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Angolan government attacks activist organization

AJPD

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/action/50746

Angolan authorities filed legal action to close down the Angolan non-profit AJPD – Association for Justice, Peace and Democracy. AJPD is one of the non-profits most committed to the development of culture of human right in the country. The State's lawsuit is based on unconstitutional arguments and invalid proceedings.

AJPD CANNOT BE SHUT DOWN!

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

1) Send a message to letajpdkeepworking@gmail.com showing your solidarity. The messages will be printed and delivered to Angolan authorities that do not have an email adress. Suggestion of writing: “Such an active civil society organization towards the practice of human rights in Angola cannot be closed down! Let AJPD keep doing its work!

2) Contact the diplomats of your country in Angola and ask them to express to the Angolan government their solidarity to AJPD. This kind of support has borught great success in the past. Suggestion of writing: “Dear Mr./Mrs., the Angolan government is threatening to close by judicial means AJPD – Association for Justice, Peace and Democracy-, one of the most active human rights non-profits in Angola. I ask you to please express your solidarity of our country to the NGO, once the lawsuit contains unvalid proceedings and unconstitutional arguments. AJPD has shown for several times its commitment to democracy and fundamental rights.”

Here at the link below, please find more information on the case.
BACKGROUND:

On September 4th 2008, AJPD was cited by the Constitutional Court on a legal action for DISSOLUTION OF THE ASSOCIATION brought by the ATTORNEY GENERAL. AJPD found out that the former Attorney General, Mr. Augusto Carneiro, petitioned legal action for the dissolution of AJPD on July 15th, 2003. The case was sent to the Judge of the Supreme Court Neto de Miranda, still on July 31st, 2003. Once the Constitutional Court was created on July 2008, the case moved to that Court.

AJPD kept intense and permanent touch with the Ministry of Justice and the Attorney General by mail and hearings with members of these institutions. AJPD understands this is a political case.

Next, there are some articles of AJPD statute that the Attorney General claims are illegal and ungrounded by not complying with the Constitutional Law and the Law of Associations:

- Articles 6, b , 6,c,2 and 6,c,3:

b) Pacific reaction against the arbitrariness of authorities and the discretion of power, undertaking, firmly, the defense of the respect of the laws;

c) Public dennoucing of the most scandalous cases when it comes to human rights violations and active intervention towards their solution;

2) To issue report on every case regarding disrespect to the duty to obey the law;

3) To cooperate in the observation of the accordance with the constitution of legal and administrative decisions;

- Article 11, 3: Applications for admittance of new members shall come along with the curriculum vitae of the applicant or, in case it is a corporation, with the document assuring its curriculum was recorded at the competent registry and the copy of its statute whenever it is possible, and a signed declaration of the party showing its acceptance.

- Article 28, 2: When it comes to a partner that is a corporation/association, its vote shall come along with the record of the meeting of the board of directors in which it was decided that the vote shall be by mail. On the other hand, the articles of the Law of Associations that the Attorney General claims seem to be unconstitutional for restraining the liberty of association.

Global: Banking for Social Change Collaborative Challenge!

2008-09-25

http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/bankingonsocialchange

Citi and Ashoka's Changemakers are leading the way to unearth the the best solutions to make financial opportunity a possibility for all. The advent of new financing methods - from mobile banking to peer-to-peer lending - are changing the way we access, spend and save our money. "Banking on Social Change: Seeking Financial Solutions for All" aims to unearth the most innovative and cutting-edge methods that allow financial security to become a reality for everyone. The deadline is just days away on October 1st!

30th anniversary of the Alma-Ata Declaration on Universal Primary Health Care

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/editorial/50756

On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Alma-Ata Declaration on Universal Primary Health Care celebrated this month, and as world leaders gather at the United Nations this week for the UN General Assembly on Africa's Development Needs and mid term MDG Review, Pambazuka News, in collaboration with Equinet News, publishes this joint special issue reviewing the state of health in Africa underlining Africa's survival imperative for implementing Primary Health Care, Health MDGs and the AU Africa Health Strategy, and the key role of health workers.

Has PHC become a global orphan?

Anthony Seddoh

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/50751

With progress towards quality primary health care still slow some thirty years after Alma-Ata, Anthony Seddoh writes that an effective global alliance of global and country actors needs to set positive and realistic paths to implement the declaration’s intentions. In light of the continuing absence of a conceptual framework for addressing longstanding debates and organisational issues, the author considers whether primary health care represents a global orphan in need of fresh guardianship.


Thirty years after the 1978 Declaration of Alma-Ata, it seems the world is still at odds on how best to implement the principles of primary health care. The slow progress in improving health outcomes for all raises questions about the effectiveness of current ways of doing business. A concerted global alliance of global and country actors needs to set positive and realistic paths to implement the intentions of Alma-Ata.

Sixty years ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated in its constitution that health is ‘a state of physical, mental and social wellbeing, not only the absence of disease or infirmity.’ Thirty years later, the Alma-Ata declaration on Primary Health Care (PHC) declared among other things that ‘health is a fundamental right’ and created a thirteen-point outline to ensure this right. This outline captured concepts of essential care, universally accessibility and affordability for individuals and families within communities, who would be able to participate fully in a spirit of self-determination. It located PHC as an integral part of a country’s health system involving all related sectors and aspects of national and community development.

The WHO constitution’s definition of health and the Alma-Ata declaration together prompt a diametrical but complementary state to be addressed concurrently in the promotion of good health. The first deals with the clinical determinants of health, pushing for the absence of disease in individuals. The second addresses the determinants of health that predispose or prevent individuals from attaining a state of mental, physical and social wellbeing as a fundamental right. These include appropriate governance, the absence of war, economic and infrastructure development, adequate infrastructure and aid policies. A unique moment occurred in 1978 to bring these complementary understandings together.

Even before the ink could dry on the Alma-Ata declarations it had however already generated polarised antagonism. From a capitalist standpoint, it was a ridiculous proposition, both too costly and defying economic reasoning, and too socialist in its excessive emphasis on state-managed intervention. The conservative duo of J.A. Walsh and K.S. Warren launched the Selective PHC debate, arguing that it would probably more be efficient to save children and limit population growth, while the two main PHC proponents, WHO and UNICEF, soon drifted apart, with UNICEF promoting a selective package of low cost interventions. With resource flows following Selective PHC, Primary Health Care translated in most countries into a basic collection of services to be delivered at district and community levels based on a select number of interventions with some outreach services, with an accompanying watered-down district health package.

Why nobody asked at the time whether there was any moral significance to be attached to a person’s life or pointed out that choices based on state preferences for total health gain can be justified over financial resource allocation efficiency is difficult to comprehend. Aside from efficiency-based arguments being ridiculous propositions founded on utility-based preferences or embodying unattractive equity assumptions, the economic bargain in a healthy population should at least have also appealed to responsible international choice.

Much has since been achieved from the advance in technology in dealing with specific clinical determinants of specific diseases. It could be argued that a saturation point has been reached, where increases in financial and human investments in existing technologies are yielding less than proportional gains. Despite this the selective interventions approach continues to define health and health services delivery. It was given a new lease on life by the World Bank through its 1993 World Development Report, entitled ‘Investing in Health’. This report, which scarcely acknowledged PHC, commoditised and de-linked health from development and moved the world closer to an interventionist approach to health; intervening at a selective point in the epidemiology of a disease or health system.

This approach has since had wide global appeal. Currently there are over thirty WHO resolutions on AIDS, TB or Malaria alone; more than all other subjects. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have further entrenched this disease-specific approach to resource mobilisation. There are over 80 major global health initiatives linked to the health MDGs, providing over US$100 million annually. The Italian Global Health Watch reported in 2008 that the Global Fund has allocated approximately US$3.5 billion to countries for interventions on AIDS, TB and Malaria, mainly in Africa. Together, these initiatives have thrown billions of dollars at addressing diseases and improving clinical health conditions and made up a significant part of health sector budgets.

PHC is hardly mentioned in these initiatives, seldom highlighted by member states outside of anniversaries of the initiatives or occasional references to district health system strengthening. For various reasons the world assumed an emergency mode to address what are considered new and urgent public health issues. Single disease interventions that lend themselves to easily recognisable financial accountability, quantitative monitoring and evaluation held greater appeal for funders, especially when twinned with arguments of weak domestic governance and public policy failures and capacity limitations.

While these initiatives on clinical determinants hummed with measurable outcomes on specific diseases, the nexus of poverty and ill health was exacerbated. On the back of a growing trend in urban slum development, decline in state services, market failures in privatised economies, growing food insecurity and massive deprivation of rights to health care, inequalities in health have deepened to a significantly greater level over the past 30 years.

Hence while a lot has been done to deal with disease in individuals, the unique opportunity provided by the Alma-Ata Declaration to also address the determinants of health have largely been lost. Thirty years later we see the costs of this omission in levels of poverty which belie the levels of knowledge and technological advance achieved globally.

As we approach another anniversary for PHC expectations are high. People expect that their physical and mental health will be promoted in a safe social, economic and political environment. They expect to have quality health systems that provide preventive services, and which diagnose, treat and manage disease injury and reduce the severity and repeated occurrence of disease. They do not expect to see wide social and economic disparities in these basic entitlements. In Africa, the region furthest from delivery on these expectations, the Ouagadougou declaration on Primary Health Care issued on April 30 2008 called for a renewal of the Principles of Primary Health Care and its implementation in developing countries and by the international community.

Such declarations are encouraging, yet their implementation calls for resolution of longstanding debates of the past 30 years. These debates are not academic. In choices made over policy measures, relative allocation of institutional, social and financial resources and complementary systems for dealing with the social determinants of health (mostly dealt with by actions outside the health sector), they present social and economic inequalities that arise due to the burden of disease (mostly dealt with within the health sector). There are no clear answers for how a conceptual framework of Primary Health Care in 2008 will address this.

And while there is a massive coalition of global initiatives dealing with diseases, there is no clear coalition of global institutions supporting or funding the determinants of health, the second factor in the PHC equation. At a global level, the Bretton Woods institutions and OECD initiatives for debt relief and poverty reduction have in some African countries led to short-lived increases in spending on health and education, with no global initiatives so far adequately addressing the determinants of health.

This leaves PHC as an orphan with no global guardian. The WHO’s attempt to foster PHC is inadequate given the pluralistic global environment. The state of poverty and the winds of change in international health resource priorities will make rational choices among the various dimensions impossible and predispose countries to the dictate of new interventions and their implementation. While debates over the conceptual understanding of PHC will not end in 2008, this year could at least mark the turning point for a new institutional response, one that builds a global alliance to generate the momentum and support for countries to implement PHC and that provide policy learning based on practice from the bottom up, reminiscent of another basis for the Alma-Ata declaration.

A WHO or UN resolution creating such a global alliance would be a befitting PHC birthday gift for the millions of people seeking more than another conference. It will squarely put implementation right at the doorstep of a recognisable entity that can mobilise the needed funds and offer effective support to individual countries.

World Health Organization Africa region inter-country support team, Harare, Zimbabwe

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

Bringing population health back into primary health care

Chan Chee Khoon

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50752

In 1974, four years before the International Conference on Primary Health Care (PHC) was convened in Alma-Ata, USSR, the Canadian Ministry of National Health and Welfare published the Lalonde Report, named after the incumbent Liberal Party health minister Marc Lalonde.

Taking its cue from Thomas McKeown’s findings on the historical decline of tuberculosis mortality in England and Wales, the Lalonde Report challenged the presumption that improvements in human health by and large flowed from advances in (bio)medical knowledge, feeding through to professional practice and individual care.

McKeown’s writings on the main drivers of population growth and mortality decline in the early industrialising countries spawned vigorous debates. In addition to economic growth and improvements in food intake and nutritional status which McKeown himself highlighted, others argued also for the population health impacts of birth spacing and family size, housing and sanitary reforms (sewage disposal), and clean water and safe milk supplies (pasteurisation and eradication of bovine TB from livestock herds).

Mortality from typhus fever, a major killer in the 19th century, had shown continuous decline over subsequent decades in the UK to the extent that by 1906, three years before Charles Nicolle had discovered that the body louse transmitted typhus, London County Council reported no more deaths from that disease. Typhus fever, closely associated with poverty, poor housing, overcrowding, and poor hygiene was much less common among the middle and upper classes in 19th century England. Its decline was arguably linked to the increased availability of public baths, wash-houses, and widening use of cotton clothing, particularly underwear, which allowed for improved personal cleanliness.

Sonja and John McKinlay similarly concluded from their historical analyses that the fall in infectious diseases between 1900–1973, which accounted for 69% of the overall decline in US mortality during that period, could only be explained to a very limited extent (about 3%) by medical intervention.

Given the limited evidence base at the time, the Lalonde Report might in retrospect perhaps be judged prophetic (or lucky), and may have restrained a more cautious technocracy professing evidence-based policy and practice. In any case, the thesis was reinforced by subsequent findings from Sweden, France, Ireland, and Hungary, which supported the view that social and environmental changes were the key factors in their decline in infectious mortality.

By the time of the Alma-Ata declaration, these findings from medical history and population health were resonating strongly with more contemporary experiences from community-based primary health care in China, Bangladesh, Kerala, and Cuba. Notably, both perspectives shared a similarly broad vision of disease causation, rooted in what might be called a social ecology of health and disease.

According to the Canadian Advisory Committee on Population Health, population health strategies in particular address the entire range of factors that determine health, in contrast to traditional health care focusing on risks and clinical factors related to particular diseases. Furthermore, population health strategies are designed to affect an entire population, rather than specific individuals with existing health problems or a significant risk of developing one.

By the late 1980s, critics had highlighted weaknesses in the arguments of McKeown, challenging the relative contributions of fertility and mortality changes to population growth during the period in question, along with the early conflation of TB mortality with pneumonia and bronchitis (affecting the timing of TB’s decline), the under-emphasis of water supply and sanitary reforms from the 1870s and onwards, and, to a lesser extent, the contribution of isolation and quarantine to the control and reduction of infectious disease. From the 1850s onwards the decline of child labour (and its associated early life effects on adult health) has more also been proposed as a contributory factor, but this too is contested.

On the limited contribution of medical interventions to population health however, there was much less disagreement. Simon Szreter, who had played a prominent role in the critical re-appraisal of McKeown’s work, summed up the consensus thus: ‘The medical profession’s scientific leaders have, since McKeown’s time, had to change their tack and concentrate on the future, rather than the past, as the field in which they can stake the claim that they can save humanity from all its ailments with science.’

In less grandiose terms, the claim might be more plausible in the less developed countries, which still had (and for many still continue to have) large burdens of infectious disease in the mid-20th century, at a time when modern biomedical science could in principle have had a more significant impact on public health and in patient care (with vaccines, antimicrobials, and control of disease transmitting organisms).

The availability of diagnostics and the ongoing campaigns for access to anti-retrovirals for instance testify to the potential impact of biomedical science for the public health control of the HIV pandemic. Access to lifesaving treatment for infected individuals is emphatically a moral and ethical imperative. But a public health approach to anti-retroviral treatment goes beyond an individual focus. Equally important, the availability of effective therapy may in some situations encourage those at high risk to come forward for voluntary testing, and hence reduce the pool of infected-but-unaware individuals who constitute one of the drivers of the pandemic.

It is nonetheless noteworthy that the population health perspectives pioneered and promoted by McKeown and Lalonde continue to be relevant to modern epidemics. The SARS epidemic outbreak of 2002–2003 subsided largely in the absence of reliable diagnostics, vaccines, or efficacious therapies, notwithstanding the rapid success in isolating and sequencing the SARS coronavirus. Its control was credited to established public health measures such as isolation, contact tracing, ring-fencing, and quarantines, and the economic and financial stakes involved ensured that SARS would not be a ‘neglected disease’. ¬¬¬¬

Likewise, the Nipah outbreak in Malaysia (1998–1999) was rapidly brought under control without vaccines or efficacious therapies once modes of transmission were established. The knowledge that Nipah encephalitis was linked to a newly recognised paramyxovirus (which could be transmitted through close proximity to live, infected pigs but not via insects, suspended airborne particulates, or contact with raw or prepared meats) allowed for its rapid control in humans, even as this control decimated the pig farming industry in parts of Southeast Asia.

Thirty years on, these more recent experiences demonstrate that modern biomedical science continues to have an integral role to play in informing the socio-ecological perspective underpinning public health care in the 21st century.

In appraising this contribution of modern biomedical science to disease control and population health, it is however useful to distinguish between its contribution to knowledge-based practices and coping responses as opposed to a focus on commodifiable consumables. This distinction (neatly exemplified in the Nipah example) is especially pertinent in ensuring that advances in biomedical science in support of public health care are not simply subject to the strategic priorities of market-driven research and product development, but are backed by publicly-funded and rationally deployed needs-driven research in the biomedical sciences.

* Chan Chee Khoon, Universiti Sains Malaysia. email: ckchan50[AT]yahoo.com

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

Alma-Ata after 30 years: still relevant for Africa?

Rotimi Sankore

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50753

In the context of Africa’s present health crisis, only people suffering from policy blindness can fail to see that Africa’s survival as a continent depends on going beyond merely declaring emergencies, and actually financing and implementing universal primary health care (PHC).

In September 1978, the International Conference on Primary Health Care was held in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, then part of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR). Led by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the conference produced the Alma-Ata Declaration, which underlined the need for governments to protect the health of all citizens and emphasised that health for all is both a socio-economic (or development issue), and also a human right. The conference also highlighted the inequalities between developed and developing countries, and between the elite and ordinary people within countries.

One of the most significant outcomes of the conference through the Alma-Ata Declaration identified primary health care as ‘the most efficient and cost effective way to provide health care’. This has been recently reemphasised by the current Director General of the WHO Dr Margaret Chan.

Going by its definition of ‘essential health care based on practical, scientifically sound and socially acceptable methods and technology made universally accessible to individuals and families in the community through their full participation’ and the principle that ‘[h]ealth services must be shared equally by all people irrespective of their ability to pay and all (and rich or poor, urban or rural) must have access to health services’, it was assumed at the time that with effective implementation PHC would lead to health for all by the magical year 2000.

Based also on the understanding of health agencies, professionals and academic institutions that ‘primary health care needs to be delivered close to the people’ through ‘maximum use of both lay and professional health care practitioners’, experts have distilled down the basic principles of primary health care to several core factors, including the following:

• Public education for the identification, prevention, and control of prevailing health challenges • Education on and provision of proper food supplies and nutrition, including adequate supply of safe water and basic sanitation • Provision of maternal and child care, including sexual and reproductive health education, and family planning • Immunisation and vaccinations against major infectious diseases. • Prevention and control of locally endemic diseases • Appropriate treatment of common diseases using the most up-to-date, cost effective and appropriate technology • Promotion of mental, emotional and spiritual health • Provision of essential drugs and commodities.

It cannot be emphasised enough that these primary health care principles can only be possible through long-term sustainable and combined financing of both health systems, and disease specific interventions. The phantom debate over ‘health systems versus disease specific interventions’ is a false one and a diversion equivalent to asking if food is more important than water to human life. It should be reasonably obvious that health systems without medicines and commodities are as useless as medicines and commodities without health systems. This applies to all health issues, whether malaria, TB or HIV/Aids.

Sustainable and long-term health financing must therefore mean identifying the specific challenges and obstacles to primary health care, and on the basis of costed plans work out clear and timely frameworks for resolving these obstacles. In addition to disease specific and wider health system challenges, this includes focusing on the resolution of key obstacles such as the lack of policies and financing sustainable plans for reproductive and sexual health, and resolving Africa’s critical health workforce shortage.

*Sankore is Coordinator of the Africa Public Health Alliance & 15% Now Campaign, which engages African governments, global and African and institutions on implementation of the AU Africa Health Strategy, Health MDGs and fulfilling the AU Abuja pledge to allocate 15% of domestic national resources to health. He is also on the editorial advisory board of Pambazuka.

The campaign can be contacted at contactus[at]africapublichealth[dot]org, and contactus[at]africa15percentcampaign[dot]org . Reactions and comments on the write up should also be copied to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org

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

Health worker shortages: policy neglect equivalent to 'institutional manslaughter’

Rotimi Sankore

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50754

Africa’s critical health workforce shortage is arguably the most serious obstacle to implementing global and African health frameworks and universal primary health care across the continent. In almost no other aspect of life could it be imagined that a serious issue of social justice or social and economic development could be resolved without the presence of relevant and adequately trained and resourced personnel. No government would ever contemplate legal systems without judges and lawyers, mines without miners, airlines without pilots, banks without bankers, the possibility of farming without farmers, and certainly no army could exist without soldiers.

Yet on a matter of life and death for every single African, almost every African government seems to be muddling and mumbling along on the question of financing training and retaining adequate numbers of doctors, nurses and midwives, pharmacists, dentists, and a diverse range of community, public health and hospital workers. The great unanswered question of our time is how any government believes the ‘war’ against disease and non-disease health conditions can be won without adequate numbers of well-trained and fully resourced brigades of health workers and professionals.

We therefore need to state it, and state it clearly now. Health conditions do not diagnose themselves, and medicines do not administer themselves. Only health workers and professionals can. Africa’s health crisis will never be resolved until its extreme health workforce shortage is reversed. Or put simply, unless African governments immediately develop and finance implementation of an emergency plan for training and retaining adequate numbers of health workers, the current figure of over eight million African lives lost annually to health conditions is bound to increase and with dire consequences for Africa’s future.

GLOBAL HEALTH WORKFORCE COMPARISONS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR HEALTH DELIVERY

In this context, it is crucial to appreciate the scale of Africa’s health workforce shortage and its impact on the capacity of African countries both to implement universal primary health under the African Union’s new Africa Health Strategy and to meet the health-related Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). There is no point claiming we are ‘scaling up’ when the degree of scaling is a mere fraction of what is required.

If we are to utilise a numerical comparison between key African countries and G8 countries of similar population, the scale of Africa’s problem becomes much clear than using just the ratio of health workforce to population. Whether there be one doctor per 1,000 people, one per 10,000 or one per 100,000 has little context outside the ranks of health campaigners who possess the technical grasp of the implications of these numbers on health care delivery.

Utilising four categories of country populations as a basis for numerical comparison of the impact of health worker shortages, and health financing on primary health care, Canada and Kenya for instance have populations of 32.5 million and 36.5 million respectively. Canada has 62,307 doctors along with 327,224 nurses and midwives, to Kenya’s 4,500 and 37,113, with 27,048 pharmaceutical personnel to Kenya’s 3,094.

Moving up a scale, France and the DRC have populations of 61.3 million and 60.6 million respectively, for whom France has 207,277 doctors and the DRC 5,827. Likeiwse, France has 486,006 nurses to the DRC’s 28,789, and 69,431 pharmaceutical personnel to the 1,200 employed within the DRC.

A bit higher up the population scale, Germany and Ethiopia house 82.6 million and 81 million respectively, with Germany possessing 284,427 doctors and Ethiopia 1,936. Germany has 662,000 nurses and midwives and Ethiopia just 15,544, just as the European nation has 46,953 pharmaceutical personnel to the African’s 1,342.

Even further along the population scale, Japan and Nigeria have 127.9 million and 144.7 million people respectively. Japan has 270,371 doctors along with 1.2 million nurses and midwives, while Nigeria has a mere 34,923 and 210,306 of equivalent personnel. And most crucially, Japan has 241,569 pharmaceutical personnel and Nigeria 6,344.

The impact of the numerical differences in health workers on life and death is astounding. It does not take a mathematical genius to work out that based on current numbers, millions of Africans (especially those in rural areas) will never see a doctor in their lifetime, not even to certify their death. For each pair of comparison countries, the difference in Health Life Expectancy (HLE) of citizens is roughly 30 years, with countries having more health personnel achieving HLE of at least 70 years, and those with less health personnel averaging 40 years. A brief comparison of disease and non-disease health conditions further underlines the impact of health workforce shortages on health delivery.

While Canada has 60,000 people living with HIV, Kenya has 1.3 million. For France’s 130,000 people with the disease, there are one million in the DRC. While Germany has 49,000, HIV estimates for Ethiopia range as high as 1.3 million. And for Japan and Nigeria, the equivalent figures are 17,000 and 2.9 million. Factoring in the levels of Tuberculosis-related deaths, the leading killer of HIV-positive people, Mother to Child Transmission (which is preventable), and poor health systems (especially personnel) which are all crucial for implementing prevention and treatment strategies, it is clear why Africa is losing the battle against HIV.

In the case of non-disease maternal death (or childbirth-related deaths), Canada suffers six per 100,000, while Kenya weeps at 1,000 per 100,000. France has 17 per 100,000 with the DRC suffering 990 per 100,000. Germany has 8 deaths per 100,000 and Ethiopia 850 per 100,000, while Japan has 10 per 100,000 to Nigeria’s 800 per 100,000. In real terms this means for instance that of Kenya’s female of population about 18 million, roughly 180,000 die annually from an almost one hundred percent preventable cause. The lack of adequate numbers of trained personnel to provide skilled birth support for millions of women is again the key factor.

But lest it be said that the main determinant of adequate health workforce numbers and healthier life expectancy is G8 status, we could point to a middle-income country such as Cuba boasting 67,000 doctors, while African countries of an equivalent population size of around 12 million such as Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe have approximately 500, 1,000, and 2,000 doctors respectively. With one of the best and least expensive primary health care systems in the world, health life expectancy in Cuba is roughly the same as G8 countries. Even compared to Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and potentially richest country with an around 140 million population over ten times bigger than Cuba’s, Cuba has twice as many doctors as Nigeria. Again the disease and non-disease comparisons between Cuba, as a medium-income country on the one hand, and Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe show similar disparities.

LONG TERM SUSTAINABLE HEALTH WORKFORCE FINANCING IS THE ONLY SOLUTION

But these numbers don’t just ‘happen’. Governments must invest in lives of citizens through sustainable health development and financing. By way of health financing comparison, Canada spends 17.5% of its budget on health, France 16.6%, Germany 17.6% and Japan 17.8%, compared with Kenya’s 6.1% (including external contributions of 18% of its health budget), the DRC’s 7.2% (including external donations of 23% to health), Ethiopia’s 10.8% (including 39.9% external input to health), and Nigeria’s 3.5% (including 4.8% of external input to health). This is why AU member states’ unfulfilled pledge to spend at least 15% of annual budgets on health (excluding external sources) is crucial to resolving Africa’s health crisis.

In this context, nothing glaringly exposes the apparent value of African lives more than per capita expenditure on health. While Canada, France, Germany and Japan spend $2,402, $2,646, $3,250 and $2,052 per capita on health respectively, Kenya, the DRC, Ethiopia, and Nigeria are spending $44, $6, $12, and $14 per capita. At the higher end, an African life is apparently the equivalent of one meal in a mid-level restaurant in more developed countries, and at the lower end the cost of a modest take away.

To ensure the same level of primary health coverage as Canada, France, Germany, Japan and indeed Cuba, African countries of similar populations must invest in achieving similar numbers of adequately resourced health workers while at the same time resolving other policy and infrastructure issues. A significant percentage of these costs are only required in the first 7 to 14 years of long-term plans. Education budgets that will provide the basis for science students – the health workers of tomorrow - also show similar disparities.

RESOLVING THE NIGHTMARE OF BRAIN DRAIN

But it is not just lack of sustainable health financing that is the problem. Without doubt, the brain drain from the developing to the developed world is partly to blame for making an already bad health workforce situation even worse, especially from former colonies to their former colonial ‘masters’. Countries like the US have also benefited massively from not having to train over 250,000 health workers drained from other countries at a cost of billons of dollars to those losing their healthcare professionals.

Health campaigners globally must engage governments of more developed countries and stress that recruiting health workers from less developed countries to prevent their own citizens from dying, simply means that millions of citizens of developing countries will die. Developed countries can train adequate numbers of their own health workers, and must do so to end this musical chairs of death.

Those who argue that health workers are subject to ‘market forces’ and that no health worker should be prevented from going where they want to go overlook a basic fact. African health workers leave their continent for two main reasons. One is poor pay and poor working conditions, and the other is that governments in more developed countries balance their budgets by investing less in training their own health workforce, and making up shortages by taking advantage of the situation in Africa through offering better conditions to African health workers.

The resolution of this ‘push and pull’ nightmare will not be found in any so-called ethical recruitment of health workers by developed countries. The proper, moral and sustainable solution is to ensure that more developed countries invest in training of adequate numbers of their own health workforce, and that less developed countries demonstrate full political commitment to training and retaining their health workers – where necessary with the support of more developed countries.

It is not necessary to drain health workers from less developed countries. Japan or the Scandinavian countries, for instance, do not rely on the brain drain to strengthen health systems, and neither does Cuba. In Cuba’s case, the country not only exports thousands of its own surplus doctors, it also trains thousands of African doctors for free. With the majority of health workers preferring to stay at home rather than leave behind or uproot their families in search of work, numerous staff associations and unions for health workers have underlined that decent pay and improved working conditions will make the ‘freedom of movement’ argument a non-issue for the majority of professionals.

AFRICAN GOVERNMENTS MUST IMPROVE HEALTH WORKFORCE WORKING CONDITIONS

African governments must get over the misguided idea that better working conditions for health workers somehow represents a form of discrimination against others. In many cases poor working conditions for medical personnel means going to work to issue death certificates rather than to cure patients. The negative impact this has on health workforce morale cannot be overstated. Having trained for years to save lives, I guarantee that anyone who has to go to work everyday to watch people die would become rapidly demoralised and more likely to want to work outside of their country given the opportunity.

In Nigeria one of the reasons the military gave for seizing power in the early 1980s was that the ‘hospitals had become mere consulting clinics and mortuaries.’ When the medical association went on strike to underline precisely that point following failed negotiations, the entire executive committee were jailed as ‘saboteurs’, as if their presence with inadequate tools and no medications in the ‘consulting clinics and mortuaries’ made any real difference to lives of patients.

It is of no comfort whatsoever that many of our leaders have sadly also paid the price for Africa’s health crisis. Africa holds the undistinguished position of being the continent with the greatest number of leaders passing away in foreign hospitals following “brief illness”. It is just simply difficult to imagine the leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Japan or Cuba in such sad situations. Enlightened self-interest demands that they must act urgently or continue to face the very sad embarrassment of being flown abroad to be saved, and in some cases being flown back home in coffins.

Yet at a time when all African governments should be rushing to invest in scholarships for science students, investing in more schools of medicine and nursing, investing in health systems development and better working conditions for health personnel (especially in rural areas), the health community and civil society still have to campaign, lobby, beg and fight for every additional penny for health care. While some people suggest that particular diseases are over-funded to the detriment of others, the fact is that Africa’s entire health care system is massively under-funded. Some even argue that there are other priorities more important than health.

In light of the apparent official policy in many countries that health care is the sole responsibility of the individual, future generations of Africans may yet look back and conclude such policy to be the equivalent of institutional ‘manslaughter’. Without doubt various historical injustices and the economic exploitation of Africa have weakened its capacity for development. But today the main factors responsible for its health tragedy are the lack of foresight and political will to ensure sustainable health development, financing and universal primary health care. We must find that political will if Africa is to survive and fulfil its great potential.

(1) Figures from various reports 2006 to 2008 of WHO, UNAIDS, UNDP, PMNCH, UNIFEM, UNFPA

* Sankore is Coordinator of the Africa Public Health Alliance & 15% Now Campaign, which engages African governments, global and African and institutions on implementation of the AU Africa Health Strategy, Health MDGs and fulfilling the AU Abuja pledge to allocate 15% of domestic national resources to health. He is also on the editorial advisory board of Pambazuka.

The campaign can be contacted at contactus[at]africapublichealth[dot]org, and contactus[at]africa15percentcampaign[dot]org . Reactions and comments on the write up should also be copied to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org

© Rotimi Sankore / Africa Public Health Alliance & 15% Now Campaign. * Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

The missing link in primary health care

Empowering demand from communities in Uganda

Rosette Mutambi

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/50755

Stifled by perennial under-funding, inadequate health care workers and a critical shortage of infrastructure, Uganda’s modest primary health care system has a more significant challenge to contend with: building effective demand among poor and vulnerable people. The Alma-Ata declaration on Primary Health Care (PHC) declared health to be a fundamental right, but also observed that this called for full participation of communities in their health services.

Official statistics show however that only a third of the population uses the government-supported health system in Uganda, both public and private not-for-profit. This means that a large share of poor and vulnerable people, including disabled people, families led by single mothers, orphans and internally displaced people, are not reached by public investments in health. They may seek services in private clinics, or buy medication from pharmacies or herbalists, but many poor people are likely to self-medicate at home, or hope for a natural healing process.

This still limited uptake of public sector health services obviously has many roots. The Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development (HEPS-Uganda), a local health rights civil society organisation, advocates for access to affordable health care and essential medicines, especially for disadvantaged people. The evidence HEPS-Uganda has gathered from eight of the 85 districts of the country in which it operates suggests that both service providers and users lack awareness of their rights and responsibilities in health. The Uganda Human Rights Commission confirmed this picture in 2007, observing that health rights of many Ugandans are being violated, especially the right to information, dignity and access to essential medicines. This is surely one contributor to the poor use of services, and a barrier to effective organisation of the health system around PHC.

Through its Community Outreach and Health Complaints and Counselling (C&C) programmes, HEPS-Uganda has worked with communities and health providers in eight Ugandan districts to implement initiatives aimed at increasing public and community participation in planning and implementing primary health care, including in the rational use of medicines.

The results have been telling. When expectant mothers in Kamwenge District in western Uganda, in Kawempe Division of the capital Kampala, in the districts of Pallisa and Budaka in eastern Uganda, and in the Lira District in the North of the country have increased their understanding of their health rights and the services that meet them, their uptake of antenatal services and their delivery at health centres under professional supervision has in some cases doubled over the course of a year to eighteen months.

Through the C&C programme, HEPS-Uganda has established an independent feedback mechanism that receives complaints of health rights violations from health consumers, which it then tries to resolve through mediation with health providers and counselling. The process creates awareness of health rights and responsibilities on both sides, and has proved an effective way to identify and improve the whole system, both within the community and within the local level health services.


The Uganda Human Rights Commission has observed that the violation of health rights has not been given adequate attention in Uganda. But programmes like HEPS-Uganda’s C&C programme create confidence and hope: Community members can approach health providers in an informed manner and demand the services to which they are entitled. Equally, health providers themselves also recognise their duties and play their roles more effectively. The benefits are tangible for poor communities. In Pallisa and Budaka districts, community representation on health centre management committees is now more effective in the programme areas, and decisions are more responsive to community needs and preferences. Health centres have now scrapped illegal charges that consumers have continued to incur across the country in spite of government abolishing of cost-sharing as far back as 2001. The end result is a more people-centred, friendlier health care environment for communities as well as health workers, and the initiative is successfully demonstrating people’s power in improving their health.

It is not that the country’s policy makers do not appreciate the value of community empowerment in the effort to achieve ‘Health for All.’ Uganda is among the countries to have adopted the Alma-Ata Declaration 30 years ago, committing itself among other things to a human rights approach to health in which ‘the people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care.’

At the country level, the national health policy commits the government ‘to ensure that communities are empowered to take responsibility for their own health and well being, and to participate actively in the management of their local health services.’

With ill-health identified in official surveys as the leading cause of high levels of poverty, national development plans, including the Health Sector Strategic Plan and the Poverty Eradication Action Plan, contain planned activities aimed at empowering communities for health.

There are numerous examples of how communities are playing a role in efforts to create a community-based primary health care system. Community drug distributors dispense anti-malarial medicines door-to-door, village health teams mobilise communities for sanitation and HIV prevention and treatment, and community members are involved in implementing the ‘directly-observed treatment’ strategy to manage Tuberculosis (TB). There have also been policies to entrust management of lower level health units to local governments and to management committees with community representatives.

With the exception of the TB management strategy, the performance of the rest of the initiatives leaves a lot to be desired however. Nearly a decade since the policy and other development plans were published, other planned activities, which would have empowered communities and consolidated the success of those already underway, remain at the planning level. For example, there has not been any national programme of community capacity building ‘for effective participation of health problems, planning of health services, in resource mobilization and in the monitoring of health activities’.

Uganda has made the important step of guaranteeing a minimum health care package, albeit with minimal resources. Instead of the estimated US$34 per person outlined by the Macroeconomic Commission on Health, the country is trying to attain universal access to primary health care with only US$8 per person. Without effective and collective demand from community level, people will carry on ‘making do’ with poorly resourced health systems and under-using resources that are applied.

Effective and collective demand calls however for a system that involves the intended beneficiaries in planning and implementation, and for an informed and empowered community able to demand and use the services it needs. In a resource poor setting like Uganda, the case for community empowerment for health is even stronger. It is needed in setting priorities, deciding on resource allocation, monitoring the performance of service providers and in building health care seeking behaviours. The government will have to live up to its commitment to empower communities if it is to guarantee their right to quality health care.

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

The missing link in primary health care Empowering demand from communities in Uganda

¬¬¬Through examining the experience of the Ugandan Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development (HEPS-Uganda), Rosette Mutambi highlights the extent to which ordinary Ugandans remain without effective official health care. While stressing the role of government in empowering local communities, she argues that genuine improvement in primary health care rests on involving an informed population in the planning and implementation of the system overall, a consideration of even greater importance in a resource-poor nation like Uganda.

Rosette Mutambi, Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development, Uganda

Stifled by perennial under-funding, inadequate health care workers and a critical shortage of infrastructure, Uganda’s modest primary health care system has a more significant challenge to contend with: building effective demand among poor and vulnerable people. The Alma-Ata declaration on Primary Health Care (PHC) declared health to be a fundamental right, but also observed that this called for full participation of communities in their health services.

Official statistics show however that only a third of the population uses the government-supported health system in Uganda, both public and private not-for-profit. This means that a large share of poor and vulnerable people, including disabled people, families led by single mothers, orphans and internally displaced people, are not reached by public investments in health. They may seek services in private clinics, or buy medication from pharmacies or herbalists, but many poor people are likely to self-medicate at home, or hope for a natural healing process.

This still limited uptake of public sector health services obviously has many roots. The Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development (HEPS-Uganda), a local health rights civil society organisation, advocates for access to affordable health care and essential medicines, especially for disadvantaged people. The evidence HEPS-Uganda has gathered from eight of the 85 districts of the country in which it operates suggests that both service providers and users lack awareness of their rights and responsibilities in health. The Uganda Human Rights Commission confirmed this picture in 2007, observing that health rights of many Ugandans are being violated, especially the right to information, dignity and access to essential medicines. This is surely one contributor to the poor use of services, and a barrier to effective organisation of the health system around PHC.

Through its Community Outreach and Health Complaints and Counselling (C&C) programmes, HEPS-Uganda has worked with communities and health providers in eight Ugandan districts to implement initiatives aimed at increasing public and community participation in planning and implementing primary health care, including in the rational use of medicines.

The results have been telling. When expectant mothers in Kamwenge District in western Uganda, in Kawempe Division of the capital Kampala, in the districts of Pallisa and Budaka in eastern Uganda, and in the Lira District in the North of the country have increased their understanding of their health rights and the services that meet them, their uptake of antenatal services and their delivery at health centres under professional supervision has in some cases doubled over the course of a year to eighteen months.

Through the C&C programme, HEPS-Uganda has established an independent feedback mechanism that receives complaints of health rights violations from health consumers, which it then tries to resolve through mediation with health providers and counselling. The process creates awareness of health rights and responsibilities on both sides, and has proved an effective way to identify and improve the whole system, both within the community and within the local level health services.


The Uganda Human Rights Commission has observed that the violation of health rights has not been given adequate attention in Uganda. But programmes like HEPS-Uganda’s C&C programme create confidence and hope: Community members can approach health providers in an informed manner and demand the services to which they are entitled. Equally, health providers themselves also recognise their duties and play their roles more effectively. The benefits are tangible for poor communities. In Pallisa and Budaka districts, community representation on health centre management committees is now more effective in the programme areas, and decisions are more responsive to community needs and preferences. Health centres have now scrapped illegal charges that consumers have continued to incur across the country in spite of government abolishing of cost-sharing as far back as 2001. The end result is a more people-centred, friendlier health care environment for communities as well as health workers, and the initiative is successfully demonstrating people’s power in improving their health.

It is not that the country’s policy makers do not appreciate the value of community empowerment in the effort to achieve ‘Health for All.’ Uganda is among the countries to have adopted the Alma-Ata Declaration 30 years ago, committing itself among other things to a human rights approach to health in which ‘the people have the right and duty to participate individually and collectively in the planning and implementation of their health care.’

At the country level, the national health policy commits the government ‘to ensure that communities are empowered to take responsibility for their own health and well being, and to participate actively in the management of their local health services.’

With ill-health identified in official surveys as the leading cause of high levels of poverty, national development plans, including the Health Sector Strategic Plan and the Poverty Eradication Action Plan, contain planned activities aimed at empowering communities for health.

There are numerous examples of how communities are playing a role in efforts to create a community-based primary health care system. Community drug distributors dispense anti-malarial medicines door-to-door, village health teams mobilise communities for sanitation and HIV prevention and treatment, and community members are involved in implementing the ‘directly-observed treatment’ strategy to manage Tuberculosis (TB). There have also been policies to entrust management of lower level health units to local governments and to management committees with community representatives.

With the exception of the TB management strategy, the performance of the rest of the initiatives leaves a lot to be desired however. Nearly a decade since the policy and other development plans were published, other planned activities, which would have empowered communities and consolidated the success of those already underway, remain at the planning level. For example, there has not been any national programme of community capacity building ‘for effective participation of health problems, planning of health services, in resource mobilization and in the monitoring of health activities’.

Uganda has made the important step of guaranteeing a minimum health care package, albeit with minimal resources. Instead of the estimated US$34 per person outlined by the Macroeconomic Commission on Health, the country is trying to attain universal access to primary health care with only US$8 per person. Without effective and collective demand from community level, people will carry on ‘making do’ with poorly resourced health systems and under-using resources that are applied.

Effective and collective demand calls however for a system that involves the intended beneficiaries in planning and implementation, and for an informed and empowered community able to demand and use the services it needs. In a resource poor setting like Uganda, the case for community empowerment for health is even stronger. It is needed in setting priorities, deciding on resource allocation, monitoring the performance of service providers and in building health care seeking behaviours. The government will have to live up to its commitment to empower communities if it is to guarantee their right to quality health care.

* Rosette Mutambi, Coalition for Health Promotion and Social Development, Uganda

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

Break the Silence Congo Week

October 19 - 25, 2008

2008-09-25

http://www.congoweek.org/english/

The purpose of the Break the Silence Congo Week is to raise awareness about the devastating situation in the Congo and mobilize support on behalf of the people of the Congo. It will take place from Sunday October 19th to Saturday October 25th. The key organizers are students from North Carolina A&T , UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Greensboro, University of Maryland, Howard University, Bowie University, and Cornell University.

Of course some do cry...

Obiero Ojwang

2008-09-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/50696

I stopped reading at the end of the first paragraph Oloo's The political economy of ethnic identities in Kenya.

Oloo forgets alot of things, or maybe he just tries to ignore them. I might be wrong, but i do not think any African in a slum situation cries, nor will he go to his family and whiningly narate his ordeal if he knocks his toe on a stone. (English uses the word tripping for such.)

Of course some do cry. But they know the reason why. (As selfish as it might be) but if he is a perenial crier everyone will know and it will be upto the particular.

It is time all people who describe complaining people as people who do not know what they are saying put some reasearch to back their theories. If that is the way to go. Let us listen to complaints and use our knowledge or education to provide a respectfull way forward. Please.

Gender & Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region

By Patricia Daley, reviewed by Sreeram Chaulia

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/50763

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.
Aetiology of Violence

-by Sreeram Chaulia

(A review of Patricia Daley’s Gender & Genocide in Burundi: The Search for Spaces of Peace in the Great Lakes Region, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, June 2008. ISBN: 978-0253219251. Price: US$ 24.95. Length: 268 Pages)

Extreme incidents of violence in post-Colonial Africa have frequently been explained through the discourses of tribalism and ethnic hatred. A variant of this narrative is the obsession with Africa’s ‘failed’ and ‘collapsed’ states that are said to be paralysed by kinship and ethnicity-based patronage politics. However, systemic violence has far more entrenched structural causes and the scholarly eye searches for these underlying conditions.

Feminist academic Patricia Daley’s major new theoretical work on Burundi argues that presenting genocide in Africa as irrational violence that is internal in origin obfuscates crimes against humanity and Western complicity in abetting them. Affixing blame on innate dysfunctions within African societies helps reduce genocide to the continent’s allegedly ‘barbaric’ and ‘savage’ traditional culture. It diverts attention from colonialism, neo-colonialism and foreign aid that have a causal relationship with atrocities in Africa.

Daley’s book seeks to move understanding of genocide away from the analytical framework of ethnicity, which debases African lives, to one that taps into their emancipatory capacity for peace. The author’s notion of peace is the antithesis of the market economy-promoting ‘liberal peace’ that is imposed on African societies by Western states and multinational corporations.

The book’s early chapters elaborate how the racism and violent masculinity of European colonialism created a ‘genocidal state’ in Burundi. Prior to European social engineering, Burundi lacked a ruling class composed exclusively of one ethnic community. Since the late 19th century, the Germans followed by the Belgians supplanted the country’s fluid pre-colonial social identities with rigid ethnic boundaries so as to construct a class of native collaborators. Europeans deployed Christianity and a discriminatory educational system to convert complex social categories like Hutu, Tutsi and Twa into ‘ethnic’ identities in relation to state power.

To maximise economic exploitation of the colony, Belgians subjected Burundian peasants to forced labour and compulsory coffee cropping. By 1945, they totally ‘Tutsified’ land chieftaincy, sowing the seeds of “genocidal economics”. Colonial masters endowed Burundi with a centralised military that was recruited on the basis of European stereotypes of martial races. Together with the evolues (native elites certified as ‘civilised’), the ethnically poisoned Burundian military constituted the machinery for organising genocide after the country’s independence.

In 1961, outgoing Belgian colonialists teamed up with local anti-nationalists to assassinate Louis Rwagasore, the Burundian equivalent of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. Western powers then suborned the reigning Burundian king to destroy the cross-ethnic consensus that Rwagasore had soldered. A military coup d’etat in 1966 cemented a lasting alliance between the armed forces and Tutsi hegemony against majoritarian pressures from the Hutu. As a minority, the Tutsi elite could ensure control over the state only through recurrent violence aimed at keeping the Hutu under check.

The 1972 genocide by government forces killed 200,000 Hutus in five months and pushed an equal number into exile. The United States knew about the unfolding genocide but chose not to upset the Burundian government with whom it had friendly relations. The military regime in Bujumbura manipulated Western fears of communism to evade sanctions or prosecution. International failure to intervene in 1972 offered successive Burundian governments licence to commit further rounds of genocidal violence in 1979, 1984, 1988, 1991 and 1993. The genocidal military elite drew inspiration from the state-society relationship of the colonial period and resorted to frequent pogroms for settling intra-elite competition for power.

The Tutsi-dominated state grew more murderous and militarised with the assistance of foreign development aid worth $75.6 million per annum from 1976 to 1987. Pierre Buyoya’s 1996 military coup was welcomed by Western governments that subscribed to the hierarchical ‘strong man’ approach to political stability in developing countries. Daley ascribes Buyoya’s favourable image outside Africa to “the military masculinism that pervades Western ideas about governance in Africa.” (p.88) Pervasive military rule reinforced genocidal politics and provoked numerous Hutu rebel movements and militias that carried out attacks against Tutsis. In all, some 300,000 civilians were killed in the wars between rebels and the government from 1993 to 2006.

The post-colonial Burundian economy replicated colonial practices of mandatory cultivation. Daley illustrates the intersection between free market economics and political violence through the story of the ‘gold wars’, wherein a Free Trade Zone funded by the World Bank attempted to make Burundi the epicentre of gold distribution in central Africa. The project, which reflected connections between international capitalists and local elites, led to the assassination of the country’s President in 1993.

By virtue of its reputation in the West as a “model African country”, Burundi was the highest per capita recipient of World Bank low-interest loans in the 1980s. Consequently, “eager to display the success of their market reforms, donors ignored (Burundian) state repression.” (p.101) The same trend is repeating today, with the IMF patting Burundi as a “good adjusting state” (p.103) in return for the government’s privatisation of healthcare and agriculture.

In genocidal states, sections of society deemed to be ethnically inferior are not considered worthy of protection. Burundi’s judicial system saw only Tutsis as ‘citizens’ and informally condemned Hutus and Twas to arbitrary violence. The Burundian government limited application of the term ‘civilian’ to the Tutsi ethnic group. Between 1996 and 2000, the state coercively relocated about 14 percent of the population, mostly Hutus, to regroupement camps with the pretext of protecting them. In actuality, these camps were akin to those of Nazi Germany. Moulded in an atmosphere of impunity, Hutu rebel groups shared the state’s callousness for human life.

Sexual violence against women rose dramatically in Burundi after the peace agreement of 2003, exposing the shallowness of ‘liberal peace’. The recent rape epidemic, comparable to that in the neighbouring Congo, was an outcome of Burundi’s violent masculinity, social breakdown, and absence of legal restraints on abusing women. Resurrection of traditional justice mechanisms (Bashingantahe) under conservative religious figures has not rectified the genocidal state’s gender bias. The government hides behind alibis of ‘political crisis’ or ‘civil war’ when taken to task for non-implementation of its gender equality-obligations to international law.

Daley emphasises the historical interconnectedness of genocidal culture in the entire Great Lakes region, where imperial domination and globalisation dehumanised the African body. Militarist regimes in Burundi cooperated with fellow autocracies in the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. Armed with the guarantee of non-interference from the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), and bankrolled by France, Belgium, Britain and the USA, this gallery of rogues conducted relentless warfare on its own people. Private military firms, acting as surrogates of Western states, proliferated in the region in the guise of ‘peacekeeping’ missions and added to the culture of non-accountability.

‘Neo-liberal humanitarianism’, spearheaded by UN relief agencies and Western NGOs, further “strengthened the characteristics of the discriminatory state, privileging one social group above the other.” (p.166) In the Great Lakes, humanitarians acted as accomplices of genocide. The forced confinement exercises of the Burundian state were predicated on the ready availability of humanitarian provisioning by NGOs. Forcible repatriation of Burundian refugees from Tanzania with the connivance of humanitarian organisations signalled “the acceptance of Western donors of the undemocratic practices of the Burundi state.” (p.178)

Humanitarians also buttress Western conflict resolution models that exclude African masses from the political community. In the scheme of ‘liberal peace’, says Daley, “victims become the responsibility of humanitarian agencies and politics the sole preserve of representatives of political parties.” (p.191) When the OAU embargoed the Buyoya dictatorship in 1996, aid agencies backed the World Bank and Western countries to campaign aggressively for lifting of sanctions. UN agencies also convened alternative peace talks in Paris in 1997 to confer international legitimacy on the Buyoya regime’s refusal to abide by mediation of Africa’s elder statesman, Julius Nyerere.

Humanitarians thus had a hand in undermining African agency for transformation. Their role demonstrated ways in which peace in Africa has become an industry overflowing with Western ‘experts’ and consultants.

Daley concludes her book with an exposition of the Arusha peace settlement for Burundi. Its masculinist vision of peace as power-sharing among ethnic leaders reinforced the position of Burundian elites who committed genocide and crimes against humanity. Neo-liberal economic packages for reconstruction returned Burundi to heavy reliance on international aid and kept society in a non-transformative straitjacket.

Drawing on years of field research in Burundi, Daley finds that people need a “peace that rehumanises the African body, physically, materially and spiritually.” (p.232) Towards this end, the author proposes privileging of alternative forms of masculinity and femininity that decouple African self-worth from atrocities. She calls for “regionality and regional citizenship” that transcend genocide-fuelling territorially bound forms of statehood and security.

By rigorously rethinking fundamental concepts like ‘humanitarianism’, ‘reconstruction’, ‘peace’ and ‘transformation’, Patricia Daley’s book induces a paradigm shift on studying genocidal violence and offers a brave manifesto for empowering Africans.

Sreeram Chaulia is a researcher on international affairs at the Maxwell School of Citizenship in Syracuse University, New York.

South Africa: Art creating hope

2008-09-26

http://www.ipsterraviva.net/europe/article.aspx?id=6570

Zulu artists working at the Ardmore Ceramic Studio in South Africa’s coastal province of KwaZulu Natal have gone from poverty to international acclaim. Some of them have exhibited internationally and the work created by Ardmore artists can be seen in galleries, shops and embassies across the globe. Thousands of pieces are exported either through people who visit the studio and place orders or order through the internet.

Africa Blogging roundup 22 September 2008

Sokari Ekine

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/blog/50749

As to be expected South African bloggers are focused on the forced resignation of President Thabo Mbeki. Most bloggers whether supporters of Mbeki or not are concerned with the precedent set by “recalling” a president in the manner in which Mbeki was particularly as a further 11 minister have followed him and also resigned. Sokari Ekine reviews:

The Fish Bowl
My Haven
Commentary South Africa
YBlog ZA
The Moor Next Door
Black Looks
[url=http://jontyfisher.blogspot.com/2008/09/dust-settles.html]The Fish Bowl
[/url]
The Fish Bowl though not critical of President Mbeki’s tenure he does not believe history will judge him kindly. However he is critical of both the actions of the NPA and the response of ANC President Jacob Zuma to the calls for Mbeki to resign.
“I will go further to say that Zuma's silence during this process as president of the ANC has been one of his greatest failures in the past few years. Regardless of his perceived involvement or not, he is the top man in the ANC party, and he should have been a much, much stronger voice. Calls for unity should be coming from him, not the secretary-general, and it only adds to the view that the ANC at present is suffering from an abject lack of strong leadership.

Regardless, Zuma looks free to now take his place as president-elect and will undoubtedly be the next president of South Africa (acting president aside).”

My Haven
My Haven takes a biblical perspective on the drama.
“If we were in biblical times I’d probably say indeed this man was a man of God!”
Perhaps a big dramatic and over zealous, he does go to criticise the media and the what he sees as the failure of democracy in South Africa...
“I also thought of the fine line between being a “Mbeki critic” and an “anti-Mbeki pagan”. I have seen that sensational journalism has become obsessed with Mbeki, over-analysing and misleading the country. I would like to think that this is a sign that our democracy is maturing. As one opposition leader said, our democracy is now at its adolescent stage. No need for me to tell you what happens during that stage.”

Commentary South Africa
Commentary South Africathough highly critical and disdainful of Mbeki’s presidency is appalled at how a President can be thrown out by “the ANC and Zuma Camp” without he or any other citizens having a say in the matter.
“To be frank I’m struggling to reconcile my gut-reaction to the NEC’s petulent demands and Mbeki’s meekness with the simple fact that, so far, nothing in this process over the weekend has violated any regulations or constitutional laws. This is the wheels of the ANC and government moving ever so rapidly towards a goal I can’t quite see at the moment. I want to be outraged that this can happen. That we can lose our president without having an ounce of a say about it, that the ANC and the Zuma camp can depose our president at the snap of a finger while he himself has yet to undergo trial for corruption. It’s worrying, but at the same time, it’s entirely above-board.”

YBlog ZA
YBlog Z though he alludes to his “aloof nature”, is clearly a supporter of Mbeki who he believes leaves with his “moral integrity in tact”.
“Thabo Mbeki is a quiet man of few words. A tireless worker, he took his mandate seriously and expected South Africans to do the same. Elected to office, he saw little need for populism, eschewing fireside chats for negotiation and action, most frequently elsewhere and in relative obscurity. Discrete diplomacy was his talent and he was damned good at it.

Despite evidence to the contrary (many crossed Thabo and few survived), opportunists insisted his unassuming but aloof nature — painted 'paranoid' or 'conspiratorial' — to be the chink in his armor. Sooner or later, they believed (or in MotoMouth Malema's case, boasted), they would take him down.”

The Moor Next Door
The Moor Next Door provides us with a rare glimpse of the actions of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) operating in Mauritania and the Saharan region of North Africa. Having received copies of the interrogation transcripts of three terrorist suspects, he highlights some of the major aspects of the interrogation revealing a complex organisation which is spread throughout the Sahara region including Mali, Niger and Senegal as well as Algeria and Mauritania.
“This indicates that the AQIM presence in Mauritania is basically a GSPC [an Islamic militia operating to overthrow the Algerian government] colony whose operations and finances are controlled by Algerians and carried out by Mauritanians. They are less bin Laden’s franchise as they are El Para’s. When asked what the organization hoped to gain by recruiting suicide bombers, Ould Sidina responds that it was his understanding that Mauritanian youth were being recruited for use as suicide bombers in Algeria, not in Mauritania. He claims to have left AQIM because they started to sell drugs to help finance themselves, which should help us to understand AQIM within its wider strategic environment in the Sahara: as I and others have said, its existence is critically tied to the smuggling routes in the south-western Sahara, even more so than it is to jihadi ideology”

Black Looks
http://www.blacklooks.org/2008/09/trans-homosexuality.html
Black Looks guest blogger, Mia Nikasimo writes a series of articles on being a Nigerian trans lesbian. In this piece she writes about transphobia amongst lesbians and the scrutiny faced by translesbians like herself amongst the community.
“It is no surprise that suddenly all the lesbians around you feel threatened by the unknown they assume that you present them with. It is something people do out of insecurity, paranoia and a scream out for approval. The question I would love a straight answer to is, who’s transphobic/homophobic now? The assumption that only female born women can be lesbian has a history as dated as humanity itself. Translesbianism is only one strand of womanhood and trans-homosexuality (i.e. transsexual and homosexuality), there are trans-gay-men (a strand of manhood) out there doing their thing on various platforms too: be they non op, pre op or post op and we date with as much diversity as the mainstream does.”

Sotho
http://basotho.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/troy-davis/
Finally, Sotho makes a plea for Troy Davis who is to be executed in the US on the 23rd September. By the time you are reading this it is very possible that an innocent man has been murdered by the State of Georgia and a racially divided justice system.
“The decisions about who lives and who dies are being made along racial lines by a nearly all white group of prosecutors. The death penalty presents a stark symbol of the effects of racial discrimination. In individual cases, this racism is reflected in ethnic slurs hurled at black defendants by the prosecution and even by the defense. It results in black jurors being systematically barred from service, and in the devoting of more resources to white victims of homicide at the expense of black victims. And it results in a death penalty in which blacks are frequently put to death for murdering whites, but whites are almost never executed for murdering blacks. Such a system of injustice is not merely unfair and unconstitutional–it tears at the very principles to which this country struggles to adhere.”

* Sokari Ekine blogs at www.blacklooks.org

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

Ripples of the China milk scandal in Africa

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/5ya4ps

In China, an estimated 13,000 children have fallen ill since the tainted milk scandal broke. Chinese influence has grown in Africa, as have imports of all kinds products, from running shoes to instant noodles. Bloggers as far afield as Congo and Senegal, concerned about the safety of Chinese products in their countries, are closely following the story.

'New government’ must prioritise human rights

2008-09-26

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news250908/zimgovt250908.htm

As Zimbabweans and the rest of the world wait anxiously for the new government to begin, calls are being made for the authorities to prioritise the issue of human rights. The latest call comes from Canada’s International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development (Rights & Democracy) saying the power sharing agreement must be accompanied by concrete measures to ensure human rights are respected and past abuses are investigated and prosecuted.

MDC file papers opposing challenge on Moyo speakership

2008-09-26

http://www.swradioafrica.com/news250908/mdcfile250908.htm

The Tsvangirai MDC on Thursday filed papers opposing a court challenge to the election of national chairman Lovemore Moyo as speaker of parliament. Independent MP Jonathan Moyo, with support from the Mutambara MDC, have filed a court challenge saying Moyo’s election was not proper, citing a variety of reasons. Arguments from the camp are that the vote was illegal, based on claims that Tsvangirai-MDC MPs showed their ballot to party Vice President Thokozani Khupe.

New government has to tackle culture of impunity

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/3j7dla

Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe signed a power-sharing agreement with the Movement for Democratic Change’s leaders on Monday, 15 September 2008 in an attempt to resolve the political crisis that has been developing since 2000 and escalated sharply in the last six months. The crisis has been characterised by a series of politically-motivated violations of civil, political, social and economic rights against real and perceived opponents of President Mugabe. Those who instigated or committed these violations have enjoyed almost total impunity.

African Development

AU Monitor Weekly Roundup: Issue 152, 2008

2008-09-24

http://www.aumonitor.org

The under-Secretary-General and UN special adviser on Africa called on world leaders gathered at the United Nations (UN) high-level meeting on African development to ‘streamline actions and upgrade priorities towards the New Partnership for Africa’s Development’ as Africa’s economic development still faces enormous obstacles. African leaders present at the summit, worried that the international financial turmoil menaces efforts to fight poverty in underprivileged countries, urged developed countries to honour their aid commitments in order to tackle hunger and poverty. The African Union (AU) Chairman and Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete told journalists that developed nations have a moral obligation to assist the poor. Still in development news, heads of states and governments of the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group will meet in Accra to review the Cotonou Partnership Agreement, the accord that defines their relationship with the European Union (EU). They will also discuss the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, rising food prices, energy and Economic Partnership Agreements. Elsewhere, the EU announced a €1 billion plan for African countries to expand their energy sector, launch a renewable energy co-operation programme between the AU and EU and support Africa’s participation in the Global Gas Flaring Reduction partnership of oil and gas producing countries. Meanwhile, a four-day inaugural China-ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West African States) economic and trade forum opened in Beijing with the objective of elevating the existing bilateral relations between China and ECOWAS to a strategic partnership by exploring and concretising agreements for Chinese investment in critical sectors and to use such investments towards the realisation of the ECOWAS development vision.

In peace and security related news, representatives of the EU and the AU met in Brussels to discuss the crisis in Darfur and universal jurisdiction. While some African countries have argued that universal jurisdiction is used by the West against Africa, Human Rights Watch said that the ‘meeting was an opportunity to bring justice to women, children and men who are abused every day across the world’. The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor was to meet with UN and AU officials on the need ‘to protect the civilians in Darfur, stop the crimes and ensure the execution of the court’s judicial mandate and decisions.’ Further, the Peace and Security Council of the AU has reiterated its clear condemnation of all acts of violence in Darfur and violations of human rights and stressed the need to bring their perpetrators to justice.

In other news, the legislative elections recently held in Rwanda saw women taking 56.25 percent of the contested parliamentary seats putting the country on the world record of having 44 parliamentary seats held by women. Meanwhile, experts and officials attending the third and final conference of the Africa Green Revolution Conference affirmed that Africa’s food crisis could be alleviated by ‘modernising agriculture and reforming supply chains so that small-scale farmers get cheaper fertiliser and high-yield seeds’.

Africa: Forum focuses on development needs of Africa's women

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/3qr953

As the General Assembly meets to consider Africa’s development needs, gender experts are coming together at a United Nations-backed forum spotlighting the continent’s women, who are a vital part of efforts to achieve the global anti-poverty targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). “For millions of African women, hunger, violence, exclusion and discrimination are their everyday realities,” the UN Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) – the lead agency for the forum – said in a news release.

Cameroon: Teenage pregnancies hinder girl education

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/3jkmre

Statistics from the Social Welfare Centre indicate that five percent of girls in Buea, Southwest Province, fail to go back to school at the beginning of every academic year due to pregnancy. The same situation cuts across the country, causing the termination of the educational career of most teenage girls, The Post gathered. The rise in pregnancy among teenage girls has been attributed to youthful excitement, especially during holidays.

Morocco: Underage marriage fatwa prompts official inquiry

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/54x4uu

The controversial fatwa concerning underage marriage issued in Morocco by Cheikh Mohamed Ben Abderrahman Al Maghraoui will be the target of a new government inquiry, following a decision by the king's prosecutor in Rabat.

Nigeria: FIDA tackles rape, sexual abuse

2008-09-26

http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=123367

International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA), Kaduna branch, has said it would stamp out cases of rape and sexual abuse in the state. Kaduna State's Chairperson, Mrs Sa'adatu Sambo, said this in Kaduna, during an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria.

Rwanda: A toast to Rwanda's women

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/3fltqb

The Rwandan constitution, ratified in May 2003, states that 30 per cent of decision-making positions are to be reserved for women. This clause has seen Rwandan women make remarkable gains in elective politics. In the last parliament, Rwanda had the highest percentage of women in parliament in the world.

Africa: Darfur deception

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/52we2z

The story of displacement and death in the Darfur region of Sudan is indeed horrific. And, since Sudan is one of the few countries in Africa which has been off-limits to US oil deals and capital penetration, the crimes of the Sudanese government have a special resonance in U.S policy-making circles.

Global: Senate hearing on human rights and extractive industry

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/4eb9y2

One month before it will appear before a federal jury in the landmark human rights case, Bowoto v. Chevron, facing charges of torture and wrongful death, Chevron, along with other leading extractive industry companies, will come under the scrutiny of the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law. In the hearing, “Extracting Natural Resources: Corporate Responsibility and the Rule of Law,” witnesses will bring to light oil, mining and gas companies’ complicity in human rights abuses perpetrated by public or private security forces in Nigeria, Burma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Indonesia.

Liberia: Taylor's son on trial

2008-09-26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7634750.stm

The son of former Liberian leader Charles Taylor has gone on trial in the US accused of torture. Prosecutors says Charles "Chuckie" Taylor Jr led a unit that tortured and executed government opponents in Liberia between 1999 and 2003.

Rwanda: Former prosecutor found guilty of genocide by UN tribunal

2008-09-26

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28229

A former prosecutor was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of genocide, extermination and murder by the United Nations war crimes tribunal set up in the wake of the 1994 killing spree in Rwanda. The ICTR found that Simeon Nchamihigo, former deputy prosecutor in Cyangugu Prefecture, instructed the Hutu-dominated rebel group known as the Interahamwe to seek out and kill Tutsis and moderate Hutus with the intent to destroy the Tutsi ethnic group and accomplices of the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front.

Liberia: Sierra Leonean refugees move to new houses

2008-09-26

http://www.unhcr.org/news/NEWS/48d7bbda4.html

A group of 16 refugee families have moved into rehabilitated houses in the Liberian town of Bensonville as part of a process to locally integrate some 3,500 Sierra Leoneans who cannot go home or are unwilling to repatriate.

Mali: US asylum courts mishandled gender violence case

2008-09-26

http://www.ipsnews.net/africa/nota.asp?idnews=44005

A woman who was denied asylum in the U.S. despite her fears that she would suffer additional female genital mutilation if she was deported to her native Mali has been given a second chance. Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey - whose intervention was sought in a national campaign by women's and human rights groups has reversed a ruling by a federal immigration board that acknowledged that the woman's genitals had been cut as a child but said that while "reprehensible", the mutilation could not be repeated.

South Africa: Zimbabwean migrants and the future of Southern Africa

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/3flkdy

With Robert Mugabe begrudgingly accommodating Morgan Tsvangirai and Arthur Mutambara at the bridge of Zimbabwe’s sinking ship, there is at last hope that the once proud country will soon find its way to calmer waters. Although anxious of snags ahead, no one is more relieved than the millions of Zimbabweans both in and outside the country who have suffered through more than eight years of violence, persecution, and economic tragic-comedy.

Sudan: 21 Refugees feared drowned

2008-09-26

http://www.afrol.com/articles/30960

At least 21 Eritrean and Somali refugees are feared to have drowned when their overloaded boat capsized in a river in east Sudan, United Nation refugee agency (UNHCR) has said. The group was part of a larger group of four boats crossing Atbara river at night to evade police checkpoints in early hours of Tuesday morning as government regulations stipulate that refugees must remain in camps and receive assistance there.

Africa: Water crisis in Africa

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/50748

Trade Union affiliates of Public Services International (PSI) in Southern Africa, Africa Water Network and Civil Society working on water met in Johannesburg, South Africa in a workshop organised as per the PSI project on Water.
PRESS
STATEMENT,
Friday, 19 September 2008

WATER CRISIS IN AFRICA
Trade Union affiliates of Public Services International (PSI) in Southern Africa, Africa Water Network and Civil Society working on water met in Johannesburg, South Africa in a workshop organised as per the PSI project on Water.

We recognise that Government has introduced prepaid water meters as instruments for the delivery of water services to the community. There is evidence that shows that prepaid water meters prevent citizens especially the poor from accessing water to meet their day to day requirements. We also recognise the fact that there is an escalation of poverty, unemployment and diseases among the poor communities. We are much worried about the introduction of prepaid water meters in some Southern African countries such as Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland where they have been introduced even in the rural communities. Research has shown that even in the advanced economies such as the United Kingdom, prepaid water meters have been banned by the courts of law because of the danger they cause to people’s health. We demand that the city of Johannesburg respects the high court ruling of 30th April 2008.

We therefore call upon the Municipality of Johannesburg to be more conscious of people’s health than meeting cost recovery. We are calling upon the Municipality of Johannesburg to drop the appeal on the prepaid water meters
Secondly it has come to our attention as we met here that Senior Trade Unionists have been arrested in Swaziland in yet another attempt by the Swazi Monarchy to repress Trade Unions and their freedom.

We call upon the Swaziland authorities to immediately release the workers who have been arrested for calling for democracy. We further call upon the Swaziland Government to respect the ILO Convention no 87 on Freedom of Association and the Right to Organise as well as Convention 98 on the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining, which Swaziland has ratified and is obliged to observe.

We demand that the two years condition attached to the EU loan to Malawi Water Board be dropped.

We are also calling for effective funding for rural water and the remunicipilization of rural water system particularly for Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Botswana and South Africa.

We support the St Lucian activist fighting against water privatisation and call for other international organisation to support them.

Issued by:
PSI Southern Africa Office,
cyprian@publicservices.co.za
+27‐11‐403 7765
Africa Water Network (awn)
alhassan.adam@gmail.com
+233‐24‐4208184
Coalition Against Water Privatisation (CAWP)sindane@gmail.com
+27‐730527005

Kenya: An exhortation to the young people of Kenya

2008-09-25

http://blog.marsgroupkenya.org/?p=236

We are meeting at a difficult time for many Kenyans. In fact we are meeting at the crossroad of the history of our country. We are here to decide our future path as delegates of an important convention. We have been brought here because of the acts and omissions of an older generation. A generation that was born before our country was freed from colonial rule, and which has since Independence run the affairs of this country.

South Africa: Floods rock the city

2008-09-26

http://antieviction.org.za/2008/09/24/floods-rock-the-city/#more-983

Gugulethu — About 50 residents from Thambo Square informal settlement have been displaced from their homes to a local community hall as a result of flooding in their shacks (Cape Town’s heavy rain this winter has left a lot of people homeless in the City.

DRC: Prime minister resigns

2008-09-26

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/20719

The Congolese Prime Minister, Antoine Gizenga has resigned his position on Thursday. His letter of resignation has been submitted to President Joseph Kabila and awaiting response. He made his disclosure on National Broadcasting Television of Congo.

Kenya: Poll to replace crash MPs

2008-09-26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7635429.stm

Thousands of people have turned out to vote in two by-elections in Kenya's Rift Valley Province. The parliamentary seats fell vacant after two ministers from the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) were killed in a plane crash in June. The by-elections come a week after an inquiry into the disputed December elections called for radical reforms of the country's electoral system.

South Africa: Motlanthe sworn in as President

2008-09-26

http://www.buanews.gov.za/news/08/08092516451001

President-elect Kgalema Motlanthe took the Oath of Presidency on Thursday afternoon, swearing faithfulness to the Republic and obedience to the Constitution. Mr Motlanthe, who was elected by a majority vote of MPs in the National Assembly earlier in the day, was officially sworn in by Chief Justice Pius Langa at Tuynhuys, adjacent to Parliament.

Southern Africa: Mbeki resignation sparks concern for Zim deal

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/4e8rkw

South African President Thabo Mbeki's resignation has raised new concerns about the fragile power-sharing deal he brokered just one week ago in neighbouring Zimbabwe, analysts said on Wednesday. Although the deal was clinched last week, tough negotiations are still under way on forming a Cabinet that will bring together Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe's ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Africa: Corruption: Africa's movers and shakers

2008-09-26

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/20708

Corruption has significantly improved in Nigeria and Mauritius over the last year, according to the Transparency International`s 2008 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). The southern African country ranked 41 out of 180 countries with a score of 5.5 out of 10. Nigeria (2.7) jumped from 180 to 121.

Africa: African securities markets feel the pinch of global linkages

2008-09-26

http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=3587

For the last two months, investors at the Nairobi Stock Exchange (NSE) have watched in horror as the market dropped to a three years low. The NSE 20 shares index, which is used to gauge the general performance of the market, dipped to a 4,000 low from about 5,400 in mid July (a 26% decline).

Africa: Agricultural research 'neglected ' by donor policies

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/3wr2av

A lack of emphasis on agricultural research in development policy over the last quarter of a century is one of the main reasons for the deterioration of African farming, according to a UN report released this month (15 September). The UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) report on Africa's economic development also cites the small size of each country's research stations, isolated researchers and high staff turnover as other factors that helped "prevent the attainment of a critical mass of scientific and technical staff".

Africa: Global trade regime "detrimental to developing nations" - Seychelles President

2008-09-26

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28257

The distorted world trade regime is an obstacle to development, the leader of the Seychelles told the General Assembly, calling for increased justice and fairness to recognize the specific needs of small island nations. “We should abandon ‘solutions’ which continue to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor and the vulnerable,” President James Alix Michel told the body’s annual high-level event.

Africa: Leaders speak out on fuel, food crises

2008-09-26

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28277

The soaring cost of fuel and basic foods over the past year has left many countries in sub-Saharan Africa unable to adequately fund critical activities, such as health care and the provision of safe drinking water, their leaders told the General Assembly’s annual high-level debate.

Global: World failure on poverty 'unacceptable'

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/4r6ff6

Over a billion people will continue to face desperate poverty and starvation in 2015 as a result of governments’ failure to crack down on corporate abuses and eradicate global poverty. This warning came today from global justice charity War on Want as British prime minister Gordon Brown joined other international leaders at the UN summit in New York on the anti-poverty Millennium Development Goals.

Africa: Malaria battle given $3bn boost

2008-09-26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7636933.stm

World leaders and philanthropistshave pledged nearly $3bn (£1.6bn) to fight malaria at a summit in New York. The meeting, at the UN, is looking at ways of meeting the Millennium Development Goals - targets on reducing global poverty by the year 2015. Donors hope the money will be enough to eradicate malaria by that time.

Guinea-Bissau: UN agencies maintain fight against deadly cholera outbreak

2008-09-26

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28259

The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) continue to help authorities in Guinea-Bissau combat an outbreak of cholera that has claimed at least 133 lives since May and forced thousands of others to be hospitalized. WHO has sent an epidemiologist and UNICEF has deployed water and sanitation experts to assist in the response to the cholera epidemic, which can be a frequent occurrence in the poor West African nation.

Kenya: Circumcision booms

2008-09-26

http://www.africanews.com/site/list_messages/20734

Kenya government hopes to circumcise two million people in the Luo province where the practice is abhorred. Top politicians from the area confessed they have gone to have the foreskin of their male organs removed as part of an awareness to curb HIV/AIDS. They spoke to spur people on to go and circumcise.

Kenya: Gigolos and tourists take chances at the Coast

2008-09-26

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80562

A couple strolling hand-in-hand along a sandy beach in Kenya's coastal city of Mombasa could have jumped straight off the pages of a cheesy romance novel, except for one major difference: the man is local and in his early twenties, while the woman, a tourist, is middle-aged. The young men who trawl Kenya's seaside resorts for wealthy white tourists looking for more than just sun, sea and sand are known locally as "beach boys".

South Africa: Joy at demise of "Dr. Beetroot"

2008-09-26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7637207.stm

South African Aids campaigners have serenaded the new health minister and rejoiced at the departure of her controversial predecessor. A group of activists sang outside the Cape Town flat of Barbara Hogan and drank champagne.

South Africa: WHO bans SA manufactured generics

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/4l64dp

The World Health Organisation on Monday warned customers not to buy drugs made by Swiss pharma giant Novartis's Sandoz generics unit in South Africa after an inspection revealed more than 40 faults. AFP reported that the WHO said it had sent an official "Notice of Concern" letter to Sandoz on September 12 after an inspection of the unit's Kempton Park factory in South Africa.

Uganda: Reproductive health improvement program launched

2008-09-26

http://www.gpoba.org/news/news.asp?id=105

The Ministry of Health in conjunction with Marie Stopes International-Uganda (MSI) today launched a project to treat sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and reduce maternal and infant mortality among poor people in western and southern Uganda.

Zimbabwe: Schools turn children away

2008-09-26

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80596

Rather than encouraging enrollment, schools in Zimbabwe are asking children not to report for lessons. "We have received, with concern, continuing reports that some children [in Zimbabwe] are not going to school because there are no teachers," said Roland Monash, deputy representative of the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). UNICEF keeps 150,000 Zimbabwean children at school by paying their fees.

Global: IBRD climate investment funds: still fueling global warming

2008-09-26

http://www.eurodad.org/whatsnew/articles.aspx?id=2912

On 26 September, a “pledging meeting” takes place at the World Bank in Washington to encourage donors to channel resources to the World Bank Climate Investment Funds (CIFs). The meeting has been promoted by the UK, and several European governments are planning to attend. The UK and Sweden have already made announcements to channel funds to the CIFs. France and the Netherlands are also likely to pledge money to these funds. And Germany is still considering.

South Africa: Community takes on big polluters

2008-09-26

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80600

After years of calling on the owners of South Africa's oil refineries in Durban to upgrade their facilities to reduce pollution, local residents of the eastern port city have decided to take their case to the courts to secure a legal remedy.

Southern Africa: 'Sunny and dry' is an unwelcome forecast

2008-09-26

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80599

At least six countries in Southern Africa could receive poor rainfall during the critical planting season starting next month, says an early forecast for the 2008/09 agricultural season. Lesotho, Swaziland, most of Namibia, parts of Angola, Madagascar and South Africa are likely to receive "normal to below-normal" rain in the first half of the season from October to December, said the forecast by the Drought Monitoring Centre of the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

Cameroon: Publisher held for two days

2008-09-26

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=28702

Reporters Without Borders condemns the detention of journalist Lewis Medjo for the past two days in the western city of Douala. The publisher of the Douala-based Détente Libre weekly, Medjo was arrested by the head of the local plain-clothes police as he left a dinner in a Douala hotel on the evening of 22 September.

Nigeria: Government urged to lift suspension of TV station

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/media/50761

Independent Advocacy Project, IAP, Nigeria’s leading governance group has called on the federal government to immediately lift its suspension of the independent Channels TV, free staff members being detained and make a public commitment to restrain its agents from further clamping down on the media.
Independent Advocacy Project, IAP, Nigeria’s leading governance group has called on the federal government to immediately lift its suspension of the independent Channels TV, free staff members being detained and make a public commitment to restrain its agents from further clamping down on the media.

Security agents closed the Lagos and Abuja offices of Channels last week after the station aired a hoax report that President Umaru Yar'Adua might resign for health reasons. Security agents detained General Manager Steve Judo, News Controller Ambrose Okoh, Abuja Bureau Editor Bashiru Adigun and Abuja Station Manager Shola Olaiya, according to Channels Chairman John Momoh, who apologised to Yar'Adua the day after the report was aired. He expressed ‘deep regret’ for broadcasting the phoney report.

The hoax story which was sent electronically to some media houses was credited to News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the nation’s official agency. NAN swiftly denied the story, saying: ‘We believe that it is a mischief maker at work.’

Equally swiftly however, the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) suspended the Channels’ license, accusing the station of violating the National Broadcasting Commission Act. ‘The decision to suspend the licence of Channels is in itself a violation of the Broadcasting Code as the Code specifies that broadcasting stations must be given prior notice and a hearing prior to such suspensions,’ says IAP spokesperson Gbenga Ogundare.

IAP is particularly concerned about the Yar’adua regime’s clampdown on journalists. Apart from the Channels incident, there have been recent cases involving the National Standard magazine and reporters Abimbola Ogunnaike and Wale Ajayi of the Nigerian Compass and Nigerian Tribune respectively.


Media Enquiries: Gbenga Ogundare
gogundare@ind-advocacy-project.org
234- (0)8036697277

Nigeria: Update: Station allowed back on air

2008-09-26

http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=28598

Channels TV, the privately-owned TV station that was closed on 16 September for wrongly reporting that President Umaru Yar’Adua was about to resign because of ill health, was given permission by the National Broadcasting Commission on 19 September to resume broadcasting. The NBC also confirmed the release of all the Channels TV journalists who were arrested.

Zambia: Government calls off live radio phone-in programmes

2008-09-26

http://www.afrol.com/articles/30972

Zambia government, has called upon all broadcasters, both commercial and community, to desist from live phone-in broadcast programmes that involve members of public.

South Africa: Unions urge Motlanthe to ease poverty

2008-09-26

http://africa.reuters.com/top/news/usnJOE48P0FA.html

South Africa's powerful COSATU trade union, which wants the government to tilt away from pro-business policies, called on new President Kgalema Motlanthe on Friday to eradicate poverty and create jobs. Motlanthe pledged after being sworn in on Thursday to keep to the policies of predecessor Thabo Mbeki, who presided over South Africa's longest period of economic growth before the ruling African National Congress forced him to resign.

DRC: Humanitarian crisis deepens as peace process falters

2008-09-26

http://hrw.org/english/docs/2008/09/24/congo19881.htm

Renewed combat in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo has caused a drastic deterioration in the humanitarian situation and immense suffering for civilians, the Congo Advocacy Coalition, a group of 83 aid agencies and human rights groups, has said. The coalition called for urgent action to improve protection of civilians and an immediate increase in assistance to vulnerable populations.

DRC: Thousands flee LRA

2008-09-26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7635719.stm

Some 75,000 people have fled attacks by Ugandan rebels in northern Democratic Republic of Congo, the Catholic aid agency Caritas has said. Fighters from the Lord's Resistance Army are reported to have killed villagers and abducted children during recent attacks. The rebels have moved from their original bases in Uganda to north-eastern DR Congo and South Sudan.

Nigeria: Mass arrest of militants

2008-09-26

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7635216.stm

Nigerian police have arrested more than 200 suspected militants in raids in the oil-rich Niger Delta, authorities say. Some suspects are accused of recruiting youths to target oil installations around Port Harcourt. The military commander in Rivers State was cited as saying his men had found almost all militant camps there, and he would mount a campaign to destroy them.

Nigeria: Ogoni Land after Shell

2008-09-25

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=5675&l=1

This latest policy briefing from the International Crisis Group, examines the political and economic implications of the Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC) departure from Ogoni land and gives recommendations on resuming peaceful oil operations in the economically strategic and politically volatile region. “If handled carefully, this transition could persuade some of the Delta’s armed groups that non-violence can produce progress on their demands”, says François Grignon, Crisis Group’s Africa Program Director.

Somalia: Thousands flee capital in fresh fighting

2008-09-26

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=28258

At least 12,000 civilian residents of Mogadishu have fled their homes in the Somali capital since last weekend because of a surge in fighting between Islamist insurgents and Government forces backed by the Ethiopian military, the United Nations refugee agency has reported. Half of the newly displaced have found shelter in different neighbourhoods within Mogadishu, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while the remainder have escaped to the town of Afgooye, about 30 kilometres away.

Sudan: At least 69 children dead in food crisis

2008-09-26

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/KKAA-7JU843?OpenDocument

At least 69 children have died from malnutrition and sickness after floods washed away crops in isolated villages in southeast Sudan in recent weeks, U.N. agencies said on Thursday. Blocked roads and a lack of air transport are preventing the supply of emergency rations to parts of the region, the agencies added.

Africa: African developers release open source virtual classroom

2008-09-26

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

The University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project have released version 1.0.1 of the Chisimba/KEWL3 Realtime Virtual Classroom. Avoir is a collaboration of 13 African universities specialising in creating free software relevant to African users.

Africa: New vision for computing in Africa: Computer Aid

2008-09-26

http://tinyurl.com/4vbfxc

APC member Computer Aid has recently caught the BBC’s attention with its adaptive technologies in Kenya. The BBC covered Computer Aid’s new focus on making computers and their programmes available everyone, including people have impaired vision. The articles states, “after shipping more than 120,000 refurbished PCs to the developing world, Computer Aid now wants its kit to be usable by all – so, working alongside local experts, it is testing out adaptive technologies.”

Global: One missed call?

Refocusing our attention on the social mobile long tail

2008-09-25

http://publius.cc/

Things have come a long way since 1973. For a start, many of us now have mobile phones, the most rapidly adopted technology in history. In what amounts to little more than the blink of an eye, mobiles have given us a glimpse of their potential to help us solve some of the most pressing problems of our time. With evidence mounting, Ken Banks asks one question: If mobiles truly are as revolutionary and empowering as they appear to be – particularly in the lives of some of the poorest members of society – then do we have a moral duty, in the ICT for Development (ICT4D) community at least, to see that they fulfill that potential?

Global: The case for licensed open source software

2008-09-26

http://www.tectonic.co.za/?p=3172

Open source software (OSS) has now become a well recognised and utilised brand. A brand that, if we were to get a broad sweeping perception poll on, would generally stand for free, fair and cost effective. However, despite this growth, the battle between open source and traditional software still rages on whereby the pros and cons for each can be endlessly debated.

Kenya: Students design vote tallying software

2008-09-26

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

A group of university students in Nairobi has developed tallying software that could cut costs and eliminate errors at the Electoral Commission of Kenya. The students said the software could enable the controversial electoral body record and process results electronically at individual polling stations across the country.

Nigeria: EFCC develops software to combat cyber crime

2008-09-26

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

Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes (EFCC) says it is developing computer softwares that would monitor internet services in the country as a way to combat cyber crimes. Spokesman of the Commission, Femi Babafemi, who disclosed this to IT World, said the Commission is partnering with Information and Communication experts to develop the software.

Call for Nominations: Freedom Awards 2009

2008-09-25

http://www.freetheslaves.net/NETCOMMUNITY/Page.aspx?pid=447&srcid=341

Free the Slaves created the Freedom Awards to celebrate today’s anti-slavery heroes and to catalyze additional innovation and resources to end slavery once and for all. The Awards program will define what successful, sustainable anti-slavery work looks like and build a vision of freedom for change-makers to adopt. The Freedom Awards are an outgrowth of Free the Slaves’ role within the global anti-slavery movement as an organization seeking to provoke innovative ideas and thoughtful reflection on what techniques have worked and which ones still need to be tried.

Global: Conference on Refugee Warehousing

2008-09-19

http://www.refugeeconference.org/

The 2008 Conference on Refugee Warehousing presents a unique opportunity to learn about the issues and join the global movement to end the human warehousing of refugees. Learn from experts and activists in the field. Keynote speakers Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond of the American University in Cairo and Merrill Smith of USCRI and will kick off the conference with an inspiring talk about how you can help stop this inhuman practice.

Africa: African Monitor tender announcement

2008-09-26

http://www.afrodad.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=329&Itemid=1

African Monitor (www.africanmonitor.org) is commissioning 4 independent studies to be undertaken in the following countries; Ghana, Zambia, Ethiopia and Uganda. Proposals are hereby invited from suitably qualified consultants/organizations to undertake a 3 month comprehensive research and fieldwork survey on “Resource Tracking in the agriculture sector” in each of the above named countries. Deadline is 29 September 2008.

Kenya: Call for consultants - UNDP

2008-09-25

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/50758

Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, partnering with UNDP is looking for consultants. If you think you are qualified, or youth think you know someone who can do it, kindly disseminate and/or send at CV to: - philip.nganga@undp.org Kindly specify the tasks you are applying for.
Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports, partnering with UNDP is looking for consultants to carry out the following activities;
1. Edit and Finalise for publication Action Plans on the following thematic areas; One consultant per thematic area.

i.) Youth, Crime and Drugs
ii.) Youth Education and Training
iii.) Youth and Environment
iv.) Youth and ICT
v.) Youth, Leisure, Recreation and Community Services
vi.) Youth and Employment
vii.) Youth, Empowerment and participation

The above action plans have already been drawn, and the tasks will be to edit, harmonize and align each of them to prevailing development issues as regarding young people, in line with vision 2030 and Millennium development goals. The consultants will work very closely with Ministry of Youth Affairs and Sports as the lead in finalizing of these action plans and in giving professional layouts for publishing of the action plans. The consultants must have at leas a basic degree in communication or social sciences. Previous experience in working in any of the thematic areas or in documentation will be an added advantage.

2. Translate the Kenya National Youth Policy into Swahili and Braille. This requires one consultant per translation. Experience and education background justifying the consultant’s qualification is required.
3. Facilitators/trainers on Youth Friendly Service provision to Youth Officers. This will be an outdoors experiential training. At least 3 consultants are required for this particular training programme. Previous experience facilitating outdoors training programmes will be necessary.


If you think you are qualified, or youth think you know someone who can do it, kindly disseminate and/or send at CV to: - philip.nganga@undp.org by Close of business on Thursday 25th September 2008. Kindly specify the tasks you are applying for.

Senegal: Francophone Africa researcher

Business & Human Rights Resource Centre

2008-09-26

http://www.business-humanrights.org/Documents/FrAfricaResearcher

The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre has just launched a recruitment for a Francophone Africa Researcher & Representative, based in Senegal. The position is half-time (2.5 days per week). The closing date for applications is 28 October. Applicants must be fluent in French, have strong English language skills, and must already have the right to work in Senegal.

Fahamu