaken. International buffer stocks have to be built up and an intervention mechanism put in place to stabilize prices on international markets at a reasonable level. Exporting countries have to accept international rules to control the quantities they can bring to the market, in order to stop dumping. The right to implement import controls, set up programs to support the poorest consumers, implement agrarian reform and invest in domestic, farmer peasant-based food production has to be fully respected and supported at the international level.

We ask the FAO, based on its mandate, to take the initiative and create the political environment for a fundamental change in food policies. In the International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ICARRD) a broad majority of governments recognized and agreed on the importance of rural development and agrarian reform to combat poverty and hunger in the rural areas. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), an assessment of the agricultural sector that involved Civil Society organizations, the private sector, and governments as well as the FAO and the World Bank came to the conclusion that corporate-led agriculture and the increasing dependence of peasants and small farmers is at the heart of the problem. They also concluded that peasant, and farmer-based sustainable agriculture has to be supported and strengthened. The International Fund on Agricultural Development (IFAD) also recognizes the key role of peasants and small farmers in the production of food.

We request that G8 governments allow these initiatives to be taken. They should stop the promotion of agrofuels as these are no solution for the climate crisis and add to the destruction of forests. Especially in the southern countries, agrofuels occupy millions of hectares that should remain available for food production.

We also demand that the G8 analyze critically their own agricultural policies, take initiatives to stop the ongoing volatility of the international markets and shift their financial support away from industrial agriculture towards sustainable family farmer-based food production.

We also demand that the G8 stop and cancel any free trade agreements that will only contribute to the destruction of food production in developing countries and block any possibility of autonomous industrial development.

The influence of transnational corporations and financial speculative interests has to be controlled as much as possible and kept away from the the international food market. Food is too important to be left to business alone.

A possible WTO agreement in the Doha Round will mean another blow for peasant-based food production. We demand that the governments of the G77 assess again the WTO negotiations on agriculture in the Doha round and reject any agreement that has negative implications for domestic food production and does not allow the taking of all necessary measures to strengthen food production and increase national self sufficiency.

Peasants and small farmers are the main food producers

La Via Campesina is convinced that peasants and small farmers can feed the world. They have to be the key part of the solution. With sufficient political will and the implementation of adequate policies, more peasants and small farmers, men and women, will easily produce sufficient food to feed the growing population. The current situation shows that changes are needed!

The time for Food Sovereignty has come!


*Henry Saragih is the International Coordinator for La Via Campesina.

**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

New Green Revolution and world food prices

Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Giménez

2008-04-15

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/47358

Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Giménez look at the food protests as "angry rebellions of hungry people fed up with the inequitable global food system.' They argue that neoliberalism and global capitalism have eroded policies that would have protected the already poor from sliding into starvation.

It was just a matter of time… and not long at that. The world food crisis and the explosion of “food riots” across the globe has been turned into an opportunity. By whom? By the same institutions that created the conditions for the crisis in the first place: proponents of the new Green Revolution.

In their April 10 editorial entitled The World Food Crisis, the New York Times warns that increases of 25-50% in the price of food and basic grains have sparked unrest “from Haiti to Egypt.” The Times rightly lays part of the blame on the doorstep of northern countries’ thirst for ethanol, pointing out that the substitution of fuel crops for food crops, “[Accounts] for at least half of the rise in world corn demand in each of the past three years.” A rise in demand means a rise in price. This puts food out of reach of poor consumers.

But then confusing economic demand with actual availability, the Times jumps to a dubious solution. Quoting World Bank president Robert Zoellick, the paper calls for “[A] ‘green revolution’ to increase farm productivity and raise crop yields in Africa.” This was of course, a likely response from the World Bank, the institution that, along with the International Monetary Fund, forcibly applied the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) responsible for destroying the capacity of African nations to develop or protect their own domestic agricultural systems from the dumping of subsidized grain from the U.S. and Europe. Over the same 25 years in which SAPs were being implemented, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) invested over 40% if its $350 million/year budget in Africa’s “Green Revolution.” The result? A big zero. Actually, it was worse, because as African marketing boards, agricultural ministries, national research programs and basic infrastructure fell under the scythe of the mighty SAPs, Africa’s agricultural systems steadily eroded. Now their entire food systems are hopelessly vulnerable to economic and environmental shock—hence the severity of the current food price inflation crisis.

How do CGIAR and other Green Revolution champions explain this debacle? The Green Revolution, they claim, ‘bypassed” Africa. If that is the case, then where on earth did CGIAR spend all that money? If not, and the Green Revolution was simply a failure, then how will more of the same solve the present food crisis?

Of course, the Green Revolution is not just one institution, and it is not static. The new genetically-engineered Green Revolution is a conglomeration of public and private research institutions, supported by both tax dollars and conditional investments from a handful of powerful seed/chemical and fertilizer monopolies. The Green Revolution is an industrial modernization paradigm, as well as a campaign for penetrating agricultural markets in the Global South. But above all, the Green Revolution is a political strategy designed to gain and keep control over the Global South’s food systems firmly in the hands of northern corporations and institutions. It is precisely this political dimension of the current food crisis that is so tacitly avoided by the New York Times, the World Bank, and other Green Revolution promoters.

The politics of food, however, are inescapable. Food First associate Raj Patel, author of the recently-released book Stuffed and Starved(http://stuffedandstarved.org/drupal/frontpage), points out that “food riots” have to be understood historically, in the context not of shortages, but of poverty, not of lack of technologies, but of lack of democracy.

“Historically,” writes Patel, “there are two things to look out for. The first is a sudden and severe entitlement gap; a gap between what people believe they’re entitled to and what they can in fact achieve. Agricultural prices have risen because of a perfect storm of biofuels, rising meat consumption, oil price increases, low grain reserves, and bad harvests. That inflation has meant that people believe they ought to be able to feed their families at one level, but end up being able to feed them significantly less. The existence and spread of this entitlement expectation gap is one of the things that matters in the precipitation of food riots.

But there’s a second element. Riots tend to occur in places where there isn’t any other means of making the government listen. It’s a sign, in other words, that democratic proscesses do not exist or have been exhausted. Haiti has long been beset by political instability, and now led by U.S. backed, president, René Préval. He recently commanded people to return to their homes, perhaps not realizing that through their protests, the people were commanding him to make their food cheaper…

But the real question here is why governments are unable to respond to the needs of their citizens. There are two answers. First, the policies that would mitigate the price rises (grain reserves, tariffs, social expenditure for poor people) have all been eroded by decades of neoliberal and free market global trade and development policy.

In order to implement this policy, governments have had to close their ears to the demands of their people. The World Bank won’t give loans without ‘structural adjustments’ that cut deeply into social programs. There has been a strong financial incentive, in other words, for governments to behave less democratically.”

The current protests—over 50 people have been killed in the last two months—are less chaotic riots of starving people than they are angry rebellions of hungry people fed up with the inequitable global food system. The solution to the present food crises is not bringing in the institutions of “disaster capitalism” that created the disaster in the first place. The solution is to democratize the world’s food systems, taking the control away from the handful of agri-food oligopolies and putting it back in the hands of the farmers and consumers who are supposed to benefit from agriculture.

*Raj Patel is the author of "Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System" and Eric Holt-Gimenez is the Executive Director of Food First (www.foodfirst.org).

**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Mbeki’s AIDS denial – Grace or folly? Part III

William Gumede

2008-04-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/47584

Pambazuka News continues to serialize William Gumede's chapter on Mbeki and the controversies surrounding his AIDS policies. This is from his book "Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC." Be sure to look for parts four and five in upcoming issues.

What made Mbeki turn to the AIDS dissidents? In July 1999,Anthony Brink, an advocate and the author of the online book Debating AZT, had given him and senior health department officials copies of his book, which argued that the so-called life-giving drug was highly toxic.[33] His interest aroused, Mbeki began doing further research on his own, via the Internet.

While surfing the Net, he stumbled on virusmyth.net, a website favoured by the international dissident community. On 28 October 1999, Mbeki told the National Council of Provinces that he had examined ‘a large volume of scientific literature’, which showed that AZT was dangerous.[34]

The orthodox scientific community has never claimed that AZT is not toxic, but makes the point that all drugs have side effects, and that those known to be caused by AZT were far outweighed by its benefits to AIDS patients.

But Mbeki had been seduced, and before long his meanders along the inform- ation highway led him to question whether HIV caused AIDS and whether the virus was sexually transmitted.The dissidents argued that HIV was a benign ‘passenger virus’, and that AIDS was a lifestyle disease caused by poverty, malnutrition and narcotic abuse by homosexuals. They claimed that, far from helping the infected, ARVs caused even greater damage to their compromised immune systems.[35]

The World Health Organisation and the MCC had classified AZT safe, but Mbeki, newly installed as South Africa’s president, decided that his health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, would be entrusted with determining the ‘truth’ about the disease and its treatment once and for all. On 2 December 1999 she met with AIDS dissident Charles Geshekter, and came away from their discussions convinced that the president was right to question views that had already gained wide international acceptance.

In his nocturnal online research, Mbeki also found the writings of American biochemist David Rasnick, a leading rebel against the conventional premise that AIDS stems from HIV. Mbeki contacted him by fax and spoke to him at length by phone, and soon the two were in regular e-mail contact. Rasnick enthusiastically agreed to support Mbeki’s quest for the ‘truth’. The president also made contact with another prominent AIDS dissident, Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California in Berkeley.

There was a major stir when a South African newspaper published Rasnick’s assertions that ‘condoms don’t prevent AIDS because AIDS isn’t a sexually transmitted disease. In fact it isn’t contagious at all. AIDS in Africa is just a new name for the diseases of poverty caused by malnutrition, poor sanitation, bad water, parasites and so on. Using condoms to prevent the diseases of poverty is the leading obscenity of our time.’[36]

Mbeki was sincere in challenging mainstream science and in his support of AIDS dissidents. He stoically believed that he was a modern-day Copernicus who would ultimately be vindicated, even if posthumously. Needless to say, the dissidents, long banished to the scientific wilderness, latched on to the new legitimacy that the president provided, and it would prove all but impossible for Mbeki to dissociate himself from them later.

His next mission was to persuade unsuspecting world leaders of the dangers of treating AIDS with conventional methods. In a brazen and bizarre letter to Bill Clinton and UN secretary general Kofi Annan dated 3 April 2000, South Africa’s head of state defended an alternative approach to dealing with AIDS. In the five-page document, Mbeki passionately defended Duesberg and the other dissidents, and suggested that factors other than HIV could be the cause of AIDS in Africa. He called for a uniquely ‘African solution’[37] to the problem, as AIDS seemed to affect Africans differently to those who live in the developed world. He also defended his right to consult dissident scientists, and accused unnamed foreign critics of waging a ‘campaign of intellectual intimidation and terrorism’ akin to ‘the racist apartheid tyranny we opposed’. In an earlier period in human history, Mbeki wrote, Duesberg and his followers ‘would be the heretics that would be burnt at the stake. The day may not be far off when we will, once again, see books burnt and their authors immolated by fire by those who believe that they have a duty to conduct a holy crusade against the infidels.’[38]

The letter, copies of which were delivered by hand to Clinton and Annan, concluded: ‘It would constitute a criminal betrayal of our responsibility to our own people to mimic foreign approaches to treating HIV/AIDS.’[39]

The Clinton administration initially thought the letter was a hoax. Upon realising it was genuine, the contents were leaked to the Washington media. Mbeki was suitably embarrassed, and furious, convinced more than ever that Western leaders were conspiring against their African counterparts.

Bolstered by the counsel of the AIDS dissidents, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang reiterated that the government would not provide ARVs through the public health system, adding the inability of existing infrastructure to implement the drug protocols to their earlier claims of toxicity and cost. Tshabalala-Msimang now argued that anti-AIDS drugs alone would have scant effect, and that the state simply did not have the money to simultaneously offer recipients clean water, sanitation, nutritional food and adequate housing.

Mbeki would charge his AIDS critics, especially those who were ANC members or belonged to the TAC, of being willing ‘to sacrifice all intellectual integrity to act as salespersons of the product of one pharmaceutical company.’[40] Later, he would use this accusation again, to attack ANC MPs critical of his policies,[41] and when he opened the international conferences on AIDS in Durban in July 2000, he lambasted activists in the same manner. He blocked every effort by civil society and private organisations to set up AIDS treatment projects involving ARVs, prompting Desmond Tutu to comment: ‘In South Africa we have to introduce a vibrant and lively education for the people. Churches and religious communities are already playing a role but are hamstrung by the constant worry about what government will say, when they ought to be on the same side.’[42]

Mbeki has consistently placed poverty at the heart of all South Africa’s health problems, and few disagree with him, in general. But he found no broad support for his insistence that AIDS should be treated as just another disease, like malaria or TB.The scariest realisation for many people was that Mbeki genuinely believed that a number of factors, including poverty, caused rather than exacerbated AIDS, and that HIV was not to blame.

Tshabalala-Msimang drew hoots of derision when she famously announced that people with AIDS should preserve their health not with drugs, but with a diet of garlic, lemon, olive oil and the African potato.[43] In March 2003,her credibility took another dive when she appointed Roberto Giraldo,a leading AIDS dissident and one of the most vocal naysayers regarding the link between HIV and AIDS, as a consultant on nutrition.

Amid mounting evidence of AZT’s effectivity and growing criticism of the government’s opposition to ARV distribution, he Mbeki-ites began searching for compliant scientists who would support them.

In October 1999, Tshabalala-Msimang had rejected a report favouring the use of AZT by South Africa’s MCC on the grounds that it had not been subject to a satisfactory review process. A month later, she commissioned the Cochrane Centre, an international health-care NGO that reviews clinical trials on new drugs and has branches all over the world, to research the risks of ARVs, especially AZT. Their preliminary study found strong evidence that both an intensive or shorter course of AZT was effective in decreasing the risk of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, even in breastfed babies. The most serious adverse effect the researchers identified was anaemia, but this condition tended to disappear once the full course of drugs had been concluded. Nevirapine, less expensive than AZT, was found to be both safe and effective.

These findings were given to the health minister in December. She filed the report and allowed it to gather dust while she turned to the National AIDS Council for an outcome more in line with dissident opinion, as well as her own. Tshabalala-Msimang appointed new members, renamed the former AIDS Advisory Council the Presidential AIDS Advisory Council, and extended the council’s influence to sectors not previously involved in AIDS programmes.

Activists saw through the ploy and criticised the council as just another attempt by Mbeki and his health minister to muzzle and marginalise those with a different viewpoint. In due course, the council would issue a report that did nothing but reiterate both the orthodox and dissident views on AIDS, without attaching particular weight to one or the other.

In a new affront to activists, government revealed that in the 1999/2000 financial year,40 per cent ofthe AIDS budget had gone unspent. Worse, it announced that funding of AIDS service organisations was to be cut by 43 per cent the follow- ing year. In March 2000, dismayed by government’s persistent obfuscation and continuous flirting with AIDS dissidents, Judge Edwin Cameron, Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane (head of the Anglican Church in Southern Africa),Bishop Mvume Dandala (head of the Methodist Church in South Africa), Professor Jerry Coovadia,(chairman of the 2000 International AIDS Conference) and Merci Makhalamele (a prominent AIDS activist) wrote a personal letter to Mbeki, expressing anxiety over the government’s head-in-the-sand policies. They also asked him to reconsider the decision not to provide life-saving drugs to pregnant, HIV-positive women.[44] The Sunday Independent was given a copy of the letter. Mbeki responded by fax, again questioning available evidence that AZT was safe and effective. He warned the signatories that a similar consensus had existed over the use of thalidomide, with deadly consequences. He urged them not to fall into the same trap.

Throughout all the polemic, Mbeki was telling senior ANC leaders that the magnitude of the AIDS crisis in South Africa had been exaggerated to serve the interests of the drug giants and NGOs. Unfortunately, South African AIDS statistics have been the subject of dispute for several years, but it remains the only country in Africa that has even remotely reliable figures, even though, as author Rian Malan45 points out, they are computer projections based on surveys on antenatal clinics.

The situation has not been helped by international studies of dubious credi- bility. As recently as 2003, the World Bank warned in a report that South Africa faced imminent economic collapse as a result of HIV/AIDS, and, even though respected local experts such as Standard Bank chief economist Iraj Abedian and the South African Business Coalition dismissed the report as inaccurate and unreliable, Mbeki grasped at hyperbole to defend his claims that the figures were inflated.

But the first extensive and broadly credible surveys on the incidence of HIV/ AIDS, conducted independently by the South African Medical Research Council and Statistics SA in 2000 and 2001, painted a bleak picture. They estimated that 5.3million South Africans would be infected with the virus by the end of 2002, and that it would be killing 600 people a day.[46]A government report leaked in late March 2004 said 100 000 public servants were HIV-positive, presenting a very real threat to normal government administration.

In August 2001, the government was back in court as the TAC and various NGOs claimed it was acting unconstitutionally by refusing to make ARVs available at state hospitals. In its March 2002 judgment, the Constitutional Court agreed, ordering that pregnant women should start receiving the drugs immediately. Still the government prevaricated, claiming that state hospitals did not have the infrastructure necessary to administer ARVs. It was not until seven months later that Nevirapine became available at some urban hospitals as part of a pilot scheme, and not until the eve of the 2004 election that distribution was extended.

Costs have unquestionably played a role in the government’s response to the AIDS crisis. GEAR, the economic policy adopted in June 1996,calls for economic austerity and financial prudence, and structural adjustment programmes have seen jobs frozen and public service cuts. In 2000,finance minister Trevor Manuel and Manto Tshabalala-Msimang sketched a gloomy picture for Mbeki of the costs involved in the proposed ARV roll-out, and the government concluded that it was not financially feasible to make the drugs available to all HIV-positive patients at state cost.

Thenjiwe Mtintso, assistant secretary general of the ANC at the time, pointed out: ‘Making antiretroviral drugs available is only one side of the story; the state will have to take responsibility for all the costs ofAIDS-infected individuals. The state doesn’t have that kind of capacity or resources.’[47][ Manuel was more blunt: ‘The rhetoric about the effectiveness of ARVs is a lot of voodoo and buying them would be a waste of limited resources.’[48]

Underlying the decision was an unspoken belief among Mbeki’s inner circle that spending money on ARVs would be futile, since the real problem lay with the reasons for South Africa’s masses being particularly vulnerable to AIDS. At its most cynical, the view suggests that the exchequer was to be spared the cost of subsidising treatment for the poor and unemployed, who were a drain on resources rather than contributors to the state coffers. It suggests that in the long term, resources would be better utilised by creating jobs, educating people, and fighting poverty and malnutrition.

Manuel said as much at a closed hearing of the committee that investigated the feasibility of a basic income grant: ‘It does not make financial sense to spend money on people dying anyway, who are not even productive in the first place.’[49] He apologised when he realised that the commissioners were shocked by his comments, but, far from being an isolated aberration, such sentiments were the driving spirit behind the economic mandarins’ response to the pandemic. The tendency to focus on the healthy has been the overriding objective of govern- ment’s financial managers.

In June 2003, Mbeki’s media spokesman, Parks Mankahlana, asked in an interview with Science magazine: ‘Who is going to look after the orphans of AIDS mothers, the state?’[50] The clear implication was that prevention of mother- to-child transmission of HIV would be counterproductive, since the children saved would end up as welfare cases in any event.

Of course, no one in government could say this publicly – it would simply be too cold-hearted. But Tshabalala-Msimang apparently had no qualms about allegedly telling London’s Guardianin 2002 that South Africa could not afford AIDS drugs because it needed submarines to deter US aggression, though she later denied saying anything of the kind. However, many authoritative studies show that public provision of ARVs with an uptake of around 50 per cent reduces the impact of HIV and AIDS on economic growth and greatly justifies the cost involved. One study calculated that a roll-out of ARVs could reduce the number of HIV/AIDS deaths by around 100000 a year between 2008 and 2010.[51]

Mbeki’s attitude to the AIDS problem was almost certainly strongly influenced by his great personal distaste for the stereotypical Western portrayal of black sexuality, which he condemns as racist and neo-colonial. In his mind, this viewpoint extended to scientific postulations that AIDS originated in the African jungle and was primarily spread through sexual transmission. Many share these views. In a lecture at Fort Hare University in 2001,Mbeki said: ‘And thus it happens that others who consider themselves to be our leaders take to the streets carrying their placards...convinced that we are but natural born, promiscuous carriers of germs, unique in the world, they proclaim that our continent is doomed to an inevitable mortal end because of our unconquerable devotion to the sin oflust.’[52] The argument found support among many ANC leaders and intellectuals outside the party. Tshabalala-Msimang is a great believer in this precept, to which Achmat responds: ‘The president doesn’t want to believe that people in Africa have a lot ofsex.’[53]

In autumn 2002,Mbeki sent an e-mail to members of his cabinet, expanding on this thesis. A 114-page document, chiefly authored by former ANCYL head Peter Mokaba, virulently attacked pharmaceutical companies, ARVs and mainstream opinions on HIV. The sarcastic monologue lashed out at the bigotry that equates blacks with promiscuity and portrays Africans as diseased and poor, and always running to the West for aid:

Yes, we are sex crazy! Yes, we are diseased! Yes, we spread the deadly HIV through uncontrolled heterosexual sex! In this regard, yes, we are different from the US and Western Europe! Yes, we, the men, abuse women and the girl-child with gay abandon! Yes, among us rape is endemic because of our culture! Yes, we do believe that sleeping with young virgins will cure us of AIDS! Yes, as a result of all this, we are threatened with destruction by the HIV/AIDS pandemic! Yes, what we need, and cannot afford because we are poor,are condoms and antiretroviral drugs! Help![54]

Within weeks of writing the paper, Mokaba, like Parks Mankahlana, died from what is widely believed to be an AIDS-related disease, though their families persistently denied this.It was around this time that Mbeki announced that he would launch an international advisory council to investigate the high incidence of heterosexual infection in southern Africa and assess drug-based responses. Renowned medical scientist Jerry Coovadia urged him to leave science to the scientists.

Mbeki’s stubborn AIDS denial epitomised the ANC’s battle to keep its traditions of internal democracy alive as it underwent transformation from a liberation movement to a governing political party. The debate split the tripartite alliance down the middle, with COSATU and the SACP siding with the TAC, as did two ofthe great post-apartheid moralists, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. COSATU president Willie Madisha accused Mbeki of wasting his time on scientific speculation and hindering the fight against the disease. ‘The current public debate on the causal link between HIV and AIDS is confusing,’[55] Madisha worried publicly.

Privately, government officials warned that Mbeki’s intellectual approach was preventing the government from getting across the message that people should use condoms. Indeed, AIDS educationists frequently encountered resistance based on the argument that if the president did not believe there was a link between HIV and AIDS, unprotected sex posed no danger of infection.

A disturbingly high number of ordinary South Africans saw Mbeki’s views as an endorsement that, since AIDS was not sexually transferable, they had no reason to alter or modify their sexual behaviour.

The health department was as divided on the issue as the general public, with individuals having to battle their own consciences and decide whether they should administer ARVs and risk being fired, or follow orders. Many senior health officials at national and provincial level supported ARV distribution, and though he refused to talk publicly about the reasons for his departure, Tshabalala-Msimang’s director-general, Dr Ayanda Ntsaluba, quit and went to work for foreign affairs, allegedly because of his inability to reconcile his own beliefs with those of the minister and president.

Health professionals at state hospitals were also confused. Should they admin- ister life-saving ARVs or not? If they did, would they be punished? At grassroots level, health-care workers were dealing almost daily with the fatal consequences of confusion over government’s policy, which led the uninformed to believe that the disease was not transmitted sexually.

The greatest tragedy was that Mbeki failed to see that his refusal to acknowledge the effectivity of ARV treatment was undermining the entire AIDS education programme. It had been designed around the premise that HIV causes AIDS, and condom use was a mainstay of the government campaign that was being waged through awareness projects, educational television, radio, posters and in classrooms throughout the country.



*William Gumede is the author of Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC - Published by Zed Books (http://zedbooks.co.uk). His latest book, "The Democracy Gap - Africa's Wasted Years", will be published later this year.

**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

The role of the USA in Haiti hunger riots

Bill Quigley

2008-04-22

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/47579

In the same way that US cotton farm subsidies hurt African cotton farmers by depressing the world market, Bill Quigley argues that by subsidizing its rice farmers, the US has gravely hurt Haitian rice farmers.

Riots in Haiti over explosive rises in food costs have claimed the lives of six people.  There have also been food riots world-wide in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivorie, Egypt, Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.

The Economist, which calls the current crisis the silent tsunami, reports that last year wheat prices rose 77% and rice 16%, but since January rice prices have risen 141%. The reasons include rising fuel costs, weather problems, increased demand in China and India, as well as the push to create biofuels from cereal crops.

Hermite Joseph, a mother working in the markets of Port au Prince, told journalist Nick Whalen that her two kids are "like toothpicks - they're not getting enough nourishment.  Before, if you had a dollar twenty-five cents, you could buy vegetables, some rice, 10 cents of charcoal and a little cooking oil. Right now, a little can of rice alone costs 65 cents, and is not good rice at all.  Oil is 25 cents.  Charcoal is 25 cents. With a dollar twenty-five, you can't even make a plate of rice for one child."

The St. Claire's Church Food program, in the Tiplas Kazo neighborhood of Port au Prince, serves 1000 free meals a day, almost all to hungry children - five times a week in partnership with the What If Foundation.  Children from Cite Soleil have been known to walk the five miles to the church for a meal. The cost of rice, beans, vegetables, a little meat, spices, cooking oil, propane for the stoves, have gone up dramatically. Because of the rise in the cost of food, the portions are now smaller.  But hunger is on the rise and more and more children come for the free meal.  Hungry adults used to be allowed to eat the leftovers once all the children were fed, but now there are few leftovers.

The New York Times lectured Haiti on April 18 that "Haiti, its agriculture industry in shambles, needs to better feed itself." Unfortunately, the article did not talk at all about one of the main causes of the shortages - the fact that the U.S. and other international financial bodies destroyed Haitian rice farmers to create a major market for the heavily subsidized rice from U.S. farmers.  This is not the only cause of hunger in Haiti and other poor countries, but it is a major force.

Thirty years ago, Haiti raised nearly all the rice it needed. What happened?

In 1986, after the expulsion of Haitian dictator Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loaned Haiti $24.6 million in desperately needed funds (Baby Doc had raided the treasury on the way out). But, in order to get the IMF loan, Haiti was required to reduce tariff protections for their Haitian rice and other agricultural products and some industries to open up the country's markets to competition from outside countries.  The U.S. has by far the largest voice in decisions of the IMF.

Doctor Paul Farmer was in Haiti then and saw what happened. "Within less than two years, it became impossible for Haitian farmers to compete with what they called 'Miami rice.'  The whole local rice market in Haiti fell apart as cheap, U.S. subsidized rice, some of it in the form of 'food aid,' flooded the market. There was violence, 'rice wars,' and lives were lost."

"American rice invaded the country," recalled Charles Suffrard, a leading rice grower in Haiti in an interview with the Washington Post in 2000.  By 1987 and 1988, there was so much rice coming into the country that many stopped working the land.

Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest who has been the pastor at St. Claire and an outspoken human rights advocate, agrees.  "In the 1980s, imported rice poured into Haiti, below the cost of what our farmers could produce it.  Farmers lost their businesses.  People from the countryside started losing their jobs and moving to the cities.  After a few years of cheap imported rice, local production went way down."

Still the international business community was not satisfied. In 1994, as a condition for U.S. assistance in returning to Haiti to resume his elected Presidency, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced by the U.S., the IMF, and the World Bank to open up the markets in Haiti even more.

But, Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, what reason could the U.S. have in destroying the rice market of this tiny country?

Haiti is definitely poor.  The U.S. Agency for International Development reports the annual per capita income is less than $400.   The United Nations reports life expectancy in Haiti is 59, while in the US it is 78.  Over 78% of Haitians live on less than $2 a day, more than half live on less than $1 a day.

Yet Haiti has become one of the very top importers of rice from the U.S.  The U.S. Department of Agriculture 2008 numbers show Haiti is the third largest importer of US rice - at over 240,000 metric tons of rice. (One metric ton is 2200 pounds).

Rice is a heavily subsidized business in the U.S.  Rice subsidies in the U.S. totaled $11 billion from 1995 to 2006.  One producer alone, Riceland Foods Inc of Stuttgart Arkansas, received over $500 million dollars in rice subsidies between 1995 and 2006.

The Cato Institute recently reported that rice is one of the most heavily supported commodities in the U.S. - with three different subsidies together averaging over $1 billion a year since 1998 and projected to average over $700 million a year through 2015. The result?  "Tens of millions of rice farmers in poor countries find it hard to lift their families out of poverty because of the lower, more volatile prices caused by the interventionist policies of other countries."

In addition to three different subsidies for rice farmers in the U.S., there are also direct tariff barriers of 3 to 24 percent, reports Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute - the exact same type of protections, though much higher, that the U.S. and the IMF required Haiti to eliminate in the 1980s and 1990s.

U.S. protection for rice farmers goes even further. A 2006 story in the Washington Post found that the federal government has paid at least $1.3 billion in subsidies for rice and other crops since 2000 to individuals who do no farming at all; including $490,000 to a Houston surgeon who owned land near Houston that once grew rice.

And it is not only the Haitian rice farmers who have been hurt.

Paul Farmer saw it happen to the sugar growers as well.  "Haiti, once the world's largest exporter of sugar and other tropical produce to Europe, began importing even sugar-- from U.S. controlled sugar production in the Dominican Republic and Florida.  It was terrible to see Haitian farmers put out of work.  All this sped up the downward spiral that led to this month's food riots."

After the riots and protests, President Rene Preval of Haiti agreed to reduce the price of rice, which was selling for $51 for a 110 pound bag, to $43 dollars for the next month.   No one thinks a one month fix will do anything but delay the severe hunger pains a few weeks.

Haiti is far from alone in this crisis.  The Economist reports a billion people worldwide live on $1 a day.  The US-backed Voice of America reports about 850 million people were suffering from hunger worldwide before the latest round of price increases.

Thirty three countries are at risk of social upheaval because of rising food prices, World Bank President Robert Zoellick told the Wall Street Journal.  When countries have many people who spend half to three-quarters of their daily income on food, "there is no margin of survival."

In the U.S., people are feeling the world-wide problems at the gas pump and in the grocery.  Middle class people may cut back on extra trips or on high price cuts of meat.  The number of people on food stamps in the US is at an all-time high. But in poor countries, where malnutrition and hunger were widespread before the rise in prices, there is nothing to cut back on except eating.  That leads to hunger riots.

In the short term, the world community is sending bags of rice to Haiti.  Venezuela sent 350 tons of food.  The US just pledged $200 million extra for worldwide hunger relief.  The UN is committed to distributing more food.

What can be done in the medium term?  The US provides much of the world's food aid, but does it in such a way that only half of the dollars spent actually reach hungry people.   US law requires that food aid be purchased from US farmers, processed and bagged in the US and shipped on US vessels - which cost 50% of the money allocated.  A simple change in US law to allow some local purchase of commodities would feed many more people and support local farm markets.

In the long run, what is to be done? The President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who visited Haiti last week, said "Rich countries need to reduce farms subsidies and trade barriers to allow poor countries to generate income with food exports.  Either the world solves the unfair trade system, or every time there's unrest like in Haiti, we adopt emergency measures and send a little bit of food to temporarily ease hunger."

Citizens of the USA know very little about the role of their government in helping create the hunger problems in Haiti or other countries.  But there is much that individuals can do.  People can donate to help feed individual hungry people and participate with advocacy organizations like Bread for the World or Oxfam to help change the U.S. and global rules which favor the rich countries.  This advocacy can help countries have a better chance to feed themselves.

Meanwhile, Merisma Jean-Claudel, a young high school graduate in Port-au-Prince told journalist Wadner Pierre "...people can't buy food. Gasoline prices are going up. It is very hard for us over here. The cost of living is the biggest worry for us, no peace in stomach means no peace in the mind.I wonder if others will be able to survive the days ahead because things are very, very hard."

"On the ground, people are very hungry," reported Fr. Jean-Juste.  "Our country must immediately open emergency canteens to feed the hungry until we can get them jobs.  For the long run, we need to invest in irrigation, transportation, and other assistance for our farmers and workers."

In Port au Prince, some rice arrived in the last few days.  A school in Fr. Jean-Juste's parish received several bags of rice.  They had raw rice for 1000 children, but the principal still had to come to Father Jean-Juste asking for help.  There was no money for charcoal, or oil.

Jervais Rodman, an unemployed carpenter with three children, stood in a long line Saturday in Port au Prince to get UN donated rice and beans.  When Rodman got the small bags, he told Ben Fox of the Associated Press, "The beans might last four days.  The rice will be gone as soon as I get home."


*Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. People who want to help change U.S. policy on agriculture to help combat world-wide hunger should go to: http://www.oxfamamerica.org/ or http://www.bread.org/

**Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Private ownership of Africa's gene pool

Carol B. Thompson

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/47808

Thank you for the helpful analysis! http://www.pambazuka.org/en/issue/361

It shows well the Gates contradictions. A major point missed in the article, however, is that AGRA capitalists do not only want to position themselves, against China, to be the suppliers of seed and agricultural inputs to poor African farmers. They are also advancing full speed ahead in stealing African bioresources. AGRA will greatly assist the theft and patenting (biopiracy) of African indigenous strains, something already happening in Kenya as they genetically modify sorghum.

Corporations with falling rates of profit from overproduction, as Gabirondo correctly points out, need new markets. But they also need lower cost or free inputs, such as biodiverse food crops. This theft of seed ('accumulation by dispossession' - David Harvey) adds to profit more quickly than dreams of future markets.

Further, rather than allowing them to use the word, 'philanthropy,' let's call it private ownership of Africa's gene pool. The corporations are financing research after African governments have been systematically removed from agricultural extension, research and marketing since 1981, according to the neoliberal agenda. African agriculture does need assistance, but what the Gates Foundation is doing is not a gift, for the program is taking genetic wealth much more valuable any billions of dollars.

Zimbabwe Truth and Reconciliation Coalition

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/47800

The Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM) has formed a Truth and Justice Coalition to, amongst other things "identify perpetrators and seek legal redress for the victims of crimes against humanity and other serious crimes in Zimbabwe."

“The destruction of democracy begins when good people, just people or merely those who are well intentioned do nothing”, Gabriel Shumba, a torture victim, human rights lawyer, exile and spokesperson for the Truth and Justice Coalition announced. The Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM) has initiated, with full support from civil society, labour and legal organizations, the Truth and Justice Coalition on Zimbabwe. Its objectives are to identify perpetrators and seek legal redress for the victims of crimes against humanity and other serious crimes in Zimbabwe.

Shumba announced yesterday that the coalition had now assembled over 200 names of ZANU (PF) military, militia, members of parliament and war veterans who in their personal and/or professional capacity have unleashed terror and tyranny against civilians in recent months. More importantly, their complicity with a cabal of high-ranking Zimbabwean politicians and military personnel with links to other countries is now documented for public release. Shumba said, “today we shall begin the rollout of disgrace for people driven by personal greed, who have defamed and destroyed democracy in our nation. These names are part of a criminal dossier being compiled to support prosecutions in South Africa and other jurisdictions.” He added, “we begin with names like Brigadier Nyikayaramba, who is based in Mudzi South and commanding the indiscriminate torture, rape and beating of innocent citizens.

“The Truth and Justice Coalition will not stop pursuing these perpetrators of crimes until they are brought to justice. In addition, the Coalition shall highlight their personal assets, illicit money laundering and collusion with some Asian and other African states in disclosing their criminal activity. Bright Matonga, MP for Mhondoro-Ngezi and former Deputy Information Minister has been identified for acts of property destruction, including farm looting and public transportation fraud. In addition the blood diamonds trail may lead us to the DRC, where senior government officials and their families have already been implicated.

The TJC believes that one of the most tragic betrayals of this once proud liberation movement in Zimbabwe is the subversion of institutions of government like the army, the police and the judiciary whose loyalty is now not to the citizenry but ruling clique. For example, the Commander of the Armed Forces, General Chiwenga, in his personal capacity is the architect of military madness and murder nationwide. He has personally lied to and advised the caretaker President to subvert the peoples’ will, due to his personal interest and those of his colleagues.

The General has personally accumulated an estimated US$3 million worth of minerals and assets including a palatial home at Borrowdale Brooke in Harare. His wife, Jocelyn Chiwenga, receives the Zimbabwe Defence Forces main supply contracts. He has personally rejected democracy and has also instructed a military roll out which includes the deployment of militia, soldiers, army brigadiers and war veterans into rural areas to torture at will, and in some instances kill mainly opposition MDC supporters.

In Mudzi North, General Chiwenga is working in cahoots with Assistant Commissioner Pfumvute assisted by war veteran Zvidzai Katsande, Councilor Nyakumba, Asst Commissioner Nikati and, as a particular shame of justice, Member of Parliament Newton Kachedza. These people were in positions of command and authority at the time of the tragic death of Murunde Tembo who was attacked in Mashonaland East on Tuesday the 15th of April. Tembo sustained serious injuries to his body including broken legs. He died on his way to hospital.

Davie Malungisa, Executive Director of IDAZIM explained “these profiles are real stories of ordinary people, not only tortured, but silenced forever because of their decision to exercise their right to vote. General Chiwenga, by virtue of the principle of command responsibility, in his personal capacity, will be charged under local and international laws for these crimes.”

One of the most shameful assaults on innocents to date ironically occurred on 18 April, Zimbabwe’s Independence Day. On this fateful day, five-year old, Brighton Mabwera from Manyika village in Uzumba was murdered in his sleep when the hut he was sleeping in was set on fire by ZANU (PF) thugs. After the discovery of his charred remains, his grieving parents were compelled to bury the body in the absence of a post-mortem so that evidence will be hidden. Little Brighton’s only crime is that his parents belong to a different party than the ruling one.

The Coalition’s legal coordinator, Nicole Fritz, Director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (SALC), which was responsible for the court action that prevented the Chinese arms shipment from docking in South Africa, commented: “Mr Chiwenga in his personal and professional capacity attracts the same responsibility in international law as did the warlords of Bosnia Herzegovina, Rwanda and Sierra Leone. This course of action has legal precedent. This Coalition will seek legal representation in South Africa where, in terms of South African law, those responsible for crimes against humanity can be apprehended and prosecuted. We have been receiving unprecedented reports of widespread, state-sponsored killing, rape, assault, damage to property, and large-scale displacement.”

The Truth and Justice Coalition will shortly reveal names of other Zimbabwean officials– including their business, financial and possible political associations that are protecting or even perhaps preventing Mugabe from following democratic resolve.

Zimbabwe: Not the MDC!

Carlos Otero

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/47802

It is interesting that there is very little comment in relation to the origins of the Zimbabwe crisis. Had the Lancaster House agreement been fulfilled, perhaps the land reform programme would have been more timely and orderly.

But where is the critism/analysis of the UK and US who turned their backs on the financial committments to pay the white farmers for the land that they had originally stolen from the Africans? It was not unexpected that mistakes were made in the resulting land reform programme given the absence of the financial guarantees originally committed the North.

But, where is the criticism of the World Bank, IMF, Commonwealth, European Union, US etc. which placed dranconian economic sanctions on Zimbabwe precisely because it took its land back? What developing country could survive such an economic attack which is the root cause of the economic crisis? Now we are supposed to join with the same villians who created the conditions for the crisis by condemning Mugabe in favour of a externally-created MDC whose leader was videotaped discussing assasination of the elected president?

When the dust clears, follow the land and see how quickly new schemes will be developed under this MDC to reverse the land reform, not in the interest of the Africans. After all, they must pay back their masters.

Justice Initiatives: Pretrial Detention

2008-05-01

http://www.justiceinitiative.org/

The Open Society Justice Initiative has released a new publication examining pretrial detention—the practice of jailing criminal suspects, sometimes for years, before trial—and efforts to reform its use. "The excessive use of pretrial detention violates human rights and harms all members of society," said Martin Schönteich, a senior legal officer for the Justice Initiative. "Treatment of pretrial detainees is often far worse than for those convicted of crimes, but because they are relatively transient population they receive very little attention."

Kenya: The Online Tribal Wars

Edwin Okong'o

2008-05-01

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/blog/2008/04/kenya_the_onlin.html

I had been out of journalism school for barely two weeks when Julia Opoti, a friend and an editor at Kenya Imagine, a popular online discussion forum for Kenyans, sent a text message to my cell phone. My name, she wrote, had been the subject of another online forum. "Hey, did you know that there is a whole thread about you on Mashada?" the message read.

Review of African Blogs

Dibussi Tande

2008-04-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/47766

One month after Nigerian passengers were kicked off a British Airways flight for protesting against the inhumane treatment of a deportee, the outrage has not subsided, particularly on the blogosphere where there are numerous petitions and articles calling for the boycott of BA.

Intellectualismo
http://intellectualismo.wordpress.com/2008/04/27/british-airways-apologize-to-nigerians-or-face-boycott/

Intellectualismo is among those calling for a boycott, arguing that it is in the interest of BA and the British to treat Nigerians with respect:

“The British government needs Nigerians. In the post 9/11 season of transatlantic flights decline, the Lagos-London route almost literally kept BA afloat. Presently there are daily flights from Abuja and Lagos to London respectively…

The British High Commission of Nigeria makes millions of Naira from visa applications (on a monthly basis, I dare say). Less then 20% of all applications are successful. For the unsuccessful, their application fees are not refunded. The High Commission generates an absurdly high amount of revenue from application fees alone, all their offices in Nigeria are self-sustained. Consequently they’ve been weaned off financial reliance on the Home Office.

The British High Commission has no qualms about issuing visas to looters and thieves, but when the common man applies they almost have to pry open his mouth and count his teeth to make sure they’re really his and he is not in fact stealing them. Despite this, many will continue to try their luck to migrate to the UK where they can be productive and enjoy the fruits of their productivity. Thousands of students will also apply to study in the UK because of the warped perspective of Nigerian employers who value UK degrees over locally obtained ones.

Needless to say, it’s high time Nigerians demand better treatment in this symbiotic if not equal relationship. We no longer live in colonial times where we have to fear offending the master.”

David Ajao
http://www.davidajao.com/blog/2008/04/25/top-cyber-crime-countries-in-afric/#more-306

David Ajao publishes excerpts from the 2007 Internet Crime Report which lists Nigeria, South Africa and Ghana as the worst offenders in Africa:

“The verdict is out: Nigeria is still among the top ten countries from which fraudulent credit card transactions and other forms of cyber-crime originate though USA and UK lead the pack. According to WikiNews:

‘The United Kingdom is listed second in a report on global cyber-crime statistics, behind the United States and ahead of cyber-crime “hotspots” Nigeria and Romania. The 2007 Internet Crime Report was released in April by the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), a joint operation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National White Collar Crime Center.

It is interesting to note that 3 sub-Saharan African countries are listed among the top ten perpetrators with Nigeria taking the lead.

‘The 2007 Internet Crime Report cites the top ten countries by amount of perpetrators of online crime. In descending order, the top ten list includes the United States, the United Kingdom, Nigeria, Canada, Romania, Italy, Spain, South Africa, Russia, and Ghana…’”

The posting also includes a link to the complete report.

Cry Beloved Zimbabwe
http://crybelovedzimbabwe.blogspot.com/2008/04/results-are-non-negotiable.html

With the results of Zimbabwe’s twin elections still mired in controversy, Cry Beloved Zimbabwe rejects any talk of a possible government of national unity as a way out of the crisis:

“A lot of theories as to what Mugabe will do next have been doing rounds with the state's own propaganda machinery fueling the rumours ever since Mugabe and Zanu PF lost to Tsvangirai and MDC in the March 2008 harmonised elections. Lets make one thing clear here Morgan Tsvangirai and MDC won the elections they are the choice of people irrespective of the fact that the results from the presidential election are still to be officially announced, and that an illegal recount is taking place in 23 constituencies engineered to reverse the will of the people of Zimbabwe, nor the fact that the Mugabe's dogs of war have murdered 10 people and displaced 3000 arrested 500 MDC members and officials on trumped up charges. So this new talk written in Mugabe's propaganda mouthpiece, of a government of national unity headed by Mugabe should be discarded here and forthwith. Mugabe and his military junta have been behaving as if nothing happened, like as if no election took place, they cannot just brush events like the recent harmonised election like a non-event to suit their selfish needs.
[…]
Because MDC has refused to partake in the run-off that will only inflame a volatile situation Zanu PF is now changing its strategy. Now we hear that they want a government of national unity, based on what? They called the elections and lost what needs to be negotiated is the smooth transition of power to MDC the choice of the people. Even Zuma the South African Presidential hopeful's ideas of a negotiation between MDC and Zanu PF should be mooted, there is nothing to negotiate, we won the election, we are ready to govern. This whole idea of that Mugabe will steal this election and declare himself a victor rule for 18 months and then hand over power to Emmerson Mnangagwa who in turn will then instigate negotiations with MDC to resume the flow of international aid and perpetuate Zanu PF's stranglehold on Zimbabwe will be rejected by people of Zimbabwe and if needs be we will defend our vote violently.

Sports Kenya
http://sportskenya.blogspot.com/2008/04/changing-face-of-kenyan-football.html

On a much lighter note, Sports Kenya writes about the changing attitudes of Kenyan football fans towards local Kenyan clubs:

“I couldn't believe it the other day when I was walking in the streets and my fellow countrymen were talking about Mathare United and Tusker FC. Now what was more interesting was to find them actually naming players in both teams… I was amazed to read our radio personalities as well as our TV journalists are going to watch Kenyan football games live. Now that's progress !

It is good to see Kenyans are developing an interest in the local game. The challenge now goes to the teams to raise the quality of the game as well as develop some consistency. I also think the Stadia Management Board need get more stadia around the country back into playing fields. That way the game will actually reach its intended audience.
For those guys ( I might be a victim too) who usually follow foreign leagues with such intent, it's time we learnt to love our own.”

Free Thinking
http://mpayukaji.blogspot.com/2008/04/is-it-right-time-to-probe-mkapa-and-is_30.html

Free Thinking republishes a commentary from This Day which is calling for the prosecution of former Tanzanian President, Benjamin Mkapa, currently facing a series of abuse of office and corruption allegations:

“We used to laugh at Zambians when they were prosecuting their corrupt rulers-cum-looters. Now look! The same shame-cum-imbroglio is amidst us testing our tenacity and accountability…

Let’s face it point blank. Mkapa abused and misused the office of president… What precedent are we setting for current and future heads of state if we let Mkapa off-the hook…?

Silence is golden. But this is relative. There are issues that do not need silence. Mkapa has arrogantly and shamelessly maintained silence! Phew! Why shouldn’t he be presumed guilty because of his silence? … The right thing for [President] Kikwete to do is to distance himself and let Mkapa face the music…

On the same footing even the parliament should strike off the much touted immunity that Mkapa has so as to let the judicial process take its course…

Let us face the moment of truth as far as Mkapa's legacy and deeds are concerned.”

Scribbles from the Den
http://www.dibussi.com/2008/04/joe-la-conscien.html#more

Scribbles from the Den writes about the imprisonment of Cameroonian protest Singer “Joe La Conscience’ for campaigning against the recent constitutional amendment which scrapped presidential term limits in that country:

“At first glance, the story of Joe La Conscience is just another personal tragedy in good old Cameroon; the tale of an individual and his family paying a heavy price for his political activism. But deep down, this is a story about Cameroon, its government, its people and its future. It is a very telling snapshot of the reigning political climate in Cameroon and a good indicator of what the Biya regime’s so-called troisième mandat will look like...

Recent events have shown that in its bid to hang on to power at all cost, the Biya regime is, more than ever before, driven by an élan autoritaire or a dark authoritarian impulse which does not bode well for the country.

Extremists who for years have been itching for a head-on confrontation with “the forces of change” have finally gained a solid footing within the regime and are creating a deleterious political climate reminiscent of that which prevailed in the last years of the Abacha regime in next door Nigeria; a climate characterized by the emasculation of the civil society and organized political opposition, the muzzling of the press and persecution of journalists, the militarization of political life and the increasing use of martial language in regular political discourse, the isolation of potential catalysts for popular mobilization and political reawakening particularly artists, an increasing appeal to ethnicity, etc...

With no viable organized political force to stand up to Biya, it is now left to artists and other “lone wolfs’ to pick up the mantle for political change in Cameroon, usually with dire consequences as we have seen in the cases of Joe and Lapiro.”

* Dibussi Tande, a writer and activist from Cameroon, produces the blog Scribbles from the Den

* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at www.pambazuka.org/

Sudan: Chinese companies sign contract on heightening dam on Blue Nile

2008-04-30

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2008/04/china-sudan-dam/

Sudan has contracted two Chinese companies to raise the height of Sudan’s Roseires Dam. China’s involvement in this project is significant, given that the Roseires Dam supplies more than 70 percent of Sudan’s hydropower and that China has also been criticized for ignoring not only Darfur, but also the human rights abuses and environmental consequences arising from Sudan’s dam projects.

Angola to allow arms ship to dock

2008-04-30

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7368208.stm

Angola's government has authorised a Chinese ship carrying arms destined for Zimbabwe to dock, although it says it will not be allowed to unload weapons. In a statement, the government said the vessel would only be allowed to deliver goods intended for Angola.

Locals defend themselves against Mugabe's militia

2008-04-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/47761

Reports from the rest of the provinces paint a bloodcurdling picture. Army barracks across the country are issuing war veterans and former military/police officers with weapons (AK 47 assault rifles). The official line is that they need to protect themselves against anticipated attacks by the MDC and its foreign supporters, particularly on former white-owned farms. But the real intention is to use the weapons against opposition supporters in the rural areas. The issuing of weapons began 24 April.
Locals defend themselves against Mugabe's militia

HARARE - Reports from the rest of the provinces paint a bloodcurdling picture. Army barracks across the country are issuing war veterans and former military/police officers with weapons (AK 47 assault rifles). The official line is that they need to protect themselves against anticipated attacks by the MDC and its foreign supporters, particularly on former white-owned farms. But the real intention is to use the weapons against opposition supporters in the rural areas. The issuing of weapons began 24 April.

Meanwhile, the killers of MDC supporter Tapiwa Mbwanda in Hurungwe East have been identified as ZNA Private Madamombe and one Jawet Kazangarare, a Zanu (PF) militiaman. It is suspected that the police are reluctant to take action against the two.
MDC supporters in Masvingo and Mashonaland East provinces have organised themselves into local defence units to fight back violence and intimidation by war veterans, military personnel and Zanu (PF) militia. Yesterday, 24 April, there were fierce battles in the village of Makaha in Mutoko/Mudzi, Mashonaland East as MDC supporters repelled an attack by Zanu. Reports are still coming in but indications are that Zanu militiamen were badly mauled.

Wilf Mbanga
The Zimbabwean
P O Box 248 Hythe
SO45 4WX, UK
Tel/fax +44 (0)2380 845 271
Mobile - +44 (0)7963963547
email: mbanga@thezimbabwean.co.uk
www.thezimbabwean.co.uk

MDC reunites as recount confirms victory

2008-05-01

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/17859

As the recount process for the parliamentary elections confirm the victory of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the party's rival factions announced on Monday that they had reunited. This gives the opposition a comfortable majority in the parliament.

Truth and Justice coalition formed

2008-04-30

http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12408

"The destruction of democracy begins when good people just people or merely those who are well intentioned do nothing", Gabriel Shumba, a torture victim, human rights lawyer, exile and spokesperson for the Truth and Justice Coalition announced. The Institute for a Democratic Alternative for Zimbabwe (IDAZIM) has initiated, with full support from civil society, labour and legal organizations, the Truth and Justice Coalition on Zimbabwe.

Zanu (PF) kills another four MDC members

2008-04-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/zimbabwe/47753

The regime of Robert Mugabe's violent onslaught on the MDC continues without remorse. Four more members of the MDC have been killed in Guruve, seven shot in Rusape, and one of them died on his way to the hospital. In Hurungwe North, the regime has killed Tapiwa Mubwanda an MDC activist in the area. Tapiwa Mubwanda was killed by one Jauet Kazangarare, who is a ZANU PF councilor and Peter Madamombe who is a member of the Zimbabwe National Army.
The regime of Robert Mugabe's violent onslaught on the MDC continues without remorse. Four more members of the MDC have been killed in Guruve, seven shot in Rusape, and one of them died on his way to the hospital. In Hurungwe North, the regime has killed Tapiwa Mubwanda an MDC activist in the area. Tapiwa Mubwanda was killed by one Jauet Kazangarare, who is a ZANU PF councilor and Peter Madamombe who is a member of the Zimbabwe National Army.

The MDC has made representation to the United Nations (UN) to send an envoy to immediately stop the violence against unarmed and defenceless citizens, whose only crime is voting for change, and change they can trust. We have also called on the UN urgently move in to provide humanitarian aid. The situation is dire. We can not afford any other loss of live. The violence against the MDC and the people of Zimbabwe must stop, and stop now.

Contact person: Mr Nqobizitha Mlilo: MDC Regional Office Spokesperson 083 527 4650

AU Monitor - Weekly Roundup

Issue 134, 2008

2008-04-30

http://www.aumonitor.org

One month after elections in Zimbabwe, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has yet to release the results of the presidential elections. The Pan-African Parliament (PAP) noted in its interim statement that “the post-election phase which forms part of the entire electoral process, including the announcement of results, remains a concern and needs to be closely monitored" but concluded that “the environment for holding an election was conducive” and “generally the voting was conducted in a transparent and efficient manner”. The African Union (AU) goes further to express “its satisfaction once more over the success of these elections, which were conducted in a peaceful and orderly manner” though also expressing “concern over the delay observed in the announcement of the results, which creates an atmosphere of tension that is not in the least conducive to the consolidation of the democratic process that was so felicitously launched through the organization of the elections.” Following comments by South African President, and mediator for the Southern African Development Community (SADC), Thabo Mbeki that “there is no crisis in Zimbabwe”, the East African Law Society (EALS) called an emergency pan-African citizen’s consultation on the situation. Over 200 African civil society organizations convened in Tanzania and called on the AU “to revoke SADC’s mandate on Zimbabwe and appoint an independent high level Pan African panel of mediators” as well as “not to recognize the illegitimate incumbent government in Zimbabwe until a democratic solution to the crisis is found”. One of the conveners of the consultation, Don Deya, Director of the EALS, noted that “when election fraud occurred in Kenya, the AU acted swiftly and effectively to mediate a settlement. We have the same situation in Zimbabwe. Why is the AU silent?” Concurrently, Professor Anyang Nyong'o, a Kenyan minister and member of the opposition Orange Democratic Movement, called into question the electoral process throughout Africa for not responding to the wills and wishes of the people.

While the role of SADC remains uncertain in resolving the situation in Zimbabwe, the SADC International Consultative Conference on Poverty and Development was held in Mauritius to engage in policy dialogue, forge consensus, and review progress of the SADC economic integration agenda, with emphasis on poverty eradication. Similarly, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) will hold an extraordinary meeting of ministers of trade and industry in early May to discuss the impact of rising food prices in the region. The meeting will further review the status of the Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations with the European Union. As one of the organizers of Africa’s International Media Summit, ECOWAS has also agreed to implement three media pilot schemes, in and with the collaboration of governments of Ghana, Nigeria and Tunisia, to deploy African youths towards improving the image of the continent as part of the process of re-branding Africa. Meanwhile, the ECOWAS Commission has signed an agreement with Cuba to implement a regional programme on renewable energy. Further, ECOWAS will collaborate with Oxfam America to create a common mining code for the region “to facilitate the contribution of civil society in the process of forming a common mining policy that is favorable to the poor, respectful of the protection principles of the environment and of human rights, and that renders the government and the mining companies responsible through good governance practices.”

Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi expressed support for strengthened coordination and synergy between the United Nations (UN) and the AU during the UN Security Council high-level meeting on peace and security in Africa. He stated that: "while maintaining its authority, the Security Council should give priority to supporting the African Union’s key role in resolving regional conflicts, and give full consideration to the views of the African Union."

Ahead of the forthcoming session of the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) in Ezulwini, Swaziland, the Centre for Conflict Resolution (CCR) is hosting a panel discussion on human rights and conflict management at Ezulwini Sun Hotel on the 5th of May. The discussion will highlight the linkages between human rights and conflict prevention and resolution as well as examine the role that institutions such as the ACHPR, national human rights institutions and non-governmental organisations play in preventing conflict and building sustainable peace. The meeting will further provide an opportunity to introduce CCR’s forthcoming book on Africa’s Human Rights Architecture. The Coalition for an Effective African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights will also be holding a panel discussion at the Royal Swazi Sun on 11th of May which will consider the relationship between the African Court and the African Commission and the opportunities for civil society in using the African human rights system to protect human rights, among other themes.

Africa: Millions of children falling through the cracks

2008-05-02

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=42068

A significant proportion of the world's 2.2 billion children, many of whom are victims of violence, sexual abuse, labour exploitation and preventable diseases, are from the crisis-plagued African continent.

DRC: ICC seeks 'Terminator'

2008-05-01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7372940.stm

A Congolese warlord known as "the Terminator" is being sought for prosecution, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague has revealed. The arrest warrant for Bosco Ntaganda, was issued in 2006 but not made public and he is still at large. He is accused of conscripting children under 15 to fight in hostilities in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo between July 2002 and December 2003.

Egypt: First quarterly report on freedom of religion and belief

2008-05-02

http://eipr.org/en/reports/FRB_quarterly_rep_apr08_en/2904.htm

The Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR) issued the English version of its first quarterly report on freedom of religion and belief in Egypt. The report covers the first three months of 2008 and documents new court rulings, legislation and government policies relevant to freedom of religion and belief, as well as instances of religious discrimination and other violations of religious freedom. It also reports on incidents of sectarian tension and violence and reviews the most pertinent reports, publications, and activities during the reporting period.

Ghana: Justice denied

2008-05-02

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77995

When Naa Adorkor’s 15 year-old daughter was raped by a 45 year-old neighbour she vowed no expense would be spared in prosecuting the man. Four years later she has spent all her money and still received no verdict from Ghana’s courts. “I am fed up and frustrated. Sometimes I regret seeking justice in the court,” she said after the case was adjourned for the umpteenth time last week.

Kenya: Torture by the military at Mt. Elgon - report

2008-04-30

http://tinyurl.com/6j3mvv

Since the January post election violence and subsequent mediation and resultant national accord by the political elites there continues massive appeals on reconciliation by the grand coalition government behind the scenes the government has and continues to engage in massive infringement of fundamental rights of historical proportions never witnessed before on the civilian population in Mount Elgon district and surrounding areas.

Morocco: Disabled struggle to integrate

2008-05-01

http://tinyurl.com/4aldze

Trouble getting an education or finding a job is a fact of life for young, disabled Moroccans. Government plans are already in place to end workplace discrimination and expand integrated classrooms.

Mozambique: Police 'kill at will'

2008-05-01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7372433.stm

Police in Mozambique have been accused of killing and torturing people with near total impunity. The human rights group Amnesty International has published a report saying the Mozambique police appear to think they have a licence to kill. The group says officials have responded to rising crime rates with often lethal force, but that they almost never face criminal proceedings.

South Africa: Prepaid water meters ruled unconstitutional

2008-05-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/rights/47862

The Johannesburg High Court has ruled that the City of Johannesburg’s practice of forcibly installing prepayment water meters in Phiri, Soweto is unconstitutional. It also set aside the City’s decision to limit its free basic water supply to 25 litres per person per day and ordered it to provide the residents of Phiri with free basic water in the amount of 50 litres per person per day. The City was further directed to give the residents of Phiri the option of an ordinary credit metered water supply.
PREPAYMENT WATER METER SYSTEM UNCONSTITUTIONAL, FREE BASIC WATER TO BE INCREASED

High Court Judge slams City of Johannesburg’s water policy and orders removal of prepayment meters if residents demand

The Johannesburg High Court today ruled that the City of Johannesburg’s practice of forcibly installing prepayment water meters in Phiri, Soweto is unconstitutional. It also set aside the City’s decision to limit its free basic water supply to 25 litres per person per day and ordered it to provide the residents of Phiri with free basic water in the amount of 50 litres per person per day. The City was further directed to give the residents of Phiri the option of an ordinary credit metered water supply.

In a ground-breaking judgment – the first in which the constitutional right to water has explicitly been raised – Judge MP Toska criticised the municipality for its discriminatory approach to the provision of water. The Judge found that: “the underlying basis for the introduction of prepayment meters seems to me to be credit control. If this is true, I am unable to understand why this credit control measure is only suitable in the historically poor black areas and not the historically rich white areas. Bad payers cannot be described in terms of colour or geographical area.” The Judge also found that the consultation leading up to the adoption of prepayment meters was inadequate, stating that the process was “more of a publicity stunt than consultation”. He also criticised the City’s “big brother approach” to the residents of Phiri.

The Judge stated that “25 litres per person day is insufficient for the residents of Phiri”, whom he described as “poor, uneducated, elderly, sick, ravaged by HIV/AIDS and reliant on state pensions and grants.” The judge continued that “to expect the applicants to restrict their water usage, to compromise their health, by limiting the number of toilet flushes in order to save water is to deny them the rights to health and to lead a dignified lifestyle.” The Judge found that increasing the free basic water supply would not put significant strain on the City’s water and financial resources, especially if free basic water already supplied to rich households is redistributed to the poor.

Jackie Dugard, Acting Director of CALS and a member of the applicants’ legal team said “It has been a long hard road for our clients. This judgment is not only a victory for them, but for all poor South Africans. Judge Tsoka has shown that socio-economic rights have teeth. His judgment shows a careful and sensitive understanding of the law, the City’s obligations, but above all our clients’ lives”.

Stuart Wilson, Head of the CALS Litigation Unit said that “the judgment speaks volumes about the City’s approach to the poor and the vulnerable. A serious rethink of the City’s approach to poverty must now take place”.

For more information, contact: Jackie Dugard on 084 240 6187, Stuart Wilson on 072 265 8633 or Dale McKinley of the Coalition Against Water Privatisation on 072 429 4086

Kenya: Compensation, fear of attacks keeping IDPs in Rift Valley camps

2008-05-02

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78007

Along the Nakuru-Eldoret road, the charred remains of homes and businesses scar the picturesque landscape of Kenya's Rift Valley province and serve as a reminder of two months of violence that rocked the nation early this year. The calm that is typical of most rural settings belies the suffering experienced by thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) since fleeing their homes in January and February.

North Africa: Egypt arrests 109 African illegal migrants hoping to sneak into Israel

2008-04-30

http://tinyurl.com/6hlc6z

Egyptian police have arrested 109 African migrants hoping to cross illegally into Israel from Egypt, an Egyptian security official said Wednesday. 95 migrants from Eritrea and 14 from Ethiopia were caught Wednesday in the city of Aswan, 685 kilometers (425 miles) south of Cairo, after crossing the border from Sudan on foot, said the official. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the media.

Egypt: New strike to greet Mubarak

2008-05-02

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=42205

Hundreds remain in detention following a nationwide protest Apr. 6 against rising food prices and political stagnation. But this has not deterred activists from calling for a second general strike on May 4, timed to coincide with President Hosni Mubarak's birthday.

Kenya: Cash shortfall over cabinet

2008-05-01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7375140.stm

Kenya needs to find another $300m to pay for the expanded coalition cabinet formed after a power-sharing deal. Finance Minister Amos Kimunya says he may be forced to shift funding from vital programmes like resettling the displaced to pay for new ministries.

Nigeria: Leaders seek poll annulment

2008-05-02

http://tinyurl.com/6qyyht

Nigeria's supreme court has begun hearing an appeal by opposition leaders against the victory of Umaru Yar'Adua, the country's president, in last year's elections.
Atiku Abubakar and Mohammadu Buhari, two opposition candidates, have asked the court to overturn a lower court ruling that upheld Yar'Adua's victory in the April 2007 vote.

Southern Africa: Zimbabwe prepares to verify count

2008-05-01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7376630.stm

Zimbabwe's Electoral Commission is due to start verifying the country's delayed presidential election results. Representatives from both the governing Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change will oversee the collating process in Harare.

Sudan: Census monitors anger south

2008-05-01

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7372962.stm

Up to 170 census monitors in southern Sudan have been told to return to the capital, Khartoum, after being accused of interfering with the count. Southern officials said the monitors were not approved and were mostly from the north of the country. The controversial first population count in 15 years will help determine how wealth and power are shared out.

Zimbabwe: Opposition retains House of Assembly

2008-04-30

http://tinyurl.com/3ru9nk

Four weeks to the day after Zimbabwe queued to vote in the 29 March 2008 elections, the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission have finally confirmed their original results, and that was that Zanu PF has lost its majority in the House of Parliament for the first time in 28 years.

Zimbabwe: Tsvangirai wins poll

2008-05-02

http://www.afrol.com/articles/28788

Morgan Tsvangirai has emerged on top of the presidential elections, polling 47.9% of the vote against President Robert Mugabe's 43.2%, Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) has confirmed on Friday. Former Finance Minister and former key figure of Mr Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF party, Simba Makoni, ranked third. Makoni, who is widely expected to back Mr Tsvangirai in the election re-run, polled 8.3% of the votes.

Global: Corruption: Causes, Effects and Deterrents - Agenda for Change

2008-05-01

http://search.sabinet.co.za/images/ejour/afrins/afrins_v36_n2_a9.pdf

Corruption is a cosmopolitan problem. However, its adverse effects on less-developed countries are perhaps more profound due to the fact that it has greatly affected the potential for governments in such countries to meet the basic needs and expectations of the common people. There is, therefore, a pressing need for a sustained effort to nip the seemingly elusive problem of corruption in the bud, so to speak. This study endeavours to conceptualise the nature, causes, and effects of the scourge.

Global: Rich prosper, society suffers

2008-05-01

http://www.thestar.com/article/418637

In today's globalized world, tax evasion is occurring on a massive scale. As corporations and wealthy individuals shift their assets into offshore tax havens, the estimated loss in global tax revenues is now estimated to be $500 billion a year. This huge tax loss is hobbling the ability of governments to provide vital services to their societies.

Nigeria: Former governor confronts graft charges

2008-05-02

http://www.afrol.com/articles/28759

The former governor of Nigeria's Ekiti State, Ayodele Fayose, has challenged the fraud and money-laundering charges brought against him by the anti-graft commission, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission [EFCC]. The anti-graft agency has filed a 51-count suit against the former Ekiti governor at the Federal High Court in Lagos.

Africa: Beware bilateral trade deals with the EU

2008-05-01

http://www.wdm.org.uk/news/bewarebilateraltradedeals21042008.htm

EU trade deals are unfair to developing countries and can lead to increased poverty warns a new report, ‘Raw Deal’, released today by the World Development Movement. According to the report the benefits of signing a free trade deal with the EU sit firmly with European businesses, rather than developing countries. The launch coincides with the UN conference on trade and development (UNCTAD), held in Accra, Ghana (commences 21 April).

Africa: Network to link development partners

2008-05-01

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=26514

The United Nations agency tasked with tackling rural poverty announced today that it will help finance a new knowledge network connecting development partners in sub-Saharan Africa. The Executive Board of the UN International Fund for Agriculture (IFAD) approved a grant to create FIDAfrique-IFADAfrica, which will link existing networks in Western, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa.

Global: Changing IMF Policies - Actionaid

Get more doctors, nurses and teachers hired in developing countries

2008-05-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/development/47837

Mounting evidence in recent years suggests that the economic policies promoted and enforced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) may be preventing developing countries from being able to spend more in their national budgets, with important consequences for health and education budgets being constrained at unnecessarily low levels at a time when major increases are needed.
Changing IMF Policies to Get More Doctors, Nurses and Teachers Hired in Developing Countries

Mounting evidence in recent years suggests that the economic policies promoted and enforced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) may be preventing developing countries from being able to spend more in their national budgets, with important consequences for health and education budgets being constrained at unnecessarily low levels at a time when major increases are needed.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), 57 countries, most of them in Africa and Asia, face a severe health workforce crisis. WHO estimates that at least 2.4 million health professionals and 1.9 million health workers, or a total of 4.3 million health workers, are needed to fill the gap. Without prompt action, the shortage will worsen. Health workers are inequitably distributed throughout the world, with severe imbalances between developed and developing countries. This global workforce shortage is made even worse by imbalances within countries, with the greatest deficits in peri-urban and rural areas, and with misallocations between public and private/NGO/faith-based sectors. Sub-Saharan Africa faces the greatest challenges: while it has 11 percent of the world's population and 24 percent of the global burden of disease, it has only 3 percent of the world's health workers.

Regarding the global shortage of professionally-trained school teachers, UNESCO’s Institute of Statistics estimated in 2006 that globally, to get all children into school in class sizes of under 40 pupils, 18 million new teachers will be required. Sub-Saharan Africa alone will require a 68% increase in primary school teachers, from 2.3 million to 4 million to meet this pupil teacher ratio. Meeting the 40 to 1 teacher-pupil ratio is important because a larger class size negatively impacts the quality of education.
hese additional doctors, nurses and teachers cannot be hired under unnecessarily restrictive fiscal policies (deficit-reduction targets) and monetary policies (inflation-reduction targets) attached as binding conditions on International Monetary Fund loan programs.

The Importance of the IMF

The IMF was created in the 1940s after World War II to help finance the rebuilding of Europe and to provide short-term loans to countries that were importing more than they were exporting. However, in the 1980s, the Reagan administration in the US and the Thatcher government in the UK led a sea change in the way economics is understood, and introduced a whole new set of free market and “free trade” policies into the international foreign aid system by attaching such economic policy changes as conditions on foreign aid to developing countries. At the IMF in particular, part of this major change was the introduction of “monetarist” policies, which prioritized extremely low inflation and reducing or eliminating government deficits over other goals such as higher employment, GDP growth and public investment. While these policies were ostensibly designed to force governments into tackling the huge debt crisis and macroeconomic instability afflicting many developing countries at the time, today these policies are undermining the ability of poor countries to scale-up public spending to fight HIV/AIDS and other pressing health needs and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for health and education.
The immediate consequences of the IMF policies in the 1980s and 1990s were steep layoffs of personnel across all the public sectors, including public health systems. The lasting impacts have prevented countries from being able to make the necessary long-term capital investments in the underlying infrastructure of the public health systems. Public investment as a percent of GDP has been chronically under-funded in many countries over many years, leading to dilapidated public health facilities, weakened health systems, and an insufficient number of health workers across the developing world today. The IMF’s restrictive spending policies prevent countries both from being able to absorb and spend more foreign aid and from generating more of their own resources domestically.

End poverty. Together.

The IMF’s “Signal Effect” to Other Aid Donors Over these years, the IMF has amassed tremendous power for itself as the final arbiter of what supposedly constitutes appropriate policies for “macroeconomic stability,” and as a consequence, most bilateral and multilateral lenders and aid donors look to the IMF for its “red light/green light” signal before giving foreign aid, loans or debt cancellation to developing countries. In this way, the IMF has come to play the role of the head of a foreign aid cartel, in which most other foreign aid donors have abdicated their own individual ability to assess the economic policies of their borrowers. Although the UK has suggested it will not only look to the IMF signal before giving bilateral aid, its representative to the IMF Executive Board still supports IMF policies.
Moreover, the officials in many finance ministries in developing countries have been trained in the same economic theories as those promoted by the IMF, and ascribe to the same policies that emphasize low inflation and low deficits over the higher levels of public investment needed for a healthy and educated population to generate sustained economic growth and shared prosperity.

The IMF’s Policies Are Unnecessarily Restrictive A research report by the US Congress explained there is a “substantial gray area” between those fiscal and monetary policies that may be considered too austere, resulting in economic stagnation, and those that cause macroeconomic instability. And while no one wants policies that are too loose and can lead to overspending, hyperinflation and instability, the report warned, “Policies that are overly concerned with macroeconomic stability may turn out to be too austere, lowering economic growth from its optimal level and impeding progress on poverty reduction.” Presumably, one goal of including the macroeconomic framework within the national dialogue with NGOs for drafting Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) was to allow other policy options within this “gray area” to be fully explored to establish an effective mix of pro-growth and pro-health policies consistent with the medium-term goals of the country. However, this has not been the case. Not only is there mounting evidence in the empirical economics literature that the IMF’s policies sit at the austere end of the gray area, but such policy decisions have never been opened to NGOs or broader public stakeholders. Usually the IMF staff set such policies with finance ministry officials behind closed doors.
A 2007 study that examined at the impact of IMF policies on health spending in low-income countries, led by the Washington-based Center for Global Development, found that, “The evidence suggests that IMF-supported fiscal programs have often been too conservative or risk-averse. In particular, the IMF has not done enough to explore more expansionary, but still feasible, options for higher public spending.” And on monetary policy the report noted, “Empirical evidence does not justify pushing inflation to these levels in low-income countries.” A similar recent study of IMF inflation-reduction policies by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found, “There is no justification for inflation-targeting policies as they are currently being practiced throughout the middle- and low-income countries.” And most recently, the House Financial Services Committee of the US Congress weighed in on this issue in a November 2007 letter to the IMF, saying: “We are concerned by the IMF’s adherence to overly-rigid macroeconomic targets” in low-income countries, and, “It is particularly troubling to us that the IMF’s policy positions do not reflect any consensus view among economists on appropriate inflation targets.” It is particularly troubling to us that the IMF's policy positions do not reflect any consensus view among economists on appropriate inflation targets.
IMF Policies Can Block the Spending of Donor Aid A 2007 report by the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office (IEO) on “The IMF and Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa,” examined IMF loan programs to 29 Sub-Saharan African countries between 1999-2005 found that 37 percent of all annual aid increases to these countries in these years was diverted into building international currency reserve levels and that another 37% was devoted to debt repayment. That left and only about $2.70 of every $10 in annual aid increases for actual spending on health, education, infrastructure, or other development needs. So-called weak performers (those with inflation above 5% and “low” foreign currency reserves) on average spent only of 15% of new aid. Having so much of new aid increases not being spent was certainly not the intention of the donors, or citizens in donor countries. According to the IEO report, the “main drivers” in decisions to curtail spending of the aid was the IMF’s insistence on very low levels for inflation, its excessive concerns about the volatility of aid, and its desire for ever higher currency reserves to protect against economic “shocks.” As part of the larger context for the IMF’s tight monetary policies, one of the major overarching findings of the IEO report was that the IMF Executive Board and senior management were never really enthusiastic about the emphasis placed by donors on “poverty reduction” or the new efforts to scale-up aid and spending for the MDGs over the last several years. Without strong internal leadership directing any real policy changes in this regard, and without wide-spread publicity about pro-spending, pro-growth policy changes, the IEO report found that staff simply reverted to prioritizing macroeconomic stability over other goals. The important implication of this finding for aid advocates is that there is a contradiction happening within the leading donor governments between enabling a “scaling up environment” on the one hand while enforcing rigid macroeconomic stability and spending restraint on the other.

A New York Times editorial appropriately summarized the current contradiction in donor policies: “There is a desperate need for greater policy coherence in a period when many national governments, including Washington, are sensibly exhorting African governments to spend more on primary health care and education while international financial institutions largely controlled by those same Western governments have been pressing African countries to shrink their government payrolls, including teachers and health care workers.” Wage Bill Ceilings Cause Alarm In recent years, the IMF felt the need to suppress government spending through the use of so-called “public sector wage bill ceilings,” or caps on the amount of money used for paying the wages of public sector employees. Such wage bill ceilings have interfered with countries’ ability to educate, hire and retain the numbers of doctors, nurses, healthcare workers and teachers needed to fight HIV/AIDS and achieve the MDG health goals or to train younger generations. For example, such a policy in Kenya led to several thousands of professionally trained nurses remaining unemployed over many years. International public pressure forced the IMF into retreating somewhat on its wage bill ceiling policy in July 2007, but the IMF still reserves the right to impose such caps, while promising to do so less often in the future. However, the wage bill ceilings are merely a symptom of the deeper problem arising from unnecessarily restrictive fiscal and monetary policies: chronically insufficient public spending and under-investment in human capital development and preservation.

Debt Relief Is Not Enough

Although the rich countries have provided some debt cancellation under the Heavily-Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative and the more recent Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI), too little debt cancellation has been made available for too few countries in need. Impoverished countries that have benefited from initial debt cancellation are challenged to make use of the savings because of the continuing restrictive policies that still limit spending. Not only must countries remain “on track” with their IMF programs in order to access debt cancellation, but even afterwards they must continue to comply with IMF policies to access additional donor aid. Concerns about this problem were well exemplified in a recent report on Zambia by the United Nations Development Program’s International Poverty Centre, “Does Debt Relief Increase Fiscal Space in Zambia? The MDG Implications,” which found that even after receiving bilateral and multilateral debt cancellation, Zambia will still not be able to significantly scale-up public spending or investment because of the continuing demands for excessively tight fiscal and monetary policies in its IMF loan arrangements.
The IMF has not done enough to explore more expansionary, but still feasible,
1. Demand that the IMF change and widely publicize revised macroeconomic restraint policies Every time the IMF’s macroeconomic policies are challenged, it responds that “we are addressing that.” The truth is that the IMF has not explicitly repudiated its overly restrictive inflation and deficit targets, nor has it widely publicized new found flexibilities for health and education spending. Not only must the IMF reverse its antigrowth, anti-health, and anti-education policies, it must publicize any new policy flexibilities widely to Ministries of Finance and to its own staff.

2. Demand that other policy options for increased public spending be fully vetted and explored Health, education and HIV/AIDS advocates should work together with macroeconomists to learn about the current policies to which the IMF and many finance ministries adhere, their harmful impacts on constraining education and health spending, the existence of more expansionary spending policy options, and what such alternative policies could mean for increasing public health and education investments in developing countries. Each of the alternative policy options will have its own short-term and long-term costs and benefits for countries, and advocates should demand that all of these should be fully explored and considered.

3. Demand greater public stakeholder involvement in such explorations of alternative spending options Health, education and HIV/AIDS advocates should demand that NGOs and other key stakeholders such as the education and health ministry staff, key legislative committee members, labor unions and even the domestic media be allowed to participate in such in-depth explorations of alternative policy options for increased public spending.

4. Call on your Government to raise this issue through the Executive Board of the IMF, which approves the IMF loan programs for borrowing countries Advocates should insist that the policies first introduced over 20 years ago be revisited and changed to enable countries to meet current health and education imperatives.
There is a desperate need for greater policy coherence... THE NEW YORK TIMES Contact Rick.Rowden@actionaid.org for the latest research and analysis on these issues or for information about ActionAid’s Multi-Country Economic Literacy and Advocacy Project (“The IMF Project”), which will include 4 sets of introductory Macroeconomic Literacy Trainings and a series of national advocacy initiatives over 2 years (2008-2009) for health, education, HIV/AIDS and women’s rights advocacy organizations in 4 countries: Kenya, Sierra Leone, Malawi and the United States.

Global: The State of the Humanitarian Enterprise - report

2008-04-30

http://fic.tufts.edu/?pid=75

Humanitarian Agenda 2015: The State of the Humanitarian Enterprise describes the challenges faced by humanitarian actors striving to maintain fidelity to their ideals in a globalized world. The report highlights persisting tensions in the relationship between “outsiders” and local communities, encroachments of political agendas – particularly as a result of the war on terror – and the deteriorating security climate for humanitarian workers on the ground.

Global: U.N. and World Bank pledge to tackle food crisis

2008-05-01

http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSSP15678520080429

U.N. agencies and the World Bank have pledged to set up a task force to tackle an unprecedented rise in global food prices that is threatening to spread social unrest. The international bodies called on countries not to restrict exports of food to secure supplies at home, warning that could make the problem worse.

Africa: Boosting vaginal health could cut HIV risk

2008-05-01

http://tinyurl.com/62rn2k

Oral treatment to improve vaginal health could have the potential to reduce the risk of infection with HIV for women, according to a study published in the May 15th edition of Clinical Infectious Diseases. Most new HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa are among women, for whom new HIV-prevention strategies are needed.

Africa: Campaign to restate and implement AU Abuja April 2001 15% Commitment

2008-04-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/47762

On the 7th anniversary of the pledge by African Union member states to allocate 15% of national budgets to health, Nobel Prize Winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Africa Public Health Alliance 15% Now Campaign of which he is Honorary Chair have urged African Heads of State and Government not to in any way revise, drop or further delay implementing the Abuja April 2001 commitment.
On the 7th anniversary of the pledge by African Union member states to allocate 15% of national budgets to health, Nobel Prize Winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Africa Public Health Alliance 15% Now Campaign of which he is Honorary Chair have urged African Heads of State and Government not to in any way revise, drop or further delay implementing the Abuja April 2001 commitment.

In a communiqué from its recent Abuja conference released today and supported by 141 African and global organisations and networks, the 15% Now Campaign also made a 7 point call on African Heads of State and Ministers of Finance.

In a statement to mark the anniversary of the 15% pledge Archbishop Tutu stated:
"The AU Abuja 15% pledge is one of the most important commitments African leaders have made to health development and financing , and our Heads of State should strive to meet this pledge without further delay. The continued loss of millions of African lives annually which can be prevented is unacceptable and unsustainable. Our leaders know what they have to do. They have already pledged to do it. All they have to do now is actually do it. This is all we ask of them."

The Nobel Prize Winner underlined that:
"While global health is a global responsibility, African leaders also have a moral responsibility to our people. Just as we expect the international community to honour their commitments to global health, we also expect African leaders to honour African commitments"

Coordinator of the 15% Now Campaign Rotimi Sankore added that:
"It is a tragedy that we have to remind African leaders of their own commitment to invest public funds in Public Health at a time when we are loosing over 8 million lives a year to preventable, treatable or manageable health conditions. This is the equivalent of 21,917 lives lost daily or the equivalent of 43 transatlantic jets with 500 passengers each crashing every single day."

"While we appreciate the concerns of some of our Finance Ministers that there are many issues requiring their attention, Africa's most important resource is its human capital and sustainable social and economic development is impossible with average African healthy life expectancy falling to less than 40 years. The more we postpone public health investment, the more it will cost us in the future. For instance, the cost of not treating TB to Africa between 2006 and 2015 would be $519bn while TB can be controlled with $20bn in the same period."

He emphasised that:
"Nothing can or should compete with public health. Dead people dont eat, dead people dont need education, they dont live in houses and do not require transport or electricity. African's must first be alive and healthy to enjoy any other rights. The African Union Commission has delivered on the Africa Health Strategy and other health policy frameworks and its up to our Finance Ministers to fund their implementation."

The 15% Campaign Coordinator stressed that:
"Poor reproductive and sexual health is at the core of Africa's high disease burden. HIV is primarily a sexual and reproductive health issue, and costs Africa 1.6 million lives annually. Poor reproductive health systems also impact greatly on infant and child health leading to 4.8 million child deaths a year, and over half of non disease maternal deaths globally are in Africa. Considering that TB is now the biggest killer of HIV positive persons, and malaria now has an increasing impact on maternal and child mortality. It is clear that without massive investment to rebuild our public health systems Africa may die out slowly and painfully."

"Training and retention of African health workers is particularly crucial. Medicines as important as they are - do not diagnose illness, prescribe or dispense themselves, nor care for patients, health workers do.

In the Communiqué from its recent conference, the 15% Now Campaign called on "Fellow members of African Civil Society, the health and medical community, other sectors of society and global partners to join us in building the biggest continental, sub-regional, national and community based movement possible for ensuring that health development, financing and budgeting on a needs based basis and the 15% commitment is implemented as Africa’s top social and economic development priority."

Global: Global warming increases HIV risk in developing countries

2008-05-01

http://www.iolhivaids.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=&fArticleId=4382223

Climate change is the newest threat to the increasing HIV and Aids epidemic worldwide, panelists said Wednesday at an HIV forum at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, the AAP/Age reports. The forum, titled "A Future Free of HIV," was moderated by Justice of the High Court Michael Kirby and included several HIV and Aids researchers, according to a UNSW release.

Global: Most high blood pressure in developing world - study

2008-05-02

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N01359260.htm

More than 80 percent of high blood pressure disease occurs in the developing world, and mostly among younger adults, researchers said on Thursday in a report that belies the image of hypertension as a disease of harried, overfed rich people.

Guinea Ecuatorial: AIDS and the contradictions of Spanish development cooperation

Agustín Velloso

2008-05-02

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/hivaids/47861

At the end of October 2007 in Madrid, Spanish President Zapatero promised 0.7% of GDP towards development aid during some workshops promoted by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and presided over by Queen Sofía. As he did so, a boy we can call Miguel, ill with AIDS in Equatorial Guinea, was dying in his mother's arms in the hospital of Malabo the country's capital. His doctors administered an extract from tree bark instead of the internationally recognized treatment, anti-retrovirals.
At the end of October 2007 in Madrid, Spanish President Zapatero promised 0.7% of GDP towards development aid during some workshops promoted by the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID) and presided over by Queen Sofía. As he did so, a boy we can call Miguel, ill with AIDS in Equatorial Guinea, was dying in his mother's arms in the hospital of Malabo the country's capital. His doctors administered an extract from tree bark instead of the internationally recognized treatment, anti-retrovirals.

These drugs are available in Equatorial Guinea. International agencies donate them. One is not dealing with witchdoctors but doctors trained by the AECID. Among that agency's purposes is training these doctors to treat AIDS and to advise their clinical work with AIDS patients.

The reason Miguel did not receive the right treatment is the corruption of the people responsible for caring for his health. According to ASODEGUE - the Association for Democratic Solidarity with Equatorial Guinea - the Prime Minister of that country called a meeting months ago of the national coordinators of the campaign against AIDS and of the international agencies working in the country. Among these are the delegates of the World Health Organization (WHO) and AECID's experts who advise Equatorial Guinea's Health Ministry.

A niece of President Obiang also took part in the meeting. She is not a doctor but a businesswoman. She presented the meeting's participants with a project to produce the bark extract - called Fagaricine - to market it as an AIDS treatment. She also asked their opinion about the project.

In its January 2008 Republic of Congo WHO Office Information Bulletin, the WHO notes "Fagaricine is not an AIDS drug." (http://www.who.int/countries/cog/publications/missive_27.pdf)

Whatever the opinion of the experts may have been, shortly afterwards a tragedy took place when a group of patients, including Miguel, attended their routine appointment in the Malabo Hospital to collect their treatment : anti-retrovirals. But they received another one instead: Fagaricine. The group of guinea pigs included children and adults and at least one expectant mother. No explanation was given, most of the people did not even know.

They soon began to get worse. Some died. The population became concerned. Despite foreign aid and government propaganda, AIDS treatment in the country is a disaster. Currently, Fagaricine is no longer prescribed in that hospital but it is sold in a few pharmacies.

Meanwhile, Obiang and his circle receive medical care abroad. Some via payment of astronomical bills in private clinics in the United States and others for free in Spain's public hospitals. At the same time, in Equatorial Guinea private clinics flourish whose services only the very well-off can afford. Several are owned by President Obiang's wife and most of them have his family members as partners.

The government is unable to provide health care to the population. As opposition leader Plácido Mico noted in November 2007 in the National Economic Conference, "the health care situation in Equatorial Guinea, a multimillionaire country, is without doubt the best example of our deep inequalities, injustices and social exclusion, as is the distribution of wealth in the country. Apart from Mongomo, no general hospital in the country permits even a straightforward x-ray." (http://www.cpds-gq.org/comunicados2007/noticia071113.html)

Equatorial Guinea is one of the main producers of oil and gas in Africa and has been a most favored beneficiary of technical and economic aid from Spain for decades. The AECID implements its health work there "via various projects with one common denominator: the formation of a framework permitting the institution building of the National Health System."

One of these projects, the control of endemic diseases, is carried out for AECID by Spanish state bodies, the National Centre of Tropical Medicine and the Carlos the Third Health Institute. With formidable funding, they aim "to achieve the training and improvement in operative capacity of local technical personnel in the Health System and in the National Programmes." (www.maec.es) The main endemic disease is AIDS.

The argument the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation's office in Equatorial Guinea use to justify their expenditure is that it is being used to build "local capacity" for each of the "National Programmes".

Tuberculosis and AIDS are allowed to get out of control at the same time discriminatory laws are issued against people who are HIV positive, like Presidential Decree No. 107/2006 of November 20th 2007, which ordains "the requirement of an HIV/AIDS test certificate in order to obtain certain public services."

During the recent electoral campaign in Spain, María Teresa Fernández de la Vega, the Spanish government's First Vice-President and Presidency Minister promised, alongside Miguel Angel Moratinos, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation and Leire Pajín, Secretary of State for International Cooperation, that Spain would "make history in the next four years" and be "a leader in solidarity". She also stressed that Spanish socialists believe in politics "as a means to make the world a better place" and that, since we are the eighth biggest economy in the world "we have to take on the responsibility demanded by our place on the world stage". (http://leirepajin.blogspot.com/2008/02/de-la-vega-reafirma-en-acto-de-la.html)

Despite the sonorous propaganda about international aid, more resounding still is the silence about the Obiang family's corruption and the results of Spanish development cooperation in Equatorial Guinea.

Translated by Toni Solo, activist living in Nicaragua.

Kenya: ARV programmes recovering form post-election crisis

2008-05-02

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77946

Thousands of Kenyans who dropped out of HIV treatment programmes in January as a result of the country's post-election violence are gradually returning to clinics and the antiretroviral (ARV) drugs that help prolong their lives.

Kenya: Clergy urged to ditch sanctimony in HIV fight

2008-05-02

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=77992

When Bishop James Otieno Okombo revealed he was HIV-positive in 1996, his archbishop summarily dismissed him, calling him a sinner and a disgrace to his church. "He [the archbishop] called me before a church leaders' conference and told me to repent; to denounce the sins that led to me getting infected," Okombo told a meeting of the National Council of Churches of Kenya (NCCK) last week. "They took off my ceremonial attire - the collar, shirt and gown, and the cross - and sent me home."

Uganda: Hard labour for HIV-Positive IDPs

2008-05-02

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78011

Melia Alanyo, 46, left northern Uganda for the capital city, Kampala, in the late 1980s when the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) started abducting, attacking and killing people in her village. She has spent the last 20 years in Kireka, a low-income suburb on the city's outskirts, collecting and breaking rocks into chips at a local quarry. For every 20-litre jerry can she fills, she earns 100 Ugandan shillings (US$0.06). On a good day, when she is feeling strong and can take the sun beating down on her back as she chips away at the rocks, she takes home about 1,000 Ugandan shillings (US$0.60).

Uganda: High prevalence of cervical cancer-associated HPV strains in HIV-positive women

2008-05-01

http://tinyurl.com/6cpvfn

Almost 50% of HIV-positive women in Rakai, Uganda are infected with strains of human papilloma virus (HPV) that are associated with a risk of cervical cancer, according to a study published in the online edition of Sexually Transmitted Infections. The study also showed that women who reported symptoms of tuberculosis, shingles or oral thrush, all of which are associated with HIV, had an increased risk of infection with potentially cancer-causing HPV strains.

Africa : Developing enabling institutions for Education For All

2008-05-01

http://www.unesco.org/education/gmr2008/chapter3.pdf

To ensure the right to a basic education, the Dakar Framework called upon governments to develop responsive, participatory and accountable systems of educational governance and management. Since then, the search for improved institutions better able to deliver education has accelerated and it is now common for education programmes to have a ‘good governance’ component.

Africa: Copyright and education in Africa: Launch of the ACA2K network

2008-05-02

http://tinyurl.com/5atk3d

As the global community marks World Intellectual Property Day 2008 (26 April), an eight-country African research network is being launched with a mandate to investigate the relationship between copyright and education in African countries. The network, called the African Copyright & Access to Knowledge network (ACA2K network), is a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa and Uganda, supported by a team of international advisors.

Zimbabwe: Schools in crisis as teachers flee rural violence

2008-05-01

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news300408/teachertsflee300408.htm

An educational crisis has developed around the country with many schools suffering from a shortage of teachers, due to the current crackdown on suspected opposition supporters and officials. Our correspondent Simon Muchemwa said teachers are not returning to work because they are being hunted down and victimised for the role they played during the elections and because the ruling party considers them agents of the opposition.

Zimbabwe: Teachers suffer post-election violence

2008-05-02

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78032

Teachers have become the latest targets in Zimbabwe's post-election violence, in which abductions, intimidation and beatings have already left two dead. "We have received bad news. As we speak, two teachers have been killed - beaten to death," Wellington Chibebe, secretary-general of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions, told a gathering of workers in Harare, the capital, on 1 May.

Sudanese: Climate scientist receives prestigious award

2008-05-02

http://tinyurl.com/5tq9lm

A Sudanese climate researcher has been honoured by the UN Environment Programme in recognition of her work on climate change and adaptation in conflict-stricken Darfur. Balgis Osman-Elasha, a senior researcher at Sudan's Higher Council for Environment and Natural Resources, was presented with a 'Champions of the Earth 2008' award this week (22 April), along with six other awardees from Bangladesh, Barbados, Monaco, New Zealand, United States and Yemen.

Gambia: Defence counsel fails to show up in court for the second time

2008-04-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/47767

The protracted sedition trial against Fatou Jaw Manneh, a US-based Gambian journalist, was on April 24, 2008, adjourned to April 30 by Magistrate Buba Jawo of the Kanifing Magistrates Court. Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) sources in The Gambia reported that the adjournment was due to the absence of defence counsel, Lamin Jobarteh, who was said to be engaged in another case at the Brikama Magistrate Court.
The Gambia UPDATE: Defence counsel fails to show up in court for the second time.

The protracted sedition trial against Fatou Jaw Manneh, a US-based Gambian journalist, was on April 24, 2008, adjourned to April 30 by Magistrate Buba Jawo of the Kanifing Magistrates Court.

Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) sources in The Gambia reported that the adjournment was due to the absence of defence counsel, Lamin Jobarteh, who was said to be engaged in another case at the Brikama Magistrate Court.

The Principal Magistrate Buba Jawo told the court that if Jobarteh failed to appear before the court at the next hearing, Fatou Jaw Manneh would have to resort to other means of defence.

Jawo's harsh reaction is likely to be connected to the fact that Jobarteh also failed to appear before the court on April 14, 2008, allegedly due to illness.

Manneh, who was arrested upon her arrival from the USA on March 28, 2007, has been charged with three counts of sedition, following a series of online articles she wrote criticising the regime of President Yahya Jammeh.

Since the trial started more than a year ago, there has not been any significant progress. The recent adjournment is just the latest of a long list of events that have prolonged the case far beyond a reasonable timeframe.

The journalist remains stranded in The Gambia, even though she had been living in the US for a decade prior to her arrest.

Prof. Kwame Karikari
Executive Director
MFWA
Tel: 233 21 242470
Fax: 233 21 221084
Email: mfwa@africaonline.gh.com
Website: www.mediafound.org

Ghana: Minister Interrupts TV programme

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/47810

Joe Baidoo Ansah, Ghana's Minster of Trade and Industry, on April 24, 2008, interrupted a live-broadcast on Metropolitan Television (Metro TV), an Accra-based TV station, to register his displeasure about the inclusion of Nii Moi Thompson, an opposition spokesman, in the flagship programme "Good Evening Ghana".
Ghana ALERT: Minister Interrupts TV programme

Joe Baidoo Ansah, Ghana's Minster of Trade and Industry, on April 24, 2008, interrupted a live-broadcast on Metropolitan Television (Metro TV), an Accra-based TV station, to register his displeasure about the inclusion of Nii Moi Thompson, an opposition spokesman, in the flagship programme "Good Evening Ghana".

Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) correspondent reported that the minister who was unhappy about Thompson's comments stormed the studio amidst insult and threats, forcing a break in transmission.

Metro TV, a state/private station run a special edition of Good Evening Ghana to review the just ended United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) meeting in Accra. It was during the programme that Thompson, who had been invited in his capacity as a policy analyst, made critical comments against the government.

Ansah told JOY FM, an Accra-based independent station, that he went into the studio to protest against the politicization of otherwise a United Nation programme.

Following the Minister's behaviour, that particular edition of the "Good Evening Ghana" was not rebroadcast the next day as has been the practice. This led to Kwesi Pratt Jnr., Editor of the Insight, accusing the Minister of Information of masterminding it. Meanwhile, both the management of the station and the minister had denied Pratt's allegation. Explaining the rationale behind their refusal to rebroadcast, the management said that the programme was in a bad state and rebroadcasting would tarnish the country's reputation.

Prof. Kwame Karikari
Executive Director MFWA
Tel: 233 21 242470
Fax: 233 21 221084
Email: mfwa@africaonline.gh.com
Website: www.mediafound.org

Niger: Radio station shut down for broadcasting military brutalities

2008-04-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/47759

Sahara FM, a privately-owned radio station based in Agadez, the largest city in the northern part of Niger, was on April 22, 2008, shut down indefinitely by the media regulator, the High Communications Council (CSC) for allegedly "inciting ethnic hatred and undermining the morale of the Army".
Niger ALERT: Radio station shut down for broadcasting military brutalities

Sahara FM, a privately-owned radio station based in Agadez, the largest city in the northern part of Niger, was on April 22, 2008, shut down indefinitely by the media regulator, the High Communications Council (CSC) for allegedly "inciting ethnic hatred and undermining the morale of the Army".

Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA)'s correspondent reported that the closure followed a complaint by the authorities over broadcast of testimonies of victims of military brutalities on Sahara FM between April 13 and April 17. Several of the victims claimed in a series of interviews, that they had suffered brutalities at the hands of Nigerien soldiers.

The complaint was filed by the Agadez Governor and Commissioner of Police and on April 18, Raliou Ahmed Assaleh, Director of Sahara FM and correspondent for Radio France International (RFI) in Agadez, was summoned to Niamey to answer the accusations The soldiers had been deployed in Agadez's region to curb the ongoing rebellion being waged by the Tuareg's Movement of Nigeriens for Peace (MNJ), more than a year ago.

The CSC, Niger's media regulatory organ, said in a statement that the closure is "without prejudice to any possible criminal action", indicating that the shut-down of the radio station does not mean that the case has ended.

Prior to the closure, various newspapers in Niger had published articles on "extrajudicial executions" by Nigerien soldiers of citizens who where suspected to be in collusion with the MNJ.

MFWA is deeply concerned about the continuous oppression of the media spurred on by the government's efforts against the rebellion. We call on the administration of President Mamadou Tandja to immediately re-open Sahara FM and launch an independent investigation into the claims of random executions by the Nigerien soldiers.

Prof. Kwame Karikari
Executive Director MFWA
Tel: 233 21 242470
Fax: 233 21 221084
Email: mfwa@africaonline.com.gh
Website: www.mediafound.org

Zimbabwe: Another journalist arrested

2008-05-02

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=26805

Reporters Without Borders condemns Thursday’s arrest of freelance journalist Precious Shumba in a police raid on the Harare office of the international aid NGO ActionAid, where Shumba works as a programmes officer. A reporter for The Daily News until it was forced to close, he is the 10th journalist to be arrested since the general elections.

Burundi: Fighting rages

2008-05-02

http://tinyurl.com/4xv67x

The Burundian military has announced the deaths of at least 11 fighters from the National Liberation Forces (FNL) in fresh fighting near the capital Bujumbura. The clashes on Monday between the government and the FNL comes after the United Nations warned of sanctions unless a ceasefire is observed.

Chad: Aid worker's death shows limits of EU force

2008-05-02

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L02840011.htm

The European Union military force in Chad does not have enough troops to escort humanitarian convoys in the conflict-torn eastern region where a French aid worker was killed by gunmen, a force spokesman said on Friday.

Somalia: More than 2.6 million people are in crisis

2008-05-01

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/MUMA-7E84HT?OpenDocument

The Food Security Analysis Unit for Somalia deteriorating at an accelerated pace due to sky rocketing food prices, a deepening drought due to an abnormally harsh dry season and a delayed and poor start to the seasonal rains (mid-April to June). As result the number of people in need of assistance has increased to 2.6 million people in Somalia (35% of the total population), which is an increase of more than 40% since January '08.

Western Sahara: UN mission extended

2008-05-01

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=26524

The Security Council has extended until 30 April 2009 the mandate of the United Nations mission in Western Sahara (MINURSO), tasked with monitoring the ceasefire between Morocco and the Frente Polisario and organizing a referendum on self-determination. In a unanimously adopted resolution, the Council called on the parties to enter into “a more intensive and substantive phase of negotiations” to resolve their long-running dispute.

Africa: Second Africa ICT Best Practice conference held

2008-05-01

http://www.balancingact-africa.com/news/current1.html

This week, the capital of Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou hosted the second annual “Africa ICT Best Practice Forum” which serves as a practical way for Governments from across Africa to share their own experiences and demonstrate practical examples of successful technology solutions in their respective countries. It attracted a large crowd of Ministers and civil servants from all over Africa and was held in at the same time as Burkina Faso’s national Internet week and the local ICT event SITICI.

Africa: Universities play catch-up with online content

2008-05-02

http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/159998/1/

African universities are crucial to the future development of the Internet on the continent in two ways. Firstly, they contain one of the largest groups of existing and potential users: today’s student user is tomorrow’s future decision-maker. Secondly, universities should be generators of content that will be used by the same students to increase their knowledge and skills. The Kenyan Government and Google have both said they want to provide free Internet connectivity to students.

Blogging for Transparency & Good Governance: on IFIs

2008-05-01

http://thekaufmannpost.net/blogging-for-accountability-good-governance/

Blogs are playing an increasingly important role for improved governance. Blogs do not face the restraints of commercial print media. The blogosphere is a planet apart from traditional PR departments of public institutions, enabling citizens to share unfiltered information, expose misdeeds, and freely express views. Blogs help make governments and public institutions more accountable. In real time.

East Africa: Uganda extends fibre cable to Rwanda border

2008-05-02

http://africa.oneworld.net/article/view/159962/1/

Uganda Telecom has started work on a fiber-optic link from the western town of Mbarara in Uganda to the Rwanda border-crossing point at Katuna - essentially giving a major boost to the long-awaited regional fibre project. When completed in November this year, a significant section of what has come to be known as the East African Backhaul System (EABS) will be in place, giving Uganda end-to-end fiber coverage, the telecommunications news outlet IDG News Service reported on Monday.

Global: Wireless Technology for Social Change

2008-05-02

http://mobileactive.org/wireless-technology-social-change-trends-ngo-mobile-use

Mobile technology is transforming the way advocacy, development and relief organizations accomplish their institutional missions. This is nothing new to readers of MobileActive. Our recent report Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use, just released by the United Nations Foundation and The Vodafone Group Foundation, brings this point home.

Global: CIDA Conference fund

2008-04-30

http://www.acdi-cida.gc.ca/CIDAWEB/acdicida.nsf/en/RAC-1128124437-NTG

The Conferences and Events Secretariat supports participation by eligible delegates at conferences that address topics of particular interest to the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Conferences must directly support one or more of CIDA’s program priorities (governance, health, basic education, private-sector development, and environmental sustainability, with gender equality as a cross-cutting theme), and seek to influence sustainable development in developing countries and/or countries in transition.

Global: MDG3 Fund: Investing in equality

2008-04-30

http://www.mdg3.nl/

‘Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women’, the third Millennium Development Goal is a priority of the Dutch government. More action is needed to truly create a society where men and women are equal and enjoy the same rights and opportunities. Concrete action is called for to achieve equality between women and men. As a result Dutch NGO’s, companies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have decided to put their back into the fund: MDG3 Fund:Investing in Equality to contribute to the realization of Millennium Development Goal 3.

Securing Women's Access to Land - Call for expressions of interest

2008-05-02

http://www.landcoalition.org/program/programmes.html

PLAAS is pleased to announce the launching of a new small grants project for action research on gender and land in Southern Africa: Securing Women's Access to Land - Linking Research with Action. The project is funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and in collaboration with the International Land Coalition (ILC) and Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR, responsible for East Africa).

South Africa: 'Being good in a bad world’: Social representations of morality among township youth

13 May 2008

2008-05-02

http://www.hsrc.ac.za/HSRC-Seminar-283.phtml

Based on a multi-year ethnography, this presentation describes township youth's multiple social representations of morality. Drawing on Moscovici's theory of social representations, it details what these might be, how they are empirically elicited, and why social representations are important for social science that aims at making a difference.

Africa Regional Organizer / Coordinator - GROOTS International/Groots Africa

2008-05-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/47803

GROOTS International/Groots Africa and the Huairou Commission are seeking an Africa Regional Organizer / Coordinator, based in Nairobi, Kenya, to support members of GROOTS and the Huairou Commission in the region to facilitate grassroots women’s effective participation in our networks and programs. The African Regional Organizer will work to fulfill GROOTS’ goals, and will work with a team based in Africa and New York to coordinate the Huairou Commission’s Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) joint regional partnership project.
GROOTS International/Groots Africa and the Huairou Commission are seeking an Africa Regional Organizer / Coordinator, based in Nairobi, Kenya, to support members of GROOTS and the Huairou Commission in the region to facilitate grassroots women’s effective participation in our networks and programs. The African Regional Organizer will work to fulfill GROOTS’ goals, and will work with a team based in Africa and New York to coordinate the Huairou Commission’s Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) joint regional partnership project. The next one year plan for GROOTS Africa focuses on identifying and building the capacity of 20 grassroots women leaders in 6 current member countries who can work with professional partners to forge national and regional networks of grassroots women. We are seeking a Regional Organizer who will work closely with GROOTS member organizations in Africa, supporting them to organize and solidify the movement.

This will include:
surfacing and building the capacities of grassroots women leaders;
facilitating their effective participation in development;
and supporting the creation of national networks.

This will require the Regional Organizer to communicate with national coordinators on an on-going basis to assist with expansion and strengthening of the national networks through long-term strategic thinking and planning, and will support the implementation of one-year strategic plans in each country. The organizer will also link these groups to each other, facilitating sharing of information, lessons learned and successful strategies. Concurrently with supporting this network and movement-building, the Organizer will work to support country-level initiatives to support and strengthen women’s land rights at the community level. These initiatives are taking part within the Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) initiative (see below for more).

The position will also require some administrative functions, including communication with existing WLLA partners; development of plans of action as a regional network in conjunction with existing and new WLLA partners; outreach to others on the WLLA Project; organizing of events, including exchanges of groups; and direct assistance to partners on a variety of tasks. A variety of administrative tasks such as budget oversight and some fundraising will also be required, though support may be available from GROOTS/Huairou Commission staff members. Requirements The chosen candidate should demonstrate several years of successful experience organizing and/or coordinating grassroots women’s groups (networks, etc) that focus on improving their lives and communities. Capacity to take strong leadership, and work with diverse groups and individuals is essential as are strong communication skills (oral, email, basic reports). She should also have motivational skills, and be able to orient members and potential members to the mission, values and goals of GROOTS and the Huairou Commission. Knowledge of women’s housing and land rights in the region is essential.

Additional qualifications:
.Dedication to supporting grassroots women and the development processes they are leading, including those related to land and property rights.
·Focus at the grassroots level and on amplifying the voices of grassroots women;
·Competent and conversant with the issues most central to the themes our members are working on – primarily Land and Housing, Governance and HIV/AIDS;
·Ability & willingness to travel (including site visits, meetings, exchanges);
·Ability to think and write in a critical and articulate manner;
·Ability to communicate in multiple languages (French and English) a plus;
·Ability to analyze reports;
·Experience with grant-writing and fundraising;
·Fiscal knowledge & ability to organize budgets and reports;
.Ability to collect and process data/statistics.

The organizer will be supervised by a regional coordinator based in Nairobi, and will also work closely with the global offices of GROOTS International and the Huairou Commission (in New York). Full time Salary $15,000 per year based on 3-month contracts An additional budget will be available for regional/international transport and communication To Apply:

Interested persons should contact:
Esther Mwaura-Muiru
Waiyai_esther@yahoo.com
254-20-271-8977 Via email copy:
and
Shannon.Hayes@huairou.org
Nicole.Ganzekaufer@huairou.org

Background: The Organizations GROOTS International GROOTS International is a network of grassroots women’s organizations working for the development of their communities. In Africa, GROOTS member organizations have been building a unique, values-based network over the past five years, focused on supporting and documenting effective grassroots-driven strategies, linking grassroots women’s organizations to each other for peer learning, and bringing grassroots women’s priorities and practices into policy-making venues at the local, national and international levels. GROOTS network members have focused on fostering grassroots women’s participation in local governance/decision making, organizing home-based care workers for recognition of their contributions in the fight against HIV AIDS, and supporting women’s groups to secure women and children’s control over land and property amidst the HIV-AIDS pandemic.

GROOTS International is a founding member (and the host network) of the Huairou Commission. Please see: www.groots.org The Huairou Commission, established in 1995 at the 4th World Conference on Women, is a global coalition of networks, institutions and individual professionals that links grassroots women’s community development organizations to partners for access to resources, information sharing and political spaces. The Huairou Commission is a collaboration among development professionals and locally focused women’s networks that aims to highlight and upscale the effective local development approaches of grassroots women’s groups and to establish development policies and programs that foster their replication. www.huairou.org The Huairou Commission’s Land and Housing Campaign: Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) Joint Regional Partnership Project The Huairou Commission is seeking a Regional Organizer / Coordinator of the Women’s Land Link Africa Joint Regional Partnership Project. WLLA was founded on the principal that organizations and others who are working to to improve the situation for women’s land and housing rights in Africa should link in complementary ways to strengthen existing efforts. As a partnership project, the Huairou Commission has been playing the key role of linking and highlighting in particular the innovations at the grassroots which lead to concrete improvements in the lives of community women. The WLLA provides information gathering and dissemination and facilitates knowledge exchange between grassroots organizations and others. As a partnership project, the WLLA enhances these efforts by providing a direct link to international and regional arenas and mechanisms that may otherwise be difficult to access for women’s organizations in the Africa region.

Africa: Executive Director : Africa Division - Human Rights Watch

2008-05-02

http://www.hrw.org/jobs/docs/2008/02/15/africa18084.htm

Human Rights Watch ("HRW") is seeking a highly-qualified, senior-level professional to head its Africa Division. The Executive Director of HRW's Africa Division is responsible for the development and implementation of strategies for HRW's work in Africa and ensuring the setting of programmatic priorities, including response to emergencies. S/he is responsible for overseeing the division's research on human rights violations and for developing effective advocacy and communications strategies for maximum impact.

Deputy Director - Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative

2008-05-01

http://www.humanrightsinitiative.org/jobs/default.htm#4

The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) is looking for a Deputy Director, to be based at its Headquarters in New Delhi, India. CHRI is an advocacy organization whose core concerns are Access to Information and Access to Justice. Send CV, with contact details of three referees and a covering letter outlining why you are applying for the position and how you would contribute to the organisation to: vinu@humanrightsinitiative.org Applications will be accepted until the position is filled.

Fahamu