Dorothy-Grace Guerrero and Firoze Manji (ed) (2008) China’s New Role in Africa and the South: A search for a new perspective. 
Current Issue
Pambazuka News 367: Zimbabwe, the food rebellions and Mbeki's AIDS folly
The authoritative electronic weekly newsletter and platform for social justice in Africa
Pambazuka News (English edition): ISSN 1753-6839
With nearly 500 contributors and an estimated 500,000 readers Pambazuka News is the authoritative pan African electronic weekly newsletter and platform for social justice in Africa providing cutting edge commentary and in-depth analysis on politics and current affairs, development, human rights, refugees, gender issues and culture in Africa.
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CONTENTS: 1. Features, 2. Comment & analysis, 3. Pan-African Postcard, 4. Letters, 5. Obituaries, 6. Books & arts, 7. Blogging Africa, 8. Zimbabwe update, 9. African Union Monitor, 10. Human rights, 11. Refugees & forced migration, 12. Social movements, 13. Elections & governance, 14. Africa & China, 15. Corruption, 16. Development, 17. Health & HIV/AIDS, 18. Education, 19. Environment, 20. Media & freedom of expression, 21. Conflict & emergencies, 22. Internet & technology, 23. Fundraising & useful resources, 24. Courses, seminars, & workshops, 25. Jobs
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Highlights from this issue
FEATURES:
- Chido Makunike on the many complexities of Zimbabwe
COMMENTS & ANALYSIS:
- Henry Saragih's calls for food sovereignty
- Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Giménez on the food crisis and the New Green Revolution
- William Gumede on Mbeki and the AIDS controversy - Part III
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Bill Quigle on the US and the food riots in Haiti
LETTERS: Readers' comments and announcements
BLOGGING AFRICA: Review of African blogs
AFRICAN UNION MONITOR: AU Monitor weekly round-upANNOUNCEMENTS: Angola allows arms ship to dock
ZIMBABWE UPDATE: Locals defend themselves against militia
CONFLICT AND EMERGENCIES: Fighting rages in Burundi
HUMAN RIGHTS: Report on torture by Kenyan military
REFUGEES AND FORCED MIGRATION: Egypt arrests Israel-bound immigrants
SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: New strike planned in Egypt
ELECTIONS AND GOVERNANCE: Cash shortfall over Kenya cabinet
AFRICA & CHINA: Chinese companies sign deal to heighten Blue Nile dam
CORRUPTION: Corruption: Causes, effects and deterrents
DEVELOPMENT: New Report on the sate of the humanitarian enterprise
HEALTH AND HIV/Aids: Boosting vaginal health could cut HIV risk
EDUCATION: Developing enabling institution for EFA
ENVIRONMENT: Sudanese scientist awarded
MEDIA AND FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION: Another journalist arrested in Zimbabwe
INTERNET & TECHNOLOGY: ICT Best Practice conference held
PLUS: e-newsletters and mailings lists; courses, seminars and workshops, and jobs
*Pambazuka News now has a Del.icio.us page, where you can view the various websites that we visit to keep our fingers on the pulse of Africa! Visit http://del.icio.us/pambazuka_news
Features
The complexities of Zimbabwe
2008-05-01
Chido Makunike
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
Comment & analysis
The time for Food Sovereignty has come!
2008-05-01
Henry Saragih
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
2008-04-15
Raj Patel and Eric Holt-Giménez
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
2008-04-22
William Gumede
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. 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
Pan-African Postcard
The role of the USA in Haiti hunger riots
2008-04-22
Bill Quigle
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
Letters
Private ownership of Africa's gene pool
2008-05-01
Carol B. Thompson
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
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!
2008-05-01
Carlos Otero
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.
Obituaries
Homage to Aimé Césaire
2008-05-02
Lazare Ki-Zerbo
Homage to Aimé Césaire
On the 23rd of June 2006 I arrived in Fort de France to celebrate Aime Césaire's 93rd birthday. Visiting the beautiful island of Martinique, and meeting her celebrated son filled me with a deep sense of joy.
The 22nd of July 2006 will remain one of the most important days of my professional life, a gilded moment in one's lifetime.
Césaire, to borrow his characterization of Haiti:...where negritude stood up... was negritude standing up, as unique as the slaves' victory over their master. He was both the uniqueness and the universality of the black experience.
The universality of the black experience is particularly critical to the current discourse on human rights, especially when one considers that negritude is in essence a revolt against the specific conditions facing black people everywhere; oppressed, shunned, victimized, as expressed by the likes of Rimbaud in Abyssinia. It is through this expansive lense that we understand Césaire's negritude. At the end Toussaint Louverture we read: Toussiant demonstrated that there is no pariah race; that there is no marginal country; that there is no special nation of people. The aim was to emphasize and give force to a principle. In the struggle for human rights, Louverture was an advocate for all blacks, and this is his true legacy. Toussaint Louverture fought to concretise the rights of man and for this reason the slave revolt of Santo Domingo is inscribed in the history of human civilization.
Beyond his poetry, Césaire contributed ideas that provide us with a basis for the struggle for protection and advancement of human rights.
How do Césaire's ideas resonate in Brazil?
Eminent scholars have distinguished between the different forms that negritude has taken; the insurrectionist, the intellectual, Cesairian, Haitian, black-American in the tradition of Marcus Garvey, or Malcolm X, and even the religious, the rural, and the Brazilian.
In 1979 on the occasion of the First African Diaspora Studies Institute (FADSI) held at Howard University, St Clair Drake asked the question: Should black Brazilians be included in the broader pan-African network, or should their way of life and their more parochial form of negritude be granted its own legitimacy?
Roger Bastide addressed the same question at the end of his book Les Amériques noires (« les chemins de la négritude »), in which he makes a distinction between,a negritude that is lived, deeply rooted and rural, on the one hand, and that of the uprooted urban black proletariat, and intellectuals on the other.
Other scholars have noted the resurgence of a ritual and pan-Africanist negritude in the Afro-Brazilian religiosity and its spread to the United States
Besides the fact that Brazil is to some degree the the foremost « African » country in the diaspora, in terms of size, resources, population, and the struggle for the rights of its black citizens, the country provides an important case study on negritude and pan-Africanism. It allows us to explore the different political cultures within these literary and political movements.
I also recall that during Rene Depestre's sojourn in Brazil during the 1950s, he was challenged by Césaire for having defended the formalist style of [Louis] Aragon. He refers to the Haitian revolution in the poem « le verbe marronner »:
« C‘est une nuit de Seine et moi je me souviens comme ivre du chant dément de Boukmann accouchant ton pays au forceps de l’orage ».
Césaire's collection of poems Noria, published in 1976 expresses his perception of Brazilian negritude, especially in Bahia. This perception stems from a particular Brazilian Africanness that does not preclude a direct connection to the founding fathers of Quilombos, not the least of whom was Zumbi de Palmares, the famous maroon. This national hero was a revolutionary in the vein of Toussaint Louverture.
In a seminal speech delivered at the CIAD (I) conference, professor Mamadou Diouf recalled that it was not until 1956 at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists, that there were any Brazilian or even South American delegates at any major pan-African gatherings. The Brazilian writer Jorge Amado attended that famous meeting in Paris.
Meanwhile on the 22nd of February 2006, Elisa Larkin Nascimento, wife of Abdias do Nascimento sent me an email in which she emphasized the point that the spirit of negritude was always present in the work of her illustrious husband, ever since he founded the Black Experimental Theater (BET) in 1944. this is what she had to say:
...I would say that Leopold Senghor and his work on negritude occupy have historically had a major influence in our struggle. More recently, they have served as a significant reference point. Abdias do Nascimento, Gerreiro Ramos and the BET, were the main, if not the only voices that advocated negritude in Brazil in the 1940s and 50s, at a time when mere mention of the term evoked indignation and horror. It is true that the negritude they embraced adopted the Brazilian language and the particular reality of Afro-Brazilians. However the reference to the essential negritude movement was always present.
The official delegation to the World Festival of Black Arts excluded Abdias and the BET, instead sending white intellectuals to represent the country's Afro-Brazilians. You are no doubt familiar with the open letter Abdias addressed to the Festival and that was subsequently published by Alioune Diop in Présence Africaine. In some way the critique may have been biased by an ideological position that tended to ignore the specific African realities, as demonstrated by the experiences of pan-Africanists like George Padmore and CLR James.
We would sooner identify with the voice of Aime Césaire and Leon Gontran Damas than Senghor, because of some of the latter's political positions, especially his membership in the Académie Francaise, and vis-a-vis Cheikh Anta Diop. This is no doubt a simplistic take on what is in essence a more complex problem. Nonetheless, I hope it is useful...
This is just a personal view, but it clearly demonstrates how negritude was a wonder weapon for afro-descendant victims and their allies, faced with injustice, deprivation and both real and symbolic violence
My preoccupation is with the present form of this negritude, forged in resistance to all forms of discrimination, and human rights abuses... all human beings, be they Indian, European, black... we need to find political and institutional solutions. The work of the Special Secretariat of Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality (SEPPIR) in Brazil , or even the Institut de Peuples Noirs in Burkina Faso is a good start. Could this work transform into an Institute for the people of Africa and the Diaspora in which the incandescent voice of our Osiris, Aime Césaire will echo through to all the immortals of the pan-Africanist movement
* Lazare KI-ZERBO
(Comité international Joseph Ki-Zerbo)
* Translated by Josh Ogada
Books & arts
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."
Blogging Africa
Kenya: The Online Tribal Wars
2008-05-01
Edqwin Okong'o
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
2008-04-30
Dibussi Tande
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/
Zimbabwe update
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
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
More...
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
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
More...
African Union Monitor
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.
Human rights
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
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 asi