Current Issue

'Alternative Nobel prize' to FoE International chair Nnimmo Bassey

Friends of the Earth International

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/67403

Friends of the Earth International, the world's largest federation of grassroots environmental organisations, is proud to announce that its chair, Nnimmo Bassey from Nigeria [1], will be a recipient of the 2010 'Right Livelihood Award'. [2]

The Right Livelihood Award, often referred to as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize' will be delivered in Stockholm on December 6.

The announcement that Nnimmo Bassey is one of the four 2010 Laureates was made today at a press conference at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Stockholm.

Nnimmo Bassey, who is also Executive Director of Friends of the Earth Nigeria, was nominated ‘for revealing the full ecological and human horrors of oil production and for his inspired work to strengthen the environmental movement in Nigeria and globally.’

Nnimmo Bassey, who is currently in Africa, said: ‘This award is a vindication of the just and resolute struggles for environmental justice by impacted communities globally. We want to see an end to the corporate crimes committed by oil giants like Shell in Nigeria and around the world.’

‘ Friends of the Earth and four Nigerian farmers recently filed a groundbreaking court case against Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell in the Netherlands for its massive oil pollution in Nigeria and we look forward to the first hearing which will take place in the coming months,’ he added.

Nnimmo Bassey is one of Africa’s leading advocates and campaigners for the environment and human rights. Bassey has tirelessly stood up against the practices of multinational corporations and the environmental devastation they leave behind, destroying the lives and trampling on the rights of local people.

Fahamu Refugee Legal Aid Newsletter - October issue

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/Announce/67402

The newsletter follows recent developments in the interpretation of refugee law; case law precedents from other constituencies; reports and helpful resources for refugee legal aid NGOs; and stories of struggle and success in refugee legal aid work. It welcomes contributions from legal aid providers, refugees and others interested or involved in refugee legal aid.

Millennium Development Goals: A critique from the South

Samir Amin

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67326

cc W E CWith saturation coverage of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) following a UN meeting in New York last week, Samir Amin attacks the 'supposedly democratic packaging' of the goals. Stripping away the language of development, he suggests that the MDGs mask the pursuit of other goals which have nothing to do with social progress.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were adopted by acclamation in September 2000 by a resolution of the UN called the ‘United Nations Millennium Declaration’. This procedural innovation, called ‘consensus’, stands in stark contrast to UN tradition, which always required that texts of this sort be carefully prepared and discussed at great length in committees. This simply reflects a change in the international balance of power. The US and its European and Japanese allies are now able to exert hegemony over a domesticated UN. In fact, Ted Gordon, well-known consultant for the CIA, drafted the MDGs.

The claim is made that the MDGs follow up on the conclusions reached in the cycle of summits organised in the 1990s. That’s going a bit too far. The preparatory meetings to these summits had tried something new by organising assemblies of so-called civil society representatives parallel to the official conferences, where only state representatives were seated.

Although things had been organised to reserve the best places for the charitable NGO’s, which are beneficiaries of financial support from large foundations and states, and largely to exclude popular organisations fighting for social and democratic progress (authentic popular organisations are always poor by definition), the voices of the latter were sometimes heard. In the official conferences themselves, the points of view of the triad and of the South often diverged.



It is often forgotten that the triad’s proposals were rejected in Seattle not only in the streets, but also by states from the South. It is also important to remember that the reconstruction (or at least the first signs of reconstruction) of a group (if not a front) of the South took place at Doha. All of these divergences were smoothed away by the supposed synthesis of the MDGs.

Instead of forming a genuine committee for the purpose of discussing the document, a draft was
prepared in the backroom of some obscure agency. The only common denominator is limited to the expression of the pious hope of reducing poverty. In what follows, I will examine how these goals are formulated and the conditions required to reach them.

Eight sets of goals were defined over a period of 15 years, between 2000 and 2015 (http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/index.html). The accomplishment of each of the targets that specifically define them is based on measurable indicators, generally altogether acceptable in themselves.

Each of these goals is certainly commendable Who would disapprove of reducing poverty or improving health? Nevertheless, their definition is often extremely vague. Moreover, debates concerning the conditions required to reach the goals are often dispensed with. It is assumed without question that liberalism is perfectly compatible with the achievement of the goals.

Goal one: Reduce extreme poverty and hunger by half.

This is nothing but an empty incantation as long as the policies that generate poverty are not analyzed and denounced and alternatives proposed.

Goal two: Achieve universal primary education.

UNESCO devoted itself to this goal beginning in 1960, hoping to achieve it in 10 years. Progress was made during the two decades that followed, but ground has since been lost. The almost obvious relationship between this lost ground, the reduction in public expenditures, and the privatisation of education is not examined in fact nor in theory.

Goal three: Promote gender equality and empower women.

The equality in question is reduced to access to education and the empowerment is measured by the proportion of wage-earning women. The neoconservative Christian fundamentalists of the US, Poland
and elsewhere, the Muslims of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other countries, and the fundamentalist Hindus agree on eliminating any reference to the rights of women and the family. Without discussion,
declarations on this question are only empty talk.

Goals four, five, and six: Reduce infant mortality by two-thirds and maternal mortality by three-fourths; stop the spread of pandemic diseases (AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis).

The means implemented in these areas are assumed to be completely compatible with extreme privatisation and total respect for the ‘intellectual property rights’ of the transnational corporations and, curiously enough, are recommended in goal eight concerning the supposed partnership between North and South.

Goal seven: Ensure environmental sustainability.

A general principle is asserted ‘to integrate the principles of sustainable development’ into national and global policies, but no definite content is made explicit. Moreover, any mention of the refusal of the US to promote conditions necessary for environmental protection (For example, their rejection of the Kyoto Protocol) is carefully avoided.

It is presupposed, then, that the rationality of capitalist economic strategy is compatible with the requirements of ‘sustainable development’. That is obviously not the case since capitalist strategy
is founded on the concept of the rapid discounting of economic time (with the timespan governing investment decisions never exceeding a few years at maximum), while the questions raised here relate to the long term. The specific goals are thus in fact reduced to nothing much: reduce by half the population having no access to clean water, improve living conditions in the slums - two ordinary goals of simple public health.

The criteria for measuring the results (CO2 emissions, change in the ozone layer) undoubtedly make it possible to monitor the degradation of the environment, but certainly not to curb it. Note the strange timidity of the writers concerning biodiversity. There is no question of infringing on the greater rights of the transnationals. They propose only ‘to observe’ the evolution of land areas protected from the destruction of biodiversity. But above all not to stop it.

Goal eight: Develop a global partnership for development.

The writers straightaway establish an equivalence between this ‘partnership’ and the principles of liberalism by declaring that the objective is to establish an open, multilateral commercial and financial system. The partnership thus becomes synonymous with submission to the demands of the imperialist powers. Progress in access to the market is measured by the share of exports in the GDP. An increase in this ratio is thus synonymous with progress regardless of the social price.

To carry out this ‘liberal partnership’ would require, in the end, nothing more than the fight against poverty (the only ‘social’ goal allowed). To this is added, like hair in soup, ‘good governance’, a phrase favoured by the US establishment that is never defined and is taken up uncritically by the Europeans and the institutions of the global system.

The real goals of dominant capital

A critical examination of the formulation of the goals as well as the definition of the means that would be required to implement them can only lead to the conclusion that the MDGs cannot be taken seriously. A litany of pious hopes commits no one.

And when the expression of these pious hopes is accompanied by conditions that essentially eliminate the possibility of their becoming reality, the question must be asked: are not the authors of the document actually pursuing other priorities that have nothing to do with ‘poverty reduction’ and all the rest? In this case, should the exercise not be described as pure hypocrisy, as pulling the wool over the eyes of those who are being forced to accept the dictates of liberalism in the service of the quite particular and exclusive interests of dominant globalised capital?

Besides, the MDGs cannot truly be taken seriously by their promoters in the imperialist triad, which implements them only when it is convenient and ignores them otherwise, nor by states in the South that, not wanting to take any risks at the present time, refrain from formally rejecting the proposals. In another time, a text of this type would not have been adopted and the states of the South would have, at least, imposed a compromise.

The MDGs are part of a series of discourses that are intended to legitimise the policies and practices implemented by dominant capital and those who support it. The real goals, openly recognised as such, are:

1. Extreme privatisation, aimed at opening new fields for the expansion of capital. Such privatisation calls into question the existence of national state property, which should be liquidated on open markets, by foreign capital among others. Beyond that, privatisation aims at eliminating public services, particularly in education and health.

Here, the ideas developed in the MDGs concerning the elimination of illiteracy and the improvement of health lose all credibility. The privatisation of property and access to important natural resources, in particular petroleum and water, facilitates the pillage of these resources for the wastefulness of the triad, reducing the discourse of sustainable development to pure, empty rhetoric.

2. The generalisation of the private appropriation of agricultural land. Just as with agricultural and food products, land, too, must be subjected to the general law of the market. This general offensive aims at nothing less than extending the policy of ‘enclosures’ (referring to the ‘enclosures’ implemented in England in the 16th and 18th centuries and then extended to the rest of Europe in the 19th century. Its success would lead to the destruction of the peasant societies that make up nearly half of humanity.

This destruction, now underway (and liberalism would like to see the tempo accelerated), is already the major cause of pauperisation in the third world, which results in emigration from the countryside to the urban slums. But that is of little importance, since the minority of so-called modernised rural producers who will survive the massacre, and be subjected to the demands of agribusiness, will produce the profits that the latter aspires to capture. Nothing else matters.

3. Commercial ‘opening’ within a context of maximum deregulation. This is a way of lifting all obstacles to the expansion of a trade that is as unequal as it can possibly be in conditions characterised by a polarised world development and a growing concentration of power in the hands of
the transnationals that control the trade in raw materials and agricultural products. The example of coffee illustrates the disastrous social effects of this systematic choice. Twenty years ago, all coffee producers were paid $9 billion dollars and all the consumers paid out $20 billion for this same coffee. Today these two figures are respectively $6 and $30 billion. The gap between them is the gigantic profit margin. It goes without saying that in these conditions campaigns in favour of so-called fair trade, even when their promoters are moved by the most impeccable moral intentions, are not up to the challenge. The correction of these deteriorating terms of trade for the producers can only be obtained by the political intervention of government authorities - both national legislation and international negotiations and legislation.

4. The equally uncontrolled opening up of capital movement. The fallacious pretext advanced is that deregulation would make it possible to attract foreign capital. Yet it is well known that China, which attracts more of this capital than other countries, has maintained a tighter control over foreign enterprises. Elsewhere, direct foreign investments are targeted at little more than pillaging natural resources. In fact, the IMF imposed the opening of ‘capital accounts’ in order to facilitate the indebtedness of the US, allow speculative capital to engage in pillaging raids, and subject the currencies of the South to systematic undervaluation. This undervaluation, in turn, makes it possible for local assets in these countries to be purchased for next to nothing, to the evident advantage of the transnational corporations.

5. States are forbidden in principle from interfering in economic affairs. Internally, the state is reduced to narrow police functions. Internationally, it is reduced to guaranteeing debt service, as the first priority in public expenditures. The debt is hardly anything more than a particularly primitive form of exploitation and pillage.

This model is presented as being without an alternative because it is imposed by the ‘objective’ requirements of globalisation, which negates the power of national states. In reality, the causal relation is just the reverse: this particular form (among other possible ones) of globalisation is allotted the objective of destroying the ability of nations and states to resist the expansion of transnational capital.

That is why all these principles, openly adopted by the writers of the MDGs, can only produce what I have elsewhere described as apartheid on a world scale, reproducing and deepening global polarisation. As a counterpoint, the restoration of a margin of autonomy for states and the recognition of the legitimacy of state intervention (the definition even of democracy) within a multipolar perspective are the inescapable conditions required to attain the social objectives proclaimed by the MDGs.

In fact, then, the social goals proclaimed by the MDGs do not constitute the real goals of the whole exercise. Their supposedly democratic packaging must, in turn, be subject to a legitimate doubt. No democracy can possibly take root if it does not support social progress, but, instead, is associated with social regression. This is undoubtedly the reason why the vapid term ‘governance’ is served up as an accompaniment to the empty rhetoric of the MDGs.

The writers of the document appear to have paid no attention to the facts. In the course of three decades following the Second World War, the highest rate of growth known in history took place, along with full employment and notable upward social movement and, if not always a reduction in inequality, the stabilisation of structures aimed at more equitable income distribution. But it appears that because the systems in existence at that time regulated markets, these procedures were
‘irrational’ and their results ‘bad’. In the course of the following three decades, accompanying the welcome deregulation, there has been a collapse of growth, a breathtaking increase in unemployment,
precariousness, and other manifestations of pauperisation, and mounting inequalities. Yet it appears that this system is nevertheless better and more rational. That is undoubtedly because in the preceding systems the rate of return for capital was in the range of four to eight per cent and since then it has doubled, moving to between eight and 16 per cent.

The new doctrinaire liberalism

The central question concerns the concept of development maintained, explicitly or implicitly, in the MDGs. It can be formulated in this way: In the successive globalised economic and political systems of modern times, who was forced to adjust to whom? The subjects in question can be class or social groups, regions or nations.

In capitalist logic founded on private property, it is capital (the firm) that commands and employs labour. Workers do not have direct access to the means of production, which are not used to their liking. In its global expansion, capitalism is polarising, that is, it is founded on asymmetrical adjustment. The peripheries are shaped to serve the model of accumulation in the dominant centres. The ideology of capitalism ignores the concept of substantive development, for it recognises only
expanding markets.

It is significant that the term ‘development’ appeared only after the Second World War, supported by the governments of the Asian and African states that arose from national liberation movements. In this sense, the 1955 conference of Asian and African states at Bandung was the birth place of the project of developing the new third world. It was a multidimensional project of modernisation: of the economy (through industrialisation), the society, and the state.

This modernisation project appears within a type of globalisation and is not at all an invitation to economic and cultural autarky. But it does imply that in this process the North would adjust to the requirements for the development of the South, development conceptualised as a ‘catching up’.

Globalisation in this context is then recognised as having to be the result - beyond the conflicts - of negotiations between partners who recognise the divergence of their interests.

At each of these steps, capitalist globalisation rests on transnational social alliances, without which the models of accumulation in the dominant centers and dominated peripheries could not be reproduced.

The ‘colonial’ model, challenged after the Second World War, involved the management of the societies of the peripheries by local comprador classes of a given type (merchant intermediaries, large landowners). The new model resulting from decolonisation involved social reforms that deprive the older comprador classes of their power and substitute hegemonic blocs of a new type (national populist). This model is the basis of the successes (not the failures) of the economic and social
transformation of the Third World in the 1950s,1960s and 1970s. But it was always fought - with violence - by the powers of the imperialist triad.

The turnaround in the political conjuncture beginning in the 1980s brought us back to former times, before development, which has, in effect, been shown the door. It is significant that the new language of the dominant economics even abandons this term and substitutes ‘structural adjustment’ (adjustment of the societies and economies of the South to the requirements of the pursuit of accumulation in the North). Simultaneously, this turnaround in the balance of power to the benefit of capital appears everywhere - in the North as well as the South - as a strengthening of the subjection of labour to capital. The new doctrinaire liberalism acknowledges only expanding markets, not the deliberate political transformation of social and economic structures.

Although imposed on the societies of the South with extreme brutality, the new model had to be clothed in a discourse that gives it the appearance of legitimacy. It was necessary to reintroduce the word ‘development’ (as in the MDGs) but empty it of all meaning. This was done by reducing it to the fight against poverty and for good governance.

A series of documents prepared this revision in the meaning of words. The agencies set up to manage the rest of the world (85 per cent of the earth’s population, the dominated peripheries) by collective imperialism (the triad) here fulfilled the functions expected of them. The World Bank (which I call the ministry of propaganda for the G7) produced, in this spirit, distressing documents called Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSP). The IMF (the triad’s collective colonial monetary authority) imposed the priority of debt service, the debt itself being the means of imposing structural adjustment. The World Trade Organisation (WTO), far from being an institution responsible for managing world trade, is devoted to the objective of shaping the productive systems of the peripheries to the needs of the commercial expansion of the North, that is, to operate like a collective ministry of colonies.

The European Union - lined up with the general offensive of the imperialist triad - integrates the relations between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP) within this same context, pursued literally in the convention for the development of the ACP.

It could be asked why the governments of the countries of the South have subscribed to all of these commandments drafted in the imperialist centers. The response, in general terms, is that we should look to the social hegemonic blocs mentioned above that make possible the reproduction of asymmetric globalisation. There is a new comprador class in the countries of the periphery that actually derives its existence from the new model of globalised liberalism. This comprador class participates in the new government arrangements.

It is possible to distinguish those that are probably unique to so-called emerging countries (China in the first place). In these countries, the current governments live on illusions: they think about ‘catching up’ (through strong growth) while they are constructed as the industrialised peripheries of tomorrow, and dominated by the new monopolies on the basis of which the imperialist centers reproduce their domination (monopolies of technology, access to the planet’s natural resources, and weapons of mass destruction). They think of building a ‘strong and independent nation’, but in that connection must ignore that the US prepares ‘preventative wars’ against them that will not allow them this opportunity. History will undoubtedly be given the responsibility to dissipate these illusions.

Here I will place more emphasis on the rationales offered with respect to the most vulnerable peripheral regions, Africa in particular. The discourse developed in this regard by dominant thought is well known: Africa is marginalised in the new globalisation. This is by its own fault, having sunk into an excessive nationalism during the Bandung period. It can only get out of this difficult situation if it accepts being ‘more integrated’ into globalisation by a totally uncontrolled opening that will allow foreign capital to ‘develop’ it. The miseries associated with this option, for which there is no alternative, will only be ‘transitory’ and can be attenuated by programs that ‘fight against poverty’. This option will require, moreover, democratic political management called ‘good governance’.

This discourse abounds in contradictions and inadequacies. Africa is no less integrated into globalisation than other regions, but it was and is differently integrated. The forms of the new proposed integration, based on agro-mineral specialisation, are not new but are, on the contrary, a
return to the old. These forms can only accentuate the pauperisation and exclusion of huge masses of the population, in particular the peasants. But simultaneously and independently, they facilitate the pillage of the continent’s natural resources (petroleum, minerals, and wood), which is probably the principal objective of large transnational capital in Africa. Foreign direct investments will come to Africa for nothing else.

The responsibility of the current government teams - and behind them the new comprador classes - should not be excused. But that does not absolve the dominant forces in the imperialist centers of the global system from responsibility either.

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) is undoubtedly part of the new liberal thinking, but not with any great conviction it seems. It should be remembered that originally behind this initiative was the justified refusal of the racist ‘afro-pessimist’ discourse and the proclamation by Thabo Mbeki in 1998 that ‘Africans should and can appropriate modernity’, a way of indicating the renaissance of Africa that he called for. But Mbeki rushed into the same discourse of specifying that that appropriation should be done ‘in cooperation with the developed countries’, ignoring, or pretending to ignore, that that has never been the case up to now.

The NEPAD document lines up with liberal thought on the discourse of ‘good governance’. This is a concept that is useful as a way to dissociate democratic progress from social progress, to deny their equal importance and inextricable connection with one another, and to reduce democracy to good management subjected to the demands of private capital, an ‘apolitical’ management by an anodyne civil society, inspired by the mediocre ideology of the US. This discourse comes at the very moment when the interruption in the construction of the state imposed by structural adjustment has created, not conditions for a democratic advance but, instead, conditions for the shift towards the primacy of ethnic and religious identities that are manipulated by local mafias, benefit external supporters, and often degenerate into atrocious ‘civil wars’ (in fact conflicts between warlords). As Bernard Founou-Tchuigoua argues, it is less a question of a North-South partnership (here EU/ACP) than a new phase in asymmetrical structural adjustment.

The NEPAD document’s exposition, its hesitations or anodyne character, acquires its meaning in this context. For example, the wish to alleviate the debt is expressed, but this is done precisely because the debt has fulfilled its function of imposing structural adjustment. NEPAD also proposes an ‘integrated’ (Pan-African) development, just like the EU, giving its preference to arrangements with regional African groups. But, in the end, this document remains, as far as its proposals on trade, capital transfers, technology, and patents are concerned, aligned with liberal dogmas.

I will say in conclusion that a system of this type hardly has any future. Neither the MDGs nor NEPAD will make it possible to attenuate the seriousness of the problems and curb the resulting processes of political and social involution. The legitimacy of governments has disappeared. Thus conditions are ripe for the emergence of other social hegemonies that make possible a revival of development conceived as it should be: the combination of social progress, democratic advancement, and the affirmation of national independence within a negotiated multi-polar globalisation. The possibility of these new social hegemonies is already visible on the horizon. I bet that at the end of 2015, no one will propose a balance sheet of the achievements of the MDGs or NEPAD, which will have been long forgotten.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Samir Amin is director of the Third World Forum in Dakar, Senegal. His recent books include Obsolescent Capitalism: Contemporary Politics and Global Disorder (Zed Books, 2004) and The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (Monthly Review Press, 2004).
* James H. Membrez translated the essay from the French.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The global capitalist crisis and Africa’s future

Part 2: What is the way forward?

Dani W. Nabudere

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67401

cc B SIf we are to create and provide space and a platform for African autonomous thinking on issues of the future of the continent, we have to begin by liberating ourselves from Western ways of thinking and draw knowledge and inspiration from our own heritages, argues Dani W. Nabudere, in the second half of a two-part article based on his inaugural address to the newly formed Nile Heritage Forum on political economy.

The way forward beyond neo-liberal agenda’s is therefore to move towards an African agenda for social and economic transformation of the continent. However, as argued above, this requires our linking with the African masses through learning and unlearning processes, which must encompass both the African intellectual and the African masses. To move towards the establishment of the Pan-African University requires developing an epistemology that can enable us to access the knowledge embedded in our communities. This is because all knowledge is a creature of languages and African languages are a store of immense knowledge and wisdom.

We at the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute have been working along these lines to create an epistemology, which we have called ‘Afrikology’. This has laid a solid ground for the building of a new African institution, which is based on the African peoples’ heritage. As the originators of human knowledge and wisdom, the African people created a basis that enabled other societies in Asia and Europe to develop a global-universal system of knowledge that emerged from the first human beings in the Human Cradle located on the continent of Africa – the original homestead of all humanity. These activities started with the grassroots research work of Afrika Study Centre-ASC in pastoral communities in North-Eastern Uganda, beginning with traditional conflict resolution research aimed at overcoming destructive cattle rustling that went on between the pastoralists and their agricultural neighbours. These conflicts had increasingly turned inwards between the pastoralist communities themselves across the whole region of East Africa. The research enabled a dialogue to begin within the communities, which later turned into a questioning of whether the research activities were really reaching out to the real issues as understood by the pastoralist communities themselves.

This questioning led to further programmes in the communities and academic links, including my membership of the US-based Social Science Research Council’s-SSRC programme on human security and international cooperation in which I had raised the question of epistemology in dealing with issues of research and creation of pools of knowledge by scholars and ‘practitioners’. These ‘field building’ research activities involved new players that led to a new understanding of knowledge production and application. It was in this context that the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute-MPAI came into existence to engage in research at a very high academic level in which we began to raise issues of epistemology in much more considered form and in the writing of the first monographs on the issue. These monographs were later developed into full-fledged monographs on philosophy and epistemology of Afrikology.

The grassroots research carried out by Afrika Study Centre-ASC produced results about the way we understood pastoral communities and their knowledge systems. It led to the questioning of the current Eurocentric epistemologies, including Cartesian ‘scientific epistemologies’. The second area of research by ASC was the ‘Field Building’ research activity in which the challenge made in the SSRC of New York took on a hands-on grassroots approach in which certain community sites of knowledge were identified and included in the dialogues. The SSRC idea was to bring together into a ‘pool’ ‘all’ knowledge produced by academic scholars and ‘practitioners’ in their ‘intervention’ activities so that such collected knowledge would be available to all ‘users’. My query was that such a ‘pool’ was not inclusive of all the knowledge available in Uganda – adding that such a proposed model would leave all ‘indigenous knowledge’ out of consideration. The SSRC agreed to the inclusion of custodians of such knowledge in the ‘field building’ activity and it was during this activity that the epistemological issues became transparent for it turned out that the ‘scholars’ and ‘practitioners’ had long assumed that their disciplines and methodologies covered ‘indigenous knowledge.’ This was rejected by the custodians, who insisted that their ‘ways of knowing’ (epistemology) were different because they took into account the communities’ cultural and spiritual values, which ‘modern’ scientific approach ignored and in fact castigated as ‘superstitious’.

This is when the creation of the Marcus Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute-MPAI became crucial because it was found that research on epistemological issues needed to be raised at a high academic level to problematise existing Western academic disciplines and epistemologies. This led to the first theoretical paper written by me entitled: ‘Epistemological foundations and global knowledge production’. This paper was published without authorisation by the African Political Science Association in their Journal of African Political Economy (AJOPE).

At this point, the issue of the establishment of a Pan-Afrikan university was raised in a paper authored by me entitled: ‘Towards the establishment of the Pan-African University’, which was also published by the African Political Science Association in their above-mentioned journal. Both these papers led to debates amongst the MPAI research fellows that led to the development of discussions on ‘Ways of Knowing’ (epistemology) and ‘Ways of Being’ (Ontology) as well as the role of culture and language in knowledge production. The first theoretical paper, which advanced Afrikology as an epistemology that was capable of reaching out to community sites of knowledge was also produced by me entitled: ‘Towards an Afrikology of Knowledge production and African Regeneration’, which was published in the International Journal of African Renaissance Studies of the University of South Africa (UNISA). This theoretical paper was further developed and passed through a series of versions of an expanded monograph, which finally came to be referred to as: ‘Afrikology, Philosophy and Wholeness’, which is being published by the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) in Pretoria. A further effort was made to develop this epistemology and relate it to research and the concept of ‘Restoration’ which emerged out of the research on ‘Restorative Justice.’ This resulted in another monograph entitled: ‘Research, Hermeneutics, Transdisciplinarity and Afrikology: Towards a Restorative Learning and Understanding’. This monograph has been taken on by the UNISA chair, held by Ugandan academic Catherine Odora Hoppers, who wants to use to create a framework for developing African knowledge.

As pointed out above, the idea behind Afrikology as an epistemology springs from the fact that all cultures and languages are the producers of knowledge. As producers of knowledge, all language communities have something to offer to the pool of human knowledge. Therefore the many African languages are a treasure trove of knowledge, which must not just be ‘preserved,’ but reactivated and brought into use to promote African transformation as well as being available to other communities, hence its universality.

But since the custodians of this knowledge are the ‘uncertificated’ African men and women living in rural areas, it follows that they alone can dispense such knowledge through their universities and centres of higher learning, of which they shall be part. In fact the ‘African Community Sites of Knowledge’ in this sense have become the biggest universities from which the African intellectuals can derive their discharge their unlearning and promote a new ‘organic’ restorative learning and understanding through their own languages – learning through research and listening and dialogue.

Nothing demonstrates better the importance of recognising African Community Sites of Knowledge than the research work that UNESCO carried out in the 1970s to write a ‘General History of Africa’. According to Professor Curtin in his chapter in Volume 1 of the ‘UNESCO General History of Africa: Methodology and African Prehistory’, the process of collecting the data and information to write such a history was a gradual one, so that with the re-emergence of an authentically Afrocentric history, the need arose to ‘join forces with the movement for an all-embracing social history’ in the first place through an interdisciplinary approach combining the histories of agriculture, urbanisation, and social and economic relations, and subsequently as a result of these advances made in history based on field surveys. According to him:

‘The latter approach freed researchers from the constraining influence of archives in which the documents were often unreliable and were basically flawed because of the prejudices of the people who compiled them from the time of the slave trade to the end of the colonial period. The first-hand verbal accounts of contemporary African victims of colonisation have proved an effective counterweight to the testimony of official papers. Moreover, as a result of the methodology evolved for making use of oral tradition, historians of Africa have become pioneers in that field and have made a remarkable contribution to its development.’

Professor Curtin continues that this approach, which had been adopted by some ‘far-sighted scholar-administrators in the colonial service’ and which enabled them to collect ‘accounts of African traditions’, where countermanded by academic prejudices of people like Murdock, following the footsteps of the British functionalist anthropologists by ‘bluntly asserting that “indigenous oral traditions are completely undependable”’. However, following the publication of Jan Vansina’s book: ‘Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology’ (1961), in which he and other scholars, including Africans, ‘demonstrated the validity of oral tradition as a historical source, provided that it was subjected to the necessary critical controls’. The seminars held later by historians in Dakar in 1961 and in Dar es Salaam in 1965 had emphasised the same view, ‘as well as the roles of linguistics and archaeology’, so long as they were also subjected to the same critical controls, we should add.

Professor Curtin also notes that it was the process of the decolonisation of African history that also liberated ‘colonial history’ by ‘reversing’ it, and did away with the presentation of European conquerors ‘as heroes of civilisation’:

‘In the work of the historians of decolonisation, the picture was completely changed and aligned more closely to the facts: the heroes were the African resistance fighters, whereas the conquerors were the leaders of expeditionary columns and colonial governors, who equated right with might, a policy always applied with brutality and sometimes with bloody consequences. A second step forwards was taken when the spotlight was focussed on the protest and resistance campaigns which, at the height of the colonial period, were to pave the way for the national liberation movements.’

These approaches had rendered outstanding service to the other social sciences, and ‘what achieved this was not the interdisciplinary methodology, but that for the first time African voices through their oral traditions had brought out the facts of their heritage and knowledge systems’. The African decolonisation struggle had even gone further to ‘reverse’ the way history was henceforth to be written: As a ‘social history’. Primarily, the results showed that ‘traditional’ Africa had never been static and changeless, as the prejudiced Eurocentric historians such as Coupland had asserted in the ‘History of East Africa’. The studies from oral tradition also disproved those economists, historians, political scientists and sociologists who had split Africa into the ‘before’ and ‘after,’ implying separation of traditional and ‘modern’ Africa in which the former was depicted as static and the later as dynamic because it was said to have ‘jolted [Africa] into action’, because ‘before’ it was ‘a world that had lain sleeping until them.’ Curtin ends by observing that:

‘It was the English-speaking anthropologists who were most put out by the revelation that dynamic internal forces had been at work in traditional African society. As functionalists, they had taken the structures of that society and had set about isolating the different agents or groups that had played a specific role in the original balanced state of things; their method entailed analysing the real and observable present and sifting out everything that might have been added since the arrival of the Europeans, so as to end up with an indigenous “model” in the pristine state, in a sort of timeless “anthropological present”. It is true that this approach, which was dominated by the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, helped give an insight into the workings of societies. But this partiality for an Africa that was as ‘primitive’ as possible and, what is more, was immobilized in the museum of the ethnological present, tended to strip the peoples of Africa of one of their most important dimensions: their historical development. Consequently, historical studies had a positive impact on functionalism by recalling that the present is by definition transient.’

In his preface to the ‘General History’, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the director-general of UNESCO, observed that since the European Middle Ages, which was the drawing line between the European dark ages and the modern era, the new Europe was used as the yard stick for judging other societies, although the Greek Iliad and Odyssey, based on oral tradition, were rightly regarded as essential sources of the history of ancient Greece from which Europe was claiming its heritage for their renaissance. Much of this source also contained elements of African history, but this was ignored and African oral tradition, the collective memory of peoples of Africa that ‘holds the thread of many events marking their lives, was rejected as worthless.’

But, M’Bow added, African oral tradition and history, ‘after being long despised, has now emerged as an invaluable instrument for discovering the history of Africa, making it possible to follow the movements of its different peoples in both space and time, to understand the African vision of the world from inside and to grasp the original features of the values on which the cultures and institutions of the continent is based.

Therefore, we have a peoples’ history as the entry point in going deeper into the African soul to discover what Africa stood for and what it offers today. The oral tradition and the hieroglyphs as well as the archaeological sources, literature, art, religion, philosophy all offer the opportunity to bridge the confusing ‘paradigms’, methodologies and scientific epistemologies that have alienated humankind from historical bearings rendering modern society into a materialistic, greedy and immoral society that foregrounds self-interest above community. The attempt to bridge these confusing academic disciplines has been done by Afrikology, which is a transdisciplinary approach to knowledge production.

The other ‘aberration’ was the ‘ethnographic contempt for the sequence of events’ and a tendency to concentrate on structures and a certain linguistic approach that became ‘blind and deaf’ to the dynamics of language, which was also the weakness of functionalist anthropologists. Therefore, for African historians, the interdisciplinary approach was not a question of choice, but one of necessity and in this respect M’Bow regarded oral tradition as a ‘fully-fledged historical source’.

In this respect too, Ki-Zerbo placed emphasis on linguistics, which he regarded a an ‘inexhaustible historical source, for tradition is encapsulated in the living museum of language’. It is not only a psychological entity, its vocabulary ‘is like sedimentary layer in which the realities forged by each people’s history are deposited.’ He added: ‘But conversely, it is language, the “word”, which conveys the ideological and cultural or political messages and which makes and unmakes history and makes it afresh by creating the ideas and rules governing behaviour. Some of the concepts involved are untranslatable because they bear the stamp of an entire culture.’

It seems to me that the real problem here is the idea of the academic disciplines themselves and the epistemology upon which they are based. Once we accept that we have to operate within these disciplines in order to ‘recreate images of [African] social life’, ostensibly one that projects their authentic selves, it is naïve, in my humble opinion, to expect that people who have been trained and ‘disciplined’ to see African society from the outside and whose disciplinary concepts and ways of thinking are imbued with prejudices built within the disciplines conceptual frameworks and language, can abandon these conceptual framework unless they have internalised another epistemological framework that accords with the communal and oral character of the African wholeness, which Afrikology seeks to overcome.

In short, the scholars must be ideological transformed to see through the conceptual and theoretical frameworks they use and to cope different meanings that cannot sometimes be not only linguistically translatable but even epistemologically consistent with the new concepts found within the African traditions themselves. It is also idealistic and naïve to expect the intellectuals to just ‘change’ their ‘outlook’ and work coherently with other equally segmented and academically fragmented disciplined individuals, whose ideological positions might be incompatible. This is even more so if new centres of research and learning have to be organisationally structured to accommodate this fragmentation and compartmentalisation, where the epistemological and ideological elements are already pre-determined in the structures to be erected and the individuals to be deployed.

These Eurocentric epistemological and methodological approaches must be undermined if we are to make any progress in advancing scholarship under conditions of an African ‘renaissance’ and regeneration. African scholars together with the African masses have to create a new world by being able to recognise their existing cosmological worlds. As we move ‘from the outside to the inside’, we have to define new approaches of understanding that are appropriate to the African world. Academic disciplines in Europe arose with the needs of the time to serve particular interests. They were not created by God for all times and for all societies. They are human creations that serve particular (class) interests.

Prof Ki-Zerbo himself argues that it is an ‘imperative requirement’ that African history ‘should at last be seen from within instead of being interpreted through references to other societies, readymade ideas and prejudices.’ It is time for us, he challenges, ‘to take an inside look at our identity and our growing awareness.’ He is particularly bothered by the fact that ‘our history is being explained by a whole series of words and concepts that have come from Europe or other continents and that translate – and quite often betray – realities and structures created in another linguistic and social context.’ But we cannot do this, if at the same time, we detach the academic disciplines from their concepts and prejudices by adopting interdisciplinary methodologies, which he advocated. To do so, we would be moving in vicious circles with the blissful hope that these same academic disciplines will deliver us from the problems we seek to overcome.

So long as the ‘scientific methodologies’, that were ideologically ‘constructed’ to animalise the African people are not themselves problematised, deconstructed and new epistemologies developed based on African cosmogonies, it will be difficult to ‘domesticate’ these same academic disciplines to re-humanise the world. Linguistic gimmicks will not do unless these are built on the principle that African languages are the tools through which a dialogue is possible that alone can promote their self-understanding and orient African scholars towards their own societies. This can only be achieved through a holistic, trans-disciplinary Afrikology that foregrounds dialogue through African languages, which are holistic and non-fragmented according to academic ‘disciplines.’

Even in the area of linguistics that we all believe should be at the core of our work, and it is in fact in this area that we can be inspired to develop new ways of knowing ourselves, there is a lot of innovative work that has to be done.

Professor Greenberg adds that the Africa displays a greater degree of linguistic complexity than other continents and that the classification of African languages that has so far been carried out by mainly western linguists have created even more confusion because by following their individual conceptualisations, ’the linguistic divisions constructed by one researcher or another are disturbingly reminiscent of the colonial divisions of yesteryear’ [Greenberg, 1989: 121]. To cure this problem, he calls for more monographs to be written so that more ‘scientific identifications of the outlines of the groups that may exist between the major “families” and the basic units, which are currently the only irrefutable evidence.’ For this to be done, Greenberg, calls for Africans scholars themselves to do this work and this cannot be done in my view without the African griots and other indigenous linguistic experts becoming part of the process of research and teaching.

This work was in fact begun with the pioneering attempt by Cheikh Anta Diop to link the Egyptian language with several West African languages followed by the work of Professor Theophile Obenga in the same field. It was with their work and struggle that the ancient Egyptian language, which had previously been linked to Semitic group of languages, was corrected at the UNESCO Symposium organised in Cairo in 1974 on ‘The Peopling of Ancient Egypt’ to be part of the family of African languages. This major achievement brought nearer the acknowledgement of Egypt as an African civilisation and not an Asiatic one as had been argued by the Eurocentric ‘Egyptologists.’

The essence of the matter is that African scholars must be prepared to do the kind of research that is original and that can enable them to abandon Eurocentric clothing of academia and engage in dialogue with the experts in their communities. They have to admit that in that case, they alone cannot determine the research agenda from above, but must humble themselves to come under the feet of the African sages and griots, just like the Greek students like Plato did in Egypt to learn at the feet of the Egyptian scribes.

The designing of the research is not a top-down affair. It has to involve those who have the knowledge and information required for whatever is desired to be achieved by the research. In that case, the methodology cannot be predetermined. It has to be ‘negotiated’ with those ‘who know’ and during this process, the problem of the academic disciplines in which the hypotheses are formulated will be determined by the result of the dialogue between the researcher and (the researched) – those who know. The crucial question will be: ‘What is the purpose of the knowledge to be created?’ Is it for knowledge’s sake, or is it intended to result in some good for the community who will participate in such a research and knowledge production? This question cannot be answered in the abstract. It can only be answered with the people who can produce the knowledge and for whom it should be produced because they will know what use it is for.

Time has come when the African elites must stop looking down at their community compatriots as ignorant and illiterate, while the villagers look upon them as agents of foreign culture and economic interests. Hostility exists between the two and there is no trust between them since relationships between them is based on top-down ‘development’ dictates passed on by the elite to the ‘ignorant masses’. This is the reason why African cultures and civilisation have stagnated, only changing to accommodate foreign-inspired solutions.

If we are therefore we are to create and provide space and platform for African autonomous thinking on issues of the future of the continent, free from disadvantageous foreign influences that have resulted in Africa’s weakening, we have to begin by liberating ourselves from the dominant epistemologies and adopt such an epistemology such as Afrikology that can enable us to draw knowledge and inspiration from our own heritages, which our people created through their languages.

This knowledge is a living knowledge and incorporates our heritages. A Nile Heritage has deep roots in the origins of the Human Cradle, which is located in the Nile Valley. Ethiopian, Nubian and Egyptian civilisations were its flowering. Since then, our heritage was invaded and taken over by foreigners in Egypt and now in the rest of the continent. This injurious invasion must be fought back as the struggle in the Sudan has demonstrated. It is a long and arduous struggle, which must not only take an armed form. It has foremost to take the form of RESISTANCE THROUGH KNOWLEDGE and such knowledge is to be found deep in our heritage. So let us work on it. We are very much behind time.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Read Part 1 of ‘The global capitalist crisis and Africa’s future’
* This paper has been written without references only for purposes of discussion at the inaugural conference of the Nile Heritage Initiative, held in Nairobi on 9 September 2010. It is not to be quoted from or extracted without the prior authorisation of the author.
* Professor Dani W. Nabudere is executive director of the Marcus-Garvey Pan-Afrikan Institute, Mbale, Uganda.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Zenawi and the devaluation of the birr

A layman’s guide

Seid Hassan

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67399

cc WikimediaEthiopia’s central bank announced a devaluation of national currency the birr by a fifth on 1 September, reportedly on the instructions of a macro-economic team chaired by President Zenawi. Placing the devaluation within in a wider political context, Seid Hassan outlines what the move means for the country’s economy and why it might please the IMF.

On 1 September 2010, the Central Bank of Ethiopia announced a devaluation of the birr by 20 per cent.[1] With this devaluation measure, the value of the birr has declined by at least 45 per cent since 2008. It is to be recalled that the birr was devalued by at least 10 per cent in October 2008, by 9.9 per cent in July 2009, and by at least 5 per cent in early May/late April 2010. Numerous sources indicate that all devaluation measures are conducted after the macro-economic team chaired by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi makes the decisions to do so.

Devaluation is associated with fixed or pegged exchange rates systems whose value is not being determined by the normal (free) mechanics of supply and demand. In general, devaluation reflects the existence of serious macroeconomic problems (imbalances or weak economic fundamentals) and also reflects weaknesses of the government that is devaluing its currency.

When it comes to Ethiopia, the economic weakness is reflected by several of the resource gaps: The savings-investment gap, the balance of payments (BoP) gap which in 2009 escalated, with total exports and imports amounting to US$1.657 billion and US$7.093 billion respectively, according to the CIA World Factbook. Ethiopia is also afflicted by other gaps such as a continuous budgetary gap, a skilled human resource gap, a significant agricultural (food security) gap, a dire foreign exchange gap, technology gap and most importantly, a good governance gap.[2]

By just looking at the solvency issue, that is, the balance of payments and budgetary balance gaps and the alarming foreign exchange shortages, one is also led to believe that the birr is overvalued and some measure of devaluation is necessary. When I wrote the popular article ‘The Causes of the Soaring Ethiopian Inflation Rate’ a few years ago, and suggested that the birr was overvalued, some of my readers were perplexed by such an expression, informing me that I was wrong.

They did so partly because they thought I agreed with the government that devaluing the birr would serve as a panacea for the structural problems that the Ethiopian economy was facing, and partly because they thought all the theoretical possibilities were applicable to Ethiopia, and devaluation would solve the country’s structural problems All that I was saying was this: Using standard economic reasoning and rationales of devaluation, the fact that the country has been engulfed with high inflation rates means that the purchasing power of the birr has been decreasing.

The fact that the government has been facing foreign exchange shortages and is unable to meet the lowest required foreign exchange reserves (which is supposed to be not less than a 3-month import coverage, but with actual coverage at times being less than six weeks of import coverage) and the fact that such shortages have led the Central Bank of Ethiopia to ration foreign exchange to both importers (and foreign investors who are unable to repatriate some of their profits back home as a result of the foreign exchange shortages) also indicates a non-market clearing foreign exchange market. The fact that the IMF has been warning the government that it would face financial difficulties implies that the birr could collapse, sooner or later. Moreover, the fact that even some domestic firms were suspending their operations and were unable to import the necessary intermediate inputs from overseas due to the lack of foreign exchange also indicate a disequilibrium in the exchange rate market (that is, the exchange rate between the birr and other currencies has become untenable).

It also means that, with disequilibrium in the exchange rate in existence, the government will be unable to carry on its new 5-year ‘Growth and Transformation Plan’. It is for these already existing and new realities and inherent weaknesses why I argued the birr was overvalued long ago. I also believed that were it not for the continuous influx of donor assets (estimated to be US$3 billion in 2009) and remittances (the National Bank of Ethiopia reporting total remittances just for the first two quarters of 2009 being US$1,798.8 million), the value of the birr would have been much lower than what it was then and what it is now as well.

Regarding the political aspect of the weakness, in general, devaluation comes as a result of the realities of economic mismanagement and the push (many people like to call it coercion) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In general, a greater portion of a country’s citizens consider their government to be a weak one whenever they observe it bowing to the IMF’s pressure. Second, since those firms who are engaged in the production of exportables tend to benefit the most from the devaluation of the birr, it indicates the increasing lobbying power of those firms (groups) that are able to turn policy decisions in their favour.

In the Ethiopian case, given that several of the Tigrayan People's Liberation Front (TPLF)-controlled conglomerates organised under the Endowment Fund For The Rehabilitation of Tigrai (EFFORT) and the Relief Society of Tigrai (REST) (in collaboration with Sheikh Mohammed Al-Amoudi’s MIDROC Ethiopia) have seized the state, it is only them who stand to benefit from the devaluation. The fact that powerful elements are able to gear government policies towards their favour in turn reflects the weakness of the government, which is supposed to look after the interests of the country and the general populace.[3]

Political observers I talked to speculated that the largely unexpected massive devaluation of the birr may also indicate an acknowledgement of weak economic fundamentals by the authorities themselves. For example, they say, when questioned about the merits of the devaluation measure by the local business leaders and party members, Prime Minister Zenawi was quoted as saying that it was ‘a sour medicine that the economy has to swallow.’ In a normal setting, both the harsh economic realities on the ground and the ‘bitter pill to swallow’ statements made by the authorities would create serious political problems for the regime in power.

On the one hand, the bitter pill to swallow statement contradicts the rosy economic scenario that the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has been painting during the run-up to the May 2010 parliamentary elections. On the other hand, such statements and measures indicate that the regime was dishonest to the public about the economic conditions of the country. The measure and reasoning given for devaluing the birr also reflect that, in addition to the currently existing foreign exchange shortages, the authorities might have come to their realisation that they would face crunches in exchange inflows such as remittances, grants, foreign investment, and loans down the road.

With such pronouncements, the authorities are admitting to the well-known fact that the government has become increasing dependent on the remittances, in the same way of many impoverished Ethiopian families. Both the timing and relatively massive devaluation measure also reveal one important empirical fact that both political scientists and economists have known: Devaluations are delayed and the real economic conditions are intentionally distorted during the run-up to elections, in order to increase the electoral chances of the party in office.[4]

Such political opportunistic behaviours contribute to increasing uncertainties both about the competence of the ruling party and the future of the national economy. One is led to think, therefore, that both the measure and the contradictory statements by the authorities would politically backfire on them if the losers, who will be unable to handle the inflationary ramification of the devaluation measure, are forced to become better organised and more articulate.

CONVENTIONAL PARADIGM OF AND JUSTIFICATION FOR DEVALUATION

The economic reasoning behind the devaluation of the birr as a means of improving a country's trade balance is that a decline in the birr would cause exportables to be cheaper relative to other countries. This would then lead to an increase in the volume of exports, other things equal. With the cheapened birr, imported goods become more expensive, thereby leading to an improvement in the country's trade balance. The expected reduction in the trade balance depends, of course, on the exact amounts of imports and exports, their respected price elasticities and a number of other factors some of which I’ll illustrate below.

Despite being contradictory at times, the many statements given by the authorities are in line with such prescriptions. For example, Tamrat G. Giorgis of ‘Addis Fortune’[5] reports that when business leaders questioned both the timing and manner of the devaluation, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and state minister for Works and Urban Development, Arkebe Oqubay, gave three rationales for devaluing the birr:

a) To meet the $10 billion export revenue target of the ‘Growth and Transformation Plan’
b) To make imported consumer goods more expensive ‘in a bid to promote import substitution industries’
c) To provide more incentives to Ethiopians abroad who send remittances.’

Such reasoning may seem to make the devaluation measure a good idea under different circumstances but given the structural defects in the state/economic functioning, the measure will not have the effects that Mr Zenawi and the IMF desire for several reasons that I discuss below.

NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF DEVALUING THE BIRR

1) The devaluation of the birr is likely to aggravate inflation and it could spark a snowball effect of higher inflation as it can build into a cascade of expectations for further devaluation by private citizens.[6] When devaluation is done overnight in secretive and surprising manner as is done to the birr[7], the action has the potential to irritate the business sector and speculators. As a result, the devaluation measure could be self-defeating and self-fulfilling. Moreover, for those who control the commanding heights of the Ethiopian economy and the party-controlled conglomerates and their ‘owners’, the action will tempt them to convert their assets into dollars/pounds/euros and expatriate their assets before their values are eroded.

There is also a possibility for potential and future birr holders to shun the currency since holding the birr will be very expensive to them. Regarding the issue of expectations, one may convincingly argue that the birr will not be attacked by speculators since the economy is agrarian in nature and the banking sector is largely’ decoupled’ from the speculators and the international banking system as Prime Minister Meles himself suggested a few years back.[8] If the birr collapses, therefore, it will not be due to those unscrupulous speculators, but due to structural problems and bad policies and their implementation by the government in power. But again, given what took place in Zimbabwe, a combination of existing shortages and the expectation of further devaluation could lead to the collapse of the birr.[9]

2) Increased volatility and uncertainty: Since devaluation affects expectations, it could increase the volatility in the exchange rate as well. Fluctuating prices of domestic goods (caused by devaluing the birr and which will be accompanied by increased price of demand) will increase uncertainty, with their potential to decrease production. The measure will adversely affect the business sector for it does not allow it to plan its operations in advance, price its products properly and forge ahead with future contracts.

3) The devaluation will cause the prices of imported consumer goods (which is one of the purposes of the devaluation) to rise. Since Ethiopia largely relies on imported goods and services, particularly food items, the population at large will suffer from the rise in prices caused by the devalued birr.

4) By making domestic assets – including land – cheaper, devaluation facilitates the transfer of Ethiopian assets to those who hold (or have access to) hard currency (mostly the global enterprises). This will intensify the so-called ‘Land Grab’ process and the acquisition of weakened domestic enterprises by global enterprises.

5) The lack of transparency in the devaluation process coupled with the rise in the cost of living erodes trust in the government, assuming that such a trust already exists, which may complicate the governing abilities of the regime in power. In particular, rational business persons will be hard pressed to trust the government from here on, given the unexpected massive devaluation measure of the birr.

6) This measure is also filled with many contradictions. For one thing, the government has been reigning in the money supply by arresting credit and putting pressure on the banking sector just to fight the inflationary pressure that has engulfed the nation. The devaluation of the birr effectively reverses that policy via exchange rate depreciation. Moreover, given that a substantial portion of the Ethiopian inflation was caused by government spending and free access credit given to party-owned businesses, and given that the government is the biggest consumer of foreign exchange, the depreciation of the birr could only magnify its cash and debt service requirements.

7) No discernible change in the country’s balance of payments (BoP) positions: This is because for devaluation to be successful, domestic supply of output must be responsive to meet the existing and surging demand, which is caused by the depreciation of the birr. If demand surges for Ethiopian exportable products, an excess or spare capacity must have existed ready to meet the demand for domestic products.

Given that the country’s imports are three to four times than the value of its exports, thereby indicating already-existing shortages, the measure will largely be ineffective at best. In fact, the measure will exacerbate the shortages as there are no sufficiently locally produced goods ready to meet both the expenditure switching local demand for domestic goods and foreign demand for domestic products.

Since shortages exist within the Ethiopian economy, supply is inelastic (that is, quantity supplied fails to respond to a change in price caused by the devaluation.) Even if the spare capacity exists (that is, the Marshal-Lerner condition is met), the country will be unable to increase its supply in the short term. In this case, the country’s balance of payments could worsen before it gets better, if at all. This is the well-known J-curve scenario.

Let’s ask these questions: Are there enough domestically (Ethiopian) produced goods which both domestic and foreign consumers wish to buy? As I argued elsewhere, one of the major causes of the 2008 (and thereafter) rampant inflation is shortages of goods, particularly food items. Second, one of the claims made by the government and its agencies is that the devaluation is also an import-substitution strategy. Are the domestically produced goods really good substitutes for foreign made goods? I am sure the reader knows the answer to this question.

Third, assuming that there are (domestically produced) import-substituting goods, how long will it take for both domestic and foreign consumers to adjust their preferences and switch towards Ethiopian-made goods? If they take time to change their preference from imported goods to domestically produced goods, the devaluation measure will be largely ineffective. If I am allowed to use economics jargon, all of these clearly indicate that the impact of the price change on the quantity of exports demanded and the quantity of foreign exchange earned will be determined by the price elasticity of demand for domestic goods.

8) Devaluing the birr could also have a negative effect on trade. In particular, weakening the birr means that products in countries with stronger currencies become more expensive. If Ethiopia, now with a weakened birr, fails to curb imports, it will need more money to pay for the same amount of foreign goods. In this case, the measure will fail to improve Ethiopia’s serious trade imbalance.

As we all know, Ethiopia’s exports are mainly in the forms of commodities, too. Commodity prices are notoriously known to fluctuate depending on world economic situations and demand. Given that Ethiopia must export whatever it can and given the fact the government is already exporting every exportable product, it is not clear whether the devaluation will help.

As indicated above, devaluation also adversely affects intermediate and capital goods that are imported from overseas thereby affecting domestic production in a negative way. For state-owned, private and even party-owned enterprises, which heavily depend on imported intermediate/capital goods (inputs), the devaluation measure will raise their cost of production thereby adversely affecting their capacity utilisation capabilities. The net effect of the devaluation in this case depends whether the rise in the cost of production (negatives effects) of the devaluation on the intermediate goods outweighs the potential benefit from exporting more primary products. And it is not clear if the policymakers calculated these potential costs and benefits of devaluing the birr.

9) Devaluation also leads to a reduction of the country’s real wealth as inflation eats up their assets and raises the cost of living. For those individuals and firms who might have borrowed assets denominated in hard currency, the devaluation measure may force them to go bankrupt as their debt values increase with the appreciation of the foreign currency. As is well-known, some of the contributing factors for the 1994 Mexican and the 1997 Thai financial crises were lax banking regulations which allowed local banks to borrow in hard currency (dollars- most of the borrowing being in short-term loans). The local banks loaned these assets to individuals and businesses that did not have the ability to earn dollar profits. The devaluation of the Mexican peso and the Thai bhat caused a sharp increase in the peso and bhat-equivalent value of the debt of the companies, leading to bankruptcies of firms (as the mortgages held in dollars forced a massive blow-up of bad debt and mortgage defaults). Since, in general, banks borrow short and lend long, a substantial portion of the Mexican and Thai banks were unable to service their debt once the peso and baht got devalued. Moreover, those banks which were affected the most were the once which were heavily involved in the booming real estate market. Ethiopia may not have many private and public banks which have heavily borrowed in hard currency, but those banks that immersed themselves in the real estate market will now be hard pressed since the payments they receive are less in value, thanks to the devaluation.

10) In particular, the devaluation of the birr will have deleterious effects on local savers who were being robbed because of the already-existing negative real interest rates. The measure will intensify the robbing phenomena and will negatively affect the net wealth position of the country and exacerbate the resource gaps. Thanks to the devaluation measure, the real assets of the current savers are now nearly 20 per cent lower than what they were the day before the devaluation! Just think about if you were one of these ‘savers’ and you waking up in the morning finding out that someone has taken 20 per cent of your saved assets you had yesterday – in this case the devaluation! Think also about the alternative, particularly if the devaluation was gradual and transparent. In the later case, you could have found mechanisms which would have minimised the damage (the robbing). Parallel to the government’s robbing of the ‘savers’, the measure is less likely to negatively affect those who have the information that devaluation was about to happen. This fact has been observed in many countries where devaluation had taken place.[10]

11) Devaluation entails income distributional effects, favouring exporters (whose marginal propensity to consume is low) and depressing the wages of workers (whose marginal propensity to consume is relatively high). The devaluation will exacerbate the alarming income discrepancy that is afflicting the country’s population, with the pro-EPRDF forces getting the biggest of the pie. Some of the other distinct groups who are likely to benefit from the devaluation are those who are involved in grain-exporting activities – including those foreign firms who benefit from the notorious ‘land grab’ scheme.

12) The Ethiopian economy is not flexible enough to adjust or respond to devaluation schemes. Given the fact that the commanding heights of the Ethiopian economy are controlled by regional party-owned conglomerates and Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al-Amoudi’s MIDROC Ethiopia, and with a lot of corruption and opaqueness of doing business involved (with a suffocating oligarchy controlling both the political apparatus and the major and productive sectors of the economy), the devaluation of the birr will be largely ineffective on a national level, even if the government’s policy and the multilateral agencies’ intentions who are advising the government are sincere.

13) In the unlikely event that other trading partners follow suit (that is, devalue their currency so that Ethiopia would not take advantage of them), or take other retaliatory measures, the devaluation scheme could unravel as it could potentially trigger the notorious ‘competitive devaluation’ (zero-sum game activity) scheme that devastated the world’s economies before the Second World War. The measure may also trigger a potentially damaging mini trade war involving Ethiopia, its neighbours and her major trading partners.[11]

14) The devaluation measure would likely benefit exporters of products in the extractive industries and those who are engaged in exporting every bit of exportable grain and commodities that the country produces. As transpired elsewhere in the world, the devaluation ought to have already benefited those who knew or suspected devaluation was coming and had converted their birr-denominated assets into dollars/euros a day or so before the devaluation.

15) The devaluation measure is unlikely to spur production of domestic industries as Ethiopia does not have much of a manufacturing sector that is competitive enough to exploit the devaluation measure. Moreover, since devaluation is effectively a protectionist policy, it is unlikely that the devaluation measure will make domestic firms to be more competitive and more efficient than their global counterparts.

16) Devaluation reduces real income, thereby decreasing aggregate demand which will ultimately reduce GDP and the government’s ability to garner more tax revenue. When this happens, the government would be unable to fund its projects and expenditures as a result of lower tax revenues. Such constraints and the promises that the ruling party made to the voters as well as its purportedly five million party cadres will tempt the government to print more money to buy what it needs. This, of course, has the potential to intensify the inflation problems. Let’s also not forget that devaluation will raise the repayments due on existing foreign loans, thereby increasing the country’s indebtedness.

This increased indebtedness and perceived economic weakness has the potential to erode investor confidence, which in turn may hamper the flow of foreign direct investment into the country and its ability to secure loans.

It is for these reasons that some economists call devaluation a slippery slope and a fool’s game.

ARGUMENTS IN FAVOUR OF DEVALUATION AND ITS POTENTIAL BENEFITS

1) Some individuals and even consultant groups such as Access Capital – believe the economy needed the devaluation, indicating that there are potential benefits from the measure. Using the devaluation paradigm as their guide, they argue that devaluation increases the goods and services that Ethiopia exports, resulting in increased export volumes, all other things being equal. In so doing, the devaluation of the birr could promote domestic output as well as employment in the exporting sector of the economy and allow the country to earn more foreign exchange. Other things equal, they say, there could be a minor reprieve in the balance of payments (insolvency) problems. The devaluation of the birr and the potential to earn more dollars is also consistent with the government’s new ‘Growth and Transformation Plan,’ according to Access Capital and others. Other economists, such as a friend who briefly looked at my first draft of this article, strongly argue that devaluation benefiting Ethiopia, emanating from the theoretical possibility, is inapplicable to the Ethiopian case. He argues: ‘More will not be exported because of devaluation, [as] there is nothing more there to export.’[12]

2) Some who observe the skilful tactics of the ruling party say that, even if the measure is impractical when it comes to Ethiopia, it serves the purpose of fulfilling the’ pipe-dream’ (as some already called it) manifested in the absurdly too ambitious five-year ‘Growth and Transformation Plan,’ and in partially deflecting the question that people have already begun asking: ‘Where does the money come from to implement these gigantic projects and the entire big five-year plan?’ In theory – and other things equal – a major portion of the multitude of (laundry) projects listed in the ‘Plan’ can only be financed by doing a lot of exporting – and the devaluation can help, they say. In fact, this is exactly how Prime Minister Meles stated it to the two gatherings – one involving business leaders and the other one involving educators and members of the civil service community. Again, a cynic may argue that, since Ethiopia is a commodity exporting country, its exports are mainly determined by world commodity prices rather than a devalued birr. In other words, Ethiopia’s exports would remain more or less the same, whether the birr is devalued or not.[13]

3) Again, some supporters of the government’s ‘Growth and Transformation Plan’ say that devaluation could benefit farmers who are producing cash crops. This is what the government has in mind, as Zenawi also implied it several times during the aforementioned gatherings. Unfortunately, however, devaluation has the effect of raising the cost of production and decreasing productivity as the price of imported seeds, machinery, fertilisers and their costs of transportation rise.

Other economists are also not convinced that the devaluation measure will bring extra gains in farm output. For example, the same economist that I quoted above emphatically states: ‘Farmers are not earning more in real terms as a result of devaluation because it remains to be money illusion if you are considering the inflationary prices they are charging for the same amount or quantity of crops (coffee for example) they are currently selling.’

4) Others bring the traditional theory of the J-curve in play, suggesting that, even though the depreciation of the birr may worsen the country’s current balance of payments position in the short-run, the devaluation measure could lead to improved trade balances in the long run. Other economists disagree with this contention, arguing that given the dire past and current balance of payments of the country (both the current and capital account being too much in the read for too long), it is not clear for them if the J-curve theory is applicable to Ethiopia.

A prominent professor of accountancy who has published numerous professional articles on sub-Saharan Africa stated: ‘The J curve has not been observed in many African countries; hence there is little reason to expect it [to be effective] in Ethiopia.’ Another economist from back home stated this about the J-curve: ‘Theoretically, the J-curve effect holds true only if a country has a balanced BOP position at the time of devaluation, which is not the case in Ethiopia. So, for Ethiopia, the J-curve effect cannot be expected to hold true.’

5) One may also contend that the devaluation measure will have the effect of reducing workers’ wages since the birr that they are being paid becomes less valuable, thereby making labour relatively less expensive and allowing (attracting) businesses to hire more labour. Again, the same economist responded by saying: ‘[Since] wages are already the lowest in the world, how is it going to be a new incentive for investors? All investors could hire as many workers as they want at the going wage rate before devaluation.’ He also thinks that workers will demand higher wages as their real wages substantially decline as a result of the devaluation.

6) Some may argue that the massive devaluation, which exceeded the parallel (black) market exchange rate, would punish those who hoarded foreign exchange. In fact, this is exactly the response that a government economic advisor gave when I complained about the government’s raid on businesses that were engaged in the parallel exchange rate market in 2008. He told us that those people needed to be punished and the government did the right thing by seizing their assets (millions of dollars) and putting them in jail. Such a zero-sum game mentality has been the hallmark of those who have been in power for nearly two decades. But, as was the case with other countries, the devaluation actually destroys the savings of the poor and the middle class, while leaving the wealthy and the well-connected unaffected.[14]

7) Good will from the IMF: As I argue below, one could expect an inflow of loans from the IMF as a result of this ‘bold move.’

STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS

The government has been either ineffective in collecting taxes or the economy is unable to generate taxable incomes. The economy’s inability to generate tax revenues is strongly tied with the many constraints that the government has imposed on the people of Ethiopia, the most important of them being state seizure and corruption manifested by the transfer of Ethiopian assets to party-owned conglomerates (the so-called ‘endowments’ who now control the most productive sector and commanding heights of the Ethiopian economy) and the reprieve given to them from paying taxes. As long as such an opaque system stays, the government will continue to be starved of potential and real tax revenues.

Moreover, the Ethiopian economy has been beset by power outages. Local firms are unable to find sufficient skilled manpower, largely due to the government’s political decision-making process. For one thing, the nepotistic policies of the ruling party have forced out able-bodied people away from their civil service activities and the productive sectors of the economy. A great many of them have chosen to either be self-employed or work for the highly fragmented private sector, forcing many of them to be underemployed. The regional party owned conglomerates (endowments), on the other hand, are filled with inept political cadres and are run by powerful rent-seeking party leaders as their board of directors (who effectively own them).

A great many of the educated personnel have already left the country. A recent survey which indicated that 46 per cent of Ethiopians would like to migrate reveals that not only Ethiopia’s brain will continue to bleed when those who are holding their skills in their own pockets and who can sell these same skills elsewhere in the world leave the country, but also when those who are able to run away from the repression leave their beloved homeland and families behind. I mentioned just these to show that the system is largely inefficient and the problem is structural and macroeconomic, not financial. As a result, the structural imbalances will not be solved by monetary (devaluation) means.

Secondly, the imbalances are caused by past government policies and activities. The ruling party’s policies were designed to make the relatively small industrial sector fizzle out and/or be unable to get off the ground. The government’s policies enticed both party-owned parastatals and individual entrepreneurs, particularly those who have a close working (and blood) relationship with the governing party to be involved in the economic sectors that could garner them quick profits. Consequently, the aforementioned economic players found investing in banking, wholesale and retail trade, construction, real estate and renting, transport and communications, hotels and restaurants and education to be highly profitable.

The shunning of the industry sector by both ‘private’ players and the government’s spending preference towards the service sector has not only made the country less competitive, but it also has created huge structural imbalances and misallocations of resources. The so-called ‘Growth and Transformation Plan’ will exacerbate such imbalances, negatively affecting the national economy and the standard of living of the people of Ethiopia.

Despite the claims made in the new five-year ‘plan,’ all the indications are that the misallocation of resources, government interference in the economy and increased activities in the service sector will continue unabated. This new plan envisages a doubling of agricultural output, drastic improvements in social services, continuous infrastructure building, and etc – all culminating in a doubling of the country’s economy within the five-year plan.

Leaving the agricultural sector aside (which involves serious and multitude structural problems of its own, thanks mainly to EPRDF’s land tenure policies)[15], the government’s pronouncements of the ‘Growth and Transformation Plan’ being predicated by the last five-year plan attests to my contention that the ‘feel good’ words uttered by the economic planners now will not materialise, as was the case in the past.

Since the five-year plan is also based on the so-called ‘Developmental State’ policy, we are bound to see an intense ‘hands on’ activity on the economy by the government, which, according to many observers, is a byproduct of the communist style ‘Revolutionary Democracy’ philosophy of the EPRDF.

WHAT WOULD LIKELY TO FOLLOW

The devaluation measure is taken as amelioration to the chronic problems which already exist in the system. To tackle the problems, deep structural economic adjustment is inevitable. That is one of the reasons for my contention that there have been ‘negotiations’ between the Meles government and the IMF, which take place largely behind the scenes. The fact that we heard the IMF has welcomed the measure clearly indicates that there is the common ‘Letters of Intent’ and/or a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ to devalue the birr and for funds to flow from the IMF coffers to support the government.

Now that the Meles government has devalued the birr to the IMF’s liking, we should expect more loans from the IMF to be announced soon. The government possibly agreed to devalue the birr first and take other strong policy measures next in order to secure loans from the IMF. Since, normally, devaluation is insufficient to resolve the problems caused by structural issues, currency devaluations are usually followed by other measures, such as reducing public spending, raising taxes, and, in general, by doing both.

The introduction and implementation of the VAT system and its likely increase is one indicator for this claim. Even though devaluation effectively reduces wage rates, the measure could also be followed by formal wage reductions as well. These structural adjustments, if implemented, will decimate domestic demand, which is the main driver of the economic activity. It is for this and other reasons why critics duped the so-called ‘Growth and Transformation Plan’ as a pipedream originating from the Menelik Palace.

Given the massive balance of payments imbalance and the budget shortages (some say over 40 per cent of it has been financed by donor countries), the government would have to adopt contractionary fiscal policy (raising taxes and cutting spending) sooner or later, particularly if the donor funds tend to dry up. Here, one may be tempted to argue that, by devaluing the country’s currency and by not raising taxes or cutting spending, the government has opted to ‘defend the economy.’

However, after forcefully gathering the local business leaders (parading the general populace for propaganda purposes is common among dictatorial/communist leaders), Prime Minister Meles was heard several times (arrogantly) threatening them, and telling them that his government will cut their hands – as he already had cut the hands of some businessmen, he told them – if they failed to pay the newly introduced value added taxes (VAT). In fact, the prime minister told the business leaders that the government is in full swing to collect more taxes. But, even if the government does not raise taxes or cut spending to alleviate the budgetary and balance of payment shortfalls, devaluation works the same way by effectively reducing workers’ wages when the birr they are being paid becomes less valuable.

Speaking about the IMF, it is quite puzzling that the IMF would suggest a devaluation of the birr on such a massive scale, particularly for a currency that has not faced a currency collapse. Devaluation of this magnitude is generally necessitated by a currency collapse, which is not the case with the birr. One may also argue that this relatively massive devaluation may indicate the government’s willingness to forgo the necessary structural adjustment measures, using the massive devaluation as the only measure to ameliorate the problem. Again, all the information available indicates that taxes will be raised.

The second perplexing stand of the IMF is that, on the one hand, in its ‘Article IMF Report on Ethiopia, Assessment of the Level of the Birr’, it stated that only a 7-10 per cent – or perhaps even lower percentage adjustment in the exchange rate – was sufficient (even indicating the exchange rate could be where it was supposed to be), suggesting a marginally overvalued birr. The welcoming of the current massive devaluation by the IMF contradicts its own assessments, projections and prescriptions for devaluation. It also may indicate that either the IMF does not know what it is talking about when it comes to the Ethiopian economy, or there is a strong collusion between the IMF and the Ethiopian policymakers. Or, could it be that, by welcoming and accepting such massive devaluation of the birr, the IMF has come to realise the dire situation that the Ethiopian economy is in?

Another perplexing aspect of the IMF’s decision is that, until recently, it was demanding that the government fight the rampant inflation, which was close to 65 per cent in 2008. The fact that the institution has been advising the government to devalue the birr – which is known to lead to higher inflation rates – contradicts its own policies. It also indicates that the institution has either bought the government’s claim that the Ethiopian economy has been vibrantly growing. Or, does it reflect its willful negligence about the real issues that caused the structural imbalances?[16] I Certainly it knows that the government will not be able to fight inflation while devaluating the currency. Even though the ruling party cannot legitimately corroborate the growth figure that is manufactures, institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank continue to accept the manufactured numbers, irrespective of their implications for the Ethiopian people and their own reputations.

In short, unless sound economic policies are designed and implemented with the full participation of the Ethiopian people, Ethiopia will never be competitive. Devaluation will not be a panacea for the structural (political and economic) ills of the country, and the continuous manipulation of the birr is unlikely to correct the general economic malaise.

Instead, policies should be geared towards unleashing the resources from government control, eradicating the rampant corruption and the enforcement of the rule of law, diversifying the economy to reduce dependence, and incentivising the system, which includes the privatisation of land, and a total restructuring the oligarchy which has enriched itself through illegal means.[17] The patronage networks and de facto preferences given to party-owned parastatals in the form of preferential access to bank credits, foreign exchange, land and physical infrastructure, administrative services, tax breaks, procurement contracts, and import duties has been a stumbling block for those independent and foreign firms who want do business the normal way in the country.

After discussing the peculiar nature of corruption and EPRDF-owned businesses with numerous concerned individuals, particularly with those whose profession is economics and accountancy, we came to the conclusion that party-owned and operated businesses are unique creatures in the Ethiopian economy. The TPLF has used them as vehicles for amassing wealth to the region that it favours. It is a well-known fact that political party controlled companies are outlawed in countries where governments are accountable to the electorate. In countries where international corporate governance and ownership standards are at work, the managers of these companies would have gone to jail for fraud, corruption and violating the country's Company Law.[18] This is not the case for Ethiopia, for, alas, it is pretty normal for the EPRDF to break its own constitution.

It is public knowledge that the TPLF companies enriched themselves, almost overnight, by diverting Ethiopian resources. It is also public knowledge that the TPLF companies have not published their audited financial statements in a transparent and legitimate manner for more than a decade. Moreover, the amount of tax liabilities and the debts owed to the state by the commercial and development banks are unknown. The companies which are managed by the TPLF leaders and their supporters are also being repeatedly accused of providing sheltered employment to the politically connected on a regular basis. Notwithstanding these, the IMF, the World Bank and the donor community have continued to be silent. To make matters worse, a number of foreign firms (mainly Chinese firms) have collaborated with TPLF companies, hence endangering not only their own reputation and their own ethical standards but also subjecting their firms to potential lawsuits.

To summarise the main points, the Meles government and the multilateral organisations who are advising the regime in power seem to fail to recognise or fully weigh in the following issues:

1) The negative impact of the sharp rise on imported consumer and intermediate goods of the devaluation.
2) The potential for the devaluation measure to create uncertainties and its macroeconomic ramifications; and for the massive devaluation measure to spark a downward pressure on the value of the birr; the impact of the eroded birr in widening the trade and budget deficits.
3) The potential sharp decline in economic activity when companies and individuals whose dollar denominated asset liabilities rise and go bankrupt (since the devaluation would force them to spend more birr per dollar to cover their liabilities) and the potential wave of insolvencies and foreclosures if the birr continues to slide.
4) The fact that devaluation measures will have little impact on the overall GDP in part because the negative effects of devaluation could outweigh the potential gains from exporting more goods, and in part because the share of exports to GDP is relatively small. Moreover, even though the devaluation measure may give the government a short-term breathing space regarding the foreign exchange bottlenecks, the measure will have little impact in alleviating the country’s trade deficits.
5) The political ramifications of the contradictory signals that the authorities send: On the one hand informing the general public that devaluing the birr was a bitter pill to take, and on the other claiming that all is well, even though the relative massive and sudden devaluation indicate otherwise. The negative ramifications will be much higher if the sought-after foreign exchange earnings are not realised and the measure fails to resolve the balance of payments crisis.
6) The inability of the measure to attract sufficient flow of foreign direct investment and the manufacturing sector’s inabilities to pick up the slack of weak foreign exchange liquidity, and the neglect of the structural fundamental problems of the economic policies of the government.
7) Most importantly, they failed to realise that the country’s insolvency problems are not caused by an overvalued birr; instead, the imbalances are caused by the structural problems and the solution lies in addressing those problems.

NOTES AFTER REVISION

1) While exploring the impact of the devaluation of the birr within the last two weeks, my reading indicates that the massive devaluation has forced many merchants, particularly importers, to adjust their prices upwards, by 20 per cent or more. According to Afrik-News.com, price hikes of 20 percent or more are observed the construction sector of the economy, particularly in steel, cement and paints. As expected, even government owned enterprises such as Mugher Cement Factory and Ethiopian airlines have immediately raised their prices and fares following the devaluation measure. Even though I am happy not to see chaos and extremely high prices of both imported and domestically produced goods, the immediate increase in prices by 20 per cent or more is as predicted in the earlier version of the write-up.

2) My reading also indicates that other economists also more or less agree with my assessments. For example, Tesfaye Kidan, in his article posted on Addis Fortune, makes more or less the same points that I did in my original write-up.

I also discovered that Addis Fortune, using the 2008 devaluation of the birr, had posted an article which questioned the validity devaluation and raising its many pitfalls. The reader can refer to the same article here.

An astute journalist also led me to the full version of the analysis provided by Access Capital. I had only looked their summary when I wrote the first draft. I encourage the reader to visit this Access Capital’s web page link, read their analysis carefully and try to decipher what the analysts are trying to say.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Seid Hassan is professor of Economics at Murray State University. The author thanks the many web masters, concerned individuals and friends who asked him to write about this issue and is grateful to those who communicated with him while he was writing this article.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Nigeria: Remembering 50 years of independence

Towards 50 years of transformation

Horace G. Campbell

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67408

On 1 October 2010, the peoples of Nigeria and Africa reflected on the fifty years of struggle to create a society where humans can live in dignity. After five decades of leaders such as Sani Abacha, Ibrahim Babingida, Olusegun Obasanjo and other military men at the helm of government, the experiment of Nigeria has reached a new stage. From within the bowels of the society citizens are calling for a new relationship with each other, with other Africans and with the rest of humanity. Nigerians are slowly fashioning a new Pan African consciousness and this consciousness is most manifest in the arts, film, music, poetry, literature and other areas where the creativity of the people can flourish. These citizens of Africa proclaim their pride and seek to excel in all fields, whether in the areas of soccer, music, literature, and the creative arts or in the areas of spelling out the demands for social transformation. These calls for social transformation have been smothered by militarism, foreign oil companies, political careerists and international consultants who facilitate the theft of billions. If the society of South Africa was shaped by the anti-apartheid struggles from the period of the Freedom Charter, the Nigerian experiment has been shaped by the intensity of the anti-dictatorial/anti/militarist struggles. Traders, students, workers, intellectuals, real spiritual elders and patriotic business persons joined the anti-dictatorial struggles. In these long years, the working poor of Nigeria hold a special place in the fifty years of struggle. Oil bunkering and novel forms of theft ensured a form of politics that linked oil companies to politicians and generals.

Because the cultural and social power of Nigeria holds so much promise for African unity and liberation, international vultures have combined to develop unique ways to ensure that the crudest accumulators dominate the cultural and political spaces. Nigeria has been the most successful capitalist experiment in Africa and these capitalists have confirmed the reality that capitalism and individual accumulation cannot be the basis for the well being of humans. In a society where profit is placed before human life, the leading economic forces have confirmed that the people must look for another social system if they are to breathe and have life, health and peace. The media abounds with cases of multi million and multi-billion dollar fraud. Even the establishment of bodies such as the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) became platforms for the sharing of information on how to refine primitive accumulation. In the West, this form of accumulation is hidden behind the façade of the ‘market’ and liberal democratic practices, but in Nigeria, this form of capitalism bares its fangs and the real facilitators of this form of capitalism call what is going on in Nigeria, theft and fraud.

Yet, from within the belly of the society there emerged sons and daughters such as FUNMILAYO RANSOME-KUTI, Fela Ransome Kuti, Tajudeen Abdul Raheem, Ken Saro Wiwa and millions of others who demanded change. Others who are still alive call for revolution. Probably the most famous Nigerian who has called for revolution in the past year has been Chinua Achebe. Bringing his considerable international reputation to the issue of political change in Nigeria, Achebe called on the Youth to “ rise up in unison and challenge the bad leadership and looting of the country. “

These youths who face manipulation and religious intrigue from the politicians have listened to the call to rise up and are calculating on the moment to intervene so that the next fifty years of independence will be marked by Nigerian leadership within the United States of Africa. The destruction of the natural environment has been so extreme that the demands for reparations have been loudest from within Nigeria. Whether it is reparations for slavery, the return of stolen cultural artifacts or the repair of the natural environment, the call for repair reached the highest levels. From the Niger Delta in the South to the far reaches of the North, the people are calculating and seeking ways around the political parties that have become vehicles for enrichment. Chief M.K. Abiola had joined this call for reparations and was imprisoned after he ignited the passion of the people for political change and reparative justice. His death in prison did not put out the flames for repair. Killings and divisions have been the tools of those who plunder but these tools have become worn.

Today as Africa celebrates with Nigeria; it is the same Africa that weeps about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and the attempted assassination of Nigerian independence. Nigerians now understand that the freedom and independence of Nigeria is indispensably tied to the freedom and independence of the rest of Africa. While Goldman Sachs and other bankers project a future of rapid and intense capitalist activities in Africa (projecting Nigeria to be the 20th largest economy by 2025), there is another vision coming from the people, that of a society living in peace, spiritual harmony where the wealth of the society is enjoyed by the peoples.

FIVE DECADES OF MILITARISM

When the death of Chief M.K. Abiola was announced in 1998, the citizens of Nigeria understood that there was an attempt to smother the long struggle against militarism. Abiola had been jailed by the military dictator Sani Abacha after emerging victorious in the 1993 Presidential elections. The opposition to the military regime that emanated from the June 12th movement became a school for a new generation of freedom fighters who wanted peace and prosperity. From all corners of the society and from all walks of life, Nigerians banded together to support the anti -military struggle. Imperial planners were sufficiently alarmed by the extent of the democratic forces that Abacha conveniently expired in the midst of accumulating billions of dollars. It was poignant that leading members of the US state Department were on hand when the deaths of Abiola and Abacha occurred. History will one day reveal the full extent of US involvement in the attempt to organize a transition to take away from the thunder of the June 12th movement.

Imperial planners had witnessed the massive mobilization against militarism and were alarmed at the levels of unity across religious, regional and ethnic lines. From the day of independence in October 1, 1960 the fear of the enemies of Africa was this unity. The June 12th movement had brought about a unity that had eluded politicians. A new social movement was in the making and had to be stalled. It was calculated that the political parties would be a far more efficient instrument for accumulation. External military forces could entrap younger officers with courses and short term linkages to ensnare them into western thinking and leave the top Colonels and Generals to put on civilian clothes to dominate the federal agencies. Hence the political careerists and their mentors connived with the military to bring another military man in civilian garb in the person of Olusegun Obasanjo. From 1999 to 2007, this former military leader, Obasanjo, presided over a transition process that exposed the reality that democratic participation will require far more that the formal structures of elections, parliaments and electoral commissions. There are now estimates that in the ten year period of 1999-2009 as much money was stolen from Nigeria as in the period 1960-1999. This spectacular rate of thieving has only been surpassed by the intensity of the oppression of the people.

In the fifty years of the period of independence, the people have been struggling against the militarizing of social life. Political parties and institutions that were supposed to express the desires of the people have been so tainted by the cesspool of primitive accumulation that the Nigerian people are searching for ways to register their break with the old. It is this break with the old that is seeking to be born from this rich and powerful African society.

It was precisely because of the wealth and power of the people that the military has been so dominant in the political process. Britain had cobbled together the federation of Nigeria and had bequeathed power to elements from among those who had been educated in schools of alienation and westernization. It was the same British intellectuals who propagated the myth of irreconcilable divisions between the Muslim North and the Christian South. This myth took such deep hold in the society that sections of the society acted out the ideas with the bloody consequences of the Nigerian Civil War 1967-1970 .Nigerians learnt their lesson from this massive bloodletting and vowed never to fight on that scale but the ideas of divisions were drilled into every institution with the militarization of the state and the society to guarantee the exploitation of the people.

This exploitation required force and rule by the gun. Hence there were seven military coup d etats in the fifty year period of independence. From Civil War to Ibrahim Babangida to Sani Abacha, militarists have joined the history books as the most renowned Presidents in the fifty year period. After militarism was discredited, the militarists adopted civilian clothes but the same commandist tendencies dominated all spheres of social relations. Today as the people seek to celebrate their struggles against colonialism, former ambassadors of the United States such as John Campbell seek to be the new prophets of doom and gloom in 2011 because of the differences between the North and the South. However, inside of the society the women from the North, South, East and West are at the forefront of denouncing violence and violation. They are calling for investment in caring instead of killing. Women have demonstrated against the oil companies going naked and demanding water and electricity. These demands from below are registering a new politics. This new politics is not the politics of parties, but the politics of life.

The Nigerian population is estimated to be over one hundred and forty million. This is an estimate because earlier this year one politician remarked that the population was about 200 million. The imprecision itself comes from the manipulation of the numbers in the different regions. Irrespective of this imprecision, it is the reality that this is the most populous society in Africa and therefore the most resourceful. This is because the most important resource in Africa is the African peoples. This multi-ethnic society is the depository of some of the richest cultural and spiritual traditions in Africa. Those who plan strategically remember the impressive anti colonial struggles of Nigerian women and want to ensure that this tradition is not resurrected.

Up to the Abacha period, the intellectuals had internalized the Huntington philosophy that the military was a modernizing institution. For over forty years the political scientists taught about modernization and progress but all that could be seen was chaos and rubbish beside mansions. When elements from within the military emerged and signaled a deep Pan African spirit, they were gunned down. In this anniversary o independence, it is important to separate Murtala Mohammed from the other allies of Haliburton and the US military. It was Murtala Mohammed who stated clearly that Nigeria was in the camp of the anti-apartheid forces and rebuked Henry Kissinger when he sought to coerce Nigerians to support white racism in South Africa and Jonas Savimbi in Angola in 1975. For his commitment to liberation, Murtala Mohammed was assassinated. A decade later, the Babangida military regime was sufficiently compromised by the international capitalist networks that Jonas Savimbi could receive support from the highest levels in Nigeria.

Sane persons would wonder how a military person such as Ibrahim Babingida could again offer himself up for leadership in Nigeria as President after all of the details of the killings, theft, racketeering and money laundering. At this time of writing, Babangida has offered himself to be a candidate for the Presidency of the society and his candidacy said more about the military and the ruling party the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) than about the people of Nigeria. After the deaths of Abiola and Ken Saro Wiwa, the military colonized the PDP with willing intellectuals becoming governors, presidents and local leaders all over the country. They used military networks to share information while acting as conduits for the transfer of surpluses overseas. Along with the bankers and religious leaders these formed the ruling class and sent their children to be alienated in the private schools of Europe.

The military has been at the forefront of carrying forth British traditions of using force as the principal form of governance. Since that time the population has turned its back on militarism but the political class has proved incapable of unleashing even the most elementary of liberal democratic traditions in the society.

FIFTY YEARS OF SPECTACULAR LOOTING IN NIGERIA

The alliance between the militarists, the foreign banks, oil companies and other corporations has been responsible for the stifling of the people so that billions are looted from the society. Capitalism requires a minimum of stability and continuity for the emerging capitalist classes to accumulate wealth. It is this ‘stability’ that is called the ‘market.’ However, the Nigerian capitalists have understood that they cannot compete in the tradition of liberal market conditions where there is some level of transparency in the competition and the competing classes have access to the state machinery through electoral contests. So, despite the fact that there was supposed to be a transition to civilian rule since 1998, the political system has been so rigged that all who are involved in oil bunkering and the contracting system that the official politics has been contaminated by the amount of money that is available for corruption. The scale of the theft has not yet been properly documented but estimates by the Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative have revealed that in the first four decades of independence over US $ 440 billion dollars have been stolen. When Obasanjo came to oversee the political economic arrangement in 1999 he railed against corruption and established the EFCC but the institutionalization of bribery and corruption in the country led to similar amounts being stolen in the ten year period 1999-2009. This form of accumulating wealth is central to the basis of international capitalism in Nigeria. The Nigeria capitalist are competent thieves and incompetent in the delivery of products and services. Their accumulation is enhanced by international capitalists in Singapore, Malaysia, Switzerland, Hong Kong, New York, Frankfurt, London and the Cayman Islands.

After the establishment of the EFCC, law schools taught the cases that were brought against the thieves but some of the most spectacular thieves dominate the media and the political parties. The former Chairperson of the EFCC, Nuhu Ribadu, noted that,

“Over $400 billion oil money has been stolen by bad leaders. We are going to trace the activities of past and present leaders and publish the names of those leaders who have laundered money, their accounts and the names of the banks where the money is being kept. “

“We will also close the account of those politicians who have laundered money and converted it for their political ambitions. This will stop bad people from coming into power.”

Ribadu could not follow through with this threat because he believed that the curbing of corruption was a police activity that could be carried out behind the backs of the people. He did not understand that corruption was one very clear manifestation of Nigerian capitalism and that to root out corruption in Nigeria required a new social system. Ribadu himself had to seek refuge among the very forces that had supported the corruption; the capitalists in the USA. His testimony before the US Congress on Corruption and the Banking system demonstrated clearly that would be leaders did not understand the balance of forces in Nigeria or the USA. Ribadu had been seeking support from the same political forces than enabled the banks in the USA to protect the Nigerian capitalists who salt away billions in US banks. Younger bureaucrats such as World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo have joined the crusade against corruption and are at the forefront of the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative, but Ngozi believes that these changes can come about from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Neither the World Bank nor Ribadu have shown that they understand the fifty tears of domination that stifles the popular democratic forces in Nigeria.

THEFT AND CRIMES AGAINST NATURE

According to technocrats such as Ribadu and Ngozi, what most of the governors get from the Federation Account monthly is enough to develop their states but these operators lament the fact hart that instead of applying the funds for the good of the public, they disappeared into private bank accounts. Ribadu in his lectures and interviews said:

“There are a lot of cases of government officials who connived with banks to steal government money. This money is being converted and transferred to other countries.

It is this form of primitive accumulation which forces individual capitalists to live in homes which are barricaded like prisons. These elements have been unable to generate electricity, running water or a proper sewage system for themselves as a class. The resulting chaos in the delivery of individual electrical generators, water storage tanks and other forms of social amenities sharpen the differences in social consumption between the rich and the poor. It is this very same class which resorts to the private security firms so that militarism takes a new form with the privatization of military activities. This privatization leads to the planning for private armies and militias and the youths of Jos have been ensnared in this form of militarism. This military reflex is also alive among some would be revolutionaries and because of the depth of the oppression some forces in the Niger Delta have resorted to armed resistance. The killing of Ken Saro Wiwa in this period had suggested to some Nigerians that armed resistance was the only answer to militarism and force. However, criminals and accumulators also corrupted this vision of liberation to discredit those who call themselves emancipators with weapons.

FIFTY YEARS OF BUNKERING

It is in the Niger Delta where the full implications of capitalism I are laid before the world. There a form of capitalist activity called bunkering that links the political class to oil companies, soldiers, shipping companies and a network of capitalist accumulators from Hong Kong to Texas. The most sophisticated form of bunkering is carried out by the oil companies who keep two set of books, one for the company and one for the Nigeria national petroleum Company. In this way billions, if not trillions of dollars have been stolen from Nigeria by the oil companies. The Shell Oil Company has gained international notoriety from its alliance with the political forces in Nigeria at the state level and at the national level. It is this same Shell Oil Company that has paid some compensation for their collusion in the killing of innocent people in Ogoni lands. Money cannot bring back the lives of those who have expired because of Shell oil.

The international campaign against Shell and the other oil companies operating in Nigeria arise from the crimes against nature and the environmental record of these companies. Numerous organizations local and international have brought to the attention of the international community, the consequences of the operations of these transnational companies. In April 2010, the world was brought face to face with the destructive capabilities of these companies by the news accounts of the oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico. But there have been 6000 such spillages in Nigeria and the legal framework of the states such as Britain, the USA and Holland ensures that instead of being prosecuted, these firms are protected. It is this reality that has led to the internationalization of the struggles for justice in Nigeria. For this reason one of the most important forces of Pan Africanism and political change in Nigeria come from the environmental justice movements.

It is this new force that is calling on the society to leave the oil in the ground and to prepare for another future, that of cleaning up the destruction by the oil companies.

SCALE OF THE DESTRUCTION OVER FIFTY YEARS

Nigerian scholars and activists in the environmental justice and the labor movements are creating new sites of struggles for the politics of the next fifty years. During the past fifty years they have intervened to expose how the conditions of oil and gas exploration which obtain in Nigeria, would not be tolerated in other parts of the world. Before his tragic passing in a plane crash Claude Ake had been one of the many progressive intellectuals in Nigeria who had dedicated his life to bringing about democracy and social justice. He refused to join those intellectuals who had been ensnared by the wealth stolen from the people and resigned from Niger Delta Environment Survey, NDES, which had been mandated by the federal government to survey the impact of the operations of oil companies in the Niger Delta. Ake argued that the Shell Oil company in Nigeria

"has thrown Nigeria into one of the deepest crises of its history. It insists defiantly that it will not change its ways and denies any part whatsoever in the environment degradation of the Niger Delta, which it blames on indigenes conniving at oil spills to collect compensation."

Evidence of the devastation had been so overwhelming, that not even Shell's well financed campaigns around the world could hide the extent of the destruction of the environment. Claude Ake, who had written on Social Science as Imperialism, quoted from supporters of the liberal agenda such as the World Bank who have lamented the extent of the destruction carried out by the Oil Companies. The World Bank Study of 1995, "Defining an Environmental Development Strategy for the Niger Delta, " estimated that as much as 76 per cent of all the natural gas from Petroleum production in Nigeria is flared compared to 0.6 per cent in USA, 4.3 per cent in the UK, 21.0 per cent in Libya.

In the fifty year struggles of the Nigerian peoples gas flaring has been one of the most severe of the numerous hazards to which the peoples of the Delta and the Rivers States had been exposed. The details of the crimes in this region by the oil companies is well documented and it is now well known that Nigerian oil fields contribute more in global warming than the rest of the world together.

Many of the gas flares are situated very close to villages, sometimes within a hundred metres of homes of ordinary citizens. Shell Oil has been flaring at some sites for 24 hours a day for more than 30 years. . Apart from physical destruction to plants around the flaring areas, thick soots are deposited on building roofs of neighboring villages. Whenever it rains, the soots are washed off and the black-ink like water running down the roofs is believed to contain chemicals which adversely affect the fertility of the soil." Despite this record, the standard view of environmental management, is that the basic rights of private property and of profit maximization, come before the health and welfare of the peoples of Nigeria in general, and in particular, the peoples who live in the Niger Delta. Concerns for environmental justice are kept subservient to concerns for economic efficiency and capital accumulation. Moreover, since the politicians have been willing accomplices to this degradation, the oil companies are protected while the health and welfare of Nigerian society suffers irreparable. The cuts in the social wage of the population make it impossible for local communities to support health clinics and there is an absence of drugs in most rural hospitals.

THE SPIRIT OF FREEDOM

It is pertinent to underscore the reality that rights to food, clothing, shelter, clean running water, a clean environment, the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women and an end to state and domestic violence are central issues for the peoples of Nigeria and Africa. The spontaneous and organized activities of the Nigerian people in demanding these rights, enumerated above, form the foundation for the democratic transformation of Nigeria. It is from Nigeria where we have had revolutionary pan African artists such as Fela Ransome Kuti. Fela, Ken Saro-Wiwa and countless others paid with their lives to challenge the oppression meted out by the military and their political allies. Their sacrifices have paved the way for a new Nigeria. It is their sacrifice that inspired intellectuals such as Chinua Achebe to call for revolution. But the revolution is already underway. It is flourishing in the Nigerian film industry. It is lurking waiting for the right conditions to break out. Goodluck Jonathan came to power in circumstances that gave him an opportunity to move in a new direction. However, in less than one year it became clear to the people that the old politics must go.

The Nigerian people are calculating and searching for a new mode of politics, and new forms of economic relations. This search is part of the larger struggle for unity and peace in Africa.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Horace G. Campbell is a teacher and writer. His latest book is 'Barack Obama and 21st Century Politics: A Revolutionary Moment in the USA', published by Pluto Press.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The tragic gold mining affair in Zamfara State

Resource curse and wakeup call

Uche Igwe

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67329

cc G R G‘The tragedy in Zamfara State is not only a resource curse but a wakeup call,’ writes Uche Igwe. Illegal minerals mining in Nigeria's Zamfara State sheds light on the problems posed by extractive industries in developing countries. While the revenue potential is huge, federal oversight has been weak and international support is ambiguous. More transparency is urgently needed so that the mistakes made in the Niger Delta are not repeated in Zamfara.

The discovery of natural resources worldwide ought to be a blessing. This is because when such natural resources are exploited, it is expected to bring in revenue to contribute to the development of local communities. However, in these communities in developing countries, the reverse is usually the case.

No single event illustrates this more than the recent tragic events in Zamfara State in northwestern Nigeria. It was supposed to be the World Environmental Day celebration on 5 June 2010 but the inhabitants of gold-bearing communities Anka and Bukkuyum and local governments in Zamfara State had a different fate in stock for them.

About 335 suspected cases of strange ailments were reported in several hospitals in the locality. It turned out that 163 lives were lost out of which 111 of them were children between the ages of five to ten years old.

Further investigations conducted by Doctors Without Borders, a French aid agency, led to the discovery of an epidemic due to lead poisoning. The epidemic wrought havoc among the communities involved in small-scale mining. Several questions remain unanswered as one examines what appears to have been an avoidable tragedy.

ILLEGAL MINING: A MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR BUSINESS IN NIGERIA

Nigeria is blessed with many commercial deposits of solid minerals, from tantalite to barite, limestone, bitumen and kaoline, to gold, and topaz. The quantity of the deposits in more than 500 locations across nine states in Nigeria suggests that the solid mineral sector, if well harnessed, will compete with the oil and gas sector in Nigeria.

However, most of the mining in Nigeria up until the present is carried out illegally. Illegal mining is a great menace in many of our communities. Indeed the gold deposits in Zamfara State and the tantalite deposits in Kogi State have all been mined illegally. It is usually done by a ‘cartel’ that just shows up in these communities and begins to cart away the minerals in collaboration with ignorant and vulnerable community members.

Some of the illegal mine traders are from South Asian countries, especially China, but they do not perpetrate these criminal actions without the collaboration of some locals. Beyond Zamfara, active illegal mining is going on in Oyo, Kogi, Jigawa, Plateau, Nassarawa and Kwara states today. If you visit the sites, they appear surreal and unconnected to Nigeria due to the beehive of activities occurring in these communities.

ENVIRONMENTAL AND HEALTH IMPLICATIONS

The environmental implications of illegal mining are quite diverse. The first is that it destroys farmland and distorts the livelihood of agrarian communities. The trenches dug for these mining activities are abandoned after the mining is over. They therefore become death traps and easy entry points for devastating gully erosions.

As was in the case of the communities in Zamfara State, many of these mines are contaminated with impurities. In this case, gold ash was intermingled with deposits of lead. In a few cases, some of the impurities are even radioactive in nature. Ignorant community members therefore go to these mines and come in contact with contaminants.

An eyewitness account stated that reports of vomiting and stomach pain among children in Zamfara State began to come in a year ago. As is usual in most communities, deaths are attributed to one spirit or another. The death toll continued to rise until the blood samples of patients were taken abroad for adequate tests.

Experts reported that lead poisoning as in the case of Zamfara can persist in the environment for up to 15 years. There are also other long-term health problems such as permanent learning and behavioral problems and brain damage. Lead for instance is known to bio-accumulate and propagate within the ecosystem, giving rise to cancer causing cells popularly called oncogens.

IMPACT ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN

From the death toll in Zamfara State, it was apparent that women and children were the worst-hit by the side effects of small-scale mining. Indeed more than 60 per cent of illegal miners in Nigeria are women. When they come in contact with contaminants, the whole family is affected.

In the case of children, many drop out of school in pursuit of the token pay they receive when they engage in mining. They therefore become victims of child labour and are sometimes forced into premature family life and may be victims of HIV/AIDS.

POLICY INCONSISTENCY AND THE BLAME GAME

Even though Nigerian president Goodluck Jonathan commissioned a mineral processing plant in Zamfara State a few days before the tragic news, it appeared that no one knew whose responsibility it was to take action on the epidemic. The Ministry of Mines and Steel said they had reminded the state government ten times about the problem – an allegation that the state government promptly denied.

Illegal miners hide under the fact that mining is the exclusive preserve of the federal government and thus victimise our communities due to lax federal oversight. So whose responsibility is it to examine and prohibit the activities of these criminals in our communities?

In the midst of the blame game we have lost more than a hundred citizens. That is, those who were reported, as there must be many more unreported cases daily. The World Bank has been supporting the sustainable mining resources project for more than two years running. What sort of interventions is this support aimed at?

WHITHER REVENUE TRANSPARENCY?

Another aspect of policy inconsistency is that it provides a climate for opacity. Nigeria is currently at the forefront of the global extractive industries transparency initiative (EITI). The EITI movement promotes transparent disclosure of revenue receipts and payments in the extractive industries in resource-rich countries.
EITI as currently implemented in Nigeria captures revenue from the oil and gas industry only. The mining industry receipts have not yet been captured by EITI audits so far. A more organised mining sector will mean that such receipts will be monitored and captured as part of federal government receipts. As Nigeria waits to be voted as an EITI-compliant country, it is time to mainstream transparency into the mining sector as a matter of urgency.

THE WAY FORWARD

The tragedy in Zamfara State is not only a resource curse but a wakeup call. If Nigeria must diversify her economy beyond oil, then the solid minerals sector is a beckoning alternative.

There is an urgent need for a comprehensive ten-year Marshall Plan. The typical bureaucratic inertia, and complex and unclear interventions can no longer be enough. We need to borrow a leaf from a country like Botswana that became a top African economy by developing diamonds and proving that natural resources can be a blessing to citizens.

Most importantly, the mining sector offers an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the oil sector in our Niger Delta. A proactive approach is the way to go. We do not need another disaster to act. Nigeria cannot continue to be a poster child of the resource curse in Africa. Enough is enough!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Uche Igwe is a Woodrow Wilson Public Policy scholar and visiting scholar at the Africa Program at Johns Hopkins University.
* This article was originally published by The Nigerian Inquirer
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Tanzania: Private game park threatens pastoralist livelihoods

Susanna Nordlund

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67388

cc P SFor hundreds of years, pastoralists in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro District have lived off cattle, managing grazing land communally. But this way of life is under threat, as business interests trump traditional land rights, with the blessing of the government. Susanna Nordlund has written a blog about her visit to Loliondo to explore reports of conflict between local Masaai communities and a foreign-owned safari company, in which she raises a number of allegations. We reproduce her post in the hope that this might stimulate a serious investigation of these events.

In a hidden corner of the world, in the far north of Tanzania, lies Loliondo Division, one of the three divisions – Ngorongoro, Loliondo and Sale – of Ngorongoro District, where for hundreds of years people have lived off cattle, managing the land communally as wet and dry season grazing, like the wild animals migrate seasonally.

This, together with the Maasai pastoralists’ cultural aversion to eating game meat, has played a part in making the area the most spectacular place in the world for watching wildlife. The land has therefore become very valuable – but this has been far from only a blessing: Under pressure from international conservationists, all people were evicted from the huge Serengeti National Park in 1959.

The colonial government made a deal with the Maasai living in the eastern part of the National Park, giving them land further east in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (some also moved to Loliondo Game Controlled Area), where their interests would be paramount. But instead the Ngorongoro Conservation Area Authority (NCAA) now reserves the right to decide where the Maasai can graze their cattle and to evict or relocate families that they don’t consider original inhabitants of the area.

Human population has increased greatly since the 1960s, but the number of cattle has not. At the same time the NCAA has strict regulations limiting food cultivation. In 1975, families living inside the world famous crater were chased out; eviction threats have been a constant over the years and have recently intensified.

In Loliondo Game Controlled Area, land conflicts are as common as dust and many of these conflicts originated in the late 1980s, during Tanzania’s transition from socialism to a more market-orientated economy. Some often corrupt – and, in those times, even more often illiterate – leaders of village councils sold off communal lands to investors without the consent of village assemblies, and land was alienated in many other fraudulent ways.

THE OTTERLO BUSINESS CORPORATION CONFLICT

The best-known Loliondo land conflict is that with Otterlo Business Corporation (OBC). In 1992 a hunting block – which is just a kind of hunting concession and shouldn’t be about land alienation – was given to this company, owned by a member of the Dubai royal family of the United Arab Emirates, by the Tanzanian government.

The contract was for 10 years and without the consent of the affected villages, and eventually the way it had been allocated led to a mayor scandal called ‘Loliondogate’, which involved the Office of the President, the Ministry of Natural Resources and Tourism as well as the Attorney General. This contract was revoked in 1999, because of its illegalities, but new 5-year contracts have kept being signed against the wishes of pastoralists whose mobile grazing has been disturbed by the hunting activities.

There is a conflict between legal systems, where the right of villages to manage land clashes with the Ministerial Wildlife Division’s authority over wildlife. There have also been allegations of the breaking of hunting laws, including the illegal transport of live wildlife out of the country, and of violent acts against local people, including assassinations.

OBC became tired of the conflicts, and in 2007 it entered ‘development cooperation contracts’ with several villages, though two villages refused to sign any contracts. These contracts contained various flaws and varied from village to village. OBC has been involved in several development projects – even before the new contracts – but these have far from outweighed the resource losses.

In May 2009, during a severe drought, the company donated 100 tonnes of grain to the residents of Ngorongoro District and this was the last thing media reported about OBC before 4 July 2009 when Tanzania’s special police force – the Field Force Unit – together with the company – started clearing OBC’s ‘operational ground’ for the hunting season. Letters of warning had been sent to villages from different government authorities since early May, but nobody acted since according to the contract the coordination of hunting and grazing should be arranged in meetings with OBC, and those meetings had never materialised.

150 bomas (homesteads) were destroyed in the fires set ablaze by the Field Force Unit, along with stored grain and maize fields. 60,000 heads of cattle were pushed into an extreme drought area, calves were left behind in the stampede, there was a shortage of water both for animals and people, 12 men were beaten by the police and three seriously injured, four children were lost – three were found and one – Nashipai Gume from Arash – is still missing – four goats were burnt to death in the blast, 27 people were arrested and 12 have been prosecuted.

WHAT THE STATE SAID

First both the prime minister and the minister for Natural Resources and Tourism denied any knowledge of the incident, then it was said that the Maasai had burned their own houses as a sign of acceptance. In media presenting the government view giving room for an investor was soon described as ‘protecting the environment’. The Maasai were ‘accused’ of coming from Kenya, it was claimed journalists and NGOs had burnt the houses. The minister for Natural Resources and Tourism lashed out against NGOs in Loliondo accusing them of ‘breaching peace’ and the Regional Commissioner threatened with having them all ‘audited’.

Some say that there are tourism companies that have done deals with villages without threatening land tenure, but the government prefer the likes of OBC and Thomson Safaris. A parliamentary committee on investigate mission late last year (2009) conveniently found a dead elephant with missing tusks right next to the airstrip of one of these companies.

The Tanzanian state’s attitude towards pastoralism has at best been ambiguous, while the current government has been downright hostile from the beginning. Apart from in Loliondo, the government has supported ‘investors’ in agriculture, mining, conservation or tourism against the rights of pastoralists in many other places like for example Mbarali and Kilosa where human rights abuses have been committed.

Despite the fact that pastoralism is the backbone of Tanzania’s commercial livestock sector and that almost all the wildlife that attracts significant foreign earnings is located in pastoral areas, pastoralism is seen as undesirable by the government. Already in his inauguration speech in December 2005 the president stated, ‘Mr. Speaker, we must abandon altogether nomadic pastoralism which makes the whole country pastureland...The cattle are bony and the pastoralists are sacks of skeletons. We cannot move forward with this type of pastoralism in the twenty first century.’ And I March 2006 he stated, ‘I am committed to taking unpopular steps to pastoralists in order to protect the environment for the benefit of the nation and future generations.’

Not all the Maasai in Loliondo oppose OBC. There are three Maasai sections, popularly known as ‘clans’, living in the area – the Purko, the Loita and the Laitaiyok. The government has used the classic divide and rule technique, sometimes working with corrupt local leaders that think they can support anti-pastoralist policies that will mostly hurt people from other clans than their own, or that will even just benefit them personally. It’s said there were Purko and Loita leaders that in 1992 collaborated in signing away the hunting concession to OBC.

At the moment the minority Laitaiyok clan, that claim to have been politically marginalised, is being used in this way. Unfortunately, in Loliondo even the organisations working for human rights can each be described as associated to one of the three sections or clans. Navaya ole Ndaskoi – a researcher with ample knowledge about the struggle of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers all over Tanzania – says, ‘A radical change in the mentality of the human rights activists in Ngorongoro is a must if the land is to stay. Otherwise the land is gone without fight. Trading on tribalism may indeed help some selfish people. It will never help the marginalized in Ngorongoro.’

THE SUKENYA FARM CONFLICT

Another conflict – that tourists to Tanzania (like myself) should be able to do something about – is that of Sukenya Farm. Despite its name, Sukenya Farm is mostly open grazing land and not a farm. It lies in Soit Sambu village, bordered by the Sukenya, Mondorosi and Enadooshoke sub-villages, and also Enguserosambu village to the northeast.

In 1984 the then state-owned Tanzania Breweries Limited (TBL) got hold of the 10,000-acre Sukenya Farm. Exactly how is unclear, but the talk is about forged documents and corrupt leaders. What is clear is that the land was allocated by the District Land Allocation Committee, which according to the law at that time could only grant up to 100 acres.

Of the 10,000 acres TBL cultivated 100 acres during the 1985-86 season and 700 acres during the 1986-87 season. Thereafter they left the land due to conditions that were too dry for barley cultivation. Some villagers took the case to court in 1987 where they lost and in 1991 they lodged an appeal to the High Court, which was dismissed for non-appearance in 1995. By then the problem had been solved by itself – it seemed – and the grazing land was back in the hands of the pastoralists whose customary tenure should be more than evident.

Shockingly – and with immediate protests from Soit Sambu village – in 2006 TBL announced that they were ‘selling’ Sukenya Farm. Somehow in 2003 they had obtained a 99-year Right of Occupancy for 12,617 acres (some 51 square kilometres) from the Land Commissioner and eventually in 2006 they sub-leased the land to Tanzania Conservation Limited, a sister company (founded specifically for this purchase) of the high profile and extremely vocal US-owned Thomson Safaris.

As a ‘culmination of nearly 30 years of Thomson’s commitment to Tanzania’, they considered they had purchased a ‘pristine wilderness’ to turn into their own nature refuge, which they subsequently re-named ‘Enashiva [Happiness] Nature Refuge’. The land was theirs and their guards aided by the local police started blocking grazing. The disputed land lies right between several sub-villages and many homesteads, and apart from taking away important grazing, the invasion by the safari company seriously impedes movement of people and livestock to other grazing areas and to watering points. When ‘Thomson’s land’ ‘from there to there’ is pointed out to you by a local pastoralist, the sense of rudeness of this company from another side of the world, owned by a family of four, is overwhelming.

In May 2008, a link to an article on an Internet forum frequented by Africa travellers made me aware of the conflict. For some years East Africa and its wildlife had been the centre of my universe and I had come across information about injustices committed towards the pastoralists on whose land the great wildlife numbers were found. I had also come across an immense naivety shown by many travellers viewing the tourist companies reaping benefits from the pastoralist lands as charitable organisations if they had contributed to building a classroom or two.

I expressed my frustration that everyone, including myself, would soon have forgotten everything about the issue and that Thomson Safaris’ story would take precedence, but then a business associate of the company chimed in that the whole problem was ‘a local Kenyan Maasai woman that encouraged all locals to squat on the land and use it for their benefit’, and this chiming in made me less likely to forget. Much later I heard of the Tanzanian government’s habit of accusing ‘troublemakers’ of being from the nearest neighbouring country.

Then to my surprise I found information that an international photojournalist, New Zealand-born Trent Keegan, had investigated the harassment of ‘trespassing’ pastoralists at Sukenya Farm, but tragically he was already dead, murdered in Nairobi on 28 May 2008. Trent’s laptop and camera were stolen, but not the money he was carrying or his Visa card. In Loliondo, he had been visited by the police at the place where he was staying and he had encountered Thomson’s guards.

Later I found the blog of Trent’s friend, volunteer worker Brian MacCormaic, who at the time had been assisting a school in Ololosokwan as an advisor. The owners of Thomson Safaris, Rick Thomson and Judi Wineland flew over to Tanzania when they heard there were rumours about the murder and Brian, thinking that they might be unaware of what was happening on the ground, arranged to meet them.

The company owners were staying in Wasso and were also supposed to have a meeting with the Village Council in Soit Sambu that lies between Ololosokwan and Wasso, so Brian was surprised that they insisted on meeting him in Wasso. It was clear that Rick and Judi would not meet the Village Council. Instead they were having a meeting with a “grazing committee” handpicked by the District Commissioner and they insisted that Brian, who had come for a private talk, join the meeting with this handpicked committee.

The committee spoke Maa, the Maasai language, and the translator was Thomson’s local manager, Daniel Yamat. A bishop that accompanied Rick and Judi did not speak Maa, and neither did the company owners or Brian. Almost immediately the atmosphere became hostile towards Brian, and he was prevented from leaving. When he was about to leave the compound anyway, a Thomson Safari vehicle with some ten armed men arrived and these men started blocking his departure. After some considerable time and a phone call to the regional commissioner Brian was finally let go. By this time he was convinced that at least Rick Thomson was fully aware about what was happening on the ground.

A few days later Brian was summoned to the District Commissioner’s office, outside which he met Daniel Yamat, who boasted about having files from Brian’s computer, naming several of the files. Later the headmaster of the school witnessed at a meeting with the district commissioner how Daniel presented prints of personal files from Brian’s – and from Trent’s – computers.

In February 2009 British journalist Alex Renton and photographer Caroline Irby went to Ngorongoro on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the eviction from the Serengeti. They had a look at the favoured ‘investors’ OBC and Thomson Safaris. In Soit Sambu they met the then village chairman, James Lembikas, who had expressed some support for Thomson (this must be the reason that the company, that had never had a meeting with the Village Council, for a long time boasted about their excellent relations with the village government).

Detractors of Lembikas say that he was paid by Thomson, while he himself, according to people who know him, says he was intimidated by the district commissioner. As my recent Loliondo trip got cut short, I never got the opportunity to talk to Lembikas. Anyway, he was the chairman for some 20 years, but no longer.

Even before having Lembikas voted out, the Soit Sambu Village Council sent a petition to the president about the situation and recently they have initiated a court case against Thomson Safaris to regain their land.

After an invitation from Thomson Safaris’ Arusha manager and a phone appointment with Daniel Yamat, Alex and Caroline went to visit ‘Enashiva’, but the manager refused to show them around or answer any questions. Ten minutes after leaving they were stopped by the police and sent to the district commissioner’s office, where their passports were confiscated. They were then escorted out of the district by the police and sent to Arusha for investigation. The district commissioner’s secretary told Alex and Caroline that they were acting on a complaint from Thomson Safaris about their questions.

In March 2009 the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination sent a letter to the Tanzanian government requesting information about the Sukenya Farm conflict, but I don’t know if they have received a reply. They also requested some interim measures – like allowing grazing and watering, suspending commercial development, ensuring physical security and investigating brutality and criminality – to be put in place, which has not happened.

Alex Renton’s article wasn’t published until early September 2009. A couple of weeks earlier when Thomson Safaris knew about the publication, they started their own blog about their ‘Enashiva’ project. Their reaction to the article was extremely aggressive, basically accusing this journalist with more than 20 years of experience of making it all up. In a point-by-point ‘rebuttal’ their lies were so wild that they could only have been written for prospective clients with no knowledge of the area at all, and some participants in travel forums actually were convinced by these writings. I wasn’t, as I had some information from Tanzania.

Another particularity of this safari company is having a journalist on staff and managing to get their press releases published as ‘news’ in the Tanzanian press, often with something like ‘by staff reporter’ as the byline. I was hoping for someone to go and talk to people affected, tell them about what Thomson Safaris were saying and ask them what really was happening. Time passed and it didn’t happen, so when the New Year 2010 began, I decided I had to go even though I’m not a journalist or a researcher.

In late October 2009, signs were put up around the disputed land saying that the government was changing the land use classification from pastoralism and agriculture to tourism and conservation and that anyone affected should express his/her opinion within 30 days. Soit Sambu Village Council, including the Sukenya sub-village chairman, very strongly opposed this change, as did the District Council.

In April 2008 Lesingo ole Nanyoi got shot in the jaw in a confrontation with Thomson guards, reinforced by the police. In their rebuttal of Alex Renton’s article Thomson Safaris say that ‘Lesingo Ole Nanyoi was not involved in a confrontation at Enashiva and has since admitted that his injuries did not occur there.’

I personally met Lesingo in Wasso on my recent trip in February 2010. He says he was together with some other herders on their way to River Pololet watering point, near the disputed land where pastoralists have watered their animals for centuries, they were approached by angry Thomson guards. The guards told them, ‘This land does not belong to you anymore’, and a discussion ensued. Police reinforcement arrived, there was a push and pull situation and three shots were fired. One shot hit Lesingo in the jaw, people fled, some cows managed to get water.

Lesingo was first taken to the nearest dispensary, which is in Kenya, and later in the evening to Wasso hospital. Then he was moved to Muhimbili Hospital where he had to stay for one and a half months. There has not been any independent investigation at all. According to Lesingo, Thomson Safaris are corrupt and not at all fair to the community. Despite writing about him, nobody from the company has ever talked to Lesingo; only their local manager approached his father trying to corrupt him when Lesingo was in hospital. Lesingo would like to personally inform the owners of Thomson Safaris exactly what happened.

Harassment and arrests of herders by Thomson guards and the police continue. Unsurprisingly, Thomson Safaris are saying that everything is fabrication by a minority from a Purko sub-clan associated to an NGO, but the list is very long. My plan before I was kicked out of Loliondo was to talk to as many on this list as possible. Lesingo ole Nanyoi’s own brother got caught herding his cattle near the disputed land in November 2009; he was taken to prison and released after paying a big fine.

Thomson Safaris have borrowed OBC’s Laitaiyok trick, befriending some selected leaders from this minority clan that is majority – approximately three quarters of the population – in Sukenya sub-village (the Purko are majority in Enadooshoke and Mondorosi, and Enguserosambu is Loita dominated). Though Shangai ole Putaa – a traditional Laitaiyok leader and Soit Sambu sub-village chairman (not ‘ward chairman’ as claimed in Thomson’s blog) – opposed Thomson Safaris publicly during the president’s Ngorongoro tour in March 2007. Of course, Thomson Safaris claim that he didn’t oppose them, but the contrary is common knowledge and I’ve heard several first hand accounts.

Stranger than this is that the safari company also claim that nobody knows who killed Shangai in November 2007, when even the regional police commander has confirmed that the local police did it when he tried to escape while under custody suspected of knowing the place of some hidden weapons. Most people, however, find it highly unlikely that Shangai would have been involved in any crime. There has not been any serious investigation. Meeting the Putaa family was on my ‘programme’ before being thrown out of Loliondo and then out of Tanzania.

During a previous East Africa trip in June/July 2009 I got on the bus for a few days in Loliondo without talking to anyone except an ambitious young man who hijacked me upon arrival in Soit Sambu with the intent of becoming my guide for the rest of my trip. He was a great admirer of Thomson Safaris and wanted to work for them. His view was that people hated them because, unlike he himself, they were un-educated and only cared about cattle.

This time I was determined to get more information without becoming dangerously indiscreet. I was assisted in finding a guy with a motorbike and was off to Sukenya sub-village. Thomson Safaris urge people to speak to Enyuata Women’s Collaborative, the Sukenya Primary School and the Laitaiyok council of traditional Maasai leaders and elders. As it was Saturday, it would be a good day for visiting the school. This would be a visit to state employed, non-pastoralists outsiders with every reason to support Thomson.

Thomson Safaris, like many other tourism companies, have their own charitable organisation that their clients donate to, for a combination of some worthwhile projects and propaganda for the company. Schools have been a speciality of this organisation, that until recently was named Friends of Tanzanian Schools. Now its name is Focus on Tanzanian Communities.

The extremely friendly and welcoming head teacher was accompanied by an equally friendly head teacher from a neighbouring sub-village, as they were preparing for the upcoming elections that would take place at the school. I’ve had some teaching experiences and the rate of pupils per teacher at the Sukenya Primary School was simply terrifying. More housing for teachers was needed to solve this problem and teachers’ housing for 2-3 new teachers is exactly what Focus on Tanzanian Communities claim to have announced they will be building this year.

The teachers, however, had not heard anything about this saying that Thomson Safaris may have given something to the village, but never anything at all to the school – neither had anyone else - and they declared that Thomson take a lot and give very little. Maybe the online announcement was more urgent than the one on the ground. Though it looks like the Sukenya Primary School head teacher will soon feature in an elaborate youtube thanking ritual on Thomson’s blog.

The other charitable/propaganda projects that Focus on Tanzanian Communities has been involved in are:

- The delivery of 50 ton of food aid (maize) in August 2009 during the prolonged and very severe drought. It was government food aid – which further strengthened the safari company’s excellent relation to the anti-pastoralist government – and a dream for an occupying force like Thomson Safaris.
- In 2008 the repair and borehole re-drilling of the well – built originally in the 1950s as a part of the so-called ‘Serengeti Compensation Scheme’ – next to Sukenya Primary School. The pump no longer works, allegedly because it was ‘vandalized by a jealous clan’.

After meeting Moringe ole Parkipuny, I thought I had found a more efficient way of finding out what was going on – just asking! This member of parliament for Ngorongoro in the 1980s was the first African to address the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations in Geneva. After a period of exile following an assassination attempt, Parkipuny found new organisations had sprung up working for indigenous people’s (the Maasai and other pastoralists, and hunter-gatherers like the Hadza, Dorobo and Sandawe) rights, but he is not impressed with their achievements in influencing the Tanzanian state.

The day I went to see him at his home we were off to Sukenya in a rented vehicle in the afternoon. We visited a Loita – not Purko (the clan Thomson think all their detractors come from) – boma with some people very unhappy about Thomson Safaris. They quickly assisted Parkipuny in making a list of the ‘Enashiva’ staff: The manager and driver are outsiders, of eleven guards two are Purko and two are from the agricultural Sonjo tribe that mainly inhabit the neighbouring Sale division, while the rest are Laitaiyok. They also said that the sub-village chairman was on the payroll.

There are some house keeping staff as well, but those people don’t participate in the harassment of herders. These people claimed that practically all Loita and Purko oppose Thomson while the company had bought some Laitaiyok leaders living out along the road. They said that Enyuata Women’s Collaborative basically consists of the wives of these leaders. In 2008 Thomson had made a big circus of donating the cheapest Chinese-made maize grinder to this collaborative (this donation apparently was from Thomson Safaris and a guest, and not Focus on Tanzanian Communities).

Parkipuny got the idea that we should just go to ‘Enashiva’ for a friendly visit and a drink. This wasn’t cautious at all, but I was curious and off we went. Parkipuny got out next to the staff housing to talk to a very tense looking guard. Within seconds another guard talking on a phone appeared and then a third one with a bow and poison arrow ready in hand. The people from the Loita boma had said that the guards had both firearms and bows and I’ve also seen pictures of this, but one of the more farcical aspects of Thomson Safaris is the way they in their propaganda material insist on that they don’t even have guards, but only ‘unarmed wildlife scouts’. I couldn’t resist snapping a picture, the guards got even more upset and we had to leave. They had phoned the manager who was in Arusha. The guards were mostly interested in the vehicle writing down the registration number and there was little risk they would know who I was.

I met Parkipuny again the following day and during the night he had been ‘visited’ by three men with a powerful searchlight. Fortunately, he was accompanied by three friends and the ‘visitors’ were chased off. One of Parkipuny’s friends, who was from Sukenya, said that Thomson Safaris use that kind of searchlight.

I wasn’t in a hurry, thinking I would still have a week or two left for talking to people, and the last day of January I was again off to Sukenya together with Parkipuny. As there was a celebration for a girl that was getting married, not many people were around. Parkipuny found some friends to talk to and then we found one of the women of Enyuata Women’s Collaborative.

I had met this very friendly and laughing group on my visit by motorbike, but lacked language skills and was still too discreet to talk with them about Thomson Safaris. It must be noted that this women’s group are the people Thomson Safaris most strongly urge anyone to talk with to experience the ‘overwhelming support’ for their ‘Enashiva’ project.

This member spoke very frankly and had no problem sharing her opinion: Yes, the group of 20 women do business with Thomson, but they live off cattle and not beads. They complained in Loliondo Town about Thomson invading the land, but are very poor and would do business with the devil. They sell to anyone passing, like they sold me a snuff container. They also go and sing at the camp – if Thomson pay.

It’s just common sense that a pastoralist would value the land more than a bead business opportunity. The Laitiyok are pastoralists like everyone else and it would be a good idea to talk with them and work together with them instead of thinking that they have some congenital defect that make them collaborate with the nastiest of ‘investors’ – even though some of their leaders apparently are doing this.

We continued to Soit Sambu and sat down in a central restaurant where anyone may turn up. Thomson Safaris’ driver made an appearance, Parkipuny enquired about visiting the camp and was told it’s only possible with a special permit. Many people wanted to talk about Thomson. I had – very unwisely, I would later discover – written a list of what the safari company is saying on the Internet. The things said astonished some people from sub-villages bordering the disputed land. I needed interviews, but it certainly wasn’t the right time or place. There would be a meeting the following morning at ten and we would return to Soit Sambu then.

On Friday 5 February, due to logistical problems I arrived in Soit Sambu very late and without Parkipuny, and did not know where to go. In the middle of ‘town’, there was a big heap of mosquito nets from the government. I tried to make some [mobile] phone calls, but there was no coverage except for a few seconds sometimes next to a little dry tree. The driver and his friend went for lunch and time was running out, as the vehicle I had rented had to be back in Wasso before 4 pm. I thought I’d heard Parkipuny saying something about ‘ofisi ya kijiji’ so I went to the ‘ofisi ya kijiji’, asking if anyone knew anything about a meeting. I even introduced myself as someone wanting to know if what Thomson Safaris were writing on the Internet was true.

The men in the office were the ward executive officer, Amati, and the ward educational coordinator, so I thought they were working with the ward councillor, about whom I didn’t know anything, except that Parkipuny was waiting for him. Some village representatives arrived, I asked the men at the office what they thought about the conflict, but they couldn’t say anything about this sensitive issue without talking to the district commissioner first. They were working under the DC! Talking to representatives for the government and Thomson Safaris should have been left for the last moments of my Loliondo stay.

I continued asking for an un-official opinion, but the ward executive officer phoned the district commissioner who said he would be in Soit Sambu next morning, and would answer my questions then. It suited me well as it would be market day with public transport and I would meet the new district commissioner who had been appointed in March 2009. I had heard that he would be more reasonable than the old one.

The ward executive officer suggested I buy everyone sodas and we walked off to the restaurant. His phone rang and he held it up so that everyone could see that the screen said ‘Thomson manager’. I was waiting for the government employees to leave, but they didn’t and I had to leave at 3 pm to be sure I wouldn’t return later than 4pm. The ward executive officer and ward educational coordinator followed me to my vehicle and outside the restaurant was also the ‘Enashiva’ vehicle loaded with a pile of mosquito nets.

After some other business I went to my room for a while before dinner, there was a knock on my door and I was told that the police had been at the guesthouse looking for me.

In the morning I decided that the best thing to do was to go to Soit Sambu and hope for some informative pro-Thomson spectacle by the district commissioner. Though, because of the visit by the police, I would not be going to the ‘ofisi ya kijiji’ without Parkipuny, who should be around on a market day. There was a long wait for the bus and I had to decline several offers of cheaper transport as I had already bought the bus ticket.

When the bus had finally, arrived a policeman approached me and told me the district commissioner wanted to see me at his office. I protested that I was going to meet him in Soit Sambu, but the district commissioner had changed his plans and was going to Soit Sambu later. A young policewoman accompanied the policeman and I had to go with them in their vehicle first to the Loliondo police station and then to the district commissioner’s office. An ironic detail was that I was told to ‘feel free’. Otherwise I didn’t notice many details as I was on my mobile phone sending text messages all the time.

At the District Commissioner’s office I was shown into a room where, apart from the DC himself, Elias Wawa Lali, five men from the Ngorongoro Security Committee were seated around a table. I should have written down their names, but I was very busy on my phone trying to alert relatives and friends of my whereabouts. My friend – in Dodoma at that moment – had phoned the Swedish Embassy in Dar es Salaam and my brother had phoned the foreign ministry in Sweden.

I did not get any explanation at all regarding the meeting in Soit Sambu. Instead the committee wanted to know what permit I had to be working in Tanzania. I didn’t have any permits except the tourist visa and I wasn’t working. Nobody – anywhere – was paying me any money at all. The district commissioner wanted to know who had paid my ticket. As if anyone would be that generous… He was interested in the owner of the vehicle used for the ‘Enashiva’ visit, but this person had nothing to do with the whole issue, except for doing business.

I was driven back to the guesthouse to get my passport. The security committee joined their heads gleefully looking at my visa stamp and then I was asked to read what it said, ‘employment with or without pay is strictly prohibited’. But, I still wasn’t employed by anyone. I was told there is no country in the world where I can just go and ask people about sensitive issues, and I was asked, ‘how would you feel if someone came into your house and started asking your children what was going on?’

I calmly explained that I am a repeat visitor to East Africa and that exchanging information with people on the Internet is my main activity AFTER work. I had even discussed this sensitive issue with Thomson Safaris and they had strongly urged me to go and speak with people on the ground – which I did, asking them if what the safari company was writing on the Internet was true. I was even shown around by a former member of parliament part of the time (but this did not impress). It was more than obvious that the security committee just wanted to get rid of me.

They claimed to have talked to Thomson Safaris’ Boston office that said that what they had told me was that I had to arrange a meeting in Arusha if I wanted to see the local manager, nothing else. Anyone doing research had to seek a permit through Dar es Salaam and Arusha. It was also for my own safety as I could be bitten by a snake. ‘Research’ is a matter of definition, but I suppose it’s something I could be accused of having tried to do. All documentation about me would be sent to the president. Last year they had a big problem with someone who came and then wrote about Loliondo issues all over the Internet! My passport was confiscated and sent to Arusha for investigation and I would have to go to the office of the regional commissioner on Tuesday morning. It was Saturday and there would be a bus to Arusha the following morning.

The security committee wanted prints of my photos from the day we visited the ’Enashiva’ guards and asked me how to get this. They did not have a computer or printer. I went with two men working for the security committee to an office that I should not have involved in this problem. One of the men getting the prints said he hoped I was enjoying my stay in Tanzania, or something to that effect. It was just too much when my passport had been confiscated and my expensive plans thwarted by the nasty, stupid and corrupt bullies of the security committee. I said that most people were very friendly and that I definitely would return, but that what they were doing wasn’t a nice way of treating visitors at all.

The guesthouse where I was staying could not have someone who had been interrogated by the security committee staying for a single night. Some staff offered their homes, but I went to another guesthouse. A dear newfound friend stayed with me until I went to bed and barricaded the door with all furniture available. I had been asked if I had any idea how dangerous what I was doing was. I did have some idea, but seeing the closeness in which people are living made me careless. Though only a little peek under the surface was needed to perceive the fear among people in Loliondo. That night it rained heavily, which contributed to a rather Gothic feeling, but bad things are more likely to stay at home when it’s raining.

Thomson Safaris had not since September 2009 updated the blog they created to attack Alex Renton, but only a few days after my encounter with the security committee they wrote about ‘The Enyuata Women’s Collaborative’ (I’ve met them) and ‘The People of Sukenya’ (their name for the selected Laitaiyok leader that they’ve befriended). They then filled up with ‘Select Projects Update’ (Focus on Tanzanian Communities), ‘Future Plans’, ‘Investigative Report Summary’ and ‘Sukenya Sub-Village: Will its People Finally have a voice’. They also added some videos with Laitaiyok leaders voicing their support for Thomson Safaris and thanking them on behalf of the Enyuata Women’s Collaborative with the Enashiva manager translating. In March they added ‘Tanzania Conservation Ltd Staff’ (‘wildlife scouts’) and ‘Sukenya Leaders Support TCL’. This renewed blog activity could have something to do with the recently initiated court case.

In August 2008, the prime minister commissioned an investigation into allegations concerning the sale of Sukenya Farm. This of course is the same as criminals investigating themselves. Before any conclusions were presented, the Tanzania Tourism Board decided to honour Thomson Safaris with the 2009 Tanzania Conservation Award for their ‘community based conservation project Enashiva Nature Refuge’. The ceremony took place in Egypt in May, with the minister for natural resources and tourism attending. No report has been published, but a summary has been presented to the District Council and it unsurprisingly concludes that the sales both to TBL and later to Thomson Safaris were very legal and that the conflict – like in the OBC case – is due to tourism companies and NGOs, throwing in some blame on Kenyans and the Purko.

The ten-hour bus trip to Arusha was an extremely frustrating affair, leaving without having talked with so many people and without having visited Mondorosi and Enadooshoke sub-villages. Though the land was beautiful and green and full of plains game, I was a bit worried about passing the Ngorongoro gate without a passport – but all interest was on the US$50 Ngorongoro Conservation Area fee that you have to pay even when you’re just passing by bus. I didn’t have any kind of document explaining that my passport had been confiscated.

Once at the office of the regional commissioner in Arusha, I was told that he was abroad and then I was sent to Immigration instead. At Immigration, I was interrogated by a clueless security officer who scolded me for saying I was a tourist when I had built houses in Loliondo. Eh? Then I was told to write a summary of what had happened and I scribbled down a short but absolutely truthful summary. In the same room was a woman applying for citizenship. She wrote a note and held it up in her palm so that I could see it. The note said, ‘Take care. They are up to something big.’

I’d been on the phone several times with the embassy in Dar es Salaam and they asked if I would like the Finnish Honorary Consul to accompany me to the regional commissioner next morning. Unbelievable as it sounds, Sweden does not have a consulate in what former US president, Bill Clinton, described as ‘the Geneva of Africa’. The Finnish consul very graciously followed me to the regional commissioner who was still away. Then we visited immigration officer Nyaki who had missed the consul’s inauguration party. He told me to return in the afternoon, which I did alone, and then I was told that my documentation was with regional security and I should return the following morning. Nyaki informed me that I had a problem (as if I hadn’t noticed), and that next day he would have to do what he was told to do about me.

On Thursday 11 February, a woman at Immigration took my statement. She said that the problem was that Loliondo was a very political area and I could have been involved in human rights. I got a bank slip saying I would have to pay US$400 as a ‘special pass fee’. I asked Nyaki when I would get my passport back and he got very angry saying that I was ‘arguing’ with him. He wanted me to go home to Sweden this afternoon, but I told him I had a ticket for the 21 February that couldn’t be changed, which made him even angrier. I paid US$400 at the bank and then it was too late to return to Immigration.

Friday morning I took the bank slip to Immigration where they said it hadn’t gone through the machine at the bank, so I had to return to get a stamp with a signature. Nyaki wasn’t around and I didn’t miss him. I handed the slip to a man in charge of those things and he asked me for my passport! I told him it must be somewhere in the building and he went to fetch it, gave me a receipt – and the passport. I asked if everything was finished and it was.

Very quietly I left Immigration, on the way meeting the woman who took my statement. I had been let go and needed to make the most of the almost ruined trip. I contemplated returning to Loliondo, which felt a bit dangerous, but I wasn’t sure I would be able to get any information in Arusha. When I phoned the embassy I was very strongly advised to leave Tanzania as soon as possible.

Some 15 minutes after having returned to the guesthouse there was a knock on my door. It was the woman from Immigration, together with another immigration employee. They had forgot to stamp my passport and the boss was away. They took the passport again and told me to return to the office on Monday 15 February – it was Friday afternoon. After another 15 minutes or so I got a text message saying, ‘Sorry madam, you are needed at the office right now’.

Back at Immigration, I got a stamp in my passport declaring me a prohibited immigrant contrary to section 10(f) of Immigration Act no 7 of 1995.[1] I also got a document called ‘Notice to Prohibited Immigrant’. The woman who took my statement and the security officer who accused me of building houses said that it was just ‘a matter of procedure’.

I went to Kenya for the rest of my trip.

Now, what Thomson Safaris have to do is to pick up their stuff and get off Sukenya Farm. Maybe they could have a camp on a few acres next to the road where they could continue their philanthropic projects without threatening people’s lives and livelihoods. The sooner they start re-building their reputation, the better. I doubt they can make Tanzania Breweries Ltd return the US$1.2 million, but that’s something they have to take. The court case against Thomson Safaris (Tanzania Conservation Ltd) is ongoing and I have fingers and toes crossed, although it is extremely rare for pastoralists to win court cases in Tanzania.

What’s really important is that anyone contemplating a trip with Thomson Safaris reconsiders and tells the company why they will not get their business. Apart from Thomson Safaris Ltd, Tanzania Conservation Ltd – that was used to buy Sukenya Farm – Thomson Family Adventure Ltd and Nature Discovery Ltd are all divisions of Wineland-Thomson Adventures Inc. They also own Gibb’s Farm in Karatu that has to be avoided because of the current owners.

UPDATE SEPTEMBER 2010

I’ve been told that the court case keeps getting delayed, but that the arrests have stopped and the harassment has been reduced since it was initiated.

In April, Thomson Safaris approached the MP for Ngorongoro to arrange a big meeting with Soit Sambu Village Council and the three Maasai sections, but then they never turned up.

Soit Sambu village chairman was interrogated by the police about why a court case had been initiated.

Thomson Safaris have stepped up their propaganda war, bringing the US ambassador to announce the construction of teachers’ housing at Sukenya Primary School.

Mondorosi have refused money for their school.

Soit Sambu Village is in the process of being split up. New villages bordering the disputed land will be Sukenya and Mondorosi. Sukenya will be part of the new allegedly OBC friendly Oloipiri Ward.

Regarding Otterlo Business Corporation, I wrote a blog entry of what I was told about the women’s protests in April.

Currently the threat is the government’s plans to take away a corridor from village land where OBC will be able to hunt undisturbed, and the renewal of the hunting permit.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* The full version of this blog post first appeared on View from the Termite Mound
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] Section 10(F) of the Immigration Act says:
(f) a person whose entry into or continued presence in Tanzania is,
in the opinion of the Minister of the Director, undesirable and
is declared by the Minister or the Director to be a prohibited
immigrant; except that every declaration of the Director under
this paragraph shall be subject to confirmation by the Minister,
whose decision shall be final.
(In case anyone would like to give me legal advice.)

Tanzania: Are children learning?

Uwezo Tanzania

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67364

cc F DCommenting on largely disappointing statistics about Tanzanian children’s reading and arithmetic levels, Uwezo Tanzania stresses that the country must focus more on learning outcomes rather than mere educational facilities.

Across Tanzania, huge progress has been made in basic education in the last decade. Enrolments are up in both primary and secondary education, and millions of children are able to go to school. Tanzania is ahead of schedule in meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) related to education access and gender parity. Tens of thousands of classrooms have been built and tens of thousands of teachers been added to the rolls. The budget for education has tripled over this period; the government now spends over a billion dollars annually or about 1 in every 5 shillings of its budget on education.

These achievements are no easy feats; they have required significant political commitment and large allocations of public resources. Parents too have scrambled to cover their share, for even free education is never quite free, with costs of uniforms, books and pens, extra tuition, transport and what not. The key question is: What have these massive efforts and investments yielded? To what extent have these achievements translated into concrete improvements in children’s competencies? The point of schooling is to enable every child to develop the knowledge and wherewithal to thrive in the world, starting with the basic skills in literacy and numeracy that form the foundation of the ability to be curious, think, listen, ask questions, analyse, synthesise and communicate with confidence. Are our schools succeeding in this responsibility? Are our children learning?

Uwezo seeks to answer this key question, and this report presents the findings of its first assessment. Uwezo, meaning capability in Swahili, is a four-year initiative to monitor the quality of learning in schools by assessing the basic literacy and numeracy skills of children aged 5–16. The initiative is housed within TEN/MET (Tanzania Education Network) in Tanzania, and is part of an East Africa-wide effort also involving Kenya and Uganda coordinated by Twaweza. The assessment is based on a proven methodology developed by the ACER (Assessment Survey Evaluation Research) Centre in India, and uses scientific methods to obtain a random sampling of households around the country. Trained Uwezo volunteers visit the households to assess the mathematics and reading (Kiswahili and English) skills of each child using a short, standard 2-level assessment. The standard 2 level is chosen because according to both Tanzanian and international standards by the end of the second year of primary education children should have acquired basic skills in literacy and numeracy.

The first Uwezo Tanzania assessment was conducted in May 2010, after extensive preparation and pre-testing. It involved 38 out of 133 districts. In each district 30 villages were randomly selected, and in each village all children aged 5–16 in 20 households were assessed. In total, 42,033 children in 22,800 households were assessed. The six key findings are presented below. The main report can be downloaded from www.uwezo.net.

KEY FINDINGS

1. One in five primary school leavers cannot read standard-2 level Kiswahili

Even though Kiswahili is the national language widely spoken across the country, a large number of children are not able to read it fluently. In our sample, less than half (42.2 per cent) of the children surveyed were able to read at the story level. Whereas all children in standard 3 should be able to read at the standard-2 story level, less than 1 in 3 (32.7 per cent) can. Most children do not learn to read a simple story until standard 5 or 6. By the time they complete primary school, however, 1 out of every 5 children still cannot read the standard-2 level story. These children will likely never learn to read, and despite spending seven years in primary schooling, are likely to remain illiterate for life.





2. Half the children who complete primary school cannot read in English

English is by far the hardest subject for students. Even though all children in standard 3 should be able to read the standard-2 story level, less than 1 in 10 (7.7 per cent) can. Progress in English is slow; by standard 5, only 1 in every 4 children can read a story. Nearly half cannot even read short English words. Many children reach standard 7 without any English skills at all. By the time they complete primary school, half of all children (49.1 per cent) still cannot read a standard-2 level English story, and far fewer are likely to be able to read at the standard-7 level. This means that the vast majority of children who enter secondary schooling are unable to read in the English language, the medium of instruction in secondary education.





3. Only 7 in 10 primary school leavers can do standard-2 level mathematics

Although multiplication is in the standard-2 curriculum, hardly any standard 2 children can multiply. In fact, more than half of them cannot even add. By the time they reach standard 5, most children can add and subtract, but the majority still cannot multiply. Most children master basic mathematics skills by the end of primary school. However, 3 out of 10 (31.5 per cent) children in standard 7 still cannot do standard-2 level multiplication. One in 10 children complete primary school with no mathematics skills at all; they cannot even do basic addition. This likely means that the majority of children entering secondary school do not have an adequate foundation in mathematics that is essential for learning and analysis, particularly in science and commerce.





4. Urban-based children perform better than rural-based children

Children in urban areas score about 7–10 percentage points higher than children in rural areas in all subjects. The difference is largest in standards 2–4, when urban-based children begin to master basic skills while their rural counterparts fall behind. Rural students seem to catch up the standard-2 level eventually by the time they are in standards 6 and 7, but in fact may be falling further behind at being able to read at their own level.



5. Girls do slightly better than boys

Girls performed better than boys in all subjects tested, although the differences are very small. Of all children tested, 43.5 per cent girls were able to read at the story level in Kiswahili as compared to 40.7 per cent of all boys. For English and Mathematics the differences were negligible, as can be seen in the table below. Nonetheless these findings counter the widely held notion that girls do less well than boys, and raise questions about why there is marked gap in favour of boys in the Primary School Leaving Examinations (PSLE). Overall, however, the slight differences between abilities of girls and boys should not mask the larger reality, namely that too many of both lack basic competencies in both languages and mathematics.



6. Children with educated mothers perform better

Children whose mothers attended secondary school perform dramatically better than other children. For instance, in standard 3 and 4 these children are five times more likely to be able to read a story in English and more than twice as likely to be able to multiply and read a story in Kiswahili. Even children whose mothers have attended only primary school seem to have a small but significant advantage above children whose mothers have not been to school. The gap in performance begins in standard 1 and continues through standard 7, which suggests that mothers’ education remains important for children at all levels of schooling.



CONCLUSION

The findings of Uwezo’s large-scale assessment involving over 20,000 households and over 40,000 children reveal that there is a crisis in education in Tanzania. By the time they enter standard 3, 100 per cent of children should have basic competencies in literacy and numeracy. The reality is that by standard 3, 7 out of every 10 children cannot read basic Swahili, 9 out of every 10 children cannot read basic English and 8 out of every 10 children cannot do basic mathematics. Even by the time they complete primary education, large numbers of children cannot do what they should have mastered five years earlier in standard 2. Breakdowns by districts reveal large disparities, with some districts performing far below the national average.

The stark reality is that, despite the enormous advances in education made possible by investing trillions of shillings each year, the vast majority of children in Tanzania are not learning.

What can be done about the situation?

First, we need to pause and make the effort to fully absorb these results and analyse what they mean. Rushing to explain them away or come up with quick solutions may not help, and lead to improper diagnosis and ineffective responses. It may also require, politically unsound as it may seem, to temper the enthusiasm with current achievements. Celebrating new buildings and higher enrolments is dangerous folly if its effect is to mask the reality that too many children in Tanzania complete primary schooling without the ability to read and count.

Second, while major challenges are inevitable whenever an education system is expanded rapidly, one can still ask the question: Are the strategic policy and political objectives focused on the right things? At present, in Tanzania and elsewhere, much of the focus is on the provision of educational inputs, such as classrooms, laboratories, books and teachers, rather than learning outcomes, such as literacy, numeracy, writing, critical thinking and creativity. Since the evidence shows that the inputs are not being translated into learning outcomes, there is a need to realign focus system-wide on achieving learning outcomes, within ministries responsible for education, training institutions, curriculum development, examinations, teacher and school assessment, measures of progress and political commitments.

Third, there is a need to focus on what happens at the school, rather than in national aggregates alone. Studies across the region suggest that the teaching and learning process may be severely compromised. Two of the most common problems appear to be that insufficient funds are reaching schools (i.e., increasing education budgets are being used up for other things than school-level improvements) and teachers are both poorly motivated and not teaching (i.e., ‘time on task’ is very low). It may make sense to pay greater attention to these two issues and how to improve them, as well as rigorously study the relationship between resources at the school level and teacher time on task on one hand and learning outcomes on the other.

Fourth, greater transparency may spur reflection and action between both policy-maker and citizen alike. Uwezo is committed to sharing its findings widely to contribute to this purpose. But the government could take things much further by enabling data from every school to be available online and through mass media, so that every local government official, teacher, parent and student can compare how she or he is doing in relation to others. Technological innovations and the spread of the mobile phone in particular make possible information sharing that would have been unimaginable a few years ago.

Fifth, instead of doing more of what has been done harder or faster it may be time to do something different. Our analysis and studies worldwide suggest that a core part of the puzzle may be to realign incentives – so that key actors system-wide are recognised for promoting learning. One idea worth trying and already endorsed by President Jakaya Kikwete is called ‘cash on delivery’. Its basic premise is that additional funding in education should be predicated on and paid on the achievement of an (independently audited) agreed learning outcome, such as literacy and numeracy (e.g., for every child who completes primary education with agreed ability, US$200 would be provided). This idea could be rolled further down, whereby the US$200 could be shared among local officials, teachers and possibly even parents. The point is to nudge key actors to focus on and reward achievement of learning. There is no guarantee that this idea would work. But in the face of the gravity of the crisis in Tanzania, where the usual methods have failed to bring meaningful progress, experimenting with a carefully designed and bold alternative as cash on delivery, and rigorously studying its impact, makes sense.

The Uwezo findings are released on the eve of national elections in Tanzania. Whatever its outcome, the next five years present an opportunity to address the education crisis in an honest, bold and strategically effective manner. A skilled, competent and confident people are essential to enable the nation to thrive, particularly in the context of regional integration and increasing globalisation. Whoever emerges as the next president of Tanzania, turning education from more of the same inputs to ensuring that every child can read, count and learn may be the greatest test of their leadership.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This 2010 annual learning assessment report was brought together by Uwezo Tanzania. Uwezo is hosted by TEN/MET and is part of an East African-wide effort that is coordinated by Twaweza.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Are our children learning? What about parents?

Chambi Chachage

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67327

cc M MA report released by the East African literacy project Uwezo shows that educated parents – even just at the primary school level – make for better-educated children, Chambi Chachage writes. As well, the Tanzanian system has focused too long on education ‘inputs’ such as teachers and classrooms, rather than ‘outcomes’ such as high literacy, critical thinking and creativity.

Today, ironically a day after Tanzania received an award for ‘better achievements in implementing the Millennium Development Goal on education’,[1] I attended the launch of Uwezo’s report 'Are Our Children Learning? Annual Learning Assessment Report - Tanzania 2010'. The report is available at uwezo.net.[2]

Expectedly, its statistics are glaringly saddening - as all 'factual' educational statistics in the country are. For instance, it was found out that whereas ‘all children in Standard 3 should be able to read at the Standard 2 story level, less than 1 in 3 (32.7%) can’.[3] The situation remains pathetic at Standard 7: ‘By the time they complete primary school, however, 1 out of every 5 children cannot read the Standard 2 level story’.[4] Mind you, a total of 42,033 children in 22,800 households were assessed across 30 randomly selected villages per district in 38 districts.

The situation is also drastic when it comes to English. The study found that ‘less than 1 in 10 (7.7%)’ children in Standard 3 can read a Standard 2 level story’.[5] Worse, ‘by the time they complete primary school, half of all the children (49.1%) cannot read a Standard 2 level English story’.[6] We are talking here of a very basic English paragraph. In fact, a collection of simple sentences, as one of the participants at the launch, Dr. Martha Qorro, highlighted.

Lest one argue (as one participant somehow argued) that the difference between Kiswahili and English comprehension in the study findings is very small and so, by inference, the call for teaching in Kiswahili as a medium of instruction is unfounded, it is important to stress Qorro's sharp observation. The paragraph and story the children were required to read in Kiswahili, though at a Standard 2 level, was relatively much harder as those they were required to read at the same level in English. Upon probing, we were told that teaching experts thought that if a more complex, albeit Standard 2 level, story and paragraph were given to the children it would be impossible for them to read let alone comprehend it and, presumably, the researchers thought this would be impractical for the purposes of comparative assessment of levels.

What does all this mean as far as the Language of Instruction (LOI) in Tanzania is concerned? It simply means that if the students had been asked to read a relatively equally complex paragraph and story in English they would have 'failed' miserably compared to the way they performed in Kiswahili. Thus, it is still important to factor in LOI if we truly want to make our children learn and thus improve the glaringly pathetic quality of education in Tanzania.

Nevertheless, taken independently, these scores in Kiswahili and English comprehension remind us that our education system as far as learning outcomes are concerned is not working. Another of the report’s findings paints the same dim picture: ‘Only 7 in 10 primary school leavers can do Standard 2 level mathematics’.[7] It is in this regard that the following observation and conclusion from the report are so timely:

‘At present, in Tanzania and elsewhere, much of the focus is on provision of educational inputs, such as classrooms, laboratories, books and teachers, rather than learning outcomes, such as literacy, numeracy, writing, critical thinking and creativity. Since the evidence shows that the inputs are not being translated into learning outcomes, there is a need to realign focus-wide on achieving learning outcomes within ministries responsible for education, training institutions, curriculum development, institutions, curriculum development, examinations, teachers and schools assessment, measures of progress, and political commitments.’[8]

My question is: Have the inputs failed us or have we failed them? If teachers are indeed 'inputs' have we surely prepared and deployed teachers who can really teach? Or are we still 'inputting' teachers who are reflections of the 'outcome' of the picture above? In fact, as one of the participants at the report launch said, it would be very interesting to assess teachers by using these same tests that were used on the children. We may find similar results like those that happened when certain teachers were asked somewhere to do the national examinations that they were meant to mark.

Nonetheless, I totally agree with the report that ’instead of doing more of what has been done harder or faster it may be time to do something different’[9]. As for me, something different would be to capitalise on one of the findings of the studies: that children with educated mothers tend to perform better and more dramatically when that parent has attended secondary school. In fact, the report found that ‘in Standard 3 and 4 these children are five times more likely to be able to read a story in English and more than twice as likely to be able to multiply and read a story in Kiswahili.’[10] These findings show why the following point about the role of higher education that was stressed recently by Prof. Mahmood Mamdani is so pertinent:

‘The whole process [of declining university standards] was set into motion in the early 1990s when the Government succumbed to the pressure of the World Bank to cut funds to the university so as to increase funding for primary education. What the Government and the World Bank forgot was that you cannot expand the primary education sector without expanding university education because you need university products in building a strong UPE (Universal Primary Education). The policy itself was wrong...You cannot have a successful UPE without a strong university system. Their policy was wrong because they assumed that you could let a university system collapse and it would not affect the primary system or secondary system or even the economy and other sectors. A university is like a power generating plant, generating intellectual power which feeds all sectors of the country including industries, businesses, education, health and indeed all other sectors.’[11]

Indeed, we need to educate parents since their education trickles down to their children. The current national rate of adult illiteracy is too shameful - a far cry from the rate we had in the heydays of Mwalimu Julius K. Nyerere's rallies for adult education. As Salma Moulidi alerted us elsewhere, literacy has risen from about ten per cent to above 30 per cent in a generation. If parents are such an important educational ‘input’ to the extent that even ‘children whose mothers have attended only primary school seem to have a small but significant advantage above children whose mothers have not been in school’,[12] we ought to invest heavily and urgently in their (yes, our) education. It is in this regard that I commend the report for considering ‘possibly even parents’ [13] in their recommendations which state:

‘Our analysis and studies worldwide suggest that a core part of the puzzle may be to realign incentives - so that key actors system-wide are recognised for promoting learning’.[14]

Let our parents learn. That way our children will and shall learn. After all, teachers are parents.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Chambi Chachage is an independent researcher, newspaper columnist and policy analyst based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
* This article was originally published by Udadisi: Rethinking in Action
* © Chambi Chachage
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] The Citizen (2010) ‘Tanzania drive to improve education lauded’, 21 September
[2] Uwezo is a four-year initiative that aims to improve numeracy and literacy among children aged 5-16 in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda.
[3] Uwezo (2010) ‘Are Our Children Learning? Annual Learning Assessment Report - Tanzania 2010’, p. 1
[4] Ibid
[5] Ibid
[6] Ibid
[7] Ibid, p. 3
[8] Ibid, p. 45
[9] Ibid, p. 46
[10] Ibid, p. 5
[11], Sunday Vision (2010) ‘Commercialisation is killing Makerere’, 21 August
[12] Uwezo (2010) ‘Are Our Children Learning? Annual Learning Assessment Report - Tanzania 2010’, p. 5
[13] Ibid, p. 46
[14] Ibid

Behind the Hout Bay violence in Cape Town

Mphuthumi Ntabeni

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67328

cc I AMany Capetonians were shocked by recent images of violent clashes between police and residents of the Hangberg community in Hout Bay, Cape Town. Residents say they were resisting the demolition of informal houses on the mountainside, but the City of Cape Town has said these structures had to go because they were built on a firebreak and obstruct rainwater flow. Why is it, asks Mphuthumi Ntabeni, that it’s okay for rich mansions to climb any mountain they wish, but once poor people dare to do the same they are labelled ‘criminals’?

Anti-eviction forces, accompanied by the City of Cape Town metro police and South African Police Service (SAPS) members invaded the community of Hangberg in Hout Bay on Tuesday, 21 September 2010 to demolish poor people’s homes. The community held a post-mortem meeting on Thursday, 23 September 2010 to discuss what had taken place.

Different organisation, political parties, trade union members, religious groups and various associations came to bandage the wounds of this society. They all expressed dismay at the brutality shown by police, which was reminiscent of the apartheid era. Many people shared their painful stories that day, and vowed to recover the dignity the City of Cape Town had robbed them of - and to take the future of their own lives in their hands.

An Anglican priest in the community narrated how at some stage (during the events of 21 September) they had demanded access to a police Nyala (an armour-plated vehicle used for riot control) and had been refused on the basis that the hydraulics were not working properly. The priest had information that the police had a 14-year-old girl inside the vehicle, which was categorically denied by the officers in the vehicle. Eventually the vehicle was opened, and true as the rising sun, there was the girl scared as a trapped bird.

There were other testimonies of the police abusing the elderly in their homes and taking them to jail on pretentious charges of public violence. People vowed not to allow the government officials to divide them but pledged to stand together as a community united.

The Congress of the People (COPE) have advised the community to launch a complaint with the South African Human Rights Commission about what happened, and hope that this time, if the independent body chooses to find against the Democratic Alliance-led municipality it will not be subjected to another attack on its credibility and independence, but rather that the municipality will heed its criticism and abide by its rule. We will also recommend that the shameful waste of municipal public expenditure on metro police manpower, with seemingly one priority in mind - to protect a luxury development in the area known as Panorama - be subjected to scrutiny, preferably by the public protector. The three-building complex had a veritable army of metro police and armoured vehicles around it the whole of the next day.

What the well-planned and coordinated incident of Tuesday has managed to do was to first divide the community of Hout Bay, and then initiate a muted race war. For instance, when the violence subsided Hangberg community residents saw white ‘valley’ folks bring tea, coffee and pastries for the police whilst they sat in their vehicles. This disgusted the brutalised community, who felt invaded and humiliated by the police.

Secondly, the invasion stripped the community of Hangberg of their right to shelter, threatened their health and further interrupted their right to schooling. These rights are all guaranteed in our Constitution, yet were freely violated by the city officials. Hence, the community are now calling for the national minister of cooperative governance and traditional affairs, Sicelo Shiceka, to institute a judicial inquiry and subpoena whoever was involved in planning, coordinating and executing the invasion to the Hangberg on Tuesday. It was obvious that this was a meticulously planned operation and nothing happened by chance that day. The South African people deserve to know the true motivates of that invasion and not be fobbed off by the false excuses of the Western Cape Premier Helen Zille regarding firebreaks and alleged interference with mountain rainwater run-off.

As I read the media reports on what happened in Hangberg I was surprised at how none of the real incidences that happened that day were reported. It is not that the journalists were not there. I know they were, and some were even brave enough to stand on the side of the community that was being fired at by the police. But very few to none of these incidences came out from the media reports. Why not? What was the editing policy of the newspapers that covered the story?

It is well known in Cape Town that the DA and the newspapers enjoy an extremely unobjective, mutually beneficial relationship. If this ‘friendship’ lies at the heart of the unquestioned statements of the premier, that the Hangberg is a community held to ransom by a few drug-pushing ‘rastas’, who are now extending their kingdoms to the 70 odd shacks under attack, then those media outlets must seriously question their morality and how damaged their psyche towards the marginalised actually is. I don’t care to politicise this issue, but am trying to question the professionalism of the media, who like to pass themselves off as protectors of freedom and the Constitution. What happened that day? Perhaps it is time the media take a hard look at itself too and the method of their operations. Perhaps it should instigate its own inquiry into the reporting of that incident.

In any event, the premier’s claims and name calling in relation to the homeless members of the Hangberg community were exposed by the decision of the community to stand united to protect and demand their constitutional rights. This is hardly the reaction of a community freed from the tyranny of the drug lords. Obviously the premier is actively embarking on divide and rule apartheid tactics. Sadly, the media does not appear to be as sophisticated as the community in breaking down this propaganda.

How easy the premier forgets: only a few decades ago we marched with her to KTC (an informal settlement) to stop police demolishing informal houses; now she is the one treating people like dirt.

On Tuesday Hangberg looked like a warzone: bricks, rocks and bullet casings littered the roads and smouldering tyres and branches blocked the roads. Has the premier forgotten that treating poor people like this is a crime against humanity? How paradoxical that she of all people is at forefront of delegitimising the realisation of the constitutional rights of the poor when she is always talking about protecting the Constitution.

The premier says she is justified in halting the upgrading of the area and provision of housing to the people of Hangberg as they did not keep their promise of not growing their footprint towards the Sentinel mountain (situated behind the Hangberg area). But this argument is conceptually fallacious. How can you justify withholding the provision of housing because the homeless have been forced to fend for themselves? Where and when has any housing development been done in the area? The last, if I remember well, was in 1992. What upgrades have been done here in the last few years? Only those undertaken by the residents themselves, who have placed wendy houses in all the available spots amongst the existing development, which has led to the use of the mountainside in the last year or so. What infrastructural developments have been ploughed into the area? Even the schools are falling apart, never mind the unmaintained council housing stock.

On the other hand it has been alleged that the football field, the only one in the area, that the children make full use of, has recently been sold to a private developer. Can the premier or mayor of Cape Town confirm or deny this?

There is more municipal land ready for development and for building decent houses for people in Hout Bay. Why has it not been utilised? Or perhaps I forget, most of it was sold to rich private developers and the trend continues, but there is none to build houses and schools for the poor. Also what of the unused factory land at the entrance to the harbour area? Why is this being sold to private developers and not the municipality?

The municipality has in the past three years or so been looking for land to build a second high school for the swollen population of Hout Bay. Despite objections from the community, the DA led government want to site this school within the black area known as Imizamo Yethu. The people of Imizamo Yethu have strenuously attempted to prevent that, asking that the school be sited in the main Hout Bay area so that it will be accessed by all the children in the area (knowing from the experience of the high school in the harbour area that is under-maintained and marginalised). Imagine the shock the community felt when they heard that the municipality leases the perfect spot for a high school in a central location to a privately run Christian school.

It is okay for rich mansions to climb any mountain they wish in the City of Cape Town, but once poor people dare to do the same they are labelled ‘criminals’ and ‘drug lords’ and accused of holding law-abiding community members to ransom.

Hout Bay is the perfect area to be an excellent pilot project for the integration of classes. Everyone knows that the most successful communities are those where people co-exist. The city could easily build apartment complexes in the area that would also accommodate low-income families. This model has been highly successful in other countries like the Republic of Ireland. The tendency of pushing poor people around all the time and loading them out to peripheral and impoverished areas where mechanisms to uplift them are unavailable is unfair. Everyone has the right to be positioned where they want, especially if it is closer to their livelihoods, like the fishermen at Hout Bay.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

For a selection of news stories on events in Hout Bay, visit the following links:
- Police battle shack dwellers
http://bit.ly/houtbay
- Three people lose eyes
http://bit.ly/houtbay2
- Eviction order threats follow Hout Bay clashes
http://bit.ly/houtbay3
- Clashes could have been avoided, says SAHRC
http://bit.ly/houtbay4
- Cosatu plans anti-Zille protest
http://bit.ly/houtbay5

*Mphuthumi Ntabeni is a COPE researcher and writes here in his personal capacity as a resident of Hout Bay.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Nigeria at 50: The battle for a new leader begins

Sokari Ekine

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67398

cc WikimediaWith Nigeria marking 50 years of independence on October 1 and campaigning for the 2011 elections already kicking into action, Sokari Ekine presents posts on the country’s controversial political scene, in this week’s round up of the African blogosphere.

2010 marks 50 years of independence for 27 African countries. I see that the majority of countries were French colonies, which makes me wonder if there was any particularly reason for this.

On 1 October, Nigeria marks 50 years of independence but apart from the government, few people have anything positive to write. The country is also in the early stages of campaigning for the 2011 elections with the party nominations coming next month. This week’s roundup covers comments on both Nigeria at 50 and the election campaigning which is already proving controversial with a plethora of social media sites, some real, some well… we just don’t know.

The leading candidates, Goodluck Jonathan, Ibrahim Babangida and Nuhu Ribadu along with steadily multiplying ‘pro-democracy’ sites, all have a confusion of Facebook pages, Twitter handles and websites in triplicate and more. We are now at the point of asking will the real ‘candidate’ or ‘group’ stand up? Campaigns show a lack of understanding of how to use social media, as there does not seem to be a coherent strategy. As yet, neither Babangida nor Jonathan are engaging with the general public, which is beginning to frustrate many.

Black Looks has two posts this week, the first of which addresses some of the issues just mentioned. In ‘Saving Nigeria from Save Nigeria’ she writes:

‘Nigeria’s election campaign is off to a great start. Political intrigue, a plethora of candidates – old faces which need to disappear have revived themselves and new ones provide plenty of opportunities for gossip – campaign and pro-democracy groups vying for constituencies and publicity, and the battle sites of Twitter and Facebook, all add to the excitement looming over the next 6 months. Discussions around postponing the elections may possibly put a temporary damper on election fever but I doubt it. Seriously I cannot understand why this particular discussion did not take place before the election announcement.’

One of Nigeria’s foremost political bloggers, Nigerian Curiosity has a number of excellent posts, but the two which come to mind are the Goodluck Jonathan and Dele Momodu campaign videos. On the latter she again picks up on the confusion of names between campaign groups, which point to a certain degree of dishonesty and lack of transparency:

‘He is a publisher of a gossip/society magazine, Ovation, and according to his website and other social media sources, he wants to become Nigeria's next president. I know very little about Momodu, but, there is growing controversy over the name change of a certain Facebook fan page. Originally called "Save Nigeria", the page was assumed to be related to Save Nigeria Group (SNG) which organized a youth-led march to the National Assembly on March 16th, 2010 in Abuja. SNG is tied to Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, and progressive youth groups such as Enough Is Enough (EIE). For those who mistook Save Nigeria for SNG, many were quickly outraged when an email was sent to members informing them that the fan page was to become 'Dele Momodu For Nigeria'. One commenter called it an "abracadabra" and "win members by subterfuge" tactic.’

Akin reports on the growing possibility of the elections being deferred to a more realistic timeframe. Why could this not have been decided in the first place? Nonetheless Akin puts the blame on the Nigerian legislature:

‘Hypocrisy of the highest order. The Nigerian legislature which is comprised of the political parties that are now acquiescing to the need for a postponement or rescheduling of the calendar are the ones who voted to have the elections hold in January 2011 instead of April 2011; giving the new chairman hardly any time to stamp his authority on the organisation he has sworn to make deliver free and fair elections.

‘The logic was wrong, flawed and self-serving, it is better to conduct free and fair elections late which put aside the need for dispute if the elections were conducted properly than to conduct them early to allow for disputes to be resolved before the declared winners or their aggrieved opponents are satisfied and sworn into office.’

Canary Bird by political activist, Kayode Ogundamisi, has a comprehensive post on the candidates battle for the ‘cyber generation’. ‘Team Ribadu’ is running in next to last place which might cost him as the ‘youth’ migrate to those candidates already online. However Nuhu Ribadu’s team can still move ahead if they show some ‘cyber savvy’ which is seriously missing from the other candidates. IBB [Babangida] is the ‘most aggressive’ and is described by Kayode as ‘the man they hate to like’. Well he does add to the intrigue and gossip!

Buhari, another ex-military dictator, is pictured as being cyber shy: ‘A Messiah we can all believe in’, whilst former Cross River State Governor, the suave looking Donal Duke is presented as ‘unNigerian’ after revealing how elections, including his own, were rigged. Finally former Vice President Atiku has very little cyber presence and frankly very little chance of getting nominated let alone winning the elections.

Max Siollun brings us a CNN interview with Babangida. If anyone has any thoughts about possibly voting for this man, this video should be confirmation that once and for all this man should be relegated into Nigeria’s political wilderness. If you are still in doubt then this wonderful piece, ‘When Babangida becomes President’ by Suleiman’s Blog should convince you.

Osun Defender likens the Osun State PDP branch to ‘the popular television soap opera, Fuji House of Commotion! The revolution of vote robbery and electoral banditry is consuming its own children; and the vote robbers are turning their swords against themselves! That is what you get when you steal the people’s vote.’

Osun gets somewhat carried away as he goes on to discuss the ‘spiritual implications of such grave evil’:

‘That spiritual comeuppance is playing itself out right now. The Osun PDP[1] has become a tower of Babel . The falcon, as the literature says, cannot hear the falconer. Things have fallen complete apart and the robbers are completely aghast. The centre has not only collapsed, the PDP robbers are playing out a Samson syndrome: everything is collapsing on their heads! By the time the rubble clears, our people would have back our long suffering land. But there is need for more vigilance and more organisation yet.

'As they are wont, the whole crisis started with brazen imposition: an attempt by the renegades in power to impose, willy-nilly, Iyiola Omisore, who tragically and comically figures himself the next “governor” of Osun State , before whom everyone must bow. Since he is as hollow and shallow as they in the PDP could possibly be, it was a shock to him and his co-conspirators to realise some people, even withing the PDP, could rise against him.’

Grandiose Parlor adds to the depressing comedy of tragedies that is Nigerian politics. Describing two of the candidates, Nuhu Ribadu and Pat Utomi as ‘decent men’ he goes on to say that unfortunately their ‘decency’ will not win them an election:

‘Nigeria history tells us no “newbie”—what Ribadu and Utomi are, politically—has been able to move against the odds and wrestle political power from, or contest successfully against, formidable foes in the presidential elections. At the state level there are two instances in recent time: Adam Oshiomole (Edo State) and Segun Mimiko (Ondo State); and both men have strong political grassroots connections. Oshiomole was a national labor leader and an astute organizer. Mimiko has 15 years of politicking under his belt before he became governor and he’s the quintessential grassroots politician.’

Saratu of Method to the Madness is unable to write anything meaningful to mark Nigeria at 50 – the whole event being too depressing to know where to begin – she decides its fatigue:

‘The weight I am feeling on my fingers that renders this post such a chore is not fear at all, is it? It's fatigue. I don't want to throw my hands up in despair anymore. I'm tired of doing that. Lamenting "No water, no light" holds no interest to me. I'm not Wole Soyinka. Pounding my fists on my soapbox is getting irritating. I admire those among us who never tire of crying for change, but I do.

‘And yet, as living in the U.S. and knowing a fair amount about EU politics has shown me, every country has its problems. Logic then follows that Nigeria has either this set of problems, or another. So as the big 5-0 approaches, I will this space to hope not that Nigeria gets rid of it's problems, but that it replaces them. And soon.’

Finally Black Looks Black Looks takes the opportunity to recognise and celebrate Nigerian women in a post ‘Women and the Nation’.

More blog posts on Nigeria at 50 can be found on Nigerians Talk.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Sokari Ekine blogs at Black Looks
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] PDP - People’s Democratic Party - Ruling party.

Kenya’s constitutional renewal: A post-referendum analysis

Tim Murithi

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67331

cc A GOn 27 August 2010, President Mwai Kibaki of Kenya promulgated the country’s new Constitution. This was the culmination of a journey that begun over two decades ago when the first attempt was made to reform the constitutional order that Kenya had inherited from Britain, its former colonial power, in 1963. The draft Constitution was approved in a poll that took place on 4 August 2010, by 68 per cent of those who voted. Tim Murithi outlines what is at stake in the implementation phase.

The official adoption of the new Constitution was greeted with a collective sigh of relief following the tumultuous series of events that had plagued the country over the last five years. The previous constitutional referendum held in 2005 entrenched deep political and ethnic divisions in the country. The political formations that emerged out of the 2005 constitutional referendum coalesced into the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), led by Raila Odinga, and the Party of National Unity (PNU), led by Mwai Kibaki. These divisions, which were based on ethnic coalitions, subsequently contested the presidential and parliamentary elections in 2007.

The 2007 presidential poll was marred by allegations of irregularities and electoral fraud. The refusal of the incumbent, Kibaki, to relinquish his seat to his opponent Odinga, claiming that he had in fact won the poll, unleashed a cycle of violence in the months of January and February 2008. Across the country, the violence led to the death of approximately 1,300 people and the internal displacement of close to half a million people. The violence was ultimately tempered through the mediation of the African Union (AU) Panel of Eminent Personalities, led by Kofi Annan, the former secretary-general of the United Nations (UN). On 28 February 2008, the main political parties signed a National Accord and Reconciliation Agreement and one of the items agreed upon was the establishment of a new Constitution which would be adopted through a national referendum. This process was finally concluded through the poll and the promulgation of the new constitution.

The legacy of this 2008 post-electoral violence still reverberates across the country. Deep psychological scars are still evident among the Kenyan populace, and therefore the successful transformation of the constitutional order without any major incidents of violence will remain a historical landmark for the country.

This significance of the new Constitution should not be underplayed. The new charter will usher in fundamental changes that has the potential to significantly alter Kenya’s political and socio-economic landscape. Above all it is the first home-grown and indigenous constitution given the fact that the previous constitution was developed as part of the decolonisation process and was therefore heavily influenced by British norms of government and jurisprudence.

The new Kenyan Constitution, like most constitutions around the world, borrows from the constitutions of other countries. The outgoing Constitution granted Kenya’s president imperial powers and the ability to effective control the executive and judicial branches of government and a tremendous leeway to manipulate and coerce the legislature. This framework was ruthlessly exploited by the country’s first three presidents, Jomo Kenyatta, Daniel Arap Moi and Mwai Kibaki, who entrenched a debilitating system of political patronage and created a permissive environment for corruption and the misappropriation of state land to private individuals who were politically connected. This is the primary reason why the majority of the country’s people have become deeply impoverished without access to the basic services of health care and good education.

The country’s infrastructure has also lagged behind as ‘tenderpreneurships’ fostered by a political and business kleptocratic class of ‘wabenzi’ led to the massive economic mismanagement of state funds and self-enrichment. It is well known fact that the families of all of Kenya’s post-colonial presidents and their close advisers are among the wealthiest in the country, while an unsustainable number of citizens live below the World Bank poverty line, earning less that US$2 a day.

The new Constitution seeks to introduce a system of checks-and-balances that will strive to keep future presidents from exploiting the state for their own personal gain. In particular, the new Constitution establishes a bi-cameral parliament, with a legislative assembly and a Senate. The Senate will have a limited role in developing legislation and will primarily function as a checks-and-balance mechanism for legislation developed by the Members of Parliament (MPs). The Senate will also be able to exert oversight on the activities of the executive. In particular, a future Senate will be able to impeach the president of Kenya if circumstances require this to be done.

The Parliament has powers of accountability including reviewing the conduct of the executive, including the president, and exercising oversight over other state organs. In order to entrench the accountability of MPs to the people, the proposed Constitution also provides for the right to recall parliamentarians. A notable feature of this new constitution is the extent to which public participation in the conduct of parliament has also been made a constitutional obligation.

Geographically, Kenya will now be divided into 47 counties which will be headed by an elected governor. The Constitution also stipulates that 15 per cent of the national budget will be disbursed to the counties for their own developmental, education and health initiatives. This will ensure that state resources are not monopolised by the metro pole or entirely controlled by the national government, but equally distributed to all sections of the country.

The new Constitution will also entrench a Bill of Rights as well as promote gender equality. In particular, the Constitution stipulates that as a general rule state institutions should not have more than two-thirds of one gender to the exclusion of the other. Furthermore, the Constitution has established a framework for the comprehensive review of land reform. It creates legal protection against corruption to enable businesses to flourish, unhindered by state exploitation. If the provisions of the new Constitution are upheld Kenya could gradually become a place to do business without fear of bureaucratic or political heavy-handedness. The Kenyan government is planning to issue government bonds to finance one of its major challenges, namely infrastructure development.

The reality of constitutional change, as the South African experience shows, is that political behaviour will not change overnight. The Constitution is ultimately a piece of paper that requires citizens and all sectors of society to remain vigilant and ensure that its provisions are not undermined by vested political interests.

One guarantee is that new constitutional orders will always remain under threat if they are not accompanied by a behavioural and principled change towards upholding ethical leadership. As recent events and debates in South Africa about the proposed media tribunal have demonstrated, the Constitution is not able to defend itself. Citizens, journalists, politicians and the business elite have to constantly fight to maintain constitutional integrity. The Constitution is constantly under threat from forces within countries that seek to undermine democratic accountability and transparency. The old adage that power corrupts remains valid. Even diffuse power can still lead to diffuse corruption.

Kenya is in effect a post-conflict country given the reality of the 2008 post-electoral violence. Peacebuilding and reconciliation are therefore necessary in order to address the simmering tensions generated by this violent epoch. Mutual suspicion and ethnic tension has not been eradicated. While a new Constitution can facilitate the revitalisation of the political landscape, societal healing will require a greater degree of intervention at the national and community level. In this regard, the embattled Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) has to be revived and be permitted to document the grievances and atrocities committed in the past. Unless Kenyans can confront their past and come to terms with it, even a new Constitution may not be able to prevent the revival of ethnic animosity and competition which would not augur well for national stability.

Ultimately, the role of each Kenyan citizen will be to remain an active guardian of their, and their fellow citizens, hard worn freedoms. This will be vital towards ensuring Kenya’s constitutional renewal.



BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Dr. Tim Murithi is Head of the Transitional Justice in Africa Programme at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town, South Africa. www.ijr.org.za He also contributed a chapter entitled: ‘Aid Colonisation and the Promise of African Continental Integration’ to the recent Fahamu publication ‘Aid to Africa: Redeemer or Coloniser?’ published in 2009 and edited by Hakima Abbas and Yves Niyiragira.
*Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Reform of South Africa requires coordinated approach

William Gumede

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/67396

cc A BTo be really effective, South Africa’s new National Planning Commission must operate like the command centre of a country in war, meticulously planning, not against invaders, but the transformation of the economy, sector by sector, as if the country’s existence depended on it – which it does, writes William Gumede.

South Africa’s extraordinary high levels of mass poverty, unemployment and inequality, are pegged at levels that were seen in many countries only during the Great Depression of the 1930s, or during or immediately following the aftermath of debilitating wars.

This means that ordinary measures won’t do to tackle the perilous mountain of problems South Africa is stuck with. The successes of most East Asian and other developmental states – many who had to rebuilt after humiliating defeats in wars, occupation or colonialism, was driven by a singular focused national development effort which presupposed that unless they were successful, their countries would be in peril, either from external or internal threats. Failing to do so, these countries faced being annihilated by powerful external enemies, ready to pounce on their vulnerability.

At the heart of successful developmental states not only are there relevant policies, particularly industrial policy, but also specific institutional arrangements, both formal and informal, and public and private, which interface to provide the optimum conditions for economic growth and development. Most successful developing countries since the Second World War, especially the East Asian tigers, have had a central structure, such as a national planning unit, managing economic development. They did so around a well-thought out long-term development plan.

In many countries these planning structures were set up after governments, society and citizens realised that their countries were in deep economic crisis and they had to do something very drastically and very quickly to lift their economies out of the morass.

The task of these central planning units was to synchronise the collective effort to raise economic growth, spread prosperity to the largest amount of people in the shortest possible time, and industrialise in the quickest possible time. These economic planning structures had the political backing from top leaders, most political parties, civil society and the wider population. Everything was given to them to make their work possible. The best talent in the country, combining technical, administrative and professional skills was recruited – this helped foster cross-societal legitimacy.

These institutions were generally backed up by extremely competent public services, resolutely focused on public service, led by the best talents also appointments to the public service were often through strict entrance examinations. In fact, successful East Asian developmental states as the first priority got their civil service in shape, because without a proper, honest and smart public service, whatever the smart policies, implementation just won’t happen. In these countries an efficient, motivated public sector implemented the reforms.

Central planning institutions were at the centre of these public services, and marshalled them behind a common goal: To secure industrialisation in the quickest possible time, according to clear delivery time-lines, and targets. These organisations were extremely accountable: They had to account for every cent, in circumstances where resources were scarce that the country could not afford to waste the littlest of resources.

Such central planning units make detailed assessments of the state of the economy, then draw up plans to improve their economies to specific time-lines, closely monitoring these plans to see implementation remains on schedule, if not, or if the policies appear to be inappropriate, make suitable interventions early on. They task individuals with responsibility and hold them accountable for every facet of the delivery chain.

Furthermore, the public service and the economic bureaucracy are generally ring-faced from patronage systems. The public service is generally above opportunistic capture, whether from political, business or ethnic groups, yet it is ‘embedded’ in society, through reciprocal engagement with civil society, social partners and communities. This ‘embeddedness’ with society, makes the public service not only in tune with its problems, but also helps make it more responsive to policy changes needed.

This ‘embeddedness’ is crucial in forging a developmental coalition between the state, civil society, social partners and communities, which is a negotiated partnership, where either groups can take policy initiatives, but the state takes a guiding role, either by exercising leadership directly, or by delegation to social partners.

In successful developmental states, not only are the formal rules of engagement in politics across society focused on national development, but also the informal rules. This ‘embeddedness’ is also crucial to secure a consensus on both the formal and informal rules of engagements that binds all actors in society, whether individuals, groups or governments, to a common project of national development, rather than self-enrichment. In South Africa’s case the informal rules of engagement, must, like the formal rules, be based on democratic ones.

What would be the appropriate operational model for South Africa’s National Planning Commission, given the country’s specific administrative culture, capacity and institutional arrangements? Having had an effective public service has always been on decisive difference between the successful East Asian developmental states and other mostly failing or mediocre developing countries.

On current form the South African public service will not be able to deliver a successful developmental state along the East Asian developmental states. South Africa’s public service is politicised, riddled with corruption and inefficiency, and appointing the most competent individual for the job is certainly not the norm. In fact, any national planning commission may see the implementation of its policy stymied by an inefficient public service.

South Africa has two choices. In the first option it would spend time fixing the public service, and then focus on full-scale implementation. A focused reform, with a clear time-line, say at the end of the 2014 term, will tackle the public service, starting by filling the 40 per cent vacancies, and firing the most obviously corrupt and inefficient. New appointments will be made truly on merit, to get the best people into the already vacant positions, at a minimum. Importantly, a serious attempt will be made to orientate the public service to a genuine public service ethos.

Implementation would focus on getting the basics right, which means mostly implementing current policies, rather than introducing any new ones. The only new policies that would be implemented would be essential economic ones.

The second option would be fixing the public service and implementing new policies, particularly necessary economic reforms at the same time – all before 2014. This would mean a kind of shock therapy, filling the 40 per cent empty posts with quality incumbents, while firing the most corrupt, and changing the administrative culture of the public service, while at the same time implementing necessary economic reforms. This may not be practical.

In our first option, a strategy for the end of the 2014 term must be centred on the economic cluster of ministries (including the Public Administration Ministry), the South African Reserve Bank and South African Revenue Services, and key Development Finance Institutions (DFIs), such as the Industrial Development Corporation and Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA); and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), such Eskom and Transnet, crucial in building physical and social infrastructure. This core group will have to function as centres of excellence that should drive economic transformation in the short term (up to 2014).

As a first strategy, co-ordination and synergy within the economic cluster must be a priority in the first term; to prevent economic policy being pulled in all directions, which will only cause more overlaps, confusion and paralysis. Currently not only is there mandate creep between different government departments, ministries and state-owned companies, but also a silo mentality in operational work, with little co-ordination of core functions.

For the past few years’ government, organised labour and business and community organisations have failed to cobble together a national social pact. Perhaps in the short term it would be best to structure sector based social pacts. In May 2010, the Congress of South African Trade Unions, Federation of Unions of South Africa, the National Council of Trade Unions and eleven manufacturers of car parts, electronics, glass, petroleum and steel got together to come up with joint strategies to support the industry.

But government may also have to delegate certain policy initiatives to business, civil society and labour. For example, in May 2010, South Africa’s two largest business organisations, Business Leadership South Africa and Business Unity South Africa pledged to come up with self-generated initiatives to help government lift electricity capacity. Or Business Leadership South Africa’s initiative to double or triple the size of South Africa’s economy within a generation; or their initiative to get company CEOs to commit to skills development or more responsible corporate behaviour.

How should the national planning commission respond? Firstly, as it set up its structure from anew, it has the opportunity to recruit only the best brains, to give them a clear mandate, with targets and deliverables, and a long-term development plan to pursue.

The national planning commission may possibly have to circumvent the public service, at least in the short-term, when the service is being transformed into a more efficient and accountable one. There are some lessons to be learned from South Africa’s 2010 World Cup Local Organising Committee, in terms of pursuing targets and meeting deadlines, for a new national planning commission. South Africa’s 2010 World Cup Local Organising Committee’s task was to plan, implement, and deliver a successful World Cup for South Africa. If they did not deliver on time, South Africa would be deeply embarrassed. This kind of urgency and resolve, where failure is not an option, and delivery must happen on time, must be the driving force for any new planning commission. Furthermore, to implement the World Cup successfully, national, provincial and local government spheres unprecedentedly work in unison, rather than as separate silos, to achieve a common task.

Political will from the leaders of the governing African National Congress (ANC) to make reform trade-offs that are in the widest interest of a collective national transformation is going to be absolutely crucial. A national planning commission that has the backing of the president, can circumvent lethargic parts of the civil service, and which has the power to get individual departments and officials to actually do something to deliver, could be an option for South Africa. Finally, in addition to an extraordinary sense of accountability, transparency and internal democracy, any national planning commission must also allow for maximum citizen participation.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article first appeared in the Sunday Independent, 19 September 2010.
* William Gumede is co-editor of the recently released ‘The Poverty of Ideas: South African Democracy and the Retreat of the Intellectuals’(Jacana).
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Frantz Fanon and Nigeria at 50

Violence as a means to regain self-respect?

Okello Oculi

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67332

cc D PIn Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial relations in Algeria, Okello Oculi looks at Nigeria’s political trajectory from independence until today. Fanon argued that violence was a means to regain self-respect. Oculi critically examines this claim in the context of Nigerian events such as the war in Biafra and violence in the Niger Delta.

Frantz Fanon was a man of African bloodline who became involved in African affairs while fighting German soldiers during the occupation of France in the Second World War. Fanon fought bravely against these Germans and was decorated for being a great warrior for France. Born in 1925 on the island of Martinique in the Caribbean, Fanon would enter medical school; graduate in psychiatry, and be posted to work in a hospital at Blida in Algeria at the height of Algeria’s war to expel French colonists.

In his book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, it is clear that after seeing the mental convulsions manifested by wounded French and Arab patients, as well as the wounds inflicted on Algerians from brutalities by French officers, forced Fanon to abandon his French citizenship and his job and join the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN), the movement fighting for Algeria’s independence. This led him to attend the historic All-Africa Conference in 1957, convened by Kwame Nkrumah one year after Ghana’s independence. Fanon would remain Algeria’s ambassador to Ghana and other countries of West Africa.

'VIOLENCE IS A CLEANSING FORCE'

Of interest here are the medical cures that Fanon fed into his political theories for development in post-colonial African countries. One element of his thinking could have been provoked by a letter written in 1959 to the Emir of Bida by one M.J.E. Babatola, the parliamentary secretary to the Premier of Western Region in Nigeria. The main body of the letter is a condemnation of the use of ‘hooligans’ by the Northern Peoples Congress party (NPC), to ensure that all other political parties were ‘expelled by force from exercising their political rights’ to address campaign rallies in Bida. Babatola hoped the Emir would ensure the ‘civilization’ that Frederick Lugard had brought to his emirate when he conquered the land would seep into the political culture of his officials and politicians. That punch line was a snub and a derogation whose power would prove hurtful.

Whether it hurt fiercely or not at all, it was symptomatic of a framework of mind that would poison relations between ruling groups in the north and the south of Nigeria. Fanon had collected data on similar relations between French colonists and Algerians. And that is almost certainly what provoked his medical prescription:

‘At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction, it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.’

With reference to Nigeria in 1966 it can be asked if the widespread killings and attacks on Igbos across northern and southern Nigeria could be blamed on impulses to overcome inferiority complexes and earn self-respect. And if Fanon is correct, it is worth considering in what ways becoming ‘fearless’ and full of new ‘self-respect’ affected the conduct of Nigeria’s affairs in subsequent decades.

Looking at Nigeria’s affairs in 2010, one wonders if the new splash of self-respect and fearlessness gave leaders an opportunity to re-think how they developed their respective regions. The logic used to be one of competition among the one another. We can speculate whether the explosive anger that came out of Maitesine’s religious incidents in Kano (and as far afield as Yola) in the 1980s, inter-ethnic killings in Kano, Kaduna, Lagos, and ‘Boko Haram’ between 2000 and 2009 , could be traced to historic escapes by leaders into prolonged indifference to the needs of their communities.

BIAFRA AND THE NIGER DELTA REGION

Fanon was not too concerned about the curative medical value that the violence by Algerians against French soldiers and officials had on their victims (at least, not beyond their shocked recognition that Algerians were also human beings). In Nigeria the victims of the 1966-67 war were driven into fighting for a home and a sunrise of their own in a space they called ‘Biafra’. The drive to build Biafra is widely acclaimed for releasing new waves of creativity and scientific inventiveness among its new citizens.

From the 2010 perspective, one wonders if the triumph of violence and loss of group self-confidence which followed the pogroms (and later the defeat of Biafra) left a condition of ideological uncertainty that would be seized upon by a succession of hustlers and lone kings rolled from cocaine pushers, political godfathers, human traffickers and kidnappers. The unemployed lumpen-proletariat that infests growing urban slums and on which Fanon put high hopes to eat away the roots of the tree of failed African countries may be undermining the very fabric of Nigeria’s society without offering a hope in unity.

'ORGANISED AND EDUCATED' VIOLENCE THEN AND NOW

Fanon could not possibly have anticipated the conflict that spread across decades in the Niger Delta region. The following medical prescription that he offered from his Algerian and French war experiences may not have fallen into the creeks of the Niger Delta and died inside fishes and crabs. He wrote:

‘Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organised and educated by its leaders makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them.’

There is a vital condition that the violence he is talking about must be ‘organised and educated’ by leaders of the people that are using violence to achieve political aims. We have evidence that Samora Machel in Mozambique, Amilcar Cabral in Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde, Agostinho Neto in Angola, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Sam Nujoma in Namibia and Oliver Tambo in South Africa took Fanon’s prescribed medical drugs. They showed evidence of having led and disciplined the use violence to achieve liberation. Cabral wrote that the political wing must always control the military wing of a liberation war. In the Niger Delta, however, there has probably been more evidence of non-educated violence that ignored control by elders, community leaders and politicians in the region. There is evidence that rebel commander Government Ekpemupolo (alias Tompolo) did inject valuable political education into various groups of militants but there was nothing resembling the political giants like Cabral, Neto, Machel or Mugabe ensuring the education of a liberation movement.

For example, the liberators in Mozambique and Angola owed much of their success to military victories on the ground, political re-education, the release of captured Portuguese soldiers and their return to Portugal. Young soldiers captured and released by African fighters went home and told stories that contradicted Portuguese state propaganda meant to whip up support for the war in the colonies. Dead bodies repatriated to Portugal unleashed terror among university students who feared being drafted to fight in Africa, and provoked increasingly angry student protests in cities. The resulting military coup led to a relaxation in the war as well as a radical move to accept the notion that these countries were NOT provinces of Portugal and had inalienable rights to be independent states.

In 2010, the equivalent of this in the Niger Delta was a growing fatigue at official federal levels with the costs of violence on the Nigerian economy and political culture. The radical and bold offer by President Umaru Yar’Adua of ‘unconditional amnesty’ to militants in the Niger Delta was the equivalent of Portugal severing sovereignty links with African lands.

And just as the violence against Igbos may have been at the cost of leaders using political power to accelerate the development of two regions, we might ask if the seeming military victory by the Niger Delta militants will become empty and betray benefits to the masses at the bottom in Niger Delta.

FANON THE SCEPTIC

Fanon remains unhelpful in offering guides to those used to spraying violence and blood across creeks and mangrove swamps. In Millennium Development Goal language, it is worth speculating if in the next 50 years leaders at all levels will ensure ‘smart investment in education, infrastructure, the environment, infrastructure and health of women and children’. Fanon is useful as a sceptic for those willing to face the task of undertaking social imagination.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Okello Oculi is the director of the Africa Vision 525 Initiative
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News

Election campaigns and the politics of performance

Chambi Chachage

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67333

cc W AA political scrap between a young challenger and a veteran politician points towards a possible candidate for future Tanzanian president, writes Chambi Chachage.

I am not a fan of election campaigns. I don’t like attending or analysing them. To me leaders emerge, they don’t sell themselves in the market place.

However, a video clip that is circulating online has dragged me out of my hibernation. It is called, in short, ‘Bumbuli Songa’. Bumbuli is a parliamentary constituency in Tanga. It is where the rising political star, January Makamba, is running as Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party candidate after ousting a respected politician, William Shelukindo, in primary elections.

For quite some time I have been wondering why and how Shelukindo, the then Bumbuli member of parliament (MP), lost miserably to Makamba Junior. By the way, just in case you are not familiar with Tanzania’s political landscape, Yusuph Makamba - or Makamba Senior - is the CCM secretary general.

I found it quite ironic that Makamba Junior got 14,612 votes and Shelukindo got 1,700 votes, given the fact that the seasoned politician was celebrated, not least by the CCM presidential candidate, for allegedly spearheading the fight against grand corruption in the Richmond scandal. I say allegedly because this was a response to the credits claimed by an opposition party, particularly the opposition Chadema presidential candidate, for all this.

Shelukindo conceded. But he was quoted online as saying that his defeat in the primaries was all thanks to ‘years of scheming engineered by people within their “party harbouring ulterior motives’ (The East African, 9 August 2010)’. However, one could hardly find support for his assertion - not even among young elites in the new media who are increasingly critical of the aging ruling party machinery. In fact to them January Makamba represents the change of guards that they - and indeed we - are yearning for.

But it is not only this ‘youth power’ that is behind the rise of January Makamba. One only has to watch the video clip (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQevWZqk6Fs) to understand what kind of force was and is behind his stride. Here is a master strategist who knows the role of the power of performance in politics in this ICT age.

In her groundbreaking Ph.D. study, published in 2002 as ‘Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania’, Kelly M. Askew makes this poignant point: ‘Power-holders have always known that in order for their power to be recognised and respected, it must be rendered palpable.’ That is what has been happening in Bumbuli.

But what power does January hold? Apart from his intellectual power, which is made palpable to the youth constituency in his blog, ‘Politics, Society & Things’, his other power lies in presidential politics. As a close aide of the incumbent president, he managed to draw some of that presidential power. Bumbuli is now basking in that aura.

In a special interview with Umoja, January clearly mentions the current president as someone who has influenced his political career. The new and colourful magazine is splashed with photos that indicate how close the two have been.

It is not surprising then that his name is among those mentioned as possible future presidents of Tanzania. As his political performance in videos and photos indicates, he is seen as a natural successor of the present president in 2015. Shelukindo should have known better. Opposition parties, if they really want to wrestle him, should know much better.

Probably only January Makamba’s friend, Zitto Kabwe, can muster such power. He could be the ace card if the opposition really wishes to take Bumbuli. As we know, in politics there are no permanent friends. That, in itself, is the power of the politics of performance.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

© Chambi Chachage

* Chambi Chachage is an independent researcher, newspaper columnist and policy analyst, based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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

Why Slaa could win the presidential election

Chambi Chachage

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67336

cc F LTanzania's general elections are slated for October. One presidential candidate has changed the political landscape in more ways than one, writes Chambi Chachage.

This is a sequel to my article on ‘Election campaigns and the politics of performance’. Therein we looked at the power of performance. Now we look at the power of psychology and personality.
 


It is quite clear that Dr. Wilbroad Slaa’s decision to run as a presidential candidate has tilted the balance of power. Now the debate is no longer about whether the ruling party’s candidate will get a landslide victory - as in the previous election. Rather, it is about by how much that victory will be cut.
 


For the more optimistic, who draw inspiration from the rise of Barack Obama against all odds, everything is possible. However, to the more cautious, who have not forgotten how the then celebrated Augustine Mrema did not become the president in 1995, this is a delusional hype. ‘Yes Slaa can’ is thus pitted against ‘No Slaa cannot’. 


Frankly, I think it needs nothing short of a miracle for Slaa to win. But there is something in this election that is different from previous elections. It is coming at a time when, for a combination of reasons, many more people have registered to vote.
 So, it is difficult to have a situation, like the one we had in 1995, when one opposition party’s candidate blamed the massive crowds who attended his campaigns for his loss. Why? Simply because they could not and did not vote as they were not registered.

This time the crowd matters. As I said during the registration period, a number of people - including many youth - have registered not necessarily because they want (ed) to vote. All they need (ed) was a card that will help, particularly the unemployed, have a sense of identification when opening a bank account or, as a colleague alerted me recently, to register a Sim card. It is in this regard that at 19,670,631 - the official figure in the National Electoral Commission’s (NEC) permanent voter’s register - nearly half of the population is eligible to vote in this election.

Now, regardless of political parties’ weaknesses in data storage and processing, it is a well-known fact that, in terms of membership, the ruling party can hardly boast a quarter of that number. This implies that many of those who have registered, including myself, are the swing voters. We can swing either way in terms of the personality and policy of the candidate.
 


This is what happened in 2005 when the ruling party fielded a very attractive personality. It is now happening as one of the opposition parties has fielded a very influential personality. But that is not enough to make Slaa overcome the strength or experience of the ruling party election machinery. It is another factor, what I call a reverse bystander effect, that can do this.
 


In social psychology a ‘bystander effect’ happens when a number of people - the bystanders - in an emergency situation increases. This causes a diffusion of responsibility as they end up thinking that someone else will intervene. In such cases an emergency can simply pass on unattended to.

One can hardly claim it to be treason to state that in a way the country has been in a ‘state of emergency’. The war on grand corruption is too overwhelming. Its attendant impoverishment is unbearable. The voters are desperate for change. Slaa is indeed using this as his policy ace card. What I am observing so far is some sort of a reverse bystander - or maybe I should call it ‘byvoter’ - effect. Increasingly, people are deciding to vote for Slaa since they think most people will vote for the ruling party’s candidate anyway.

Coupled with massive voter awareness and election campaigns, it is possible that Slaa will win the presidential seat. But, again, it is also quite possible that Slaa will be a ‘lame’ president since it is very likely that the ruling party will have a majority of seats in parliament. I am not sure how well prepared the Constitution is to deal with such an outcome. One thing I am very sure of: such an eventuality will open a new chapter in Tanzania’s quest for democratic constitutional reform. Slaa may not become president. But his candidature is democratising us. Either way he wins.


BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

© Chambi Chachage

* Chambi Chachage is an independent researcher, newspaper columnist and policy analyst, based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

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

SMS message ban raises difficulties

Russell Southwood

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67340

cc W AThe banning of SMS messaging in Mozambique is but one of several signs that both SMS (short message service) and the internet are changing the way media creates a national conversation in African countries, writes Russell Southwood.

During the food price riots in Mozambique, both mobile phone operators in Mozambique, M-Cel and Vodacom, bowed to pressure and suspended their text-messaging services but then said that they had not done so, according to Agência Informação Moçambique (AIM).

As from 6 September, people who used pre-paid M-Cel and Vodacom cards found it was impossible to send text messages. Since the Maputo riots of 1–2 September had been mobilised via text messages, it was immediately suspected that the government had ordered the companies to halt the text-message service.

But when Transport and Communications Minister Paulo Zucula was asked about the matter, he denied giving any such order. ‘I'm the minister in charge of communications, and I have no knowledge of any instruction to suspend the messaging services’, he told reporters.

Both M-Cel and Vodacom assured AIM that the interruption to the messaging service was entirely due to technical problems.

On Friday night, interviewed by the independent television station TIM, Fernando Lima, chairperson of the media company Mediacoop, which publishes the weekly paper ‘Savana’ and the daily newsheet ‘Mediafax’, displayed a copy of the letter which the regulatory body, the INCM, had sent to the two operators. Text messaging now seems to have returned to normal.

In the post-election violence in Kenya in 2008, the government considered closing down the SMS messaging system that was being used to send hate messages. Safaricom CEO Michael Joseph has said in a subsequent interview that mobile phone providers convinced the government to pass up this idea, and instead allow the providers to send out messages of peace and calm, which Safaricom did to all nine million of its customers.

It was also reported that a list of more than 1,700 contacts of individuals who created or forwarded SMS messages to incite ethnic violence had been compiled and was awaiting action by government.

However, the government did ban broadcasting and this gave coverage by Kenya's bloggers a new prominence as one of the few ways left open to discover what was happening. It also gave birth to Ushahidi, which helped to track and map violent incidents in the country.

The worst occasion of this kind of banning of SMS was the Ethiopian government after the contested elections in 2005. The ban remained in force for two years. In Ethiopia, the opposition party Kinijit was particularly effective at using text messaging to mobilise its supporters and get them to the polling booths. Then when the election result was announced the government took fright, contested what had happened and then moved quickly to shut down the SMS service to ensure the opposition party couldn't use it again.

With no acknowledgement of why it had been banned, subscribers simply received the following message announcing its re-opening: ‘[Wishing] you [a] happy Ethiopian Millennium. And now the SMS service is launched.’

SMS is a media channel but there are almost no ground rules governing either access to it by content providers or under what circumstances it can be closed down. Mobile operators can be pressured by governments to shut the service and have to take the income hit from that decision: their rights are not protected in any way. You can hardly sue the government or the regulator for loss of trade if they are the hand that gives you your licence to do business.

According to a national survey carried out in Ghana for Audiencescapes, 16 per cent of the sample had got news and information in the last week using SMS, compared to 18 per cent from newspapers. In other words, the mobile is becoming almost as important as newspapers as a channel through which citizens get certain types of information.

But there are no ground rules governing who can use it and why, and the rules that do exist don't make sense. For example, Econet had to withdraw a service it was proving to Zimbabwe's MDC (Movement for Democratic Change) as it was claimed that it was broadcasting when it was not licensed to do so. It was operating an information service for its activists using a service provided by kubutana.net.

In an interview in June when the banning took place, Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe Chief Executive Obert Muganyura said that the MDC-T's (Movement for Democratic Change – Tsvangirai) toll-free audio service was illegal under the Broadcasting Services Act. ‘According to the law, broadcasts that are provided through cellular systems require a licence from BAZ [Broadcasting Authority of Zimbabwe]. There are services that have been offered by some institutions, including MDC-T, where the public can dial and receive audio programmes.

‘These services are classified under the Broadcasting Services Act and once anyone decides to provide such services, the network providers must follow procedures of licensing for consideration,’ he said. So how is the internet different from SMS, save that government fears the larger user base of the latter more?

Finally, as the world turns, there was a report this week in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) newspaper Le Potentiel saying that sales of newspapers were being undercut by piracy (photocopying of issues) and by people using the internet to access daily news.

Shabani Keni, a vendor of the newspaper, told its reporter: ‘Le Potentiel has serious difficulties in selling their wares. This is because it is on the web. It's not bad to put a newspaper on the Internet. Globalization means it has to happen. But the output of the newspaper Le Potentiel [on the Internet] should be limited in order not to blunt the desire of readers [to buy it].’

Online business model, anyone?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article was originally published by Balancing Act Africa.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Collateral consequences: Costs of pretrial detentions

Kersty McCourt

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67339

ccT T PThe excessive and arbitrary use of pretrial detention critically undermines socioeconomic development and is especially harmful to the poor, argues Kersty McCourt. Pretrial detention disproportionately affects individuals and families living in poverty: they are more likely to come into conflict with the criminal justice system, more likely to be detained awaiting trial and less able to make bail or pay bribes for their release, McCourt stresses. For individuals, the excessive use of pretrial detention means lost income and reduced employment opportunities; for their families, it means economic hardship and reduced educational outcomes; and for the state, it means increased costs, reduced revenue and fewer resources for social service programmes.

INCOME

Persons detained awaiting trial cannot work or earn income while detained, and often lose their jobs. If the period of detention is lengthy, detainees’ future earning potential is also undermined. Those who are self-employed – common to people working in the informal economy in much of the developing world – are at risk of bankruptcy, losing their goods through theft, missing sowing or harvesting season, or foregoing their trading space at the local market.

In Mexico, an independent study estimated the amount of income lost, as a result of their detention, by pretrial detainees who were employed at the time of arrest, as 1.3 billion pesos (or about US$100 million) in 2006.[1] In England and Wales, half of men and two-thirds of women employed at the time of arrest lost their jobs as a result of their detention, while only 18 per cent of men and 11 per cent of women expected to have a job to return to upon their release.[2]

The employment and income lost as a result of excessive pretrial detention affect not only the detainees, but their families as well. In addition to lost income, these families must wrestle with legal fees, the cost of bribes to corrupt criminal justice officials, and other expenses. When an income earner is detained, family members must adjust not only to the loss of that income but also to costs of supporting that family member in detention, including travel to visit the detainee, food and personal items for the detainee, and, often, low-level bribes to guards. The impact is especially severe in poor, developing countries where the state does not provide reliable financial assistance to the indigent and where it is not unusual for one breadwinner to financially support an extended family network.

EDUCATION

Many pretrial detainees are young adults, some of whom will have their education interrupted as a result of their detention. In addition, the education of children is often disrupted when their parents are detained. These children have to take on new roles, including providing domestic, emotional or financial support for other family members. According to an NGO report, such children ‘may have to move to a new area, a new home or a new school because of imprisonment’.[3] A review of the literature on children whose mothers are detained found that those ‘children’s lives are greatly disrupted … resulting in heightened rates of school failure and eventual criminal activity.’[4] A study of the children of imprisoned mothers found an ‘increased likelihood of their becoming “NEET” (Not in Education, Employment or Training)’.[5] Particularly in developing countries, children are commonly forced out of school and into work to replace the lost income of detained adults.

EMPLOYMENT

Even where correctional systems offer educational or vocational programmes, pretrial detainees are ineligible because they are considered transient. The enforced idleness of pretrial detainees leads to lower self-esteem and the loss of skills. Add to this the social stigma attached to detention, and it is clear why detainees have great difficulty finding employment after their release. The interruption of education, the lack of vocational programmes for pretrial detainees, the stigma associated with pretrial detention and the loss of work all conspire to disrupt and undermine the occupational prospects of pretrial detainees and, in many cases, those of their children. Although an individual’s pretrial detention may last only a few weeks, the impact can be felt over two generations.

FUNDING DEVELOPMENT

Excessive pretrial detention – especially for persons charged with minor, non-violent offences – is costly and restricts states’ ability to invest in socioeconomic development. For poor countries, where state budgets are rarely balanced and state funding to meet the basic needs of all citizens is inadequate, expenditure on incarcerating pretrial detainees represents a stark opportunity cost. Every bit of state revenue spent on detention results in potentially less money for crucial social services, health, housing and education.

The true impact of pretrial detention on development is often hidden. States generally count only the direct costs of housing and feeding pretrial detainees and overlook indirect costs such as the lost productivity and reduced tax payments of pretrial detainees who could have continued working if they were released before trial. Moreover, a Justice Initiative study in Mexico found that it is far more costly to investigate a case involving a pretrial detainee than one in which the defendant is at liberty: cases involving detainees must be expedited, and pretrial detainees usually face a higher number of court hearings than defendants who are not detained – all of which must be paid for by the state.[6]

MUTUALLY REINFORCING CONSEQUENCES

The various factors through which pretrial detention weakens socioeconomic development are not mutually exclusive, but overlap and reinforce one another. Thus, detaining a large group of people is not only costly for the state (and, thereby, the taxpayer), but has negative financial and social repercussions for detainees, their families and society at large. Reducing the excessive use of pretrial detention can boost socioeconomic development at the family and community level, especially in developing countries where the difference between a stable existence and bare survival is often tenuous.

RECOMMENDATIONS

- Pretrial detention should be used only when no reasonable alternative can address genuine risks of flight or danger to the community. States would better serve their citizens by spending less on locking up people who are presumed innocent and dedicating more resources to social services.
- The use of monetary bail should be avoided. Poor people do not have money readily available to deposit with the court. In place of bail, courts should use personal surety (a promise by the defendant to attend court hearings and stand trial) or reporting requirements under which the defendant reports regularly to the local police station as a condition of remaining free pending trial.
- Where monetary bail is used it should be proportionate to an accused person’s income and within his or her means.
- Detained persons should receive basic necessities – nutritious food, clothing, toiletries and medication – free of charge from the prison authorities.
- To the extent practicable, pretrial detainees should be able to volunteer (though they should not be coerced) to perform prison-based labour for remuneration, and should be eligible for training and education programmes.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This report was originally published by the Open Society Justice Initiative.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] Guillermo Zepeda, Costly Confinement: The Direct and Indirect Costs of Pretrial Detention in Mexico (English-language summary), Open Society Justice Initiative, October 2009.
[2] Unjust Deserts: A Thematic Review by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons of the Treatment and Conditions for Unsentenced Prisoners in England and Wales, HM Inspectorate of Prisons for England and Wales, 2000.
[3] Oliver Robertson, The impact of parental imprisonment on children, Quaker United Nations Office, 2007, p. 7.
[4] Barbara J. Myers, Tina M. Smarsh, Kristine Amlund-Hagen and Suzanne Kennon, ‘Children of Incarcerated Mothers,’ Journal of Child and Family Studies, Vol. 8(1), 1999, p. 11.
[5] New Economics Foundation, Unlocking value: How we all benefit from investing in alternatives to prison for women offenders, London, 2008.
[6] Zepeda, op cit.

Where there is no lawyer…

Adam Stapleton

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67407

What does the phrase ‘legal aid’ mean to you?

To most people it conjures up lawyers representing people in court. To most people in Africa, legal ‘aid’ remains illusory and the promise an empty one when there are so few lawyers to go round and those there are are to be found in the capital, rather than in rural areas where most people still live.

The meaning was given a broader definition in 2004 at a conference on legal aid held in Lilongwe, Malawi, involving representatives from 21 African countries who looked at the matter from the point of the person in the village, asking not ‘what can the state provide?’ but rather: ‘what legal services do people need?’

The conference listened to legal anthropologists, law professors, practicing lawyers and paralegals and took soundings from the formal justice system and the informal. The definition they came to reads as follows:

‘Legal aid should be defined as broadly as possible to include legal advice, assistance, representation, education, and mechanisms for alternative dispute resolution; and to include a wide range of stakeholders, such as non-governmental organizations, community-based organizations, religious and non-religious charitable organizations, professional bodies and associations, and academic institutions.’ (Lilongwe 1)

The adoption of the Lilongwe Declaration and its plan of action by the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights (ACHPR) (2006) and UN (Ecosoc 2007/24) forms part of an international movement to recognise the role of paralegals as primary justice service providers. Inspiration is drawn from the health sector and the provision of primary health care through paramedics and nurses and it was noted that the justice ‘sector’ offers no such primary services.

Paralegals work as ‘barefoot lawyers’ in many countries in Africa providing a range of advisory services to ordinary people. Since 2000, they have moved into the criminal justice arena to offer advice and assistance on the front line of the criminal justice system – at the police, in prison and in court. The impact has been extraordinary: Remand prison populations have gone down where the paralegals are in evidence as they push the cases through the system and empower prisoners to represent themselves in the courts; at the police they divert young offenders from entering the justice system; and in court they provide advice and guidance to allcomers. Lawyers too have welcomed the development as paralegals do much of their donkey work (taking statements, tracing witnesses etc) and refer the serious and complex case to them.

Governments are increasingly recognising the role of paralegals in national legislation (Sierra Leone, Malawi and Uganda being cases in point) as providing an affordable way of providing meaningful legal services to the poor.

A Survey of Legal Aid in Africa researched by the Paralegal Advisory Service Institute last year and to be published later this year by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) found that:

- Coverage by the state legal aid system is incomplete at best
- Access to legal aid ‘at all stages’ of the criminal justice system is generally unavailable
- Budgetary allocation for legal aid is minimal
- Persons accused of crime cannot expect legal advice in mounting a defence or informing – a plea to a serious charge; or representation in cases attracting a prison sentence
- Lawyers are few in number and generally unavailable in rural areas
- Paralegals, or trained non-lawyers, are not provided in most countries in a systematic manner
- Community legal services are not available in every district or accessible by every person in need of such services
- Information on legal aid is not available to the general population
- Most governments do not have an over-arching legal aid ‘strategy’ to maximise the use of the resources available.

The Lilongwe Declaration speaks of the ‘societal benefits’ that these services can produce. These benefits include ‘elimination of unnecessary detention, speedy processing of cases, fair and impartial trials, and the reduction of prison populations.’ (Lilongwe 2). The work of paralegals in East and West Africa has born this out (namely in Malawi, Kenya, Uganda and Sierra Leone). In 2008, senior justice actors in Bangladesh visited Malawi to learn how these paralegals operate at first hand. They returned to their country and promptly established a pilot in three districts. There is symmetry in this as the previous year a team from Madaripur (in Bangladesh) came to Malawi to assist establish a village mediation programme, based on a mediation model developed by the Madaripur Legal Aid Association and refined over 30 years.

In common law and civil law jurisdictions and from Africa to Asia, paralegals are proving their worth. Last year, UNODC started the process of drafting new Principles and Guidelines on Legal Aid to broaden the definition (away from the narrow sense of ‘legal aid’ to one encompassing a broad range of legal services, drawing on the innovative work of the paralegals in Africa).

Recently the African Correctional Services Association (ACSA) met in Ghana to discuss overcrowding in the continent’s prisons and the work of paralegals in helping them to reduce the remand caseload. Africa is not alone in having congested prisons, but it is unique in seeking to approach the problem in a manner that places partnership with civil society organisations at the centre of the strategy.

1+10=100

On 23 September in Malawi, four organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding to establish the Association of Paralegal Organisations (APO) – an international alliance of organisations to promote primary justice services to the poor. APO seeks to disseminate the good practices of other organisations to persuade governments that legal aid need not be illusory; that legal services are important to upholding the rule of law and inherent sense of justice in society’; and that these services – adopting the formula above (ie: 1 lawyer + 10 paralegals reaching 100 persons) – are affordable and attainable and can make a real difference in assisting people settle their disputes and/or navigate the justice system.

APO Focal points: West Africa (Timap for Justice, Sierra Leone – Simeon Koroma); North Africa and Middle East (Peoples’ Legal Aid Centre, Sudan – Rifaat Makkawi); Southern Africa (Paralegal Advisory Service Institute, Malawi – Clifford Msiska); Europe (The Governance and Justice Group, Portugal – [email=astapleton@governancejustice.org]Adam Stapleton[/email).

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Food crisis response excludes land distribution question

Southern Africa and the US plan for global food security

Rebecca Burns

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67334

cc J TNew food security policies in Mozambique wrongly focus on increasing food production through large-scale farming, instead of supporting small-scale agriculture, writes Rebecca Burns. Food insecurity in Mozambique will actually increase as processed foods become more expensive and ordinary people can no longer afford to eat.

Deadly riots in Mozambique in early September momentarily renewed attention to the vulnerability of poor countries to shocks in global food prices. Subsequent reassurance that there are adequate fuel and grain stocks worldwide to prevent a disruption like that of 2008, in which rapidly rising food prices saw riots across the globe, has calmed much of this concern. That Mozambique is slated to begin receiving funding for agricultural development this year under US president Barack Obama’s new global food security initiative further reinforces the impression that a crisis has been averted. Unfortunately, the price increase in Mozambique bears little relation to the global food supply, and the emphasis on increasing food production will thus have little impact on hunger and malnutrition in Mozambique or elsewhere.

Efforts of major donor governments and international institutions to address global hunger and food insecurity have gone through many iterations, but a constant feature since the ‘Green Revolution’ of the 20th century has been a paradigm that emphasises increased agricultural productivity through the introduction of new seed varieties and agricultural technologies. In 2009, Obama announced his new US$3.5 billion, three-year program called Feed the Future (FTF), and implementation plans have been developed for 20 target countries.

The 2010 FTF implementation plan for Mozambique follows from the Green Revolution’s premise that farming by small-holders cannot achieve food security. Instead, the plan for ’agricultural transformation’ in Mozambique focuses on the commercialisation of agriculture through technology transfer and public and private investment to support large-scale farming.

Is this emphasis on commercial farming warranted? Roughly 75 per cent of Mozambique’s population is currently involved in agricultural production, and many do indeed struggle to maintain livelihoods and produce sufficient crops in the absence of government support and access to irrigation. Under-investment in agriculture, however, is a direct legacy of the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment programs of the 1970s and 1980s. International financial institutions urged African governments to eliminate subsidies for the peasant farmers who were previously the main source of domestic food production.

Now, as food rights group Face It Act Now (FIAN) International points out, these same international bodies and donors have begun to blame the failure of the Green Revolution in Africa on low levels of agricultural investment. Recent policy shifts on the continent, however, are heavily skewed towards investment in the production of food for export. They also are friendlier to acquisition of land by foreign investors, a growing trend in Africa that is complicating land tenure systems and further dismantling smallholder farming systems. The distribution of land is a crucial factor in determining who has access to food, but it is one that is often minimised within the framework of ‘food security’ through an emphasis on who is able to produce the most food.

Smallholders in Mozambique currently control 95 per cent of the land. According to FIAN, Mozambique’s 2006 Action Plan to Reduce Absolute Poverty (PARPA II) emphasises ‘rationalising’ land use and the loosening of legal barriers to these ‘land grabs’. PARPA II, the FTF implementation plan, and other internationally-backed strategies would thus likely begin to consolidate land ownership in Mozambique in the hands of larger producers under the premise that declining involvement in the agricultural sector is one of the hallmarks of a growing economy. In this way, food security becomes de-linked from access to land and premised instead on the ability of agricultural-led growth to create non-agricultural sector jobs so that newly landless consumers are able to purchase cheap food.

This model of land and agricultural relationships is one that exists currently in South Africa, which the 2009 UN Conference on Trade and Development report identifies as the top importer and exporter of food in the region. South Africa also features in FTF documents as a ‘strategic partner’ for implementing food security in the rest of southern Africa, both through trade and through sharing expertise. The intersections between the food systems of Mozambique and South Africa are symptomatic of the problems of FTF’s approach and the analysis resulting from the broader framework of food security.

Mozambique only produces about 30 per cent of its wheat requirements, and its status as a food importer is precisely what makes it so difficult to keep prices stable. A basic implication of a globalised food system is that a number of factors impact prices, and prices in turn determine who can access food, regardless of how much is available. Mozambique imports many of its staples from South Africa, and a recent strengthening of the South African rand against the Mozambican metical was most likely the key factor in the government’s decision to increase bread prices by 30 per cent.

South Africa, in turn, is generally considered a ‘food secure’ country at the national level, but as many as half of South African households experience hunger regularly. This contradiction is inherently related to the state of land relations in South Africa, which remains one of the most unequal countries in the world. The country has a strong agricultural sector developed historically through expropriation of fertile land during colonisation, subsidies from the apartheid government, and the exploitation of black labour. The post-apartheid government’s plan to redistribute 30 per cent of fertile land to black farmers has been excruciatingly slow, and farm labour remains plentiful and exceedingly cheap.

These historical inequities have been exacerbated by the more general features of the globalisation of the food chain. As South Africa has begun to import more processed foods, the agricultural sector lost has lost hundreds of thousands of low-paying farm-worker and processing jobs. Meanwhile, South Africa still sends primary commodities to Europe and elsewhere in Africa. This results in a pattern in which agricultural activity in South Africa has become consolidated onto larger, export-oriented farms while soaring unemployment and the decreasing availability of local food sources makes the majority of the population less food secure. To export this model, which is literally built upon a colonial system of land relations, to other parts of southern Africa will likely result in an increased food supply which a decreased proportion of the population can afford.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Rebecca Burns is a master's student in peace studies at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame, USA.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News

China’s rise: Lessons for the West

Stephen Marks

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67337

cc S MThe decisions of the last Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) meeting confirmed that China can take on board the need to respond to critical reactions to its African engagement. But, asks Stephen Marks, how far are Western researchers and policy advisers taking on board the lessons that may be learned from China’s rise and its impact on low-income countries?

Raphie Kaplinsky of Britain’s Open University was one of the founders of its Asian drivers programme which began as far back as February 2005 following a Rockefeller programme on global production networks. He recalls that its researchers found that African work on China’s engagement was largely underreported in the West, apart from the work of individual scholars working in the field such as Chris Alden and Deborah Brautigam, as well as the work of some in the NGO sector, including the work being done at Fahamu.

When he and his colleagues took the case for a wider programme to the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) the response was that the idea was ‘interesting’ but did not fit into DFID’s structures built around country teams.

Official circles only found a belated response after Goldman Sachs’ work on the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India and China) had popularised the concept of ‘Rising Powers’. Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council, which channels public funding into academic research, responded by convening a workshop in May 2007 calling for a series of networks on ‘Rising Powers’, funded with a £1.5m pot - equal to six months of the UK’s total research grant budget.

‘China as the new “shaper” of global development’ is one of the networks funded under the programme. Its core objectives are to explore how China's own development trajectory shapes its engagement with and impacts on different regions; deepen our understanding of how and why China acts as an agent of global development; and assess the implications of China for low income countries and for the international development community more broadly.

As network co-ordinator, the Open University’s Giles Mohan explains that the network confronts a situation in the academic and research community where ‘there are Africanists who know little about China, and Sinologists working on foreign policy who know little about the local impact’. So a dialogue is needed between these different area specialists as well as across disciplinary boundaries, between economists, and social and political scientists and others.

The network’s first meeting was held in Beijing in July 2010 in collaboration with Tsinghua University. It aimed at understanding the domestic processes behind China’s development policy thinking, and the ways in which Chinese experience shapes the Chinese approach. A key message, says Mohan, was the need to disaggregate foreign policy actors, beyond the usual top-level analysis concentrating on central bodies such as Eximbank and MofCom, to take in wider groups and multiple discourses within China.

The second workshop, just held in London, looked at the actors, institutions, motives and modes of interaction through which China and low - income countries engage, and the problems of researching and analysing their impacts and China’s impact on globalisation and international development.

As Mohan points out, much current analysis concentrates on the level of elite interaction and prestige projects. The project aims to concentrate at a more low-key level on topics such as agricultural innovation, the role of Chinese SMEs, and other ‘below the radar’ issues.

One aspect of conventional wisdom to be challenged by workshop contributors was the view of China’s outward investment as state-driven. As Jing Gu of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University pointed out, the majority of Chinese firms investing in Africa are SMEs. They are characterised by high flexibility, a strong entrepreneurial spirit and work ethic, and are highly concentrated by provincial origin, with Zhejiang at the head of the list.

They are increasingly concentrated in manufacturing, and are intensively competitive with each other, with few joint ventures. The main motives for their African involvement, apart from access to local markets, she finds, is intense domestic competition, the need to export excess capacity, and the possibility of access to new foreign markets such as the EU through trade agreements.

Two papers from Chinese contributors threw light on the relevance of Chinese experience to Africa’s development. Wang Xinsong from Beijing Normal University reported on a survey conducted by central government and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences into the effects of the political reforms in local government introduced after the dissolution of the commune system. In the villages this included elections to village councils and elements of public oversight such as village assemblies and financial audit.

The research, surveying 3,500 villages and 380 cadres, confirmed that good governance as measured both by objective measurement and by public reaction, was greater where the democratic reforms had been more consistently implemented. Good governance was also correlated with superior economic performance - a conclusion with interesting policy implications both in China and in Africa.

Cheng Enjiang from China’s International Poverty Reduction Centre outlined China’s economic development strategy. The key lessons he pointed to included the key role of agriculture in the first stage of development for growth and poverty reduction, and the centrality of a protected domestic market for farm products. The development of manufacturing was essential for jobs and growth, with the role of government crucial in enabling the attraction of foreign investment through provision of infrastructure and an effective supply chain, together with the ability to ensure independent macro-economic and trade policies and a balanced budget.

For the future there was a need to upgrade Chinese manufacturing and develop the service sector and domestic consumption to combat the danger of an asset bubble caused by the massive trade surplus. Relocation of low-cost coastal manufacturing to other countries and to China’s poorer western interior was part of this. Purchase of overseas assets was another way of reducing the surplus and diversifying out of US Treasuries.

But how far would any such relocation of Chinese investment affect the economic development prospects of sub-Saharan Africa? As other contributors pointed out, some 50 per cent of Chinese exports are simply assembled locally for Western purchasers; of a $200 iPod only US$4 represents value added in China. Here, as Raphie Kaplinsky and Mike Morris from the University of Cape Town both pointed out, global value chain analysis allows us to measure ‘who is getting what’ along the global chains.

Morris took the example of the textile industry in Lesotho to show how Chinese-controlled value chain can lock local producers into bulk commodity low value-added items with no incentive to innovate or develop local management and skills. Meanwhile key functions such as branding, R&D and marketing are all concentrated in the global North, together with other rents - though there were indications that alternative value chains controlled by South African firms and not aimed at the US market had a better record in training local managers and supervisors and in process upgrading generally.

There was equally detailed and specific discussion of other topics ranging from the impact of Chinese demand on cassava value chains in Thailand to fieldwork with Chinese businesses in Ghana and Angola.

The papers should all be accessible within the next few weeks at the project’s website at http://www.ids.ac.uk/go/idspublication/china-s-rise--implications-for-low-income-countries

The third workshop will be held in Brighton at the Institute of Development Studies on November 25 and 26. It will apply the analytical framework of the network to particular research areas on energy and the environment to refine the methodology and synthesize the lessons from the three workshops. Research has been undertaken on China's rise as a development actor in the Mekong Region and Africa in relation to energy developments, where energy is a cross-cutting theme involving environmental, economic, social and political issues.

Findings from the first workshop have been summarised in a briefing ‘China’s Rise - Implications for Low Income Countries’ published by IDS in conjunction with the ESRC, DFID, Oxfam and the OU which can be downloaded at http://www.ids.ac.uk/go/idspublication/china-s-rise--implications-for-low-income-countries

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Stephen Marks is co-ordinator of the Fahamu China in Africa project. A researcher and writer specialising in economic development and environmental issues as they impact on civil society, he has worked as a consultant for a number of international projects.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Improving livelihoods: Defining child labour

Salma Maoulidi

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67395

cc RosinoWhen children work in order to ensure the livelihoods of themselves and their families, should this be defined as child labour, asks Salma Maoulidi.

This September the global community will be preoccupied with the status of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as countries embark on the last stretch within which key targets under the eight goals must be achieved i.e. by 2015. Children are central to the MDGs but mainly as objects of a number of MDG goals and targets. Perhaps redefining the paradigm within which young people are perceived and mainstreamed in development priorities should be the primary lesson we obtain from an honest assessment of the MDG experience globally – but especially in Africa. In this article, I will use the example of child work to show why this is necessary and timely.

Until very recently, children in most communities were expected to do some work and contribute to family welfare and livelihood. This may have involved traditional chores like farming, herding, collecting water or fuelwood, babysitting and cooking. Also, it may have involved economic activities such as being labourers in plantations, building sites or markets; being couriers in mines or the narcotics trade; domestic labour; or fishing. Working children are a universal phenomenon among families in the lower socio-economic strata in both rural and urban areas.

In the context of the MDGs, child labour can be appreciated on the one hand as a coping mechanism against high levels of poverty whereby children’s labour is critical to meet livelihoods; and on the other with goals or targets associate with education and health. The question of child labour continues to attract attention in some quarters, particularly in the context of changing and shifting political and economic realities. Activists are concerned with the type, site and amount of work performed by persons under the age of majority. But even their objection is contested.

A Plan International report, ‘Hard Work, Long Hours and Little Pay’ (2009) by Glynis Clacherty indicates that the highest incidence of child labour in southern Africa occurs in Malawi, with 88.9 per cent of children between the ages of five and 14 working in its agricultural sector. Despite legislation in some form or the other aimed at protecting children from hazardous work and the adoption of various ILO conventions[1], child labour continues in many countries. Among sectors that are notorious for employing children in Africa are the mining sector and other extractive industries; the agricultural sector; and the tourism industry.

Local communities too have an appreciation of the problem. In Pemba, Zanzibar, for example, child labour was one of the three priority gender based violence (GBV) issues identified by ten communities for advocacy. Children in Pemba work in sugar cane farms and in hauling bricks from stone quarries. Others are hired at markets to run various errands. Often, their ability to work determines whether they eat or go hungry for the day, since many are not only from very poor families but are born into families with an absentee parent – the father.

Pemba is a location with few economic opportunities, a situation exacerbated by the political impasse in Zanzibar immediately after multi-party politics were adopted in 1995. Being the seat of the opposition in the semi-autonomous island state of Zanzibar, Pemba was politically and economically marginalised. High rates of unemployment drove most men to migrate from the island on a temporary or permanent basis leaving their families behind. Polygamy is also prevalent in Pemba even though few men have the means to provide for their wives or children, expecting them instead to fend for themselves.

The most egregious forms of child labour are commonly identified with the type of work done by poor communities, emphasising a class aspect to child labour. Indeed, children employed in the entertainment and fashion industries rarely come under scrutiny except when their work involves sex work in a manner that cannot be justified as being artistic. The class dimension is also evident locally. Recently, while breaking fast with friends, the mother complained about the lazy attitude of her nine-year old daughter and her 14-year old male cousin. They were assigned chores that an average person would consider reasonable for their age – setting the table and removing the dishes after the meal; taking out the trash; and running errands – chores befitting an urbane middle class child population. What was striking was the fact that parents increasingly censored themselves in so far as how much work they would delegate to their children, lest their chores interfere with their schooling and social life.

These two scenarios – of poor and middle class children – are very different. How then do we define and classify child labour? Does all work involving children qualify as child labour or is there a potential for types of work to become child labour? The article by Philippa Croome recently posted on Gender Links and Pambazuka about children working in the fishing industry in Lake Chilwa, Malawi heightened such a dilemma. Fishing, acknowledges Croome, is the lifeblood of villagers. When children are involved in activities that are geared at ensuring their own, as well as the livelihood of their families, can it be tantamount to child labour?

Surely, what amounts to child labour if anything becomes relative, if not elitist. The distinction between child labour and child work is evident in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Article 32 of the CRC recognises child work that benefits the family. The article requires governments to protect children from work that is dangerous, harmful or exploitative. There is nothing in the CRC that prohibits parents from expecting their children to help out at home in ways that are safe and appropriate for their age and as long as the work conditions comply with national labour laws. Moreover, children's work should not jeopardise any of their other rights, including the right to education, health, relaxation or play.

Children's work ranges from helping out on a family plot after school or full-time employment. Understandably, a key concern for many child rights activists is who will monitor the conditions under which child labour/work takes place and how will it be monitored. This, however, is a separate topic for discussion best done elsewhere. The concern, at this time, is to explore the possible implications of confusing child labour and child work especially on family and community livelihoods as many families grapple with debilitating poverty.

I argue that in addition to putting the question of child work into perspective, we need to go beyond this and accurately name the practice, not misrepresent it.

What informs my interest? In addition to my training in human rights, I began working for a child rights organisation and have in the course of my activist and consultancy work consulted with a number of child rights entities across the continent. My observations are, therefore, primarily intended to provoke greater discussion on this subject on the one hand, but also to interrogate the motivation in taking up child labour as an issue for advocacy or outreach. Certainly, existing responses are a reflection of what motivates organisations to work on child labour and rarely a statement about the manner and direction African activists propose child work should be envisaged possibly within larger poverty alleviation efforts. My recent experience in Northern Ghana attests to this fact.

I was invited to evaluate a project that purported to stop child trafficking and child labour. There was, however, no evidence of the same in the locality the project took place. Instead, the practice of kayayo whereby young adolescents migrated southward or to other urban centres in Ghana and which the project aimed to arrest at best put children at risk of child labour and trafficking. Such a (re)definition of the problem required an analysis that was candid not opportunistic. And by contextualising the practice of kayaye, it became possible to recommend alternative interventions in support of children about to finish their basic education and who desired to transition to Senior High School but could not afford the fees to continue with their education. Conversely, many children dropped out of school because they could not afford various school contributions required during examinations and other occasions even though in principle basic education was free in Ghana.

To obtain fees it was customary for children to interrupt their studies to work and to resume their education once they had acquired sufficient funds to see them through school. In my opinion the response of the children (and perhaps their parents) was much more realistic and practical than that of project workers and activists who magnified the issue as one of child labour or trafficking. To build an anti-child labour agenda, they lumped all manner of child work such as hawking fruits and other goods as ‘exploitative’ especially if the same interfered with schooling.

Also, condemned were families whose children dropped out to help with seasonal farm work or herding for denying their children the right to an education. Obviously, the motivation of the project and activists was to maintain high enrolment and retention rates in schools they sponsored thereby justifying their project targets and not so much the needs of pupils and their families. Otherwise, how could they fail to realise that in this part of the world, because of how environmental and productive systems were organised, there was a cyclic pattern to school attendance and dropping out? Clearly, perpetuating a schooling system that was stationary and not geared at a population that mobile was not the ideal response in tackling the perceive problem of child work in livelihood related interventions.

Importantly, why did community workers and activists exhibit so much stigma against young people who were trying to exercise some agency, making the most of their unfortunate predicament. My investigations revealed that the children and youth in question would on their own initiative travel for kayaye many times depending on an elaborate system of networks and trust of other village members already active in the sector. Commonly, children sought employment in sectors that they had some competence in, which required low levels of skills and did not involve a lot of bureaucracy, such as farm work – but unlike the work they did at home, they would earn some income from their labour.

Of course, questions will arise about the value of their work and also the terms and conditions under which they are employed. But from the point of view of a young person or a child who needs to see some form of income, these aspects are immaterial. They realise that whatever the promise of an education, going to school religiously will not pay for the uniform they have to wear, the contributions demanded periodically at schools, or their secondary or vocational education. In some instances it will not put food on the table, giving them the energy to attend school.

Africa’s population is youthful, and this will continue to be the reality beyond 2015. In addition to offering its citizens an education that is relevant and liberating, universal health care and an enabling policy environment, positive mindsets are critical to the continent’s renaissance. How can we, therefore, capture and build on the enthusiasm and desire demonstrated by Africa’s youth eager to construct better futures for themselves, to inform larger poverty eradication strategies? How can this culture be sustained such that Africa and its young people, in particular, are no longer associated with parasitic tendencies of dependency, despondency, lack of initiative, vision or poor work ethic?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* © Salma Maoulidi 2010
* Salma Maoulidi is a GEO (Gender Education Office) member representing the Africa region.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES
[1] Among them are The Minimum Age Convention (ILO Convention No. 138), The Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO Convention No. 182); and The Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labour (ILO Convention No. 182, 1999).

African integration and xenophobia: South African attitudes

Ella Philda Scheepers

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/67338

cc F o MWhile they may appeal at a rhetorical level, South African ideas around pan-Africanism and greater regional integration tend to be ambivalent and even antagonistic, writes Ella Philda Scheepers.

The question of the extent to which South Africans are enthusiastic about greater African political and economic integration is an important one. To address this question, we first have to acknowledge that there is no universal understanding of integration in the African context. Each country is full of cultural and social paradoxes based on a complex matrix of consensus and contradictions. Thus, attempting a single premise for integration is inadequate and untenable.

South Africa’s ambivalent relationship with the concept of African political and economic integration highlights how multifaceted the notion is. This is further complicated by ideologies of pan-African loyalty and histories of postcolonial liberation. Moreover, the South African citizenry has, in diverse ways, shown aversion to the manifestations of integration within their borders, culminating in the xenophobic attacks in 2008. Thus, the concept of integration can be unhelpful as it elides the many voices and many silences surrounding the interactions between post-colonial African states.

Before looking at the question of South African attitudes, it may be helpful to review the experience of and theorising around integration north of the border. Historically, the concept of African unity and the theories pertaining to the evolution of integration have long been contentious. In the 1960s, Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere held two distinct theories for African integration. Both men were lauded as great Pan-Africanists and champions of African unity, but Nkrumah wanted a United States of Africa without delay whereas Nyerere advocated gradual progress towards union, with each step building on the last.[1] Thus a singular unitary concept of African integration did not even exist in the earliest conceptualisations.

Moreover, different theories for integration were further complicated by the development of intrastate notions of individual statehood tied to created nationalities in the context of post-colonialism. After independence, each state cultivated its own macrocosm of historical, sociological and cultural patterning with dense identities of nationality, territory and economic policy. In fact, disunity and a lack of integration between African states, highlighted by regional hostilities and country wars, have often been blamed on Africa’s ‘artificial’ borders set by the colonial powers and retained by the then newly independent states, the Organisation of African Unity (OAU). Importantly, this framework for statehood failed to appreciate the complexities of African histories of migration and forced movement during the colonial period and was imprinted from a colonial legacy of attachment to the unit of state and models of citizenship.

Thus a central feature of the African state was the institutionalisation and legalisation of a distinct ‘otherness’ which determined not only political rights and freedom of movement but also the right to hold land and the rights to economic power.[2] Even the founding laws of the new states, which aimed to put in place equal rights of all races and ethnicities, were reproductions of colonial models of enforced exclusion. In this sense state nationalism has made African integration even harder to achieve because each of Africa’s new democracies, so hard fought for, institutionalised the concept of the nation-state, and the corollary was a distorted closed-door environment.

The East Africa Community (EAC) is the newest attempt at African integration on the continent, and serves to illustrate the tensions between nationalism and integration in the African context. In September 1999, the East African Cooperation Treaty was signed, where Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya agreed to loosen border controls for the free flow of goods. However, the nation-state concept continues to limit further development. The citizenry themselves have internalised notions of statehood which entrench concepts of exclusion rather than unity and result in, for instance, Ugandans having suspicions that Kenyans will ‘steal’ their land. Therefore, the historically complex formation of the nation-state in Africa goes to the core of integration and interstate relations. How states approach efforts toward new forms of regional/continental unity exemplifies this complexity.

Attempts to build continental unity continue. They can also be seen in the state membership and participation in the African Union (AU). The AU was established on 9 July 2002 as a successor to the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) and currently has representatives from 53 member states. The objectives of the AU are based on the premise of ‘African solutions for African problems’ and aim to facilitate political and socio-economic integration on the continent, as well as to negotiate, promote and defend common African-based positions.

However, the AU’s lack of intervention in the case of Zimbabwe, where the citizenry are still under the despotic leadership of Robert Mugabe, has questioned the effectiveness of the African Union and by association has brought to the fore issues of integration. The lack of action by the AU shows a distinct lack of willingness to challenge notions of statehood and therefore blocks integration.

AFRICAN DILEMMAS

The contradictions in the South African government’s approach to integration in Africa epitomise African dilemmas. South Africa’s experience with integration shows a distinct lack of consistency. Historically, South Africa has been intrinsically linked to its neighbours and wider Africa through mutual political struggles. The armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) Umkhonto We Sizwe was supported by and allied with other liberation movements in Africa, namely the MPLA of Angola, ZAPU of Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), FRELIMO of Mozambique and SWAPO of Namibia. In this mode, African identity was not built on national identities – whether South African or Angolan or Zimbabwean – but rather on an African brotherhood.

On the other hand, South Africans have lived in a state that for decades has ploughed its own furrow. Apartheid, despite being opposed by the majority of South Africans, also implanted ideas – political, economic, social and cultural – that separated them from Africans living outside its borders. Today those differences persist despite the liberation of South Africa, making it hard for South Africans to believe or accept the reality of integration, and more actively makes them reluctant to embrace it.

Considering Zimbabwe, for example, South Africans feel widely outraged by the level of repression and lack of democracy they see there. On the other hand, they do not wish to become too integrated with their neighbour and prefer to maintain some distance. Thus, South Africa has been the most outspoken about the issues in Zimbabwe, yet President Jacob Zuma has continued with former president Thabo Mbeki’s policy of ‘quiet diplomacy’, even after having expressed the need for more drastic action. This paradoxical approach stresses the difficulty in understanding integration in the context of Africa because though South Africa participates in integrated forums it does not challenge the structures or ideologies of state that make further integration impossible. This disjunction between policy and action clearly illustrates the lack of enthusiasm by the South African government to engage critically with the concept of integration.

This raises another argument about whether South Africa actually wants to challenge these established structures as they maintain the status quo and currently the status quo supports South Africa as the regional economic superpower and influential political authority.

Therefore, though South Africa has supported other regional and continental formations of economic integration – current support of SADC (Southern African Development Community) and other regional economic blocs, for example – it has not actively followed up on substantial initiatives to politically integrate, and any economic integration is purely for profitability’s sake. In fact recently, the future of a regional economic bloc, the Southern African Customs Union, has come under scrutiny because South Africa substantially subsidises the smaller states – particularly Lesotho and Swaziland – and the South African Treasury is uncomfortable with the subsidy’s extent, given competing domestic demands.[3] Therefore, economic forms of integration are only used when profitable for South Africa.

Furthermore, these contradictions in understanding integration have manifested themselves most acutely within the South African citizenry. Despite the strong rhetoric of African solidarity that all governments and many citizens espouse, in practice there is great ambivalence, with many people finding their right to citizenship and belonging under threat today.[4] This problem was highlighted in May and June 2008 with the xenophobic attacks, where working-class South Africans attacked and destroyed the property of migrants and refugees. South Africans felt that the growing numbers of foreigners in South African informal settlements were threatening their access to resources, which they feel they are entitled to by virtue of their citizenship.

It was a stark reminder that the policies and rhetoric around African integration and unity remain external to the consciousness of South African citizenship in the context of regional/African relations. Furthermore, the laissez-faire policy approach to foreigners that the South African government had adopted entrenches and may even encourage the conflictual attitudes of the citizenry.

Notions of South Africans’ misgivings about integration are therefore correct. For South Africans, integration, as broadly and conventionally defined, implies dangers, of impoverishment, of cultural dilution and of erosion, even though the dominant ideology of Pan-Africanism persists at a rhetorical level.

In the absence of a universal, coherent conceptualisation of integration, African nation-states continue to engage with integration in an unenthusiastic, ambivalent manner. Where governments have engaged in endeavours aimed at economic and political integration, very little effort has been made to entrench the ideals, values and norms associated with African unity in the consciousness of their citizens. Furthermore, laissez-faire policies in the South African context have served to validate the inherent tensions between citizens and foreign nationals, culminating in the xenophobic attacks of 2008. The concept of national identity is fluid and in the case of South Africans it is incredibly fractious and fractured.

The solution to South Africa’s schizophrenic attitude lies in the unpacking and dissecting – in public spaces like the media, cultural performance and academic research – of the concept of integration and what it means to different parties on the continent, both as governments and as people. This conversation goes to very core of what the values that make us African are and what are the means by which this African identity is entrenched. Through this it will be possible to decipher what the concept of integration means and, therefore, whether it is a desirable for the future for African states.

I am a child of exiled parents who applied for asylum in the UK because they were discriminated against by the apartheid government for choosing a partner of a different race. This enforced denial of shared identity and abrogation of basic rights is the perfect example of how far South Africa has to go to find internal integration and national peace. Only with a broader understanding of human rights, equality and individual dignity, with a government advocating the same, will South Africa be able to overcome its past and find a more comprehensive stance on regional and greater African integration.

Ultimately, integration as a desirable political and economic configuration depends on the ability of African governments, civil society and broader populations to engage with the concept, its definition, its consequences and most importantly, the means through which it is achieved.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Ella Philda Scheepers is with the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

NOTES

[1] Shivji, I.G, ‘Pan-Africanism in Mwalimu Nyerere’s thought’ 2008 found at http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/56108
[2] Manby, B Struggles for Citizenship in Africa 2009 Open Society Institute
[3] Draper, P and Khumalo, N ‘The Future of the Southern African Customs Union’ Trade Negotiations Insights. Volume 8. Number 6. August 2009 found at http://ictsd.org/i/news/tni/52394
[4] Manby, B Struggles for Citizenship in Africa 2009 Open Society Institute

World Cup bomb suspects and human rights defenders

Kimathi's arrest renders Kampala trials a farce

Muthoni Wanyeki

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/panafrican/67330

For all East Africans, the memories of this year’s soccer World Cup will forever be blighted by the bombings in Kampala during the 11 July 2010 final.

Innocent people out to enjoy football lost their lives, others were injured and property was destroyed. East Africans therefore supported and sympathised with the government of Uganda’s determination to find and hold to account those responsible.

For Kenyans, therefore, the fact that 13 Kenyans are among the 38 now standing trial in Kampala for the bombings is not a concern. We can assume the Ugandan security services know what they are doing.

What is a grave concern, however, is the fact that Kenya’s security services, in their co-operation with their Ugandan counterparts, have once again blithely chosen to disregard human rights, our Constitution and the law.

Eight of the 13 Kenyan suspects were illegally rendered to Uganda – in some cases while habeas corpus proceedings were still going on in the Kenyan courts – and, in all cases, when legal extradition was an option.

It is not hard – in fact, it is extremely simple – to do as Tanzania’s security services have done and say, ‘Give us the arrest warrants and let us get court orders for extradition.’ That is what any state that takes responsibility for its citizens would do. Such a state would also be concerned about monitoring external trials of its citizens to ensure these are fair.

But, this being Kenya, it is not the state but organisations like the Muslim Human Rights Forum (MHRF) that have taken responsibility for flagging the concern about the illegal renditions and for monitoring the trials of the Kenyan suspects, for which it has paid the heaviest of prices.

On 16 September 2010, Al Amin Kimathi, executive director of the MHRF, was arrested and detained by Uganda’s Rapid Response Unit upon his arrival in Kampala for a second observation visit of the ongoing trials.

He was held incommunicado at an unregistered detention centre until 21 September. He was denied access to an advocate during his interrogation by Kenyan, Ugandan and American interrogators.

His personal belongings, including his laptop, were searched in his absence. Finally, he himself was charged with the exact same charges as the 13 suspects whose trials he was to observe – conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism resulting in 70 murders – and remanded in Luzira Prison pending resumption of the trials in early October.

Needless to say, the Kenyan human rights community is outraged. The message is clear: human rights and legal defence for the Kenyan suspects will not be tolerated.

The unintended message is equally disturbing. If Kimathi could be charged for the bombings, then really, anybody could be. This does not inspire confidence in the investigative process – or to the evidence collected in relation to any of the other suspects.

The disinformation trickling out in the Kenyan and Ugandan media since the arrest is easily refutable. The MHRF’s financing is from known sources, handled through a respectable accounting firm.

The documentation supposedly linking Kimathi to Al Qaeda and Al Shabaab was not released to the media at the same time as news of the existence of the supposed report was. And the documentation was not asked for or questioned by the media, who opened themselves up to libel charges.

The whole situation beggars belief. Kenya’s authorities need to intervene immediately and decisively.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Muthoni Wanyeki is the executive director of the Kenya Human Rights Commission
* This letter was originally published by The East African
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Mumia Abu-Jamal and the Global Abolition of the Death Penalty

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/67406

- TO SIGN THE PETITION, CLICK HERE

The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C.
20500

Dear Mr. President:

WE THE UNDERSIGNED petition you to speak out against the death penalty for Mumia Abu-Jamal, and all the men, women and children facing execution around the world. This ultimate form of punishment is unacceptable in a civilized society and undermines human dignity. (U.N. General Assembly, Moratorium on the Use of the Death Penalty, Resolution 62/149, Dec. 18, 2007; reaffirmed, Resolution 63/168, Dec. 18, 2008.)

Mr. Abu-Jamal, a renowned black journalist and author, has been on Pennsylvania’s death row for nearly three decades. Even though you do not have direct control over his fate as a state death-row inmate, we ask that you as a moral leader on the world stage call for a global moratorium on the death penalty in his and all capital cases. Mr. Abu-Jamal has become a global symbol, the “Voice of the Voiceless”, in the struggle against capital punishment and human-rights abuses. There are over 20,000 awaiting execution around the globe, with over 3,000 on death rows in the United States.

The 1982 trial of Mr. Abu-Jamal was tainted by racism, and occurred in Philadelphia which has a history of police corruption and discrimination. Amnesty International, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, “determined that numerous aspects of this case clearly failed to meet international standards safeguarding the fairness of legal proceedings. [T]he interests of justice would best be served by the granting of a new trial to Mumia Abu-Jamal. The trial should fully comply with international standards of justice and should not allow for the reimposition of the death penalty.” (A Life In the Balance - The Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal, at 34, Amnesty Int’l, 2000; www. Amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/001/2000.)

Your consideration is appreciated.

Sincerely,

[Note: This petition is approved by Mumia Abu-Jamal and his lead attorney, Robert R. Bryan, San Francisco.]

Solidarity: Opposing violence against women

International Women's Action for Peace and Human security

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/67405

Between October 14th and 17th October 2010, a Million Women Rise (MWR) delegation of British women will be attending the Third International Action of the World March of Women in Bukavu (province of South Kivu) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. This is a global action, with the participation of women from 48 countries travelling to the DR Congo to express concrete solidarity with women from all over the world who are struggling against poverty and violence against women. One thousand women from the African Great Lakes region are expected to participate in the week of activities, and around 1500 people will take part in the Big March for Peace on the 17th October. The MWR delegation includes the Vice Chair of Rape Crisis (England & Wales), the UK Vice President of Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF), the founder of MWR, Congolese activists of COMMON CAUSE UK, the platform of Congolese women. This solidarity trip is supported by the London Feminist Network, the Women’s Resources Centre, and female MPs.

Main Aims of the Million Women Rise Delegation:

Raise awareness and get more people involved in positive change for peace and human security in the DR Congo

Reinforce concrete local projects that support women in DR Congo.

Get the commitment of politicians to UK trade and foreign policies having empowerment of women and justice for the people of DR Congo at their heart.

Why DR Congo?

Resource wars are ravaging the east of DR Congo, where an estimated 5.4 million people have been killed since 1996 (IRC.Crisis Watch). Armed groups from inside DR Congo and from neighbouring countries are fighting to control land rich in natural resources such as diamonds, gold, copper, uranium and the ‘3T’s’ (tin, tungsten and tantalum). The 3 T’s are found in everything on the British high street from mobile phones, laptop computers, and iPods to light bulbs. 80% of the tantalum used in mobile phones comes from DR Congo. These minerals are also traded every day on the London Metals Exchange.

The UK Government has failed to put forward to the UN Sanctions Committee multinational companies who have been reported for breaking OECD guidelines by buying minerals produced in very harsh conditions and making payments to armed groups who control mineral areas and commit grave human rights abuses, including sexual violence against women, forced labour and child labour in the DR Congo.

We don’t want our light bulbs, laptops, mobile phones and iphones to fund the rape of women in DR Congo, to be the cause of human right abuses and force people to flee their homes and become refugees?

Why women?

The eastern part of DR Congo has been labelled the rape capital of the world, with 250,000 cases of reported rapes and an estimated 1 million unreported cases. Up to two thirds of girls and women between the ages of ten and thirty have been raped since 1996.

Sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war, intimidation, humiliation, displacement and control including rape with extreme violence with penetration of sharp objects, amputation of limbs, decapitation, and live burials of women. The perpetrators are occupying forces from neighbouring countries, local militias, government soldiers, UN Peace Keepers, Police and civilians. There is no justice system on the ground even though DR Congo is signed up to international laws to protect women and children.

Christine is a rape counsellor and human rights activist. In July 2007 Christine was accompanying a group of women rape survivors from Masisi territory to Goma for medical care. She left the road at one point and heard someone moaning softly. Parting the vegetation, she recounted to Amnesty International:

“I saw a girl tied up by her hands and feet. I started to untie her. Soldiers who had pushed a piece of wood into her had raped her. She was telling me that she was going to be married on Saturday and had just returned from receiving marriage instructions. I freed her and started to carry her back to the road. Then a group of CNDP soldiers came out from the trees. They beat me and I let the girl fall to the ground. Then four of them then took turns to rape me, in front of the other women I was with. When they stopped, I was bleeding heavily and my arm and leg were badly swollen. We were about to leave to get help when we saw that the girl had died. We buried her there. My clothes were stained with blood, but we walked to a health centre. Then we continued to Goma, where I spent two weeks in hospital”.

Christine continues to work with rape survivors; she runs a small refuge from which she provides basic medical care, counselling and advice to the women.

Amnesty International report September 2008, ‘War on Women and Children in North Kivu, DR Congo’.http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/AFR62/005/2008/en/f23caedf-8e4a-11dd-8e5e-43ea85d15a69/afr620052008en.html


What you can do:

a) Make a donation to support Congolese women from the UK and from within the DRCongo (Kinshasa) to attend the international action in Bukavu. Cheques payable to Centre Resolution Conflicts (CRC) and posted to CRC, All Saints Church, Bradford BD5 0NG. or to COMMON CAUSE UK, and posted to COMMON CAUSE UK, the Froud Centre. No 1 Toronto Avenue. London E12 5JF. Please mark them 'DR Congo women' and if you include contact details we will be able to send you a report. Thank you.

b) Organise a meeting and ask Congolese women’s rights activist to come and speak.

c) Get involved; join the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and support the Million Women Rise marches in Manchester on 10.10.10 and London on 5th March 2011. Register to attend the Feminism in London Conference on the 23rd of October.

d) Write to your MP – we have a useful letter to your MP we can send you.

For more information, please contact Jane Gregory at Janewriteme@yahoo.co.uk or phone 07931934422, or Marie Claire Faray on mfaray@hotmail.com or phone 07939822625.

The World March of Women is an international feminist action movement connecting grass-roots groups and organisations working to eliminate the root causes of poverty and violence against women. http://www.marchemondiale.org/

Million Women Rise is a coalition of individual women and representatives from the women's voluntary and community sector who have come together to organise an annual national demonstration against male violence that coincides with International Women's Day. http://www.millionwomenrise.com/

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom is an international NGO and the oldest peace organisation in the UK. It was founded in 1915 when 1,300 women met to protest against a war in Europe. It has launched African Women’s decade 2010-2020. http://www.ukwilpf.org.uk/

COMMON CAUSE UK, is the platform of Congolese Women in the UK, with branches in Manchester and Bradford. It aims to support the integration of immigrant and refugee Congolese women in the UK; as well as raise the voices of grassroots Congolese women in the UK.

The London Feminist Network (LFN) is a women-only networking and campaigning organisation, formed in 2004 to unite London UK-based feminist groups and individuals in action. The organisation has more than 1450 members. http://www.ldnfeministnetwork.ik.com/

Kongosi Mussanzi is a Congolese activist member of MWR, WILPF and COMMON CAUSE UK, who has had to flee DRC because of her human rights work including speaking out about the rape of women. She is one of the founders of the Centre Resolution Conflicts in DR Congo. She currently works with refugees in Bradford and continues to campaign for peace and justice both in DRC and globally. www.cr-conflict.org

Jane Gregory is a Co-ordinator of Bradford Rape Crisis & Sexual Abuse Survivors Service and Vice Chair of Rape Crisis (England & Wales). http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/

Marie-Claire Faray is a Research Scientist and the UK Vice President of the Women’s International League for Peace www.ukwilpf.org.uk

Passing on of Comrade Peter Young Kihara

Release Political Prisoners (RPP) Trust

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/obituary/67390

We regret to inform you of the death of Comrade Peter Young Kihara a veteran human rights defender, which occurred on 26 September 2010 at Nairobi Hospital, Kenya.

He has for the last five decades been in the forefront fighting for social justice in our beloved country. He played a crucial role in constitution making both at the grassroots and at the national level.

His character as a human rights defender was most exemplified in his unwavering commitment to work with the poor at the grassroot.

Even during his months of suffering from cancer, comrade Young kept on urging the human rights fraternity to keep their eyes open and challenge any injustices.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Capturing poverty and exploitation: Niger Delta’s oil

Review of ‘Curse of the Black Gold’

Sokari Ekine

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/67335

cc F SWriting as Nigeria marks 50 years of independence, Sokari Ekine stresses that as vivid as the photos within Ed Kashi’s work ‘Curse of the Black Gold’ are, the reality for Niger Deltans is even worse.

It seems appropriate to be writing this review on the eve of Nigeria’s 50th anniversary of independence. The country is on the verge of its fourth post-military election and has just survived, if we are to believe the rumours, at least one attempted military coup in the past six months. There have been 50 years of oil rents, but the oil-producing region has very little to show for it. The ‘brand Nigeria’ movement led by the government is heralding the 50 years as a ‘golden jubilee’ with estimates of N10 billion[1] to be spent on celebrations.

This bears little relationship to reality of the Niger Delta. Oil has left a huge ugly stain on Nigeria’s social, political, economic and environmental landscape and as with most stains, it is not that easy to remove or in this case hide under the extravaganza of ‘independence celebrations’. Oil in Nigeria has stained the land, the rivers, wildlife, politicians, businessmen, militants and the people. For example, there have been 7,000 recorded oil spills between 1970 and 2000[2] and the latest figures from NOSDRA (National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency) estimate 3,203 spills in the past four years alone.[3] In other words, oil spills are actually on the increase.

‘Curse of the Black Gold’ by photo journalist Ed Kashi brings to life the complexities of oil production where oil invades every aspect of people’s lives in the Niger Delta. In the introduction, Kasha describes the region aptly as:

‘[T]he pivotal point where all of Nigeria’s plagues of political gangsterism, corruption, and poverty seem to converge.’

This is a region where oil production is so ubiquitous that trekking through oil-soaked farms, fishing in oil-filled waters and drying cassava by the flames of gas flares have become the norm. In showing us everyday life in the region – farming, fishing, local festivals, oil workers, children playing, women dancing, chiefs holding court, and balaclava-clad, gun-waving militants – Kashi is able to capture both the ugliness of oil – the filth and destruction – as well as the beauty it hides, the people, their traditions and their struggles.

We also witness the harshness and chaos of a land which has seen minimal development over the past 50 years. There is no electricity, no water supplies and, in a rainforest region, no proper roads; with constant flooding, these all add to the challenges people face on a daily basis. Everyday becomes a struggle to live and a struggle against the physical challenges of literally drowning in oil.

But apart from the sight of militants waving their guns, the pictures seem to create a kind of passiveness, a despair and inevitability about the situation. The photographs leave you with no sense of resistance. For this you will need to read the supporting text, stories and short essays by women, environmentalists, youth workers and writers who provide historical and contemporary context and depth to the documentary which was produced at the height of the militant movement in 2008. The early days of oil exploration by Shell in Oloibiri in 1956 and Boma in 1958 were a time of rapid expansion, and one gets the feeling of a bulldozer at full speed ripping across the land and rivers with abandon.

‘Ten years of feverish activity saw the opening of the Bonny tanker terminal in April 1961, the extension of the pipeline system including the completion of the Trans-Niger Pipeline in 1965 connecting the oilfields in the western Delta near Ughelli to the Bonny export terminal, and the coming-on-stream of twelve giant oil fields, including the first offshore discovery at Okan near Escravos in 1964. Oil tankers lined the Cawthorne Channel like participants in a local regatta, plying the same waterways that, in the distant past, housed slave ships and palm oil hulks. By 1967, 300 miles of pipelines had been constructed, and one and half a million feet of wells sunk; output had ballooned to 275,000 barrels per day (b/d).’

Now all that is left in Oloibiri – the town where oil was first discovered – is a rusted sign marking the now capped ‘Well No 1’ with the words ‘Drilled June 1956. Depth: 12,000 feet (3,700 meters).’ There is nothing to show for the wealth Oloibiri gave to Nigeria. There is no electricity, no development, nothing.

One aspect that Kashi has not dealt with sufficiently is the huge presence of Nigerian security forces in the region, which can only be described as an ‘occupying force’. This pre-dates the militancy and goes as far back as the beginning of the 1990s. I understand this omission, as taking photographs of the military in action would have put his life in danger and most definitely it would have reduced his chances of returning to the country to continue his work. However, at least some narrative on militarisation could have been included to provide a more holistic account of what is taking place.

Although I know the region well, I never cease to be outraged by the violence unleashed upon our communities by oil companies and the Nigerian military forces. I last visited Port Harcourt and other villages in Rivers State in November last year. The most shocking thing for me is that year after year, nothing changes for the better. Despite the promises made by successive presidents and governors to invest in development, the various gangoes set up to distribute allocated oil monies and promises by oil companies to clean up the mess they have created – despite all of these – the towns and villages appear to be in an even worse state than in previous years. The explanation for this catastrophic failure can be found in the following paragraph:

‘From the vantage point of the Niger Delta—but no less in the barracks of the vast slum worlds of Kano, Port Harcourt, or Lagos—oil development is a pathetic and cruel joke. It is not simply that Nigeria is a sort of Potemkin economy—it is, of course—but the cruel fact that the country has become a perfect storm of waste, corruption, venality, and missed opportunity. To say that Nigeria suffers from corruption—‘organized brigandage’ is how Ken Saro-Wiwa once put it—does not really capture the nature of the beast. Money laundering and fraud on gargantuan scales, missing billions and inflated contracts in virtually every aspect of public life, area boys, touts, mobile police all taking their cuts and commissions on the most basic of everyday operations. Perhaps there is no better metaphor for this oil-fuelled venality than the stunning fact that huge quantities of oil are simply stolen every day. Over the last five years between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil have been stolen daily (perhaps 10-15 percent of national output), organized by a syndicate of ‘bunkerers’ linking low-level youth operatives and thugs in the creeks to the highest levels of the Nigerian military and political classes and to the oil companies themselves.’

As vivid as the photographs and as explicit as the narratives are, the reality is far worse, far more devastating, far more unbelievable that such wealth can create such poverty.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Ed Kashi’s ‘Curse of the Black Gold’ (2008) is published by Power House Books.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

REFERENCES

[1] Nigeria’s 50th Birthday - Suspicious Budget Increase - http://bit.ly/crXFTm
[2] Oil Spills in Nigeria Common http://bit.ly/cUPe9x
[3]The Nation's 3,203 Oil Spills in Four Years - http://bit.ly/9I9Top

Tackling UK poetry's ethnic imbalance, with no help from Jeremy Hunt

2010-09-30

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/22/poetry-jeremy-hunt-ethnic-imbalance

Under one per cent of poetry books published in the UK are by black or Asian poets. 'This is, quite simply, not fair,' says Bernardine Evaristo, one of the editors of Ten, a poetry anthology published by Bloodaxe Books. A week before the launch of Ten, Jeremy Hunt, the secretary of state for culture, Olympics, media and sport told delegates at the Media Festival Arts that he is firmly in favour of 'broadening participation' in the arts and is 'very ashamed' that we still live in a country 'where many, many people don't get a chance to access the arts'. Unfortunately, writes Lara Pawson in the London Guardian, what he said next was not as hopeful: 'The debate has got to move on from the kind of box-ticking targets approach that says that in return for your grant from the Arts Council, you will get so many people from particular ethnic or social backgrounds.'

Piracy – a survival strategy for Somalis?

Response to 'The Real Pirates in Somalia: Washington, Paris and Oslo'

Lugo Teehalt

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/67400

Thanks for the article.  Don't know if you agree with this factor,
expressed in this way, have to admit I'm just guessing:

The Somali pirates used to be fishermen.  Their fish were destroyed by
'the west' dumping toxic waste on their fishing grounds.  What are
they supposed to do, stoically starve?

Perhaps this is what they are supposed to do:  They, and the people
they used to feed, move to the slums on the outskirts of the cities.
Desperate for work they force down the wages in the, often American
owned, sweatshops which assemble baseball paraphernalia, make cheep
clothing, and the like.  Western workers are then put into competition
with these sweatshops, forcing down wages in the west.

Yes, it's globalization!

Just thought that might be in part what is going on - by analogy to
the thing they normally do:  forcing peasant farmers to compete with
subsidised US and European farmers.

Pambazuka News 160: Souveraineté alimentaire: Principes et valeurs pour améliorer le statut de la femme

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/summaryfr/67404

Kagame and security

Gado

2010-09-29

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/cartoons/67325

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

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

Zimbabwe: Constitutional meetings spark rights abuses, says peace group

2010-09-30

http://zimbabwejournalists.com/story.php?art_id=6925&cat=2

As public involvement in creating a new constitution for Zimbabwe draws to a close, a rights group reports the process has sparked increased human - rights violations. The Zimbabwe Peace Project says ZANU-PF supporters were the main perpetrators of intimidation at the outreach program. The Zimbabwe Peace Project said it has monitors around the country and they have witnessed many acts of physical intimidation at public meetings.

Zimbabwe: Sanctions stay until rights improve

2010-09-27

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-09-27-us-sanctions-stay-until-zimbabwean-rights-improve

Zimbabwe must show greater respect for human rights and political freedoms before the US sanctions on the impoverished African nation can be removed, the U.S. State Department said on Sunday. The State Department said its top diplomat for Africa and other US officials met three Zimbabwean ministers and had praised the economic advances but raised concerns 'that political progress has not been as successful'.

Africa: Gender equality and the law in the SADC

2010-09-27

http://www.thoughtleader.co.za/jenniferthorpe/2010/09/22/mdg-3-an-unrealistic-dream-for-sadc/

Historically the tool that has been used to counter Gender Based Violence (GBV) has been the law. Following various gender protocols the governments of the SADC countries have readily developed legislation criminalising GBV to varying degrees. Yet, legislative solutions to the problem of GBV and rape in the SADC region can be likened to covering one’s eyes in order to see no evil, says this blog post.

DRC: Rape as a weapon of war

2010-09-30

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/africa/july-dec10/congo2_09-13.html

Margot Wallstrom, the United Nation's special representative on sexual violence and conflict, and Zainab Salbi, the founder and CEO of Women for Women International, an organisation that aids women in conflict zones, were recently interviewed on violence against women in conflict zones. 'It's very extensive, unfortunately. It has happened historically. It is taking one of the worst shapes in Congo. About a thousand women is getting raped every month in the last 12 years, according to the state department.' This post includes video and audio.

Global: Efforts to increase number of female police bearing fruit, says top UN cop

2010-09-30

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36287&Cr=un+police&Cr1=

The United Nations initiative to boost the number of female police officers deployed in peacekeeping missions around the globe has made real progress since it was launched a year ago, according to the world body’s top police official. The so-called Global Effort was launched in August 2009 with the aim of more than doubling the proportion of women comprising UN Police (UNPOL) to 20 per cent by 2014.

Global: The girl effect: The clock is ticking

2010-09-30

http://www.womendeliver.org/updates/entry/the-girl-effect-the-clock-is-ticking/

Girleffect.org tells the story of girls creating a ripple impact of social and economic change on their families, communities and nations. Last week, at the Clinton Global Initiative, the Girl Effect launched a new video that builds on the original message, and discusses important issues like child marriage and early pregnancy for adolescent girls.

Nigeria: 40,000 Nigerian girls, women trafficked to Mali

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/b3jsNF

Between 20,000 and 40,000 Nigerian women and girls have been trafficked to Mali, with many of them populating brothels in the West African nation, according to the executive secretary of Nigeria’s Agency for the Prohibition and Traffic in Persons (NAPTIP), Simon Chuzi Egede. The number does not include the thousands that have also been trafficked to other African nations, including Cote d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Libya and Morocco, Egele told a press conference in Abuja Wednesday.

Africa: All at sea - the abuse of human rights aboard illegal fishing vessels

2010-09-30

http://www.ejfoundation.org/page683.html

Findings published by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) expose how in their drive to maximise catch and minimise cost, illegal ‘pirate’ fishing operators ruthlessly exploit the crews working aboard their boats. EJF’s new report ‘All at Sea – the abuse of human rights aboard illegal fishing vessels’ documents how individuals working on pirate fishing vessels can be subject to excessive working hours, incarceration, and physical abuse up to and including murder.

Burundi: Peace village crosses Hutu/Tutsi divide

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/bl57ob

The Mutambara Peace Village is a unique effort to reconcile Hutus and Tutsis by giving them homes to live together in the same village. Today, some 1,600 Hutus and Tutsis live as neighbours in 300 identical two-room homes constructed of concrete with tin roofs.

Egypt: Security forces shut down freedom of association conference

2010-09-30

http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&release=1247

The cancellation by Egyptian security of an international NGO conference in Cairo, just two days before it was to take place, is a brazen example of the government’s increasingly hostile behavior towards civil society, according to Freedom House. The conference, entitled 'Freedom of Association in the Arab World: Reality and Expectations', was organised by One World Foundation in cooperation with Al Sadat Association.

Guinea: No action one year after massacre

2010-09-27

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-09-27-year-after-guinea-massacre-culprits-yet-to-be-questioned

One year after the massacre of 157 people in Conakry, no army official suspected of taking part in the killings has been brought before a court in Guinea, which is still riven by political divisions. On September 28 2009, a peaceful rally organised by the opposition in Conakry's biggest stadium, was bloodily suppressed by junta troops, leaving 157 dead, hundreds of women victims of sexual violence and over a thousand injured.

Uganda: Terrorism charges used against Kenyan rights defender

2010-09-30

http://www.hrw.org/en/news/2010/09/27/uganda-terrorism-charges-used-against-kenyan-rights-defender

Ugandan authorities should either release a Kenyan human rights activist who is being held on terrorism charges or provide details of the charges, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch said in a joint letter to the Ugandan government. Al-Amin Kimathi was arrested, along with Kenyan lawyer Mbugua Mureithi, on September 15 after the two travelled from Kenya to Uganda to observe a hearing of six Kenyans charged with terrorism in connection with the July bomb attacks in Kampala, which killed over 76 people who were watching the World Cup final.

Africa: Northern EU states chided for resisting asylum rules changes

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/99GsEc

The EU is nowhere near implementing the burden sharing regime on immigration, which Malta has been lobbying for, according to the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner, Thomas Hammarberg. Scolding northern EU member states for resisting the much needed changes in the way the EU deals with asylum, Mr Hammerberg warned the situation was becoming very serious and accused the resisting member states of disrespecting the rights of asylum seekers.

DRC: Repatriation of Congolese from Zambia reaches 40,000

2010-09-30

http://www.unhcr.org/4c9cc3146.html

The number of Congolese refugees repatriated from neighbouring Zambia by UNHCR since 2007 has topped the 40,000 mark. The milestone was passed last Sunday when a UNHCR-chartered boat carrying 555 people arrived at Moba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Katanga province after crossing LakeTanganyika from the north Zambian port of Mpulungu.

Somalia: No food, medical supplies and shelter at IDP camp

2010-09-30

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90619

Five months after Islamist militia took over a hospital and camp hosting thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Somalia's Afgoye corridor, living conditions have deteriorated, with malnutrition, food shortages and shelter emerging as the key concerns. 'I live in the Hawa Abdi area; in my camp alone, there are 550 families [3,300 people] with little or no food, no medical help and almost non-existent shelter,' Hussein Abi, an elder, told IRIN.

Uganda: Mobile application reconnects refugees with loved ones

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/bcH4Yi

In support of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who have fled from conflict and disaster areas, Ericsson and Refugees United, in partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and mobile operator MTN in Uganda, have launched the first project to locate and reconnect refugee and IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) families through the innovative use of mobile phones and internet. The program enables refugees to use mobile phones to register and search for loved ones via an anonymous database.

Zimbabwe: Extend Zim amnesty, says Passop

2010-09-30

http://www.timeslive.co.za/local/article682271.ece/Extend-Zim-Amnesty--Passop

The December 31 amnesty deadline for Zimbabweans living in South Africa illegally must be extended, People Against Suffering, Suppression, Oppression and Poverty (Passop) said on Wednesday. The home affairs department recently appealed to Zimbabweans living in South Africa to take up the government's offer to get their documentation in order to 'regularise' their stay in South Africa, beginning last Monday.

Africa: Appeal for solidarity for debt week petition

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/67356

On 7 - 17 October 2010, ZIMCODD will join social movements across the globe in commemorating the Global week of Action against Debt and International Financial Institutions, commonly known as the Debt Week. ZIMCODD is calling on individuals, groupings and organisations to support the commemoration of the Global Week on Debt and IFIs in Zimbabwe by signing your organisation on to our petition to Parliament, the Ministry of Finance and Zimbabwe’s creditors. ZIMCODD will be commemorating the inaugural Debt Week in Zimbabwe through activities lined up in Harare, Mutare and Bulawayo with the theme, 'Responsible Lending and Borrowing to Guarantee Social and Economic Rights.' You may visit http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/zimcodddebtweekpetition2010/ to sign on or send an email with the subject ‘support for ZIMCODD Debt week Petition’ to zimcodd@zimcodd.co.zw, We hope to conclude the process of collecting signatures by 4 October 2010. Your solidarity on this matter is vital.

Kenya: Mapping peace with The Peace Council

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/socialmovements/67354

The Peace Council, a club at the Kenya Methodist University, helped launch the organisation known as "Sisi ni Amani" (We are Peace) at the Baba Ndogo slum estate in Nairobi, Kenya. Sisi ni Amani organisation is focused on interviewing and peace mapping, a concept where any individual sends a message about any peaceful, violent or volatile activity in their area to a number and analysts are able to gather this information, map it and send it to the relevant authorities for support. The launch involved many youths and children. It also aimed at promoting local talent such as music, dance, poetry and acting in the slum area. Contact: Njoroge Caleb, zaviercal@yahoo.com

Emerging powers news roundup

2010-10-01

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/67441

Call for applications

Journalist Study Tour to India 2010: FAHAMU Emerging Powers in Africa Programme

The Fahamu Emerging Powers in Africa Programme is pleased to announce a call for applications for its Journalist Study Tour to India. Four successful applicants will be chosen to participate in a 6 day study tour. African media professionals in print, broadcast, radio and online fora throughout Africa are encouraged to apply for this study tour. African lecturers from journalism schools and media programmes on the continent may also apply.

1. Introduction

There is a growing need for independent inquiry and investigation into the engagement of India in Africa from African media sources - this as media coverage has been largely dominated and influenced by Western media reports. This becomes particularly important as Indian corporate interest, aid, bilateral trade and investment in Africa continues to grow. Furthermore, India will host the forthcoming India Economic Summit in November 2010, while the second India-Africa Forum Summit will take place in Africa in 2011 following the first Summit concluded in April 2008 in India. These events will provide important outcomes related to both India and Africa’s development path, with consequences relevant to both Africans and Indians alike. Within this context the need for greater collaboration and interaction amongst African and Indian media will become ever more pertinent.

The Fahamu Emerging Powers in Programme is therefore pleased to announce a call for applications for its Journalist Study Tour to India. Four successful applicants will be chosen to participate in a study tour to India that aims to:

- Strengthen the capacity of African media commentators on India's engagement with Africa
- Facilitate greater understanding of perceptions of India in Africa, and vice versa
- Expand on knowledge amongst African media of India’s political, economic, societal and media landscape
- Create an opportunity for African media organisations and journalism schools to develop long-term relationships, collaborations and exchanges with representatives from Indian media organisations and institutions
- Provide a platform to facilitate the implementation of capacity building projects and greater media coverage amongst African media on India's activities in Africa
- Include greater media participation in discussions and advocacy in India and in Africa about India's role in Africa
- Include visits to various Indian media organisations, associations, research institutes and journalism schools.

2. Call for Applications

Media professionals in print, broadcast, radio and online fora throughout Africa are encouraged to apply for this study tour. Lecturers from journalism schools and media programmes in Africa may also apply. Applicants must:

-Provide frequent reports to their national, regional, or local print media, radio, television channels or online fora on topics related to India's activities in Africa; or lecture at a journalism school or training programme at a higher education institution in Africa

-Have 8 - 10 years experience as a journalist or journalism lecturer

-Be fluent in English

-Have a valid passport and comply with their country's visa criteria for travel to India.

The following costs will be reimbursed:

- Return ticket, economy class to India
- Accommodation in India for the duration of study tour,
- Visa costs,
- Meals and transport for duration of study tour.

The study tour will take place in November 2010.

Applications close on 5 October 2010 and successful applicants will be notified first week of October 2010.

3. Requirements

All applications are to be submitted electronically and must include:

- A current resume including professional work history

-A 500 word article on a topic that is currently relevant to the India-Africa engagement

-A brief proposal in English outlining a story you wish to cover in Africa related to Africa-India relations and that will be of interest to your target audience

- A letter of recommendation from your organisation head/faculty head . If journalist applicants are not employed directly through a media organisation, please provide a letter of support from the organisation to which you are affiliated, including your relationship to the organisation

- A letter, signed by your (affiliate) organisation or faculty head, motivating how participation in the study tour will benefit your professional work and the work of your organisation. This should include an action plan detailing how your experience in India will be incorporated into further capacity building and knowledge development within your organisation/journalism school in the three months following completion of the study tour

- Provide samples of three or four professional pieces of written work/manuscripts that have been printed or broadcast in the last 12 months; or an outline of courses taught if a lecturer in a journalism school/programme.

-Please ensure that all documents are compressed and/or zipped in compressed files to ensure all applications can be uploaded.

4. Concluding Remarks

A contract will be signed by participants requiring the following obligations to be met following conclusion of the tour:

- Produce a commentary piece for the Fahamu Emerging Powers in Africa Newsletter based on their experience in India incorporating topical issues related to Africa-India relations

- Make regular contributions on civil society issues for publication in the Fahamu Emerging Powers in Africa Newsletter

- Provide a follow up report detailing the implementation and outcomes of a capacity building activity completed through the participants (affiliate) organisation or journalism school within three months of completing the study tour.

Please direct all queries and applications to:

Ms Hayley Herman
Programme Officer
Emerging Powers in Africa Programme
Email: hayley@fahamu.org

General

BM deal to support up to 500 mn global Bharti users

US Computer giant IBM will provide Bharti Airtel with the IT infrastructure to support 500 million customers across the globe, after bagging the recent contract to manage the Indian telco’s African operations. While Bharti currently has about 180 million customers in India and Africa combined, and will take several years to reach anywhere close to the 500-million mark, both companies have decided to use their learning from the earlier deal.
Read More

Emerging economies outpace Japan in the battle for trade with resource-rich Africa

Japan has traditionally been one of Africa’s most relevant trade partners. Historical ties have been augmented by a relatively strong increase in trade linkages since 2000. As such, between 2001 and 2008 Japan-Africa trade increased almost four-fold, from $8.8 billion to $34.3 billion. This growth has been inspired largely by African exports to Japan, which grew by 366 per cent between 2001 and 2008, compared to growth of African imports from Japan in the same period of 200 per cent. However, the global economic downturn has exerted severe strain on Japan-Africa trade. After the 2008 peak, trade almost halved to $18.5 billion in 2009. The bulk of this decline was in African exports to Japan, which slumped by 56 per cent from $21 billion to $9.1 billion between 2008 and 2009. Meanwhile, African imports from Japan declined less severely, by 29 per cent from $13.3 billion to $9.4 billion. As such, in 2009 Japan ran a rare trade surplus with Africa. While Japan-Africa trade relations have displayed growth momentum, they have been unable to keep pace with the frenetic rise in Africa’s trade relations with the emerging world.
Read More

Citigroup opens China desk in South Africa
Citigroup said on Wednesday it has opened a China desk in South Africa, to support Chinese companies expansion on the continent. The desk will work with trade and investment flows in and out of China, and help Chinese firms as they expand overseas, the U.S. financial services firm said in a statement.
Read More

China in Africa

Chinese chamber worst employer: Sactwu
The Newcastle Chinese Chamber of Commerce is the worst employer in the local clothing industry, the SA Clothing and Textile Workers' Union (Sactwu) said on Sunday. General secretary Andre Kriel said the union awarded a broken brick to the chamber at its 11th national congress awards in Cape Town. "The award, a broken brick will be delivered to the chamber within the next month. The broken brick symbolises employers who break down, not build, decent work in the clothing industry," he said.
Read More

China to invest new cement plant in South Africa
China Knowledge reported that China Africa Development Fund and Jidong Development Group will join hands to aid South Africa in building a cement plant that will cost at least USD 200 million.
Read More

SA's exports to China hit a wall
Despite the hype about burgeoning trade relations with China, South Africa's exports to that country seem to have hit a plateau. A country breakdown of trade from the SA Revenue Service shows China remained the main country-destination for exports - nearly 10 percent of the total in the first half of the year - but growth slowed to 1 percent compared with the same period last year. This is a sharp deceleration, after 36 percent annual growth last year, which pushed the value of 2009 exports to R47.7 billion. Last year's sudden surge made China South Africa's main export destination, up from fifth place in 2008.
Read More

Patel: SA to partner with China
In the framework agreement for trade signed a few weeks ago during President Jacob Zuma’s state visit to China, China committed itself to mineral enrichment in South Africa. On Wednesday at a breakfast seminar held by the Progressive Business Forum at the ANC’s National General Council meeting in Durban, Ebrahim Patel, Minister of Economic Development, said that South Africa would in the coming months become involved in several discussions with Chinese industrialists and government representatives.
Read More

S.Africa's Wesizwe in funding talks with the Chinese
South Africa's Wesizwe Platinum Ltd said on Tuesday that it was in advanced talks with a Chinese consortium for an $877 million financing package, after it posted a first-half loss. Wesizwe, a mining exploration group, said the talks with China's Jinchuan Group Ltd and the China-Africa Development Fund were aimed at securing the funds in the form of debt and equity for its key Frischgewaagd-Ledig project.
Read More

China, Africa policy banks sign US$56.4m loan pact for ZTE kit
The Export-Import Bank of China has signed a US$56.4 million loan agreement with African Export-Import Bank to support African imports of telecommunications equipment from ZTE Corp., Xinhua News Agency reported Tuesday, citing unnamed managers at the Chinese policy lender.
Read More

"Liberia says Sinohydro interested in hydro project"
Sinohydro, China's top dam builder, is the sole investor interested so far in a contract to construct and operate a hydro power project in Liberia estimated to cost up to $4 billion, a minister said on Wednesday.
Read More

China extends Africa push with loans, deal in Ghana
Ghana and China signed project loans and another deal together totaling $15 billion, the latest in a string of Chinese investments on the continent. The loans, coinciding with a six-day Beijing visit by the West African nation’s president, John Atta Mills, highlight China’s strong interest in resource-rich African countries such as Ghana.
Read More

Beijing eyes Zim mining industry
As the world’s fastest growing economy evolves, its industries are rapidly expanding and asset managers — controlling billions of United States dollars in their portfolios — believe it is time to join China’s influential parastatals that are trooping to Zimbabwe. Their target, as revealed at a Mining Indaba in Harare last week, is no less than the mining industry whose 40 different minerals — among them gold, platinum, iron, steel, chrome, zinc, manganese and the recently discovered diamonds from Marange — are being seen as key to extinguishing China’s huge appetite for raw materials created by the dramatic growth of its industries.
Read More

Wen announces Africa-China partnership in combating HIV/AIDS
In a high-level meeting with world leaders from African nations including Nigeria, Ethiopia and South Africa, Premier Wen Jiabao Wednesday announced an Africa-China partnership to strengthen international AIDS prevention and treatment efforts. Citing a worldwide population of 13 million currently living with HIV, Wen stressed the urgency of ramping up efforts in the remaining five years before the stated 2015 goal date in attaining Millennium Development Goals.
Read More

Portugal’s Millenium bcp bank to open Macau branch on Thursday
Portugal’s Millenium bcp bank will open this Thursday its branch in Macau, where it aims to become a “springboard between China and Africa”, stated the branch’s director, Jose Joao Paosinho. The Millenium bcp branch has been authorised since last May and will replace the bank’s offshore agency in the territory, which was only allowed to work with the non-resident population.
Read More
India in Africa

Bhel sets up health camps in Africa in efforts to build brand
In an attempt to create awareness and goodwill that may help win orders, state-run Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd (Bhel) is holding health camps in African countries such as Libya and Sudan among others to tap the growing demand for power generation equipment there. The power generation equipment manufacturer is taking specialist doctors from India to set up health camps in African villages, where free health check-up facilities are being offered.
Read More

SA wants India to lower 30% import tariff on wine
SA’s consul-general to India, Busi Kuzwayo yesterday called on the Indian government to lower its double-digit import tariff on South African wines. India had imposed a 30% import duty on wines imported from SA, Ms Kuzwayo said. She claimed the import duty adversely affected South African businesses that wanted to supply premium wines to India’s growing middle-class community.
Read More

India to train police forces of African countries
Stepping up its engagement with Africa, India will train police forces of several African countries, including Mozambique, in modern policing and security measures.
Read More

India Ruchi eyes Africa plantations, export jump
Ruchi Soya Industries India's top meal exporter, is likely to ship out 75 percent more soymeal in fiscal 2010/11 and is planning to acquire palm plantations in Africa, its managing director said. India's soymeal exports are expected to rise because of strong demand from Southeasast Asia, industry officials say, adding competitive prices and good monsoon rains will boost domestic soybean output after last year's drought.
Read More

Mozambique, India to work for making Indian Ocean 'safe' again
India and Mozambique Thursday pledged to work together to combat piracy and terrorism in the Indian Ocean and to make the region safe and peaceful. Both countries also hope to ramp up bilateral trade to $1 billion by 2013. 'Indian Ocean is no more a safe ocean and we are on the shores of this great ocean,' visiting Mozambique President Armando Emilio Guebuza said at a joint press conference with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the end of delegation level talks between the two sides.
Read More

Several pacts to be signed during Mozambique Prez visit
A number of pacts are expected to be inked between India and Mozambique, including one on double taxation avoidance, during the visit of the President of that country Armando Guebuza starting tomorrow. During his five-day visit in India, Guebuza, who is accompanied by four of his cabinet ministers among others, will hold delegation-level talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during which important bilateral issues, including ways to enhance trade will be taken up.
Read More

India's Bharti rolls out 3G network in Malawi
The Malawi unit of Bharti Airtel rolled out its 3G network on Thursday, as part of the Indian telecom firm's push to expand in fast-growing Africa. Bharti now owns mobile operators in 15 African countries, following a $9 billion deal with Kuwait's Zain this year, and has ramped up spending across the continent to challenge dominant player MTN Group.
Read More

In Other Emerging Powers News

Russian firm to build $700m Tanzania power plant
Tanzania has signed a $700-million deal with a Russian company to construct a hydroelectric dam with a capacity of more than 200 megawatts. Under an agreement signed in the Tanzanian commercial capital Borodino Group of Companies is to build a 222-MW power plant by 2018.
Read More

Wal-Mart offers $4 bln for S.Africa's Massmart
Wal-Mart is in talks to buy South Africa's Massmart, a $4 billion deal that would give the U.S. retailer a big presence in fast-growing Africa and bolster its emerging markets strategy. The world's largest retailer has been hit by weakness in the United States, where low-income shoppers are particularly vulnerable to unemployment and higher petrol prices. It has responded by focusing on cost cuts and international growth. Buying Massmart, South Africa's third-largest listed retailer by value, would give Wal-Mart a considerable network in Africa's biggest economy and a foothold in 13 other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
Read More

New SA Brazil submarine cable underway
Submarine cable infrastructure company Alcatel-Lucent says it has been selected by eFive Telecoms, a South African telecommunications company, to build a new submarine cable network linking the west coast of Africa to South America. The system will comprise two trunks, the first one connecting South Africa to Angola and Nigeria, and the second trunk linking Angola to Brazil.
Read More

Brazilian team to assess new power project in Rufiji Basin
The Brazilian government has agreed to send a team of experts to assess the economic viability of the Stiegler’s Gorge power project in Rufiji Basin as a first step before engaging the private sector to development the project with the capacity to produce 2,100 mega watts. This follows an agreement reached between Tanzanian delegation to Brazil, led by the Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation Minister, Mr Bernard Membe and the Brazilian Deputy Secretary in the Ministry of Mines and Energy, Mr Paulo Altaur Pereira Costa.
[url=http://thecitizen.co.tz/news/4-national-news/4339-brazilian-team-to-assess-new-power-project-in-rufiji-basin.html] Read More [/url

Brazilian Mining Giant Buys Into Northern Railway
The Brazilian mining giant Vale announced on Tuesday the purchase of 51 per cent of Mozambique's Northern Corridor Development Company (SDCN). SDCN is the private consortium which is the partner of Mozambique's publicly owned port and rail company (CFM) in the Nacala port and rail systems in the north of the country. The lease on the Nacala systems is held by the Northern Development Corridor (CDN), in which 51 per cent of the shares are owned by SCDN and 49 per cent by CFM.
Read More

Sudan signs $500 mln deals with Brazil-sugar exec
Sudanese companies signed up to $500 million worth of deals with Brazilian agricultural, construction and engineering groups, the head of the African state's biggest sugar company said on Sunday. Africa's largest country, shut out of the U.S. market by harsh sanctions, has been expanding its trade with China, India, Brazil and the Middle East while trying to diversify its economy away from its main export, oil. Mohamed El Mardi, managing director of Kenana Sugar Company, told Reuters that Sudanese companies accompanying a Khartoum government delegation to Brasilia signed scores of initial agreements, many of them funded with Brazilian credit.
Read More

South Africa & Brazil: Furthering South–South Trade
The considerable expansion in South–South trade, especially in the last decade, is seen as an exciting new phenomenon with a number of developing countries among the major trade partners. Trade and investment ties between South Africa and Brazil in particular have been strengthening, underpinned by the reach and influence these two countries enjoy in their respective continents. Despite short-term setbacks due to the global financial crisis, differing comparative advantage in products produced in the two countries provides many opportunities for expansion in two-way and regional trade and investment.
Read More

Bidvest first South African bank to trade Yuan
South African demand for China’s Yuan looks set to reach a new heights following Bidvest Bank’s decision to trade in the currency. Bidvest, the first South African bank to buy and sell the Yuan, said demand for the Chinese currency by South African business and leisure travellers has been growing for some time.
Read More

Blogs, Opinions, Presentations and Publications
The 3rd Event on “Infrastructure: The Foundation for Growth and Poverty Reduction” of China-DAC Study Group Held in Beijing
The 3rd Event on “Infrastructure: The Foundation for Growth and Poverty Reduction” of the China-DAC Study Group was held by IPRCC and the Organisation for Economic Co operation and Development’s Development Assistance Committee (OECD DAC) in Beijing. Mr. Zheng Wenkai, Deputy Director-General of the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development (LGOP) and Mr. Richard Carey, Co-Chairman of the China-DAC Study Group addressed the opening ceremony. Over 100 people attended the meeting, including the comrades from the related commissions and ministries, experts of the research institutes concerned, as well as delegates of African countries and international organizations.
Read More

GIDEON RACHMAN: The realities and myths of Brazilian life under Lula
NEXT week sees the retirement of the man described by US President Barack Obama as “the most popular politician on earth”. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, known simply as Lula, steps down after eight years in office, with an approval rating of about 80%. As a result, the Brazilian presidential election on Sunday will be a celebration of the past as much as a signpost to the future. The almost certain winner will be Lula’s handpicked successor, Dilma Rousseff. Lula has not quite achieved the global renown and secular sainthood of Nelson Mandela. But the Lula and Mandela myths have something in common. In both cases, a moving personal struggle has merged with a compelling national story, turning a single man into a potent symbol of a country’s transformation.
Read More

Three Faces of the New China
“In a blur of headlines over the past few days, Americans have been surprised with brief, seemingly contradictory glimpses of how China is wielding its newfound power” writes David E. Sanger.
Read More

India Catching Up With China in Africa
“While both China and India are attempting to extend their sphere of influence into Africa, Beijing is clearly ahead of New Delhi, not just because it’s economically superior rather because it has pursued an astute realpolitik in its foreign relations” writes Balaji Chandramohan.
Read More

$16bn Worth Of Made In China Smoke And Mirrors - Na Sika No Wo He?
“The news across newswires globally was “China to Pump $16bn into Ghana”. Reuters, Ghanaweb, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, FT, and newspapers across Africa carried the news as if the money was their country-bound. What was common about all the worldwide news was that the original source quoted was the Government of Ghana website. The Mills-Mahama administration certainly saw this as a timely massive dosage of do-much perception purely for domestic consumption, one may speculate. But it was a serious PR mileage for China in Africa, in particular, and across the world. We can only imagine how many African countries are now queuing up to take theirs. Until this, China had been criticized for offering zero-moral loans to countries like Sudan and Zimbabwe. To offer such a mega-deal to Ghana, the ‘star’ of Africa’s democracy, is a huge PR for China” writes Qanawu Gabby.
Read More

MY CONSCIENCE: Why Africa must not be Scared of China
Makwaia wa Kuhenga writes “the propaganda against China most often than not is as if China is poised to grab vast swathes of land in Africa to meet this Asian country’s “hunger” for raw materials and energy! But the real worry of those projecting China in this manner with the intent to scare African countries is that the owners of these multinational media agencies are wary that Africa may diversify its trade relations in favour of China, thus ditching Africa’s former colonial powers, as the third President of this country, Ben Mkapa is quoted as saying at the outset of this perspective.”
Read More

Unpacking China’s economic miracle
How China turned its economy around is regarded as one of the great mysteries of modern times. The president of the People’s University of China, JI Baocheng, reveals how China did it in this paper presented at the University of Zimbabwe on September 21, 2010.
Read More

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Compiled by Sanusha Naidu, research director of Fahamu’s Emerging powers in Africa programme.
* Please send comments to editor@pambazuka.org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Global: India, Africa and food security: Between the summits

Call for papers

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/67386

The widening levels of inequality and poverty globally, coupled with sharp increases in the prices of agricultural products have aggravated the challenges of food security. Moreover, the diversion of land for the production of fuels (bio-fuel) in the face of environmental degradation as a result of climate change has aggravated the food crisis The recent debilitating economic slowdown has adversely impacted the situation on the African continent that is faced with a largely unsuccessful approach to agricultural production and food security and thus heavily reliant on imports and aid to meet its food requirements.
CALL FOR PAPERS
South- South Cooperation

India, Africa and Food Security: Between the Summits

January 10-11, 2011

In his closing remarks during India-Africa Summit in April 2008, the President of United Republic of Tanzania and Chairperson of the African Union Jakaya Mrisho Kikwete said one of the major concerns for Africa is food security and urged India to invest in capacity building in the agricultural sector. He stated, “Currently Africa's agriculture is peasant agriculture, traditional, plagued with low levels of production. If we are able to increase productivity in African agriculture, Africa would not only be able to feed itself, but have huge surpluses to sell to the world. India has the technology and the skills, which if made available to Africa; certainly it will help implement the African Green Revolution” (India- Africa Summit, 2008).

The widening levels of inequality and poverty globally, coupled with sharp increases in the prices of agricultural products have aggravated the challenges of food security. Moreover, the diversion of land for the production of fuels (bio-fuel) in the face of environmental degradation as a result of climate change has aggravated the food crisis. The recent debilitating economic slowdown has adversely impacted the situation on the African continent that is faced with a largely unsuccessful approach to agricultural production and food security and thus heavily reliant on imports and aid to meet its food requirements.

The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) has identified agriculture as a ‘sustainable solution to hunger and poverty in Africa’ and emphasized the role of agriculture as an ‘engine of growth.’ African countries are thereby seeking to become self sufficient in food grain production by 2015. The continent has vast stretches of cultivable lands that can collectively cater to local and global demands. Indian engagement in Africa is significant in this context, particularly in the area of capacity building of the agricultural sector in Africa. The Indian green revolution in 1960s made her a food-surplus country and can be adapted on the continent. Given its good track record India can provide low cost appropriate technology to increase agricultural productivity for food and raw materials in Africa.

The Indian engagement for capacity building in the agriculture and related sectors is perceptible. The 2008 India-Africa summit facilitated this engagement at multi- levels- government to government, public-private partnerships and at the level of civil society and academia. In the aftermath of the summit, India has become a key source of financing and concessional lines of credit for agricultural projects in Africa. Instance may be cited of Tanzania that received a line of credit of US $40 million for financing the export of agricultural equipments in 2008-2009. Building close institutional links and developing a process to share the knowledge in agro-processing and related sectors will also help add value to agricultural products.

While analyzing the current scenario prospects of closer interactions and related challenges too need to be looked at. How can we strengthen genuine attempts to promote South-South Cooperation and avoid neo-colonial manoeuvres for exploiting African resources for India’s own benefits? How can we strengthen a new and different cooperation model for South-South cooperation and avoid repeating the same mistakes of traditional cooperation?


The interregnum period between the 2008 India-Africa Summit and forthcoming 2011 Summit provides us with an opportunity to deliberate on all these issues.

Within this broad remit we expect papers that will explore key areas related to Indian engagement in African agricultural and related sectors. The themes include:

• Indian private companies (case studies)
• Exim Bank’s engagement
• Indian public sector engagement
• Food security, democracy and good governance
• Role of civil society and media
• Role of regional organizations
• Food security and gender
• Food security and conflict
• Importing Green Revolution
• Bio-fuels and Food security
• Need for a legal framework
• Capacity building and technology transfer
• India-Africa South-South Cooperation framework

The conference will be of an interdisciplinary nature.
Empirical case studies are particularly welcome.

Abstracts of about 500 words and a CV of two pages with contact details should be sent as a single word file to: conferenceafrica@gmail.com

Funding: Local hospitality will be provided to all the participants for the duration of the conference. Limited amount of travel grants will be made available on request.

Important dates

Submission of abstracts - 15 October 2010

Notification of acceptance- 17 October 2010

Submission of completed papers – 10 December 2010

All queries should be addressed to Ms. Sudha Tiwari, Research Investigator, at: conferenceafrica@gmail.com

Conference coordinator

Renu Modi (Director), Centre for African Studies
University of Mumbai, India

Zambia: Investigating China's investment in the mining industry

2010-09-27

http://www.eldis.org/go/display&type=Document&id=56136

This briefing from the South African Institute of International Affairs describes some of the challenges facing the efforts of Zambian policymakers to secure sustainable benefits from the exploitation of the country’s mineral resources - which generate about two - thirds of the country’s foreign exchange, yet their contribution to national development remains contested for various reasons. It explores the investor - friendly financial terms set by the Zambian government when the mining sector was privatised, the entry into the sector of Chinese companies, and the strain their distinctive mode of operation has put on the regulatory regime.

Sahel: States co-ordinate fight against al-Qaeda

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/9F30Xv

Algeria, Mali, Mauritania and Niger military chiefs of staff met at the Tamanrasset joint military command on Sunday 26 September to co-ordinate efforts against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). The Algeria gathering coincided with new developments in the case of seven foreigners, including five French nationals, kidnapped in Niger on 16 September.

Cote d'Ivoire: AU mission to push presidential elections

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/dDvz8q

Determined to break the deadlock in the much-delayed presidential elections in Cote d'Ivoire, African diplomats, including members of the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council (PSC), have embarked on a visit to West Africa to meet key political players in the hitherto peaceful nation. According to a statement, issued Monday by the AU, the diplomats are expected in the Ivorian capital from 27 September on a visit that would take them to other parts of the West African region. They are expected to conclude their mission on 1 October.

Kenya: Cabinet backs down on state secrets

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/cCiOSe

A cabinet committee on Tuesday dropped its opposition to allowing the International Criminal Court access to sensitive government documents in its investigations, according to Daily Nation sources. The decision was reached during a three-hour meeting of the committee, which was formed to deal with the ICC. The world court is investigating the killings and other crimes committed during the lawlessness following the last election.

Kenya: MPs named to powerful reform team

2010-09-30

http://www.nation.co.ke/News/politics/-/1064/1020854/-/76g9ot/-/index.html

Political parties on Wednesday forwarded names of MPs to sit on a key committee that oversees the implementation of the new constitution. Party of National Unity (PNU) and the Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) submitted 13 and 14 names respectively to the house business committee, which met for two hours Wednesday evening.

Sudan: Referendum raises expulsion fears

2010-09-28

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90540

Forced expulsions, violent recriminations, mass exodus, peaceful co-existence - just some of the possible outcomes for hundreds of thousands of Southern Sudanese living in the North, and to a lesser extent, vice versa, after a January referendum when the South is likely to vote to transform its semi-autonomy into full independence. 'We are worried for the future, of what happens after the referendum,' said James Jok, a vegetable seller who has lived in the Northern capital Khartoum since fleeing violence in the Southern state of Jonglei over two decades ago. 'I am frightened that if there is independence, we will just be told, "go home",' he added.

Sudan: Referendum voters' registration delayed

2010-09-30

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11435842

Sudan has delayed the registration of voters for January's referendum on secession for the south until November, raising tensions over the timetable. The chairman of the referendum commission said this was to allow for staff training and delivery of forms. Tanzania's former President Benjamin Mkapa, appointed by the UN to encourage a smooth vote, has told the BBC many challenges lie ahead.

Global: Civil society to engage World Bank on transparency and sustainability

2010-09-30

http://www.bicusa.org/en/Article.12157.aspx

The World Bank and IMF will hold their 2010 Annual General Meetings (AGM) and the accompanying Civil Society Policy Forum in Washington, DC, between 6 -10 October. Civil society will be sponsoring and participating in several events on issues ranging from access to information at the World Bank and the importance of contract transparency in extractive projects, to the dual imperative of tackling energy poverty and climate change concerns.

Tanzania: Poll abuse probe almost complete

2010-09-28

http://www.ansa-africa.net/index.php/views/news_view/pccb_poll_abuse_probe_almost_complete/

The Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) is finalising investigations on ten corruption cases involving people who participated in Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CM) opinion polls recently. The PCCB boss, Dr Edward Hoseah, said the cases would be sent to court before the 31 October general election. Speaking during the 15th anniversary of the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC) the PCCB executive director said the PCCB were waiting for more evidence so that legal action could be taken on other allegations.

Africa: Agricultural technologies for climate change in Africa

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/cUsHSr

This paper describes the potential role innovative agricultural practices and technologies can play in climate change mitigation and adaptation and aims to address the question: what policy and institutional changes are needed to encourage the innovation and diffusion of these practices and technologies to developing countries? The authors focus on developing countries in general with some specific references to Africa.

Global: A development perspective on EPA compatibility with the WTO

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/akgHNb

The discussion on World Trade Organisation (WTO) compatibility in the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and ACP countries has so far been very narrowly defined, and largely from the perspective of the European Union. This analytical note from the South Centre presents a matrix providing a comparison of the EPA commitments the EU is asking ACP countries for, and treatment of these issues in the WTO, including where appropriate, the type of flexibilities available for the different developing country groupings at the WTO.

Global: Financial institution reform may short-change developing countries

2010-09-30

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-566696

Much as developing countries have often taken the approach that 'no deal is better than a bad deal' at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), a strong joint negotiating position would leverage larger gains in the International Monetary Fund (IMF) governance reform process due to be concluded by the end of 2010. Possible gains from a tough negotiating position include a rewriting of the IMF quota formula, double majority voting, more developing country seats on the board, and an end to the US veto.

Global: Is the World Bank an impediment to climate finance?

2010-09-30

http://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-566697

Proposals to place climate funds at an institution like the World Bank, over which developing countries have limited ownership, have undermined the process of negotiations through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). However, G77 countries have stood against the World Bank and have firmly supported placing climate finance under the UN, despite a diversity of positions. This briefing note from the Bretton Woods Project examines concerns that a significant role for the World Bank in disbursal or management of funds could limit developing country calls for direct access, recreate damaging donor-recipient aid dynamics, and hinder effectiveness.

Africa: New cause suggested for high African HIV rates

2010-09-30

http://www.scidev.net/en/news/new-cause-suggested-for-high-african-hiv-rates.html

Malaria, and other common African infections, may make women more susceptible to HIV/AIDS than they are in the developed world, according to a study that may help solve the mystery of the vastly different infection rates around the globe. Researchers who compared immune cells in the genital tracts of women in Kenya and the United States, found that Kenyan women had more 'activated' cells, which are more vulnerable to attack by HIV. Cells can become activated as a reaction to infection.

Africa: Science and funding stymie HIV vaccine research

2010-09-27

http://www.IRINnews.org/report.aspx?ReportID=90590

There have been unprecedented developments in HIV vaccine research recently, but the field is threatened by the global downturn in funding for HIV/AIDS. Ahead of the AIDS Vaccine 2010 conference starting in Atlanta on 28 September, IRIN/PlusNews spoke to Mitchell Warren, executive director of the AIDS Vaccine Advocacy Coalition, about the future of HIV vaccine research and development.

Cameroon: Government under fire as cholera epidemic rages

2010-09-30

http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=53005

The death toll from a cholera epidemic in Cameroon's North and Far North provinces stands at 420, according to public health minister André Mama Fouda. The outbreak of the waterborne disease throws an unwelcome spotlight on inadequate access to clean water and sanitation, particularly in the country’s rural north.

Global: Battling HIV/Aids with SMS quizzes, chats and micro-blogging

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/bWszvt

Over the past decade there has been rapid growth in mobile phone penetration worldwide, making the mobile phone the most ubiquitous communications device in the world. This commercial growth has also opened up a tremendous opportunity for organisations seeking to provide life-changing services and provide useful information to citizens even in low-income and remote communities. One particular area that has seen a number of innovations, specifically in leveraging mobile social media, is HIV/AIDS awareness, public education and counseling.

Global: Despite progress, universal access to HIV medicine still out of reach

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/cdJrF6

WHO, UNICEF and UNAIDS have launched the report 'Towards universal access', the fourth report tracking progress made towards achieving universal access to HIV prevention, treatment and care by the end of 2010. Despite accomplishments, the report shows that the universal access target will not be met. Two-thirds of those needing access to treatment are still not receiving it, and women are the most impacted by this burden.

South Africa: Fix health system before national insurance plan, say experts

2010-09-27

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-09-27-fix-health-system-first

The ANC's discussion document on a national health insurance (NHI), unveiled at the party's national general council last week, contains few details on how to fix the embattled public health system and little in the way of innovation, experts complained last week. To ensure that an NHI brought better access to healthcare, there would need to be a concurrent improvement in the reach and quality of healthcare services and an increase in the number of facilities and staff in the sector.

South Africa: Health minister tackles strikes and health sector debate

2010-09-30

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032950

It has been 18 months at the helm of one of South Africa’s toughest cabinet portfolios and already Dr Aaron Motsoaledi has endured a disgruntled doctors’ strike, a crippling public sector work stoppage, the untimely death of his deputy minister and complex debates on a National Health Insurance initiative, which is really the critical transformation of the health system. However, Motsoaledi is proving to be a survivor and a tactician who is determined to turn the health sector around.

Swaziland: A dialogue to defeat AIDS

2010-09-30

http://www.plusnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=90625

Communities in Swaziland are coming together as never before to tackle the HIV/AIDS epidemic that has so deeply affected them. 'We will defeat AIDS, we the women of this village!' chant a group of older Swazi women wearing voluminous black skirts and bright red wraps in Ka-Vikizuula, near the Mozambique border in the east of the country.

West Africa: Growing food for nutrition

2010-09-28

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90601

Animal production - that is nutrition.” The statement by Victoria Tsekpo of Ghana’s Food and Agriculture Ministry summed up one of the themes that emerged at a nutrition forum of the Economic Community of West African States – helping nutrition find its place in the agriculture sector. Health, nutrition and agriculture experts from the 15 ECOWAS countries said nutrition usually gains attention only in the context of crisis and emergency response, but it should be integral to agricultural and development programmes if countries are to pre-empt child malnutrition.

Africa: Continent urged to catch up on early childhood education

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/cCFPgC

African governments have been called upon to show the political will and creativity to make up for the delay in early childhood education and care. According to statistics presented at the opening of the first world conference on childhood education and care, only 15 per cent of children have access to pre-school education in sub-Saharan Africa. However, 'hope to make up for this delay is quite possible,' said Hamidou Boukary, senior specialist at the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), who is taking part in the meeting in Moscow, Russia.

Rwanda: Study on lived realities of same sex women in Rwanda

2010-09-30

http://ilga.org/ilga/en/article/mDry5G81vh

Research carried out in Gasabo district of the central province of Rwanda with a focus on the lived experience of lesbians living in Kigali has concluded that there is a need for more sensitisation, lobbying and advocacy to better the livelihood and well-being of the LGBTI community. The research was an initiative to recognise the problems faced by lesbians after several attacks and arrests.

South Africa: Justice for Khayelitsha

2010-09-30

http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20032945

Health and Human rights activists have demanded that the next court date set for the trial of Zoliswa Nkonyana’s alleged killers be the last one. According to the activists, including the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Free Gender and the Social Justice Coalition, the trial has been delayed more than 27 times since Nkonyana’s murder four years ago. Nknonyana, who lived in Khayelitsha, was attacked and stabbed to death because she was a lesbian.

South Africa: Socio-economic problems behind xenophobia

2010-09-30

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-09-29-un-socioeconomic-problems-behind-xenophobia

Socio-economic problems are the major cause of xenophobia in South Africa, the United Nations refugee agency said in Johannesburg on Wednesday. 'No society is xenophobic by nature, these attacks were caused by lack of development,' UN High Commissioner for Refugees deputy regional representative Sergio Calle Norena told the Congress of South Africa Trade Unions' summit on xenophobia.

Africa: Groundwater depletion rate accelerating worldwide

2010-09-27

http://www.agu.org/news/press/pr_archives/2010/2010-30.shtml

In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use. These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies. Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 per cent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find.

Africa: In search of farming solutions to climate change

2010-09-30

http://ipsnews.net/newsTVE.asp?idnews=53006

In the semi-arid Laikipia district of Kenya’s Rift Valley province, research scientist Sarah Ogalleh Ayeri travels from one village to another, documenting methods used by peasant farmers as they attempt to adapt to changing climatic conditions. She is a research scientist at the Centre for Training and Integrated Research for Arid and Semi-Arid Lands Development and her study is titled 'Lessons from Farmers: localised adaptations in agriculture as building blocks to climate change adaptation in Laikipia district'.

Africa: Oil spills, holding governments and multinationals to account

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/95zIPc

Five million barrels of oil reportedly spilled into the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. For both environmentalists and people whose livelihood depends on the fishing and tourism potential of the Gulf, this was a grim disaster. But if Americans with all the sophisticated necessary gadgets could not contain the oil spill, what is the fate of developing economies of Africa, especially the Gulf of Guinea where oil discoveries are mostly offshore? Indeed, recent discoveries in Sierra Leone, Ghana and Angola are all offshore, writes Edem Torkornoo for TWN Africa.

Mozambique: Controversy over planned aluminum plant filter shutdown

2010-09-28

http://www.mg.co.za/article/2010-09-25-bhp-billiton-accused-of-restricting-access-to-documents

BHP Billiton was guilty of double standards by complicating public access to documents about a planned filter shutdown at its Mozambican aluminium smelter, an activist said on Friday. “I don't understand how a corporate like BHP can do one thing in South Africa and across the border it does something completely different,” said environmental activist Sandy Camminga.

South Africa: Government says it has a plan on acid mine drainage

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/bx8YOp

The acid mine drainage problem was being closely monitored and was not an 'imminent horror show', the Department of Mineral Resources' chief director of mining and mineral policy, Ntokozo Ngcwabe, told MPs yesterday. Concern over the threatened decanting of acid mine drainage into the water table in the Witwatersrand basin has caused mounting concern. Options for dealing with the problem included the construction of canals, controlled points for decanting, and water treatment using various technologies. The department would soon decide on the preferred solutions, which would be implemented in phases over the next 10 years, with the initial focus on the high - risk areas.

Africa: Focus on land grabs

2010-09-27

http://www.eldis.org/go/display&type=Document&id=56335

For many millions in the developing world, land is central to livelihoods, food security, even identity. It is not surprising, then, that a recent wave of large - scale land acquisitions in poorer countries has sparked a major debate. This brief from the International Institute for Environment and Development lays out key trends, drivers and main features of the deal, with a focus on Africa.

Madagascar: Peasants at the mercy of foreign investors

2010-09-28

http://farmlandgrab.org/15777

Although 70 per cent of Madagascar’s 20 million people are peasants, the country depends on imports for 20 per cent of its staple food, rice. Also, 30 percent of Madagascar’s land can be used for agriculture, but only 4 percent of the land is actually farmed. The government has neither the budget nor any effective strategies to address these problems. “All we do is hope for investments and technology transfers from overseas,” says Rakotoson Philibert, secretary-general of the Ministry of Agriculture.

Global: Campaigning for food rights

2010-09-28

http://www.fian.org/news/press-releases/10-for-access-to-justice-for-all-human-rights

The Optional protocol to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (OP-ICESCR) adopted by the General Assembly of the UN on 10 December of 2008 and opened to signatures and ratifications on 24 September 2009 enables new channels for the justiciability of the right to food at international level. The OP will enter in to force three months after its 10th ratification. On the first anniversary of the opening to signature and ratification, the NGO Coalition working for the ratification of the OP has launched a statement promoting the 10 first ratifications until 10 December.

Global: Food commodities speculation and food price crises

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/cEJDHc

On the eve of an emergency FAO-meeting devoted to instability in agricultural markets, the UN Special Rapporteur has published a study analysing the impact of speculation on food price volatility. The study shows that a significant portion of the increases in price and volatility of essential food commodities can only be explained by the emergence of a speculative bubble. In particular, there is a reason to believe that a significant role is played by the entry into markets for derivatives based on food commodities of large, powerful institutional investors such as hedge funds, pension funds and investment banks, all of which are generally unconcerned with agricultural market fundamentals.

Global: Vandana Shiva on MDGs and food security

2010-09-30

http://www.sacsis.org.za/site/article/277.19

Much of an MDG discussion hosted by Al Jazeera's Inside Story focuses on increasing global food security and eradicating hunger. Vandana Shiva, Indian environmental activist and author, argues in this article and video that Brazil's programme is amazing because it has been an initiative of government to allow communities to become 'food self reliant' and 'food self secure'.

Mozambique: Call for reconstruction of national food economies

National Union of Peasant Farmers statement

2010-09-28

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/food/67309

On 1 - 2 September, in popular neighbourhoods of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and in the town of Matola, in the industrial belt of Maputo, there were extremely violent demonstrations and looting. UNAC, the National Union of Peasant Farmers, condemns both the use of blind repression and lethal force on the part of the forces of law and order, and the unjustifiable destruction by some elements of the population of buildings, vehicles , filling stations and other structures.
Statement concerning the peoples’ demonstration on 1st and 2nd September 2010
National Union of Peasant Farmers

NO TO VIOLENCE! NO TO REPRESSION! YES TO FOOD SOVREIGNTY!
On 1st and 2nd September, in popular neighbourhoods of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, and in the town of Matola, in the industrial belt of Maputo, there were extremely violent demonstrations and looting of both public and private property by some elements of the population. There was also very violent police aggression, with the regrettable deaths by shooting of a confirmed 13 people, 2 of whom were children.
UNAC, the National Union of Peasant Farmers, condemns both the use of blind repression and lethal force on the part of the forces of law and order, and the unjustifiable destruction by some elements of the population of buildings, vehicles , filling stations and other structures. Furthermore, UNAC profoundly condemns the death of innocent victims, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. We urge that, in a country where “the rule of law” is established, this situation is NEVER AGAIN repeated.
One of the causes of the popular uprisings is the rise in the price of bread – almost simultaneous with the increase in tariffs of electricity , drinking water and fuel (these last two have risen regularly in recent months). Tension has been mounting for months due to the increase in the cost of living. We lament the fact that, once again, the authorities have not recognised that the demonstrations last week took place.
Although Mozambique is not a producer of wheat, bread has become a daily staple food of thousands of city-dwelling families in the country. Wheat, together with other foodstuffs, is quoted on the world stock markets, and has a very volatile value, subject to speculation, which varies according to fluctuations in the markets. In this case, the rise in the price of wheat on a worldwide scale has been caused by, among other reasons, the reduction in supply from Russia, which has suffered in recent weeks from massive fires which have affected the cereal-producing areas. How is it that forest fires in Russia can have such disastrous consequences for African populations, particularly the people of Mozambique?
If we look at what has recently happened in our country (which will probably be repeated, not just in Mozambique, but in other African countries too, as happened in 2008 for the same reasons, the so-called “hunger riots” following the rise in price for rice in various parts of the continent), it is obvious that “there is something rotten in the kingdom of globalisation”. This is highlighted in the fact that once more the so-called “third world” countries are the victims of the crises that the “first world” has caused. Thus our strong doubts whether this really is the model that our “poor countries” should follow.
We at UNAC restate today what we have demanded both at national and international level through Via Campesina: our governments – and the government of Mozambique in particular – must carry out political commitments in the long term, in order to reconstruct national food economies. The donor countries have very significant impact on the country’s budget. We call on the governments of these countries to honour the agreements of Paris and Accra concerning respect for national sovereignty in setting the agenda of our country.
Priority should be given to domestic food production in order to minimize dependence on the international market. Farmers and smallholders should be encouraged, by means of better prices for their products and stable markets, to produce foodstuffs for themselves, for their communities and for their towns. This will mean more investment in family-run agriculture and in small and medium sized businesses to cope with the internal market, together with taking steps to restrict cheap imports of foodstuffs.
UNAC wishes to insist on the term “peasant farming” as opposed to “large scale agriculture for export”: peasant farming means that it is based around the rural people, who play a social and cultural role and fight for the production of quality, organic food which suits local food habits and customs, free from speculation on world markets.
UNAC insists on the need to look on peasant farming in a more positive light. Neoliberal politics have gradually been influencing some of us, so we think “peasant farmers only produce enough for subsistence”, so “ they are not going to help us make the qualitative leap to development, and what we need is for agriculture to become more and more of a business”. This is where the paranoia of large scale agriculture or “agribusiness” comes from. Various examples in defence of this argument have been presented to us, which we therefore must follow. This is what is disseminated and implemented in so-called developed countries and others.
What is happening is that one food crisis follows another in a regular pattern, and they are moving in our direction. It is true, however, that the countries which follow this model produce far more than they need, but a large part of their population goes hungry. One commonly cited example of this model is that of our neighbour South Africa. It is common knowledge, however, that millions of people in this country go hungry, even worse in some cases than in our rural areas. And this is where the problem lies.
With the family sector benefitting from incentives and with politics leading to growth – access to credit, land, water, technology, all the infrastructure needed for expansion – they can produce a great deal more, and also, from the outset, contribute to distribution on a large scale. Production and distribution are closely linked. The food producers do not need to be business speculators in order to make a large contribution to sustainable development and Food Sovreignty of the people. This must be thoroughly analysed, as the biggest mistake would be not to learn from mistakes.
What happened last week in Mozambique confirms our view of the struggle: food is not just any commodity. It is unacceptable that a mostly poor population eat or don’t eat at the mercy of world markets, when a country like Mozambique has more than sufficient land and resources to ensure food for both the towns and countryside.
We welcome the measures announced by the government of Mozambique on 7th September, to curb price rises and calm the mood. However, we ask the government to move forward with sustainable measures in the long term so that those measures already taken are not merely palliative, necessitating a complete review of our country’s food system. We also ask the government to improve the mechanisms of collaboration with peasant farmers in government plans for the future.
As UNAC, our duty and our mission is to continue to fight so that all our families in Mozambique, rural and urban, in short, our whole country, achieve Food Sovreignty.
NO TO VIOLENCE! NO TO REPRESSION! YES TO FOOD SOVREIGNTY!
United Peasant Farmers Always Win

Maputo 8th September 2010
UNAC
Rua Valentim Siti, 30, R/C,
Maputo
Tel: 21 306 737
Email: unac.adv@gmail.com

Mozambique: Reflections on the bread riots

2010-09-30

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/09/21/mozambique-bread-riots-reflections/

Food analyst Raj Patel, on his blog, featured the Mozambican Farmers Union's (UNAC) statement on the Maputo protests, in which the social movement stated 'there's something rotten in the kingdom of globalization'. UNAC focuses on the need to concentrate on internal food production and marketing, in what it refers to as “food sovereignty” approach. For a comprehensive round-up of what bloggers and other commentators said in the aftermath of the Mozambique food riots, read the Global Voices article available through the link provided.

DRC: Okapi Radio, winner of 'Free Media Pioneer' awards

2010-09-30

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/09/26/d-r-of-congo-okapi-radio-winner-of-free-media-pioneer-awards/

On 9 September 2010, the International Press Institute (IPI) granted the 'Free Media Pioneer' to Okapi Radio, the UN radio in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The radio has been broadcasting since 2002 in an effort to contribute to the peace building process in the country.

Egypt: The Mubarak photo contest

2010-09-30

http://globalvoicesonline.org/2010/09/28/egypt-the-inevitable-mubarak-photshopping-contest/

As the 2010 peace talks involving leaders from Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, and the United States–began, Egyptian bloggers were already expressing skepticism about their outcome. The Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram saw things differently using Photoshop to place Mubarak front and center in the lineup of heads of state. As a result of Al Ahram's creative reporting, bloggers, both in Egypt and abroad, have taken the opportunity to demonstrate their artistic skills, using Photoshop to further doctor the image.

Global: Googling the censors

2010-09-28

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/opinion/28tue4.html?_r=1

Four months ago, Google unveiled a tool that allows users to monitor the requests received from governments to take down material or report data on the users of their search engine and other services. This month, it released another tool that will expose less overt attempts by governments to curtail its various services, including YouTube and Gmail.

Uganda: Call for freedom of expression to be protected

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/9KLXYK

ARTICLE 19 and four other international freedom of expression organisations are calling on the government of Uganda to respect its international and constitutional obligations to safeguard freedom of expression. The International Freedom of Expression Partnership four - day mission was undertaken in September 2010 to assess the deteriorating freedom of expression situation in the country, in the wake of the killing of two journalists and in the light of forthcoming elections in 2011.

Uganda: Implement information law, activists tell government

2010-09-28

http://www.ansa-africa.net/index.php/views/news_view/implement_information_law_activists_tell_government/

Uganda joined the rest of the world to celebrate Access to Information Day with a call on the government to show commitment and implement the Access to Information Act, passed by Parliament five years ago. The activists were also asking the government to either repeal or amend existing laws that are a draw-back on the right of access to information. The say the negative laws include the Oath of Secrecy Act and the Official Secrets Act, whose provisions are at variance with the Access to Information Act and Article 41 of the Constitution.

Africa: Renewed calls for African security council representation

2010-09-28

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36193

Top officials from three African nations have called for the continent to have a permanent representative on the Security Council, saying it was a travesty that the region that comprises so much of the body’s work does not have a permanent place.

Africa: The challenge of civilian protection for peacekeepers

2010-09-30

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90615

The protection of civilians in conflict situations is a key challenge for blue berets across the world, but what would it take for peacekeepers deployed in Africa to do better? This question has gained added urgency from the mass rape by armed rebels over four days in late July and early August 2010 of more than 300 civilians in villages in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo that lie close to a UN peacekeepers’ base. According to Paul Williams, associate professor at George Washington University, 'For many, civilian protection is the very essence of peacekeeping. But protecting civilians in Africa’s war zones raises huge challenges.'

Africa: UN and AU launch joint peace task force

2010-09-28

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=36192

The United Nations and the African Union have launched a joint task force on peace and security as the two organisations continue to step up their cooperation in conflict prevention, peacekeeping and peacebuilding across the continent. The Joint Task Force, launched at UN Headquarters in New York by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and AU Commission Chairperson Jean Ping, will meet twice a year at the senior level to review immediate and long-term strategic issues.

Burundi: Killings spread fear, disrupt livelihoods

2010-09-28

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportID=90580

Several mysterious killings in Burundi, where memories of civil war are still fresh, have spread fear and disrupted livelihoods, while authorities have sought to play down talk of renewed armed insurrection, blaming some of the deaths on bandits. Tension has been mounting in Burundi since several elections were held earlier this year. The presidential poll was boycotted by most of the opposition amid claims of fraud in the local polls.

Nigeria: Gunmen hijack Nigerian school bus

2010-09-30

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2010/09/2010928123413605689.html

Gunmen in Nigeria have hijacked a school bus carrying 15 children and demanded a $130,000 ransom for their release. The kidnapping, which occurred on Monday, is believed to be the first in Abia state in Nigeria's oil-rich south, according to Geofrey Ogbonna, a police spokesman.

Nigeria: Rains delay decontamination of soil in Nigerian state

2010-09-28

http://bit.ly/aNTH1y

The ongoing rainy season has delayed efforts to decontaminate the six villages widely affected by lead poisoning resulting from illegal gold mining activities in Nigeria's northern Zamfara state, the state government said. Over 200 children have died from the lead poisoning in the state, forcing the federal government to ban illegal mining activities there.

Global: Google data visualisations make global stats funky

2010-09-27

http://www.google.com/publicdata/home

The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages.

South Africa: Solar power park planned

2010-09-30

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11435552

South Africa plans to invest in a solar power energy park in order to help meet increasing electricity demands, the department of energy has announced. The solar park will be built in the Northern Cape Province and generate 5,000 megawatts of energy, about 11 per cent of the country's current power capacity.

Africa: Special report on the ICC review conference

2010-09-30

http://iwpr.net/sites/default/files/special_report_icc_review_conference.pdf

From May 31 to June 11, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR) attended the first-ever review conference of the Rome Statue, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. At the conference, IWPR journalists had the opportunity to hear the concerns of the victims who suffered at the hands of the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, Uganda’s notorious rebel group. These concerns prompted IWPR-Netherlands to produce a series of special reports to coincide with the conference. The articles in 'ICC Review Conference: Taking Stock on the Ground' give a voice to the victims of the LRA and look at the different aspects of international justice that were discussed during the review conference through the eyes of the people that the court was set up to serve.

Global: Right to food quarterly

Vol.5 No.1

2010-09-28

http://www.fian.org/resources/documents/categoria-3/right-to-food-quarterly-vol-5-no.1

From the Contents:
* The land is not for sale!
* Mission to the World Trade Organisation
* The impacts of climate change on human rights
* The CFS - platform for global governance of food security
* Kenya: Landmark decision on indigenous people's rights
* India's National Food Security Act: prospects and challenges
* Right to Food and Nutrition Watch 2010
* New publications

Global: The global water crisis

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/bYM9vO

A new issue of the South Bulletin focuses on the growing shortage of water which has emerged as one of the major crises of our times. A third of the world's people face water scarcity and by 2025 two-thirds of people may suffer water stress. This crisis should be at the top of the global agenda, says the South Centre.

Africa: Millions from Trust Africa for research on small enterprises

2010-09-30

http://bit.ly/9MBnm2

Over the next three years, TrustAfrica will provide US$2.7 million for pioneering research on ways to stimulate the development of small and medium - sized enterprises and ensure that prosperity is broadly shared. 'Africa has achieved remarkable economic growth over the last two decades, outpacing most other regions in the world,' said Dr. Akwasi Aidoo, TrustAfrica’s executive director. 'But the benefits of greater investment and higher returns have not been reaching large segments of the population.'

Gambling on food

26 October 2010, London

2010-09-28

http://www.wdm.org.uk/events/gambling-food

Big investment banks are making a killing out of reckless speculation, with disastrous consequences for the lives of poor people around the world. Come and find out how, and what we’re going to do to stop them.

Global: International Media Law Moot Court Competition

2010-09-28

http://pricemootcourt.socleg.ox.ac.uk/

The Programme in Comparative Media Law and Policy (PCMLP) at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford is pleased to announce that registration has opened for the 2011 Monroe E. Price International Media Law Moot Court Competition. The moot court competition seeks to expand interest and expertise in media law and policy amongst students by giving them an opportunity to interact with leading academics, policy makers and industry players, both from the UK and abroad. This year's problem bridges issues of technology, content and regulation to expose students to cutting-edge areas of media law.

Third Guy Mhone international conference

Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, 20 - 21 December 2010

2010-09-30

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/67352

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the third Guy Mhone International Conference, under the auspices of its Economic Research Programme. The theme of this year’s conference is The Renaissance of African Economies.
CODESRIA
The Guy Mhone Conference ‏on Development
Theme: The Renaissance of African Economies
Venue: Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
Date: 20 - 21 December, 2010

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the third Guy Mhone International Conference, under the auspices of its Economic Research Programme. The theme of this year’s conference is The Renaissance of African Economies. The conference is being convened in the context of the global economic crisis which should prompt a critical analysis of all aspects of socioeconomic development in Africa. The Guy Mhone Conference on Development is organised annually in honour of one of the most distinguished African development thinkers and former member of CODESRIA’s Executive Committee, the late Professor Guy Mhone. This year’s edition of the conference will be held from 20 to 21 December, 2010 in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Over the past decade, the world economy has experienced many ups and downs. Periods of recession were followed by periods of economic recovery; but while conditions for genuine economic recovery are not yet met, the evolution of the world GDP declined in the second half of 2010. The growth rate of the US dollar is expected to be 2.5% in 2010 and 2% in 2011, following a contraction of similar magnitude in 2009. Similarly, the growth rate would be 1.8% and 1.3% for the euro zone after a -3.9% drop in 2009.

Similarly, African economies were not indifferent to these changes. Periods of growth in crisis were followed by periods of substantial economic growth. After years of pessimism about growth prospects in Africa, optimism is taking over, although the latest post-crisis developments seem to temper this optimism. Growth resumed in most African economies, with encouraging results being recorded in various African countries and increased investment in the sector of telecommunications, infrastructure and financial services benefiting most of the economies. Despite the low penetration rate of new technologies, innovative applications of ICT were identified in areas as diverse as electronic banking, payment systems, agriculture, trade, administration and education. Many of these tools help to improve the business environment by contributing to the development of markets, reducing barriers related to infrastructure and lowering costs. The continued favourable macroeconomic policies, the strengthened judiciary and the improved transparency of national accounts of most countries have led to increased confidence of investors in the continent. Politically, the stability which occurred in many countries, following the decline of social tensions and increased investment in the consolidation of democracy, also contributed to creating an environment that is more conducive to investment.

These positive developments notwithstanding, it is necessary to interrogate the sustainability of this evolution. What are the prospects for the emergence of a number of African economies that will steadily practise appropriate economic policies? Can countries like South Africa, Botswana and Mauritius be driving forces for other poorer countries? Are we faced with a genuine revival of African economies, or is it rather simple economic changes? Do they allow successful cases to speak of a genuine economic renaissance, like political and cultural renaissance? What are the links between them? What were the factors of the growth recorded in many economies on the continent?

As a way of creating an avenue where these and other questions can be answered, CODESRIA has dedicated the 2010 edition of the Guy Mhone Conference on Development to the ‘renaissance and revival of African economies’. Many studies have attempted to explain the factors of this growth. For the most part however, these explanations have failed to go beyond the neoclassical standpoints, while the current dynamics require innovative explanations that could not only provide more convincing working hypotheses but also create new analytical prospects more capable of understanding and responding to major challenges facing Africa.

In terms of major economic groupings, Africa is part of the least developed countries (LDCs), with a population weight of about 18.2%, but with a contribution to world production at the rate of only about 0.5%. The economic and political future of the continent is yet a major challenge for the entire world, as its economic development is a sine qua non for world peace in the years to come. The place of Africa in the global community is defined by the fact that the continent is an important reserve of resources that can serve the entire humanity. Africa is one of the continents most capable of providing the raw materials needed by both developed and emerging countries, as could be seen in the increasing quest for African raw materials by countries like China and India. Thus, a new door of economic opportunity is opened to African countries, but this also implies risks that should not be overlooked. As a result, mismanagement of natural resources in Africa can not only lead to their exhaustion by foreign powers, but also constitute a danger to future generations, not to mention the negative impact on environment and climate.

While the effects of these imbalances are likely to be felt in the long run, there are disturbances that have more immediate impacts on African economies. Among these, the most striking fact is undoubtedly the economic crisis that has been affecting the economies of developed countries since 2008, with its effects on the steady growth of several African countries. Between 2003 and 2008, majority of African economies recorded an average growth rate of 5%. However, because of the decline in economic activities, the continent could only record a 2.8% growth in 2009, compared to 5.7% projected prior to the crisis. Thus, the crisis made Africa lose 120 dollars in GDP per capita. According to estimates by the African Development Bank (AfDB), to catch up and achieve its development goals by 2015, the continent needs 50 billion dollars additional aid per year. Nevertheless, the continent's economies are less harmed than anticipated and the revival seems to be faster on the continent than elsewhere in the world. The forecasts for 2010 and 2011 are rather optimistic, with growth rates ranging from 4.5% in 2010 and 5.2% in 2011, against 4.2% and 4.3% respectively in the rest of the world. Africa can do much better; but to achieve this, it must mobilise more domestic resources to fund its development.

In a long-term perspective, it must be emphasised that structural problems are persistent in most countries of the continent. Despite the steady growth, poverty is still prevailent on the continent, the illiteracy rate is the highest in the world and youth unemployment rate is tending towards the extreme. Moreover, the level of economic development of the continent’s different countries remains very uneven. The economy is still deeply based on agriculture, with 65-85% of African populations active in the agricultural sector, but the added value of products derived from agriculture is comparatively very low. Furthermore, there is yet no integration between African economies. Despite the progress in this area in recent years, there is still a long way to go. In this unfavourable context, Africa should show a deep imagination and ensure that the experiences of the past serve as a lesson and an inspiration towards building a brighter future. In this sense, the conference aims to identify the forces which had, in the past, allowed African societies to cope with the challenges they faced, and consider them in its emancipation and economic revival project, yet without neglecting the new situation imposed by globalisation. To this end, extensive research works and refined analyses are necessary in order to arrive at a better understanding of the situation and come up with a brighter outlook for African economies.

During the two-day conference, researchers will be invited to take stock of the evolution of African economies over the past decade and to identify trends for years to come. In doing so, discussions will focus on challenges and structural constraints that the continent will face in the coming decade in particular. A clear vision and critical analyses are encouraged so as to challenge classical theories and analyses promoted by international financial institutions, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the majority of developed countries.

The themes to be covered by the conference include:
1. Competitiveness and revival of African economies;
2. African economies in the face of emerging countries;
3. World trade and the revival of African economies;
4. African agriculture in the face of new challenges posed by the world trade;
5. The industrialisation process in Africa in the face of the challenges of the global economy;
6. The political dimension of the African renaissance and economic reforms;
7. International economic institutions and the revival of African economies;
8. Regional integration and revival of African economies;
9. The renaissance and the revival of African economies in the context of globalisation;
10. Global economic governance and revival of African economies;
11. Pan-Africanism and renaissance of African economies ;
12. The role and place of trade and investment in the renaissance and revival of African economies;
13. The Diaspora and the renaissance and revival of African economies ;
14. Migrations and revival of African economies ;
15. NEPAD and the renaissance of African economies;
16. The revival of African economies and climate change.

Researchers who wish to participate in the conference are hereby invited to submit abstracts of their papers to CODESRIA not later than 30 September, 2010. If selected, the full papers developed from the abstracts must reach CODESRIA not later than 15 November, 2010. Authors of papers selected by an independent selection committee will be informed of the outcome of the process not later than 20 November, 2010 together with information on travel and accommodation.
All abstracts and papers should be sent to:

The Guy Mhone Conference on Development
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA)
BP 3304, CP 18524, Dakar, Senegal.
Tel: +221 33 825 98 22/23
Fax: +221 33 824 12 89
E-mail: conference.development@codesria.sn
Website: http://www.codesria.org/

South Africa: Professor in human rights, director of Centre on Human Rights in Conflict

2010-09-30

http://jobs.uel.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=074A2010

The University of East London's School of Law is seeking to appoint an international scholar with an outstanding research record to lead our research in the area of international and comparative human rights and to become Director of the Centre on Human Rights in Conflict

Fahamu