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Nigeria: A smouldering rage

Nnimmo Bassey

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79195

cc FCA02The crippling strike called by labour organisations may have ended, but Nigeria is not yet at ease. The arguments the government offered for removal of the fuel subsidy ring hollow and the people are not convinced.

The nation-wide strike in Nigeria against a petrol price hike ended under rather curious circumstances. The strike called by labour unions had crippled the economy safe for the fact that the oil pipelines continued to deliver their load. Labour leaders and civil society coalitions entered into dialogue with a government that favours monologues. It was not surprising that the game was over before the labour leaders knew it.

Nigerians woke up at the dawn of the New Year to learn that the price of a litre of petrol had been jerked up by about 120 per cent. Petrol now costs 141 Naira and 200 Naira (about $1) per litre in an economy where the minimum wage is 18,000 Naira (about $110). We note that even before organised labour called out workers on strike, citizens had already hit the streets in protest against what they see as an insensitive and unacceptable action by the government.

As negotiations went on, labour insisted that government had to revert to the pre-New Year pump price of 65 Naira per litre. As the street protests grew in size and creativity, and as government glaringly lost in the communications battle, they resorted to intimidation and use of brute force, sending the military to the streets of Lagos and elsewhere, against peaceful protesters. Labour suspended the street rallies and protests in the early hours of Monday 16 January. By 7 o'clock that morning the president addressed the nation using a script that was already circulating in social media up to four hours before then. With that speech he pegged petrol price at 97 Naira a litre. No reasons given as to how that figure was arrived at. Five hours later an obviously harried labour leadership called off the strike claiming that this was after wide consultations with their constituents as well as civil society. As it happened, civil society groups could not locate anyone who agreed that he or she was consulted. Thus the underpinning forces that resolved the gridlock are yet to be known.

Analysts are busy putting pieces together and trying to see who won or lost this episode in the long struggle for socio-economic justice in Nigeria. We will not do that here. We will rather examine some of the arguments canvassed by government agents for the removal of the so-called subsidy, which many people believe does not exist in the first place.

The response of government to the massive uprising was quite worrisome. First of all the government presented a front that suggested that there were no options to the move they had made. The speeches by the president and the many presentations by the governor of the Nigerian Central Bank, the ministers of labour/productivity, petroleum resources, information and finance, remain persistently paternalistic and convey the message that they do not hear the dissensions across the nation. In moments of dramatic expression, the Minister of Petroleum Resources demonstrated on television how the government’s hands were tied on the matter of fighting the rot in the petroleum sector. It would be interesting to know why the government allows itself to be bound hand and foot by thieves!

The major anchor on which the petrol price hike has been tethered is that government is spending a disproportionate amount of the national wealth on subsidising the importation and circulation of petrol in Nigeria. The number one reason given by the minister of finance in her brief on fuel subsidy is that from 2006 to 2011, about N3.7 trillion was spent on subsidy and that a whopping N1.348 trillion was spent in the first ten months of 2011. She projected that the figure would reach N1.436 trillion by the end of that year. This figure is said to be 118 per cent of the nation’s capital budget. New information now claims that the N1.348 trillion figure includes subsidies paid for kerosene. This was not said when government embarked on their town hall monologues and copious advertisements that regularly wrapped front pages of newspapers and magazines.

The debates that ran alongside the protests showed that a huge chunk of what was paid as subsidy in 2011 was actually ‘arrears from 2009 and 2010.’ Veteran activist lawyer Femi Falana raised this issue on a recent television debate (11/01/2012) and posed the critical question about the way statistics were used by government in attempts to get Nigerians to accept the huge leap in the pump price of petrol. The government has failed on this elementary point to use the figure of what was actually spent subsidising the cost of petrol consumed in Nigeria in 2011. They prefer the bogus figure that includes arrears for 2009 and 2010.

Nigerians are beginning to believe that the size of the cash doled out in “subsidies” in 2011 can be explained by the fact that this happened in an election year.

Nigerians are also told that the only way to stop the smuggling of petroleum products is to get Nigerians to pay a higher price for the product. Really? One official even said that Nigeria’s boarder is so vast that it cannot be policed and therefore smuggling will thrive without a price hike. Really? And who is supposed to watch the boarders, to protect the citizens?

We hear over and over again that the lower petrol costs do not benefit the poor. The reality on the ground just a few days into the new price regime has shown that this is not convincing argument. Small-scale entrepreneurs, for example those who run barbershops, depend on small petrol-powered electricity generators to stay in business. With huge public power deficits, many homes are powered with the same type of generators. Nigerians buy potable water from suppliers who own water boreholes. Some of these citizens’ water works are powered with the same type of generators. Because of absence of public goods and services we run autonomous or deregulated services at home and at work.

Another argument for the removal of subsidies on petrol in Nigeria is that in the league of oil producing countries the price in Nigeria is only higher than that of Brunei, Yemen, Oman, Algeria, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela. Whereas Ghana recently increased the price of petrol by about 20 per cent, in Nigeria it is a minimum of 120 per cent. Do not forget also that the Ghanaian economy is not run on petrol powered electricity generators. Nigerians have seen that it is more helpful to extend the comparison to the minimum wage figures of the countries also. It is at that level that the hole in this argument becomes apparent.

OPEC Member countries Fuel Price per litre (Naira)/ Minimum Wage (in Naira)
1. Venezuela 3.61/ 95,639
2. Kuwait 34.54/ 161,461
3. Saudi Arabia 25.12/ 99,237
4. Iran 102.05/ 86,585
5. Qatar 34.54/ 101.250
6. Algeria 63.55/ 55,957
7. Libya 26.69/ 23,813
8. Iraq 59,66/ 25,813
9. Nigeria 140-200/ 18,000

NON OPEC countries
1. USA 157/ 197,296
2. UK 334.41/ 295,644
3. Oman 48.67/ 91,583

The Nigerian government continued to talk tough while the number of protesters on the streets swelled. In fact some of the spokespersons managed to hiss out their disdain for the protest without moving their lips. The SURE (Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme) promises are taken with a pinch of salt by a populace who see these as the sort of political campaign talks they are used to hearing.

Nigerians are not opposed to making sacrifices that would put the nation on a sound economic footing. The government’s effort at taxing citizens so as to generate more revenue should not be embarked on without showing seriousness about halting profligacy by public structures. Why can our political office holders (executive and legislative) not take a 50 per cent cut in their salaries and allowances? Why the retinue of advisers and ministers?

Nigerians have been bemused by the amounts inn the 2012 national budget earmarked for expenditure on food, cutleries, newspapers and medical facilities for pets.

In and outside of government, immoral display of wealth is an indication of primitive accumulation through dispossession of the poor or some less than transparent means. We can pay attention to individuals that take up several pages in the newspapers to celebrate birthdays within the range of 30 to 50 years whereas simple birthday cards can do the job. The same indicators can be noted from newspaper page uptakes for individuals whose cronies take up several pages to send congratulatory messages; such persons get political appointments or receive chieftaincy titles, honorary degrees and other things that bloat their egos. There are many other ways to track the leakages in the economy where productivity brings poverty and non-productive "enterprises" yield scandalous wealth.

Tensions need to be doused and one way will be for public officials to watch what they say as the incoherence in government circles is adding to a smouldering rage even after the bon fires have been smothered. There is still anger in the land!

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Nnimmo Bassey is chair of Friends of the Earth International. His latest book is To Cook a Continent is published by Pambazuka Press (ISBN: 1-906387-53-2).
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Nigeria: A giant on a keg of gunpowder

Uche Igwe

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79197

cc S PA wind of disgruntlement is blowing across Nigeria. There are fears that, unless President Jonathan steadies the ship of state, divisions within the polity and the rising discontent could be hijacked by political opportunists to cause something more catastrophic.

Unless something urgent happens, the Nigerian state may be headed to complete failure. The worrying signals became more pronounced in the weeks preceding the last yuletide season. Streets in Abuja, Nigeria’s rocky capital, became deserted as early as 6pm everyday; same as in many state capitals. Palpable fear has gripped the population and the feeling of insecurity is pervasive. The threats of the dreaded Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram have been followed with successive attacks leading to massive destruction of lives and properties, with the majority of the victims coming from amongst innocent citizens, worshipping peacefully in Christian churches as well as law enforcement agents.

Nigerian security agencies have often been caught unawares, hiding under the excuse that the phenomenon of Islamic militancy is a new one. Christians in the northern part of the country have been particularly targeted by these insurgents who are said to be clamouring for the imposition of an Islamic state governed by Shari’a laws. A state of emergency has been imposed by the federal government in the perceived hot bed zones of the terrorists but this has done little to reduce frequency of the attacks. Rather, many more states are witnessing these attacks, underlining the ineffectuality and insufficiency of the response strategy of the government. Citizens are in a state of panic as rampaging Islamist insurgents first handed down threats to Christian southerners living in the Muslim dominated northern Nigeria to leave and then followed up their threats with mayhem.

Prominent opinion leaders believe that the Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan’s handling of the situation has been less than satisfactory. A wind of disgruntlement is blowing across the land. Ayo Oritsejafor, leader of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), the national umbrella organisation of Nigeria’s more than 76 million Christians, has warned that the continuous indifference of Northern leaders towards incessant killing of Christians is an open invitation to civil war.

On top of this delicate security situation, the administration of President Goodluck Jonathan proceeded to announce on 2 January 2012 the removal of government subsidy on premium motor spirit (PMO), with the effect that PMO now costs an average of 141 Naira with the product selling as high as 250 Naira in some areas of the country, as against the former price of 65 Naira. Widespread protests led by labour unions, professional associations and civil society groups greeted the government’s policy announcement. The government claims that it is unable to sustain expenditures on the subsidy, which it claims will gulp a whopping 1.3 Trillion Naira (more than $700 million) in the 2012 fiscal year.

The shady and sordid subsidy regime is believed to be a conduit for grand corruption for the vampire elite. A few weeks ago, the Nigerian National Assembly published the list of companies benefiting from the subsidy money and it included construction companies that had little or nothing to do with the oil and gas industry. Mr Jonathan’s advisers led by former World Bank Managing Director, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, claim that the money saved from subsidy removal will be re-invested in other vital sectors of the economy including infrastructure and power, instead of lining the pockets and bank accounts of a few privileged individuals.

Dr. Okonjo-Iweala and other advocates of subsidy removal argue that market forces will force down prizes in the long term. However, many Nigerians do not believe them. A turn-around maintenance (TAM) of the four local refineries has been ordered but industry experts argue that it is yet unclear how the expected boost in local refining capacity will force down prices when domestic crude is still procured at international prices. A profit-conscious ‘cartel’ will concentrate on maximising their returns rather than worry about the impact on consumers. The announcement of the subsidy removal policy caught many Nigerians unawares, eating deeper into the dwindling popularity of Jonathan’s government. A face-saving and reactionary palliative package has been announced by the government but the citizens still remain adamantly doubtful. A few of those who support this policy remain critical of the timing and manner of introduction of the new policy.

Prominent members of Parliament even from within President Jonathan’s ruling party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), have become less supportive and more evasive in their views about the policy as citizen angst grows. Already prices of all food items and transport fares across the country have quadrupled, indicating possible inflationary trends that could wipe out marginal economic growth in Africa’s second largest economy and largest producer of crude oil. Nigeria’s crude oil production figures have gradually risen to about 2.6 million barrels per day since amnesty was granted to Niger Delta combatants, but the increase in oil revenue has not led to any significant development in Nigeria or improvement in the living standard of the people. Rather, the Nigerian extractive industry continues to remind the world of the paradox of plenty, under-development and environmental pollution.

The Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) announced a nationwide strike that started on Monday, 9 January, in an attempt to force the Jonathan administration to revert to the former petrol pump price of 65 Naira per litre. The Nigerian economy will encounter huge losses from the industrial action. However, there is little indication that a policy reversal is likely. There are speculations that divisions within the polity and rising discontent among the populace may lead to a situation where the nationwide strike action gets hijacked by political opportunists to cause mischief which may snowball into something more catastrophic. In an already volatile security situation this calls for concern. Africa’s giant is sitting astride a keg of a gun powder.

Prominent Nigerians like Nobel Laureate Oluwole Soyinka and famous writer Chinua Achebe have warned the federal government to hasten to steer the ship of the Nigerian state out of turbulent waters. The days ahead are pregnant with significance. President Goodluck Jonathan’s ability to contain the urgent security challenges of the citizens, tackle Islamic insurgents head on, engender trust within the population and adopt evidence-based approaches to policy dialogue will go a long way to determine the shape of things to come in Africa’s most populous nation.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Uche Igwe is a research scholar and governance expert.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Libya and the NTC: 12,000 US troops to Libya

Cynthia McKinney

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79227

cc US ArmyThere are fears that the US is in the process of sending thousands of troops to Libya, but there is a way that you can vote for peace.

It is with great disappointment that I receive the news from foreign media publications and Libyan sources that our President now has 12,000 US troops stationed in Malta and they are about to make their descent into Libya.

For those of you who have not followed closely the situation in Libya, the resistance to the rule of the National Transitional Council is strong. The National Transitional Council (NTC) cast of characters has about as much support on the ground as did Mahmoud Abbas before the United Nations request for Palestinian statehood or Afghanistan's regal-looking but politically impotent Hamid Karzai or for that matter, George W Bush after eight years.

The NTC not only has to contend with a vibrant, well-financed, grassroots-supported resistance, but the various militias of the NTC are now also fighting each other. I believe this ‘sociocide’ of Libyan society, as we previously witnessed in Iraq and Afghanistan before it, is part of a carefully crafted plan of destabilization that ultimately serves US imperial interests and those of a Zionist state and its US agents who are bent on Greater Israel's suzerainty over huge swaths of Arabic-speaking populations. Pakistan is also on the list for neutering in Muslim and world affairs, saddled with its own unpopular civilian leadership that finds itself in the hip pocket of the United States for survival, often getting sat upon by its fiscal guarantor.

The ‘Arab Spring’ has sprung and the indelible fingerprints of malignant foreign financed operations must be erased if the people are to have a chance to truly govern themselves. Unfortunately, these foreign-inspired organizations are present and operating in just about every country in the world. The threat is ever-present like sleeping cells - all that is needed is that the right word to ‘activate’ be given. Both Daniel Ortega and Hugo Chavez can write tomes on the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy in the political life of their countries.

In other words, those who create the chaos have a plan and in the midst of chaos, they usually are the ones who will win. Those who wrote the plan of this chaos were affiliated with the Project for a New American Century - read ‘A Clean Break’ if you already haven't. General Wesley Clark told us of the plan to invade and destroy the governments of seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. ‘These people took control of the policy in the United States,’ Clark continues. He concludes, ‘This country was taken over by a group of people with a policy coup: Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and…collaborators from the Project for a New American Century: they wanted us to destabilize the Middle East.’ Clark concludes: ‘The root of the problem is the strategy of the United States in this region. Why are Americans dying in this region? That is the issue,’ he finishes.

Now, from Libya, reports are that even while the Misrata rebels (NATO allies responsible for the murder of hundreds of Libyans, including Moatessem Qaddafi) attempted to scale the petroleum platforms in Brega (an important oil town in Libya), they were annihilated by the Apache helicopters of their own NATO allies. A resistance Libyan doctor-become-journalist reported that all of the petroleum platforms are occupied by NATO and that warships occupy Libya's ports. Photographs show Italian encampments in the desert with an announcement that the French are to follow.

Another news outlet reports that Qataris and Emiratees are the engineers now at the oil plants, turning away desperate Libyan workers. While long lines exist for Libyan drivers to get their gas, foreign troops ensure the black gold's export. Libyans lack enough food and the basics, the country has been turned upside down, and contaminated with uranium while the true number of dead and unaccounted for remains high and unknown. Thousands of young Libyans, supporters of the Jahamiriya, languish under torture and assassination in a Misrata prison where a humanitarian disaster is about to unfold because Misrata rebels want to kill them all and have already attacked the prison once to do so.

An urgent appeal to contact the International Red Cross was issued to help save the lives of the prisoners. And finally, Black Libyans continue to be targeted for harassment and murder in Libya by US/NATO allies on the ground. Teaching hate, given the images of US soldiers in Afghanistan urinating on Afghani dead bodies, is not a difficult thing to do, it would seem. Videos are posted of Black Libyans being beaten, whipped, threatened, harassed, and humiliated. These videos remind me of the antebellum South - reminiscent of the days of slavery and The Confederacy. So, when I use the word ‘descend’ to describe US anticipated actions, I mean just that: US troops are about to descend into the hell on Earth created by their President and the leaders of other countries who approved of, aided, or participated in the death of Libyan-owned society. A report from last night indicates that one militia, fearing other militias, even invited foreigners in to protect them.

I hope the report that I'm reading from 12 January 2012 is not true. I hope our President has not sent 12,000 troops of occupation to Malta destined for Libya. Lucy Grider-Bradley (of our DIGNITY Delegation) reminded me of the words of a high-ranking Libyan Jahamiriya Foreign Ministry representative who just happened to be at the Tunisia/Libya border office at the same time we were waiting there. He said, ‘Let the Americans come. We want them to taste our sandwiches. We will give them the same serving they got in Vietnam.’

Please write to our President (at www.whitehouse.gov) and ask him not to send troops of occupation (or whatever ‘euphemism de jour’ this Administration chooses to use) to Libya.

To save the lives of the young men in prison, please e-mail the International Red Cross at any or all of the e-mail addresses given below:

in Tripoli 218213409262 / Croix rouge
218919418066 / 218925236582
والبريد اللاكتروني : tri_tripoli@icrc.org

هذا اراقام المكتب الرئيسي للصليب الاحمرLe président de la croix rouge
في جنيفا 41227346001/ فاكس 41227332057
webmaster@icrc.org

منظمة حقوق الانسان: Organisation de protection des droits de l'homme
في مقره لندن : à London
David Mepham
UK Director

Eleanor Blatchley
Associate
Tel: +44 (0) 20-7713-2788
blatche@hrw.org

او مقره في سويسرا : En Suisse
Geneva
Switzerland
Tel: +41-22-738-0481
fax: +41-22-738-1791

الهلال الاحمر الليبي: http://www.lrc.org.ly/contactus.html

And then, please view the most recent addition to the extremely valuable work of a young documentarian, Julien Teil, who caught Amnesty International red-handed in proselytizing the lies in the lead-up to this Libya debacle that they tried to take back. In short, Amnesty admits that the ‘African mercenaries’ was just a rumor from the start. How many Black Libyans are suffering and have died because this woman and others like her safely ensconced in their seats of authority used them to proffer lies instead of protect the truth? The video is in both French and English and can be viewed here.

Lastly, there is one thing you can do: refuse to vote for war. Your vote is your most precious political asset. When you vote for Congressional representatives who, in turn, vote for war, you allow the people who made the coup - the people that General Wesley Clark talked about - you allow them to win. Overturn the coup by voting for peace. Cast your vote for peace. Ignore the pundits on the Sunday morning talk shows and vote for peace. Turn off the crap TV and vote for peace. Don't even listen to your friends who think you've gone crazy, just vote for peace.

Cindy Piester, a documentarian who hosted the last event that I attended with my aunt in Ventura, California, just finished a film, ‘On the Dark Side in Al Doura - A Soldier in the Shadows’ in which Dick Cheney says that the United States has to ‘work toward the dark side, spend time in the shadows, in the intelligence world.’ He goes on to say, ‘A lot of what needs to be done will have to be done quietly without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.’ View her extremely well-done and sad film here and please, don't let this gang of coup plotters take you and this country into the shadows where we don't need or want to be.

Vote peace.

Western Sahara: Denial of self-determination and human rights abuses

Malainin Lakhal

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79252

cc T SThe case of the Western Sahara is a clear proof of failure of the international system that is governed by few powerful states: the five members of the Security Council who have turned the UN into the biggest non-democratic organisation in the world.

In May 2006, and for the first time since the UN adopted the famous General Assembly’s resolution 1514, a delegation from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human rights visited Western Sahara to investigate the human rights situation in this last colony in Africa. The mission accomplished its task by writing a report concluding that:

‘1. As has been stated in various UN fora, the right to self-determination for the people of Western Sahara must be ensured and implemented without any further delay. As underlined above, the delegation concludes that almost all human rights violations and concerns with regard to the people of Western Sahara, whether under the de facto authority of the Government of Morocco or of the Frente Polisario, stem from the non-implementation of this fundamental human right.’

Nevertheless, this report was kept under embargo because a powerful member in the UN Security Council, France, refuses any kind of protection and monitoring of human rights in Western Sahara.

The right to self-determination is a sacred principle on which international law, and all international covenants are built. It is enshrined in the UN Charter as one of four pillars of international legality. It is a focal right in the two international covenants and is actually one of the main claims of all protests and revolutions in the Arab World, where the peoples ‘wanted’, and where the peoples ‘demanded’ and where the peoples ‘decided’ to take their political fate in their hands.

Western Sahara is clearly defined by the international community as a ‘Non-Self-Governing territory’, whose people are recognised as ‘the people of Western Sahara’ and are entitled according to the different UN resolutions adopted since 1963 to exercise a genuine right to self-determination to chose between independence, self-determination and autonomy with an existing political entity; yet, the people of this territory are still denied their right to decide the future of their country.

As a result to this denial, many anomalies are marking the situation of the territory and the lives of its people. The main one which I would like to talk about is the violation of human rights in Western Sahara. Morocco systematically violates the political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights of the people of Western Sahara in total impunity.

SELF-DETERMINATION AND THE FUTURE OF PEACE IN THE WORLD

Arab revolutions proved one basic thing: That the people will fight for their basic right, and most important for their sacred right to their homeland and its future. No regime and no power can deprive a population of its sovereignty over its homeland, its natural resources and its innate right to decide the political future of its country. This is the main lesson that the Arab spring is giving the world, and this is exactly what the Saharawis have been fighting for since the first days of the colonisation of Western Sahara in 1884. The Saharawi people fought against all colonial invaders of their country including the French and the Spanish, and they were not given a choice but to fight against their own brothers and neighbours, Morocco and Mauritania, when these two countries violated this brotherhood.

The case of the Western Sahara is a manifest proof of the failure of the international system that is governed by few powerful states, the five members of the Security Council, who are make the UN the biggest non-democratic organisation in the world. Western Sahara is recognised by the so-called international community as a Non-Self-Governing territory; the Saharawi people are recognised as the party that has got the legal and legitimate sovereignty over the territory; but still the world looks the other side while Morocco continues to illegally occupy Western Sahara and violates human rights with total impunity. Worse, France opposed any kind of monitoring or protection of human rights in Western Sahara while it champions the defense of human rights in other parts of the world to the point of using armed force in Libya.

On the other hand, the Saharawi people have always been denied an opportunity to communicate their sufferings to the Arab world especially because of the shameful position the Arab states are adopting from the conflict since the seventies. Most of the Arab states, it should be recalled, had supported the Moroccan invasion in one way or another, especially Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq and the Gulf States in general. Morocco has also been supported by Israel, the US, Spain and France and continues to be supported by the European Union, which is signing shameful fishing accords with Rabat to exploit the resources of Western Sahara.

CIVIL AND POLITICAL RIGHTS

Morocco militarily invaded Western Sahara on 31 October 1975 in flagrant violation of the UN Charter and in violation of the Saharawi people’s right to their land. Western Sahara was then a Spanish colony and the UN had reached the agreement with the government of Madrid to organise a referendum for the Saharawi people in 1975. Instead of that, the Spanish weak government of the dying Generalissimo Franco was forced by France and Morocco to sign an illegal tripartite agreement with Morocco and Mauritania according to which the two Arab countries divided the land of Western Sahara and its people into two zones, while Spain maintains the privileged status keeping 30 percent in the phosphate exploitation and a priority in the exploitation of fishing resources in the Saharawi rich waters.

Morocco has thus violated the Saharawi people’s right to self-determination and as a result kept violating their civil and political rights to: physical integrity and safety and their right to the protection from all kinds of discrimination, in addition to their individual rights such as freedoms of thought and conscience, speech and expression, religion, the press and of movement. These Moroccan violations generated a set of crimes against humanity and crimes of war in addition to phenomena such as forced disappearances and the systematic practice of torture by the different Moroccan corps.

The Moroccan army committed atrocities against the Saharawi population in the first years of the invasion, killing thousands of Saharawi families, especially nomads, poisoning waters in the desert and exterminating livestock which was the main economic wealth of the Saharawi people. The Moroccan Consultative Council for Human Rights recognised these crimes in a report it elaborated for the Human Rights Council in 2010. In this report, that was used within the HR Council without much advertisement, Morocco recognised the army’s responsibility in the death of some 352 Saharawis killed according to the report ‘because of bad conditions of imprisonment’ in different Moroccan secret detention camps. No other measures were undertaken to face this crimes, since the families of the victims never received information from the state before they accidentally read this report after some organisations spread it around.

The violations never stopped since 1975 indeed. Hundreds of Saharawis experienced forced disappearance, some for more than 15 years in secret detention. The majority of these victims were suddenly released in 1991, but the phenomenon, again, didn’t stop because one of the latest cases of disappearance is as recent as 2005 involving 15 young Saharawi activists who disappeared because of their participation in the popular uprising of 2005. Their mothers are still demanding the truth about their fate without success.

In addition to the phenomenon of disappearance, the Moroccan authorities systematically practice torture against demonstrators, prisoners, arrestees not only in prisons or police stations but also in streets and outside the cities. Since 2005 many demonstrators have been arrested by police but never taken to police stations; they are driven in the outskirts of the cities, beaten to death, sometimes raped and abandoned in most cases unconscious 40 or 50 kilometres away from the cities.

Demonstrations in Western Sahara are always faced with violent police interventions. Thousands of Saharawis have been injured, arrested, tortured, beaten or even killed after they participated in peaceful demonstrations. Police do not tolerate demonstrators who lift Saharawi flags or chant slogans in favour of independence of their land.

Saharawi human rights organisations without exception are considered illegal by the Moroccan authorities and treated as such. Even in the case of the Association of the Victims of Gross Human Rights Violations Committed by the Moroccan State (ASVDH) which was given a high court decision to work legally under Moroccan laws, the Moroccan authorities never recognised its militants’ right to monitor the human rights situation. Its president, vice-president and member of its bureau are victims to different human rights abuses; some of them are now in prison.

Another human rights organisation, the Collective of Saharawi Human Rights Defenders (CODESA), chaired by the emminent human rights defender, Ms. Aminatou Haidar, was not allowed to operate, and is still banned. Morocco is imprisoning now many human rights defenders, to name just a few: Naama Asfari, Ahmed Lemjid, Ahmed Sbaai, Brahim Ismaaili, Tahlil Mohamed, Banga Cheikh and Hafed Iaaza. There are 64 Saharawi prisoners of conscience right now in Moroccan prisons, 23 of whom went on a hunger strike for 38 days demanding a fair trial or an immediate release after having spent 14 months without trial. They were arrested in November 2010. 14 months after their detention they still wait for a trial, while Morocco is determined to bring them before its martial court in Rabat.

Saharawi prisoners of conscience are denied procedural fairness in law, such as the rights of the accused, including the right to a fair trial; due process; the right to seek redress or a legal remedy. Saharawis in general are denied the rights of participation in civil society and politics such as freedom of association, the right to assemble and the right to vote in a referendum on self-determination to decide over the political future of Western Sahara.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC RIGHTS

Since 1975 Morocco led a systematic policy of plundering of the natural resources of Western Sahara without the consent of its people or their legitimate representative, POLISARIO liberation movement. In 2002 the UN Security Council asked Under-Secretary General of the UN for Legal Affairs, Hans Corell, to look at the legality of the exploitation of the natural resources in Western Sahara. The UN jurist clearly ruled that it is illegal to exploit the resources of the Non-Self-Governing territory as long as the decolonisation process is not finished. He considered, however, that the exploitation can only be possible if the people of Western Sahara are fully profiting from its income, otherwise Morocco must stop such plunder.

Morocco propaganda has always spread false information about what it calls ‘The process of development and progress of the Sahara’. In 10 October, 2010, more than 20,000 Saharawi citizens from all generations built 8,000 tents in the famous protest camp of ‘Gdeim Izik’ 12 kilometres east the occupied capital of Western Sahara, El Aaiun, ‘to demand the most rudimentary economic and social rights Morocco is depriving them of’, they said. The protest camp that was described by the American philosopher, Noam Chomsky, as the starting point of the Arab Spring, was for demanding the people’s right to work, housing, to social services such as health care and an adequate standard of living and their right to profit from the wealth of their country, but also their right to dignity and their political rights. The Moroccan response came one month after in 8 November 2010. The 8, 000 tents were burned down by the army, thousands citizens were arrested, beaten, injured, hundreds of them were detained for days and 23 were kept in prison and are going to be brought before martial court.

In all Saharawi cities different social groups are organising demonstrations, sit-ins and hunger-strikes to demand basic economic rights. But the normal response from the Moroccan authorities is oppression. Saharawi organisations assert that Morocco is adopting a systematic policy to impoverish the Saharawi citizens in their own country. Saharawis are denied the right to work, they are denied opportunities of investment in many sectors, they are subjected to all kinds of economic restrictions if they defend Western Sahara independence. Most of the time they are dismissed from work, their salaries frozen or they are deprived of any kind of promotion in their jobs if they are actively in favour of the right to self-determination.

Saharawi students find a lot of restrictions that hinder their enjoyment of the right to education. Students have to travel to the Moroccan cities to study because the Moroccan authorities didn’t build a single university or high school in Western Sahara. Secondary school students are daily harassed by police. Since 2005 the Moroccan authorities posted police and soldiers inside primary and secondary schools to stop students from organising peaceful demonstrations. This armed presence usually generates confrontations and human rights violations.

CULTURAL RIGHTS

The first thing Morocco attacked in 1975 is the nomadic life of the people of Western Sahara. They forced thousands of people to move to the cities, thousands others were killed during raids or forced to flee their country seeking refuge in the neighbouring Algeria, where they are still living. Since 1976 in the Saharawi refugee camps they are relying on international aid.The Moroccan authorities also attacked the Spanish component of the Saharawi culture. They banned the study and use of Spanish from school since 1977. Hundreds of Saharawi students couldn’t finish their studies because of the change of the curriculums.

Lately, the Moroccans are even attacking the use of the traditional tents or any kind of tent by Saharawis as a reprisal against the population after the use of the tent as a symbol in the Gdeim Izik protest camp in 2010.

Saharawi writers can not print books about the Saharawi culture, history or politics. Most of them exercise self-censorship because they are forced to find false links between the Saharawi culture and the Moroccan one or their books would be banned. Morocco went further in putting the Hassania language (the Saharawi dialect) in the Moroccan constitution as a Moroccan dialect! The Moroccan authorities organise many cultural festivals to promote the idea that the Saharawi culture and heritage is Moroccan. On the other hand Saharawi associations and intellectuals can not express their own views on these attempts of appropriation of their culture by the colonising power because they risk detention and oppression.

VIOLATION OF ENVIRONMENT

Morocco started its invasion of Western Sahara with poisoning of wells and the scarce springs of water. The Moroccan army was given orders by the Moroccan King Hassan II to kill anything that moves in the desert to force the Saharawi nomads to move to cities so that his authority he could control the population. Saharawi survivors talk about terrible raids against livestock. Camels, goats and cheep were the main cattle raised by Saharawi nomads. Each family of nomads used to own hundreds of animals. In 1976 Saharawis were fleeing for their lives from Moroccan air force raids that used Napalm and White Phosphor bombs against them. Thousands of lives were lost away from the eyes of the civilised world that was applauding the Moroccan ‘Green March’. Hundreds of thousands of animals perished too.

Further, the Moroccan army built the biggest military walls now existing on earth. Six walls were built from 1981 to 1987 around the main Saharawi cities but also to protect the main natural resources behind a well defended wall so as to plunder the resources without big trouble. Morocco built around 4,000 kilometres of sand walls, using more than five million landmines, according to the most modest estimations. Nowadays, only 2,700 kilometres of this wall are operational though the rest of the walls remain dangerous because of the arbitrary use of landmines by the Moroccan army during the seventies and eighties.

The Moroccan wall doesn’t only part the Saharawi people in two parts, but it also causes a huge problem for the flow of waters (rivers and sources of water), and causes serious damage to the Saharawi livestock. It also destroys Saharawi nomadic free movement traditions and constitutes a constant danger on the lives of individuals and animals because of landmines.

The Moroccan wall also affects the wild animal life in Western Sahara. The Saharawi Gazelle is under threat of extinction because of landmines and because it was deprived of the freedom of movement in the desert. A similar fate is threatening the different species in the once rich Saharawi waters that risk becoming dangerously poor because of over-exploitation.

CONCLUSION

The right to self-determination is one of the main pillars of international law, and is one of the main guarantees for the establishment of peace, democracy and respect of human rights in the world. There are many international attempts to normalise the violation of the right to self-determination by some big powers and through their proxies such as Morocco, and the aim is always to set chaos and destabilise order in the world so as to profit from possibilities of exploiting natural resources of weak peoples.

The maintenance of the occupation of Western Sahara and Palestine, the destruction of the political stability in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, Libya and the countries of the Sahel, and in future in other countries that have big reserves of oil, gas and waters will be the result of the success of these countries in violating the peoples’ right to self-determination and sovereignty over their land and resources. This is why the peoples must keep an eye on their real enemies and always create new tactics and methods to defend their rights, otherwise humanity will loose its future; humanity will simply disappear.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA.

* Malainin Lakhal is secretary general of Saharawi Journalists and Writers Union
* This is a lecture presented during a conference organised in Cairo, Egypt, from 15 to 17 January 2012 by the Habitat International Coalition under the title: ‘Sovereignty over the land and peoples’ right to self-determination’.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

South Africa: The impacts of coal extraction

Glenn Ashton

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79201

cc CPW&F‘Against the background chatter about nationalisation and environmental sustainability, South Africa needs to carefully consider the continued development of its vast mineral resources.’

Significant developments in the energy sector are underway in western Limpopo because of the extensive coal resources in that region. Besides the South African electricity company Eskom’s massive Medupi power station, near the existing Matimba power station, there are several other mega-projects in the pipeline. The question is whether these are sustainable or in some cases, even viable.

Other developments in the area include expanding the massive Exxaro Grootgeluk mine, which supplies Matimba and Medupi, as well as Sasol’s plans for the Mafutha coal to oil mega-project, presently shelved because of its massive carbon emissions. Further to the northeast of this massive energy complex lie other coal mining projects like the controversial Coal of Africa Limited (CoAL) Makhado and Vele projects.

Against the background chatter about nationalisation and environmental sustainability, South Africa needs to carefully consider the continued development of its vast mineral resources. While our national wealth has historically been underpinned by mineral extraction, the question is not only how we can continue to extract this wealth with the broadest social benefit, but perhaps more importantly, how we can do so without destroying the very systems we rely on to sustain us.

Nowhere in South Africa are these issues more apparent than in western Limpopo, a region mired in poverty and plagued by water scarcity. The biggest single constraint to the exploitation of these coal resources is the lack of water in the region.

West Limpopo is the most water stressed region of the country if this is measured using the globally accepted method of ‘water crowding’, which considers the number of people against the available water supply. A water-crowding index in excess of 2000 is considered environmentally and socially unstable. The index in Limpopo was already at 4219 a decade ago. The problem has worsened since then.

Against this reality there are massive pressures to develop the huge coal resource in western Limpopo, estimated to contain nearly half our national coal reserve. On the one hand the state wishes to pursue their neo-liberal job creation model. On the other, mining investors see massive opportunities in the region.

The reality is that coal mining produces very few direct or indirect jobs because of its mechanised nature. It also displaces other more sustainable work and livelihood opportunities, as it is a highly mechanised process. Coal extraction can place future economic activity in the area at permanent risk.

To place the precarious water supply situation in perspective it is worth considering that the existing water supply is insufficient to meet the demands of Medupi when it is fully commissioned. In order to meet future demand, water will be transferred from the already stressed and seriously polluted Crocodile River, downstream of the Hartebeespoort dam, to the Mokolo catchment, which feeds Matimba and Medupi power stations.

This has serious implications for the comparatively pristine Mokolo. Recent CSIR-led research found a rare colonial protozoan, never before recorded either in Africa or in a river, during 2008. This organism is extremely sensitive to heavy metals and other contamination. An un-described fish species was also found. Should the water transfer scheme go ahead, these and other novel organisms may disappear forever, before they are understood or studied.

But more importantly, what is to be the fate of Limpopo residents already burdened by water stress? How are they to exist, let alone thrive, if these massive energy projects are permitted to abstract and pollute the little available water in the area?

The implications are dire and water resource experts have noted this could create conditions ripe for mass social unrest and even genocide, as frustrations are redirected at those projected as responsible for their situation.

Local residents are becoming increasingly aware of the implications of large-scale mineral extraction and its long-term consequences for the region. The CoAL project to mine valuable coking coal at its Makhado project has run into powerful local resistance from a broad coalition of opponents.

Even if sufficient water were to be found, there remains a strong and united opposition from divergent backgrounds. The real questions revolve around the sustainability of the project.

Moses Madau, of Dzomo la Mupo, a local environmental group, summed up the general feeling when he said that there was deep resentment and concern at the alleged statement by CoAL at a recent meeting that the scarcity of water would not affect this generation, but only the coming generations. This is the very definition of unsustainable.

This concern was echoed by the Chair of the Soutpansberg Agricultural Union, Stephan Hoffman, who said the impact of Makhado on this fragile environment, would undermine the ability of his children to survive in this barren and harsh land.

There are also profound concerns around the impact of this project on the sacred sites and traditional culture of this area. Given that the Venda comprise some of the most ancient of settled communities in the region, who have lived here for at least a millennium and possibly far longer, there are innumerable graves, shrines and other sacred artefacts which stand to be disturbed.

These concerns are summarised in a critique of the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) by the London based NGO Gaia, which notes the consistent use of the description of the impacts as “long term but temporary,” indicating an intrinsic failure to recognise the real consequences of this project on this fragile environment.

Underlying these collective concerns on the impacts of the Makhado coal mine, Liz Hosken of Gaia states that the cumulative impact of this project, should it be permitted, would amount to ecocide – the deliberate destruction of the natural environment. The implications are serious for both investors and local stakeholders.

CoAL investors have been quite jittery about the prospects for the company, indicated by the decline to a fifth of its share value of two years ago. Its meetings in London have been picketed and shareholders have been made aware of the inherent risks associated with the Makahdo project and its future prospects.

A major shortcoming of the EIA process is that it does not consider the cumulative impacts of a project – it only examines each impact in isolation. Yet the cumulative impacts of this mine, on water, land, farming and the ability of humans and wildlife to survive in this area could in fact amount to ecocide.

The perceptions of those involved in interrogating the EIA are divergent. Some groups appear fairly satisfied; others feel that the process has been exclusive and insufficient. This is another major shortcoming of existing environmental regulation, where local communities, which stand to be most affected, have neither the means nor the expertise to deal with expert inputs in what is a demanding bureaucratic process.

CoAL has previously attracted controversy for its Vele mine near the Mapungubwe UNESCO heritage site, which has recently been granted permission to proceed. The major stumbling block for Vele was access to water, which has now been granted from the already stressed Limpopo River. Water availability is a far greater impediment to the Makhado mine’s development.

The reality is that there is insufficient water in the area to enable mining on the scale demanded by CoAL and that would also ensure all social and ecological needs are met. Even transferring water from other river basins is not a suitable long-term solution; it is simply borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

Emerging understanding of water recirculation within water basins such as the Limpopo further emphasises the scale of the problem. The old thinking was that moisture was introduced into rainfall regions mainly from adjacent oceanic evaporation. This has been revised and studies by experts like R.J. van der Ent and others show that much of the rainfall within certain basins emanates instead from within that basin or from adjacent areas. This natural recycling, driven by evaporation and plant transpiration is thought to provide a significant amount of the moisture to the arid Limpopo region.

If the hydrological cycle is impacted in the area – as is inevitable should large-scale coal extraction be permitted - there is real potential for serious negative repercussions on the long-term sustainability of the area.

In the case of projects like Makhado consideration must be given to alternative ways of working and living within this delicate and stressed environment. As noted earlier, the water-crowding index of the region has serious implications as far as social stability is concerned.

Talk of using mining income to kick-start other employment opportunities overlooks the countervailing argument that there is no reason to not pursue similar employment and living opportunities without mining and its negative consequences. While mining is touted as a financial driver to kick-start such projects, if the legacy of mining is environmental and social disruption, then such arguments are clearly based on unsound premises.

Very few mines in South Africa have ever been issued with a mine closure certificate. Instead there are numerous avoidance practices that enable companies, which have exploited mineral wealth, to evade responsibility once the area is mined out. The legacy of acid mine drainage left by Anglo American on the Highveld and the social and ecological disruption of Namaqualand by DeBeers are two of many such examples of avoidance for taking complete responsibility for the impacts of mining.

Affected communities usually lack the economic or legal clout to enforce promises made during mining applications. Neither are they able to afford proper monitoring of the mining process and closure. Look no further than the toxic legacy of asbestos mining across vast tracts of the Northern Cape.

Appeals to nationalise our mineral resources also carry serious risks. These do not only revolve around the threat to external investment but equally apply to the weakening of the existing (flawed) EIA and mine closure and rehabilitation process. The fact is that for a state managed environmental regulatory system to assume and enforce control over the behaviour of state-owned mining companies would create an almost inevitable recipe for inter-departmental conflict. This would be exacerbated by the reluctance of the state to engage in legal action against itself.

There is already huge tension around the EIA process, which for mining is controlled by the National Department of Minerals and Energy, while all other aspects of EIAs are overseen by Provincial level Environmental Management Departments. Further state involvement in this already fraught arena would raise the spectre of diminished control over mining, as short-term job creation is pursued at the cost of long-term sustainability.

There are other proven and practical ways to shift away from reliance on extractive industries as the foundation of capital and job creation. For instance, agro-ecological farming methods provide proven improved prospects of food and financial security for local communities. Craft projects are far more likely to succeed in areas where the natural resources to supply raw materials are undisturbed, while also attracting tourism to these unspoiled, rather than “rehabilitated” areas.

While it is easy to project a coalmine contributing x amount to the economy over y number of years, such simplistic analyses fail to properly calculate the long-term economic benefits of sustainable land use. In the final analysis there is very little incentive for extractive industries to do a proper job of rehabilitation. Given the dismal track record, who will hold the beneficiaries of mining to account?

Those who wish to invest in mineral extraction in fragile environments must weigh up the real implications. These look beyond short-term profitability and include full cost, triple bottom line accounting of rehabilitation of all aspects of the damage, if it can actually be rehabilitated. But as the EIA for Makhado states, “Open cast mining results in total destruction of the various facets of the existing soils, land capability and land use.” Sure there may be mitigation but mitigatory process are at best a band-aid approach and at worst a sop to sensitive investors.

The final irony is that climate change stands to increase the temperature of this region by up to six degrees by the end of this century. Injecting more coal into the mix simply adds insult to injury.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Glenn Ashton is a writer and researcher working in civil society.
* This article was first published by South African Civil Society Information Service.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The ‘politics of my pocket’: forty years of eating Kenya to its knees

Beth Maina Ahlberg

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79218

cc A BWhile the Kenyan political elite concentrate on shoring up their own personal fortunes, the masses of the Kenyan people are turned into 'destitutes'.

In November/December 2011, I travelled to Kenya as I have done for many years as a Kenyan diaspora subject. During my previous visits, I have always felt a wind of hope gauged by the way the ordinary Kenyan people had been innovating and surviving. This time around, the wind of hope faded, and I kept wondering what had happened. I present three different cases of ways Kenyan people are turned into destitutes and that seemed to create the sense of hopelessness in me. When reflecting back, I realised that this feeling of hopelessness was not so much because of the eating by the political elite and the ‘politics of my pocket’, although over time, the network of eaters has become extensive and extremely entrenched, as the Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission director Professor Patrick Lumumba, who was unceremoniously sacked for touching the network, was to find out. Instead, it is the depth of impunity and utter lack of political will to change. So many of the leaders at all levels and sectors are so entrenched in the eating, that no one can throw a stone without inflicting pain on oneself. The few who choose not to eat are labeled fools and enemies of the eating class.

Half justice is often instituted to make it appear that something is being done, but any of the big fish implicated somehow find a way of getting off the hook. Countless commissions and task forces to investigate this or that scam are then set up, and these commissions mostly end up finding no evidence. The commissions constitute another form of eating from the public coffers, since the commissioners such as those in the Goldenberg Scandal are well-paid.

Thinking back once again, it is the half-hearted justice that is the problem, because of the ability to blind the people into hoping that this time around justice will be done. The three cases I observed in November/December 2011 were part of my frustration. They demonstrate in different ways how the masses of the Kenyan people are turned into destitutes.

1) THE SYOKIMAU HOUSING SCAM

This was the demolition of homes in Syokimau estate in the outskirts of Nairobi. Although demolition of homes in Nairobi is not a new phenomenon, this particular one was very confusing, because the houses did not seem like the usual so-called illegal structures of poor people that the city council so often claims to be clearing for development. These were homes built on land the owners had bought and had received title deeds from the Ministry of Lands.

When I arrived, in November 2011, I watched on the TV news, as many Kenyans had done during that month, footage of government bulldozers demolishing homes as owners helplessly watched in disbelief. An elected government was demolishing homes that ordinary people had built with a lot of sweat, using all their savings not to mention the mortgage. Many would continue paying to the banks even as they were turned homeless by the act of demolition. Moreover, there had been little warning and neither were the owners given time to remove their own property. Searching for why such inhuman action was being perpetrated by the government, it became clear that there was a complex and long land racket history going back to the early 1990s and involving prominent personalities in the current and previous governments.

Those implicated, according to Cyrus Ombati of the Standard Newspaper, (2 January 2012) include the Commissioner of Lands, Land Control Boards, Lands Registry, Municipal Council of Mavoko, local politicians and speculators operating as self-help groups all making quick money through the fraudulent sale of public land on which the unsuspecting buyers were issued with fake title deeds on forged documents. As Bob Odalo argues, because of the heavy involvement of government officials, only half justice was done. The state, for example, terminated a court case involving seven people, including a one-time mayor and town clerk in the Mavoko municipal council, who had been charged with fraudulently receiving more than 154 million Kenya shillings from the public on the pretext that they could sell them land in the area.

When the demolition was executed in November 2011, a court case on the same land racket was apparently going on and obviously once again some big fish somewhere were avoiding the net. What is clear beyond any doubt is that large numbers of families have been rendered homeless, and as usual a commission has been set up to investigate the scam.

2) THE SAME OLD SONG ABOUT HIV AND AIDS

As one who has been involved in research on prevention of HIV and AIDS from the late 1980s, it became very disheartening to hear the same story on AIDS Day 2011, 40 years after the virus that causes AIDS was discovered in Kenya. On this AIDS Day, there was little to rejoice about. The stigma was said to be the same, the prevalence was similarly high and the ARV drugs which seem to be doing miracles elsewhere by turning AIDS into just another chronic disease had not done the same in Kenya. AIDS is still a death sentence. I am very aware of the global politics of AIDS drugs, but in my view we need another form of soul searching. If for example, the problem is just a question of resources not being enough, as is often drummed, one could still have a glimmer of hope that one day resources will be found to reach all. However, in the context of the eating I have described above there is little hope because similar scams exist in the HIV and AIDS business.

What was however more disturbing in the Kenyan context was the reported existence of fake drugs circulating in the market, an issue which should be of concern not just because meagre resources are used to buy fake drugs. More serious for people with HIV and for the public in general is the way such drugs can create drug resistant strains. I should also point out that the sale of fake drugs is not a problem that came in 2011. In 2006 the problem of black market AIDS drugs was already reported. The question therefore is who is doing business with fake drugs? The representatives of people living with HIV put the blame on the government agency for drug procurement for allowing the fake drugs to filter through the supply chain within a system riddled with corruption. The usual reply is that the government is investigating. In spite of the scam, the same song that the donors - in this case the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria - are not giving enough is sung, thus assigning blame elsewhere.



3) THE JIGGER MENACE

This is a slightly different problem. It sums up what happens when the country is eaten bare and instead of using a dollar a day to measure poverty, the jigger menance could be more authentic. The chigoe flea or jigger (Tunga penetrans) is a parasite where the female buries itself into exposed skin on the feet, especially toes, between the toes, on the soles, the elbows, buttocks and the genital areas. The flea remains for two weeks while developing eggs, sometimes causing intense irritation after which the skin lesion grows to a 5-10 mm blister and if left within the skin, infection or other dangerous complications can occur.

As a jigger survivor, I have personal experience with the menace. In my case, this started when we had been forced into villages or rather concentration camps after the declaration of a state of emergency in Kenya by the colonial government from 1952-1960. My family, like many others in Central Kenya, had lost everything after the colonial administration burned down our homes.

During the particular time when our homes were burnt down, a teacher had been murdered by the Mau Mau fighters, just near our home, accused of being a loyalist and therefore a traitor. In fear of retaliation by the colonial administration, my family ran into the bush. We stationed ourselves on high ground, observing our homes go up in flames. The flames and the agony expressed by my mother and grandmother are still vivid in my memory, 50 years later. After this we became destitute, as many other people around us. At that time, most able men were either in the forests fighting the colonial occupation or were incarcerated in detention camps around the country. My father too lost everything of his business in Nairobi when, like other men, he was moved around in detention camps. The rural villages or concentration camps had mainly women and children.

The colonial government instituted a policy of forced labour on women who worked from dawn to sunset. They were given only one hour at five o’clock in the evening to go to the farms to look for food. If they came back one minute late, they were thrown into a detention cell where they spent the night with no food. This meant the children went for days without parents, food or any form of care and this is the time the jiggers did their round. The soil was the only readily available food except for the occasional powder milk from the Catholic nuns whom we called cucu wa iria (milk grandmother). Many of us were extremely deformed by the jiggers, but worse still many children died from the combined jigger infestation and malnutrition. The jigger menace is a measure of destitution and poverty. That so many people in Kenya are still infested by jiggers, are still getting deformed and are still dying from jiggers should call for much critical reflection on what happened to the promised development of governments of independent Africa.

What seems to have happened in the case of Kenya is not just the expansion and sharpening of the ‘politics of my pocket’ locally. More significantly, it is the utter inability and lack of will to seriously take charge to close the various mechanisms of capital flight to foreign destinations by local and foreign corporations. The amount siphoned through capital flight is staggering (Ndikumana and Boyce 2011, Abugre 20011a-d).

Since Kenya attained flag independence in 1963, the political elite has, as indicated, excelled in the ‘politics of my pocket’. The first president, Jomo Kenyatta, made it clear from the beginning that the country was for grabs. In the mid-1960s Jomo Kenyatta made his infamous rebuke of Bildad Kaggia, and publicly wondered whether Kaggia was a kihii (a derogatory term used to refer to an uncircumcised boy). He asked what Kaggia had done for himself, since his release from detention as a response to Kaggia standing by the principle for which the Kenyan people shed their blood fighting the British colonialists. Kenyatta moreover accused Kaggia of being a traitor to the Kikuyu for what he said was trying to hand over power to a Kihii because Kaggia had joined the party led by Oginga Odinga, a Luo, for whom male circumcision is not a cultural practice.

Kenyatta had then retorted that those who want to get rich should work and get rich. Work in this case should not be confused with working on one’s own farm or business and hoping to get rich. If this was the meaning, all the peasants or the urban poor who chip away on their small farms and businesses would have been filthy rich by now. Instead, Kenyatta’s meaning was working hard to cleverly amass wealth from public coffers. In this meaning of work, only the political elite class had access to public coffers. The ‘politics of my pocket’ were sharpened by the two presidents who took over power after Kenyatta.

The story would perhaps be different had the siphoned public resources been wisely invested in some productive ventures in the country. Instead, most was stashed away in foreign banks or was used for constructing housing estates.

This means that the class that has been in power since independence never plants back where it harvests and of course during these 40 years the number of eaters has kept expanding, largely because of impunity. Furthermore, the methods of eating have become varied. An example is the common practice where a government official, say in the Ministry of Education conspires with a head teacher to share half of the funds earmarked for schools. If the head teacher agrees, the two stash half of the money earmarked for the school into their pockets. Because such an official deals with many schools round the country, the amount eaten is enormous – as the $46 million missing from the Ministry of Education free primary education fund indicates. When confronted with this information, the responsible minister did not contemplate resigning as he did not feel responsible for this scam.

This is not the only government ministry that could not account for missing millions. In the Controller and Auditor General’s report for the 2009/2010 financial year, tabled in Parliament in July 2011, five other ministries could not account for a total of KSh 6.4 billion. It seems no wonder the country has been eaten bare, as was obvious during 2011 from the numerous strikes, the latest being that of doctors in December demanding better pay. The picture, as already indicated, could have been different had it not been for the lack of vision and political will to create strong institutions to both identify the various ways of eating locally but also deal with capital flight by foreign corporations. This would have in turn given the country and its people a firm base to develop a strong code of ethics, thus not just restoring the African ubuntu spirit that recognises the sovereignty of the human person, but more significantly giving people courage to be vigilant about so-called investments, including aid.

Instead, the exit of the colonial administration was replaced by a local class that allowed the continued siphoning of local resources, in ways so well described by Charles Abugre. In a series of articles, Abugre (2011a-d) gives a very vivid but complex picture of how the ‘politics of my pocket’ are played at the global level and the multitude of actors in capital flight. However, in this complex scenario of the ‘politics of my pocket’, there is a tendency to sing one song and silence others. What is mostly seen and talked about is corruption among the African political elite, as the recent cases of three Kenyan political elite suggest. The three were accused by the west of corruption, money laundering and drug trafficking. The silence on capital flight from Kenya or the role of western corporations in corrupting African political elites highlights an extremely hypocritical position, given that it takes two to tangle. However, such an expectation is like giving a child a piece of cake and than asking the child to share with you. Is the problem here not the inability of the political elite to create strong institutions which could help them fight back?

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Beth Maina Ahlberg is with the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, Uppsala University, Swede and Skaraborg Institute for Research and Development, Skövde, Sweden. beth.ahlberg[at]vgregion.se
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

REFERENCES
Abugre Charles. (2011a). Financial secrecy: We really are in together. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/77835
- (2011b). Corporations, crime, corruption and capital flight. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/75800
-(2011c). TNCs, transfer pricing and tax avoidance. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/75801
- (2011d), Fighting illicit capital flight. http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/75802
Akukwe Chinua (2011). HIV/Aids in Africa: Overwhelming Needs and Odds. The Africa Executive.
Odalo Bob (2011). Untangling the web that is Syokimau-Mlolongo land scam. Daily Nation, Thursday December 22, 2011.
Ndikumana L. and Boyce J.K. (2011), Measuring African Capital Flight. http://pumbazuka.org/en/category/features/78861
Okwamba A. (2006). Black market dispenses HIV drugs and risks. Treatment’s cost and stigma force some Kenyans to take the chances. The Centre for Public Integrity. http://www.publicintegrity.org/aids/report.aspx?aid=804
The star, Wed.7 December 2011. My cash is clean, Ruto. http://www.the-star.co.ke/national/national/52775-my-cash-is-clean-ruto

Corruption in the independent African state

Cameron Duodu

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79192

cc A F‘When a colonised state gains its independence, its troubles are not over. They are just beginning.’

For those of us who were fortunate enough to be born in the colonial times, to be eye witnesses to the struggle to remove colonialism, and having done that to go through the process of trying to rebuild a new nation for ourselves, the experience has been quite mind-boggling.

First, we enjoyed euphoria of such a nature as few people are ever blessed to taste. We were promoted to new jobs with new entitlements that gave us new status in our society. Our status as full members of the UN and other international organisations also boosted our ego.

But the closer we got to the policy-making apparatus of our new state the more our eyes were opened to the foibles of humanity. We saw selfishness and shallowness of mind and at first hand. Were these politicians the same people we had once worshipped? Did Mr Krobo Edusei, Minister of the Interior in Ghana, whose wife felt so affluent that she bought a golden bed that became a big headline story in British newspapers, the same minister whose lack of education had convinced the ‘veranda boys’ that there was a place for them too in the new administration we were creating in the new nation we were building?

The realisation that this was largely to be the order of things to come sent some of our people into a spiralling depression that descended inexorably upon the spirits, as the fact was accepted that the foibles that had become noticed were not a temporary aberration but perhaps an unmistakable signal that our leadership had succumbed to the 'sweetness of office' and become transformed into a mere replacement for the departed European oppressors, and sometimes even worse than them. Thus, in East Africa for example, the Swahili word kaburu [abusive term for white settlers] were replaced in popular disdain by the wabenzi ['big' people whose mode of transport was the Mercedes-Benz car].

Inevitably came despair, as we saw the leadership gradually resort to force against the critics within our society. They thereby unwittingly invited the monopolisers of force in the country – the military (sometimes in collusion with the police) – to remove our leadership from office. The depth to which our societies had sunk was illustrated by the emergence to power of such masters of brute force as Field Marshal Idi Amin Dada in Uganda and 'Emperor' Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic.

The violent acts that occurred in many African countries only teased out and removed the surface scum, however, and left the murky rottenness in the middle and at the bottom of the pool of corruption. It had to emerge to the top to replace the politicians and very soon afterwards, each country's treasury became a feeding trough into which the most roguish and unprincipled elements within our society were allowed to place their dirty snouts and feed fat, safe from sanctions, so long as they shared their booty with those who 'mattered'.

Power =money=power became our 'Einstein's theory that answered all questions.' It preyed on the minds of the more intelligent elements in the society, placing them at daily risk of expressing dissent and thus inviting murder, social disintegration or clinical depression into their lives. Members of their families were not spared, for which family can survive being uprooted because its head had merely expressed dissent, only to be subjected to loss of life, exile, or physical brutalisation just for uttering words of dissent? Was our country not supposed to be ruled under the principles of freedom and justice? Did we not have a parliament? Did we not live under the rule of law? People glibly boasted of these formal freedoms, and yet real people suffered without being noticed. Individuals within the society were ignored as they silently endured an aggregation of mental bedlam akin to undiagnosed clinical depression.

Frantz Fanon, who wrote so eloquently about the path to be trodden by the colonised peoples who wanted to free themselves from foreign rule, was a professional psychiatrist, and by observing the state of mind of the patients who were brought to him for treatment in colonial Algeria, he detected the disintegration of personality that could occur in a colonial setting. More important, he could foresee much of the chaos that awaited the individual and his society after decolonisation.

The inexplicable brutality that has marked Algerian society after independence is the single most eloquent validation of Fanon's theories. But it wasn't only a future Algerian 'Callous State' that Fanon foresaw. Like all the best writers, some of the social diseases about which he forewarned the world in his two most famous books, ‘The Wretched Of The Earth’ and ‘Black Skin White Masks’, read as if they were tailor-made for the citizens of most post-colonial African countries.

For instance, in ‘The Wretched Of The Earth’, Fanon warned: ‘Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land, and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns, which constitutes the national bourgeoisie.’

Who, reading that passage in, say, Mobutu Seseseko's Congo or the Cote d'Ivoire of Felix Houphouet-Boigny, would fail to recognise his own country as the butt of Fanon's jibe? And yet, if the three countries mentioned were the most blatant practitioners of ‘the state as a private company’ phenomenon, they were by no means the sole beneficiaries of that profitable 'enterprise' which had also served Cecil Rhodes, Queen Victoria, King Leopold I and quite a few other principalities, now quiescent – sometimes even adulated – in the pages of the history of their own countries.

In Ghana, for instance, a minister of agriculture, F Y Asare, was convicted in 1965 for obtaining one million pounds – worth about £20m today – as his share of a 'deal' under which a company headed by one Henry Djaba, Agric Machinery Company, was contracted to order spraying machines for distribution to cocoa farmers. Cocoa, as everyone knew, was the largest source of revenue and foreign exchange for the government of Ghana. Yet the Minister in charge of the crop's wellbeing, thought nothing of depriving the farmers who cultivated cocoa, of the spraying machines needed to save it from disease. He conspired to skim some of the money meant to purchase the machines off and allowed his co-conspirators to filch some for themselves as well. The proceeds went into cars, houses and foreign bank accounts – the favourite targets of a 'national bourgeoisie' out on a spending spree at the expense of the taxpayer.

In that episode, the president of the company, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, had enough integrity to order his Attorney General's Department, to prosecute the culprits. But today, in Ghana, it is the Attorney General's Department that, in a case involving the building of sports stadiums, known as the ‘Woyome case,’ appears to be inviting prosecution. The reason is that the department did not defend the case well before the court to which it was taken, and, even when an out-of-court 'settlement' was reached, undue haste was applied towards paying the so-called plaintiff over $50m. This was a sum which could have eliminated all the schools that take place under trees in Ghana.

And yet, some people still doubt that fifty years after his death, Frantz Fanon's writing are still 'relevant' to the world of today. Anyone who wants to answer the question of Fanon's relevance only has to dissect the socio-economic situation of any African country today. The answer is writ large in the division of the society into the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, and the political processes that led to that division.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

Cameron Doudou is a writer and commentator.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

What exactly does ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ mean?

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79215

cc WilfracoThe widespread use of ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ makes no sense and is undoubtedly a racist geopolitical signature.

It appears increasingly fashionable in the West for a number of broadcasters, websites, news agencies, newspapers and magazines, the United Nations/allied agencies and some governments, writers and academics to use the term ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ to refer to all of Africa except the five predominantly Arab states of north Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt) and the Sudan, a north-central African country. Even though its territory is mostly located south of the Sahara Desert, the Sudan is excluded from the ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ tagging by those who promote the use of the epithet because the regime in power in Khartoum describes the country as ‘Arab’ despite its majority African population.

But the concept ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ is absurd and misleading, if not a meaningless classificatory schema. Its use defies the science of the fundamentals of geography but prioritises hackneyed and stereotypical racist labelling. It is not obvious, on the face of it, which of the four possible meanings of the prefix ‘sub’ its users attach to the ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ labelling. Is it ‘under’ the Sahara Desert or ‘part of’/‘partly’ the Sahara Desert? Or, presumably, ‘partially’/‘nearly’ the Sahara Desert or even the very unlikely (hopefully!) application of ‘in the style of, but inferior to’ the Sahara Desert, especially considering that there is an Arab people sandwiched between Morocco and Mauritania (northwest Africa) called Saharan?

PRE-LIBERATION SOUTH AFRICA

The example of South Africa is appropriate here. Prior to the formal restoration of African majority government in 1994, South Africa was never designated ‘sub-Sahara Africa’, unlike the rest of the 13 African-led states in southern Africa, which were also often referred to at the time as the ‘frontline states’. South Africa then was either termed ‘white South Africa’ or the ‘South Africa sub-continent’ (as in the ‘India sub-continent’ usage, for instance), meaning ‘almost’/‘partially’ a continent - quite clearly a usage of ‘admiration’ or ‘compliment’ employed by its subscribers to essentially project and valorise the perceived geostrategic potentials or capabilities of the erstwhile regime.

But soon after the triumph of the African freedom movement there, South Africa became ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ in the quickly adjusted schema of this representation. What happened suddenly to South Africa’s geography for it to be so differently classified? Is it African liberation/rule that renders an African state ‘sub-Sahara’? Does this post-1994 West-inflected South Africa-changed classification make ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ any more intelligible? Interestingly, just as in the South Africa ‘sub-continent’ example, the application of the ‘almost’/‘partially’ or indeed ‘part of’/‘partly’ meaning of prefix ‘sub-’ to ‘Sahara Africa’ focuses unambiguously on the following countries of Africa: Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, each of which has 25-75 per cent of its territory (especially to the south) covered by the Sahara Desert. It also focuses on Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan, which variously have 25-75 per cent of their territories (to the north) covered by the same desert. In effect, these 10 states would make up sub-Sahara Africa.

Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, the five Arab north Africa countries, do not, correctly, describe themselves as Africans even though they unquestionably habituate African geography, the African continent, since the Arab conquest and occupation of this north one-third of African territory in the 7th century CE. The Western governments, press and the transnational bodies (which are led predominantly by Western personnel and interests) have consistently ‘conceded’ to this Arab cultural insistence on racial identity. Presumably, this accounts for the West’s non-designation of its ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ dogma to these countries as well as the Sudan, whose successive Arab-minority regimes since January 1956 have claimed, but incorrectly, that the Sudan ‘belongs’ to the Arab world. On this subject, the West does no doubt know that what it has been engaged in, all along, is blatant sophistry and not science. This, however, conveniently suits its current propaganda packaging on Africa, which we shall be elaborating on shortly.

It would appear that we still don’t seem to be any closer to establishing, conclusively, what its users mean by ‘sub-Sahara Africa’. Could it, perhaps, just be a benign reference to all the countries ‘under’ the Sahara, whatever their distances from this desert, to interrogate our final, fourth probability? Presently, there are 53 so-called sovereign states in Africa. If the five north Africa Arab states are said to be located ‘above’ the Sahara, then 48 are positioned ‘under’. The latter would therefore include all the five countries mentioned above whose north frontiers incorporate the southern stretches of the desert (namely, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and the Sudan), countries in central Africa (the Congos, Rwanda, Burundi, etc., etc), for instance, despite being 2000-2500 miles away, and even the southern African states situated 3000-3500 miles away. In fact, all these 48 countries, except the Sudan (alas, not included for the plausible reason already cited), which is clearly ‘under’ the Sahara and situated within the same latitudes as Mali, Niger and Chad (i.e., between 10 and 20 degrees north of the equator), are all categorised by the ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ users as ‘sub-Sahara Africa’.

2012 WORLDWIDE CLASSIFICATORY SCHEMA?

To replicate this obvious farce of a classification elsewhere in the world, the following random exercise is not such an indistinct scenario for universal, everyday, referencing:


1. Australia hence becomes ‘sub-Great Sandy Australia’ after the hot deserts that cover much of west and central Australia.

2. East Russia, east of the Urals, becomes ‘sub-Siberia Asia’.

3. China, Japan and Indonesia are reclassified ‘sub-Gobi Asia’.

4. Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam become ‘sub-Himalaya Asia’.

5. All of Europe is ‘sub-Arctic Europe’.

6. Most of England, central and southern counties, is renamed ‘sub-Pennines Europe’.


7. East/southeast France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia are ‘sub-Alps Europe’.

8. The Americas become ‘sub-Arctic Americas’.

9. All of South America, south of the Amazon, is proclaimed ‘sub-Amazon South America’; Chile could be ‘sub-Atacama South America’.

10. Most of New Zealand’s South Island is renamed ‘sub-Southern Alps New
Zealand’.


11. Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama become ‘sub-Rocky North America’.

12. The entire Caribbean becomes ‘sub-Appalachian Americas’.

RACIST CODING

So, rather than some benign construct, ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ is, in the end, an outlandish nomenclatural code that its users employ to depict an African-led ‘sovereign’ state - anywhere in Africa, as distinct from an Arab-led one. More seriously to the point, ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ is employed to create the stunning effect of a supposedly shrinking African geographical landmass in the popular imagination, coupled with the continent’s supposedly attendant geostrategic global ‘irrelevance’.

‘Sub-Sahara Africa’ is undoubtedly a racist geopolitical signature in which its users aim repeatedly to present the imagery of the desolation, aridity, and hopelessness of a desert environment. This is despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of one billion Africans do not live anywhere close to the Sahara, nor are their lives so affected by the implied impact of the very loaded meaning that this dogma intends to convey. Except this steadily pervasive use of ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ is robustly challenged by rigorous African-centred scholarship and publicity work, its proponents will succeed, eventually, in substituting the name of the continent ‘Africa’ with ‘sub-Sahara Africa’ and the name of its peoples, ‘Africans’, with ‘sub-Sahara Africans’ or, worse still, ‘sub-Saharans’ in the realm of public memory and reckoning.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author of ‘Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature’. (Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011)
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

South Africa: ‘Poverty is political’

The relentless struggles of the poor

Carmen Ludwig und Jochen Nagel

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79225

© Abahlali.org‘The important struggles of the community-based movements for a better life for everyone in South Africa, their sincerity and hospitality impressed us immensely.’

Cape Town, hosting the 6th World Congress of Education International, is a city full of contrasts and social polarisation: For years now, beyond the glittering world of the centres of consumption like the waterfront, protests and social conflicts of the poor are on the rise. They concern the supply of common goods, like water, electricity and living space, as well as resistance against forced evictions, reminding of apartheid times. To find out more about these struggles and life in contemporary South Africa beyond Cape Town’s picture postcard scenery and the official political proclamations, we met with activists from various autonomous and community-based movements in Khayelitsha.

Khayelitsha, which lies approximately 35 kilometres away from Cape Town, developed as a part of apartheid-architecture, is one of the biggest townships in South Africa with more than a million inhabitants. In an informal settlement of corrugate-iron huts lies the Container-Office of our host, named Abahlali baseMjondolo, meaning ‘people who live in shacks’. In addition to their spokesperson Mzonke Poni, a number of representatives from the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, the Mitchell's Plain Backyarders Association and the Mandela Park Backyarders were present.

These grassroots-movements share the principle of self-organisation and the notion that the carriers and intellectuals of their struggles is no one but the poor themselves. The movements support the inhabitants of the townships to take the daily and political struggles into their hands, including ‘illegal’ reconnections of electricity and water, or organising social facilities, like kindergartens. Moreover they call for the City of Cape Town to respect the poor and demand that the rights that are guaranteed in the constitution also be realised for the poor.

Unemployment reaches 60 to 70 percent in the townships and many children go to school hungry. Cape Town alone lacks approximately 400,000 houses and about half-a-million people have no access to sanitary facilities. Distribution of housing and infrastructure to the poor are prevented frequently by corruption and self-enrichment of the political and economic elite. Privatisation of electricity and water lead to heightening of prices – prices that, above all, people in the townships cannot afford.

Mzonke tells us that politicians brand the autonomous movements as ‘radicals’, just to avoid having to deal with the concerns of the poor. This is a strategy in dealing with oppositional positions and social protests which isn’t unknown in Germany either and which is aiming at delegitimising social conflicts.

In South Africa land occupation is increasing presently, even more so due to the desperation and discontent with the government’s non-transparent housing distribution system. The government of the City of Cape Town led by the Democratic Alliance reacts with police repression and violent evictions of the homeless and shack dwellers.

Abahlali baseMjondolo Western Cape supports the occupation of land: ‘For the City of Cape Town to condemn people who occupy land is for the City of Cape Town to condemn the poor. Now that the City of Cape Town has admitted that they cannot house the people of Cape Town they have no right to stop us from occupying land, housing ourselves.’

On the contrary, the commercialisation of land and the excessive wealth in South Africa must be questioned, as do the political priorities, which are predominantly oriented towards the interests of the rich and the economy. As Mzonke Poni points out, poverty is a political matter: ‘There's no way that we can depoliticise poverty, otherwise we stand a risk of making privileges seem natural and normal. Poverty is political and need to be politicised.’

The important struggles of the community-based movements for a better life for everyone in South Africa, their sincerity and hospitality impressed us immensely. Seventeed years after the end of apartheid South Africa is one of the most unequal societies in the world. With their protests the autonomous movements demand a South Africa in which the still unfulfilled promise of freedom for the majority of the people becomes reality at last.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS.

* Carmen Ludwig and Jochen Nagel were part of the German Education Union delegation attending the 6th World Congress of Education International from July 22 to 26, 2011.
* This report was published in November 2011 in German in the member's journal of the German Education Union (GEW).
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Uganda’s labour unions a threat to workers’ rights

Vincent Nuwagaba

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/features/79224

cc R MThe unions have been turned into a de facto branch of the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM) party. Bribery, pursuit of personal interest, co-option, intimidation and manipulation have made the unions less effective in fighting for workers.

If there’s any constituency that is less prioritised in Uganda, it is the workers. Yet workers have five members of parliament thanks to affirmative action. What’s disappointing, though, is the manner in which the workers’ MPs are elected. We have two labour centres – National Organisation of Trade Unions (NOTU) and Central Organisation of Free Trade Unions (COFTU) from where all the five MPs are elected. Another centre, Central Organisation of Labour Unions (COLU), died before it captured the ground. So how representative are the trade unions to be the channel through which workers’ MPs are elected? The emergency of the diverse labour centres is not so much because of their need to serve workers better. Rather, it is primarily to further their founders’ interests or because of the undemocratic tendencies of the mother centre, NOTU.

We need to recall that COFTU was formed soon after the elections in NOTU in which Sam Lyomoki and Christopher Kahirita emerged losers. Irene Kaboole also formed COLU (which died in its infancy and I don’t know whether it will be resuscitated) after Kaboole was shown the exit as vice chairperson. I will not delve into the freeness and fairness of the elections in this article; it will be a subject for another article. Rather, I strongly argue that the formation of the centres has been and continues to be a reaction to elections gone bad for some people.

At the time of COLU’s formation, Irene Kaboole belonged to the Uganda Government and Allied Workers’ Union (UGAWU), but it emerged that she was directly or indirectly booted from UGAWU as the recognised UGAWU remained affiliated to NOTU. Today, one of the Workers’ MPs Mr Arinaitwe Rwakajara is from UGAWU. Workers’ MPs have not focused on non-unionised workers who incidentally are the majority. While the MPs are elected by trade unions, they necessarily represent all the workers –unionised and non-unionised. It’s prudent that the formula of electing workers’ MPs be revised if they are to be relevant to the Uganda’s labour rights movement. As of now, the workers’ MPs naively or deliberately remain focused on their voters – the trade unionists – and forget that their constituency covers all workers.

Most likely, workers’ MPs confuse their electorate with their constituency or else they unpatriotically take their electorate to be more important than their constituency. Consequently, workers’ rights remain the most flagrantly abused. What makes matters worse also is the grim reality that Uganda’s trade unions have been turned into a de facto branch of the National Resistance Movement (NRM) Party. I have deeply studied Uganda’s trade unions and I confidently assert that they are a threat to workers’ rights. I wonder how a trade union centre of NOTU’s calibre can succumb to the temptation of getting money from the president to build its home or purchase one. Is it not clear that he who pays the piper calls the tune? How can unions elect NRM cadres as their leaders and expect them to prioritise workers and not their party? Recently the president said his job is to propose and the MPs’ job (including workers’ MPs) is to approve. Thus, all the MPs have to do is rubberstamp Museveni’s positions.

How can workers celebrate that their MP Charles Bakabulindi is a minister yet they know that as a minister he is bound by collective responsibility to endorse the Government position even if it’s antithetical to workers’ interests? How do they celebrate the indirect gagging of a leader who primarily is supposed to be their mouthpiece? MPs are supposed to be independent of the president but ministers are necessarily the president’s servants and he is their master. It’s clear that President Museveni has for so long frustrated the workers in their quest for social justice and he uses the likes of Charles Bakabulindi to cow the workers into submission. This is similar to the indirect rule method that the British used in their colonies and in Uganda which was a protectorate. None of the workers’ MP has been forthright in showing solidarity with the teachers as they demand that their salaries be revised upward. On the contrary, it is only Democratic Party’s Joseph Sewungu who stood firmly in support of teachers. So, what is the role of workers’ MPs? Why should UNATU stand alone when it is an affiliate of the leading and oldest labour centre NOTU? Although NOTU threatened to strike over teachers’ pay, I am yet to see whether they will follow through.

Bribery, co-option, intimidation and manipulation – tools that the NRM machinery has used for the past 26 years have not spared the trade unions. As we move to celebrate 26 years of the National Resistance Movement rule, my question is: What gains do Ugandan workers have to celebrate? While the trade union leaders – who evidently represent a tiny minority of workers – are driven in vehicles, attend national, regional and international seminars and conferences with handsome per diems, the rank and file unionised workers and all non-unionised workers are disillusioned, disappointed and see only betrayal in the trade union leaders and workers’ MPs.

On 6 April 2008, I was hosted on UBC TV together with Mr Bakabulindi to talk about job creation and respect for workers’ rights as a prerequisite for economic growth. Surprisingly, I found myself speaking as a workers’ MP while Baka’s job was to defend the government. His position to me was understandable – he was defending his cake and in my view, workers should have recalled him as soon as he was appointed minister. Right now workers’ MPs benefit from workers but workers scarcely benefit from the MPs. It would be understandable if the Directorate of Labour was elevated to a full-fledged ministry to be headed by a workers’ representative. Presently, I must say, workers scarcely benefit from a minister who happens to be a workers’ MP. It’s high time we subjected our trade unions and workers’ MPs to a thorough, critical assessment. Watch this space for more debate on labour issues.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMABZUKA NEWS.
* Vincent Nuwagaba is a human rights defender with keen interest in socio-economic rights
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Ethiopia: Middle Passage to the Middle East

From the International Slave Trade to the International Maid Trade

Alemayehu G. Mariam

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/79223

cc L PIn what classifies as modern day slavery, Ethiopian women sent to work in the Middle East have few rights and are subject to widespread abuse.

In the days of the Atlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage was the journey of slave trading ships from the west coast of Africa to the New World. Portuguese, British, French, Spanish, Dutch and other slave traders maintained outposts along the African coast to transact their business with their local slave raiding partners. Millions of African slaves were sold or traded for manufactured goods or raw materials. In the gruelling journey, the slaves were often shackled and chained to the floor to gain maximum cargo capacity. Many died from disease, starvation, dehydration and suffocation. Many also committed suicide by jumping overboard. Those who resisted their masters were beaten and even killed. Plantation owners treated the slaves like cattle; and those working in the fields were often flogged and beaten. Female slaves were the objects of sexual desire and abuse by their masters. The law required runaway slaves (‘fugitive slaves’) who escaped their bondage to be returned to their masters who punished them severely.

There is a Middle Passage of sorts taking place today from Ethiopia to the Middle East. It is what lawyer Khaled Ali Beydoun and others have described as the Ethiopian ‘Maid Trade’. Today a network of unscrupulous modern-day slave-traffickers (‘human traffickers’) and ‘private labour employment agencies’ operating under license by the ruling regime in Ethiopia ship thousands of young Ethiopian women to various parts of the Middle East to work as domestic servants in what amounts to ‘contract slavery’ with little follow up and monitoring to ensure their well-being and welfare in their host countries.

The plight of Ethiopian women domestic workers in the Middle East has been documented in Bina Fernandez’s survey research (Ch. 7). In 2009, ‘over 74,000 people risked their lives to enter Yemen en route to Saudi Arabia, of which 42,000 were Ethiopians.’ According to official data, 91 per cent of Ethiopian domestic workers in the Middle East were single women, 83 per cent were between the age of 20–30 , 63 per cent had some secondary education, 26 per cent were illiterate, 71 per cent were Muslim and 93 per cent earned US$100–150 per month. Some of these women ‘officially registered with the government as a migrant worker’. Others ‘worked through illegal brokers who are viciously exploitative [and] often take the women’s money and sometimes abandon them in the desert before they even reach Somalia.’

The ‘Middle Passage’ of Middle East ‘contract slavery’ for the young Ethiopian women is unspeakably harrowing. Their working conditions are described as slave-like, except, as Beydoun argues, ‘Shackles and whips have been replaced by more inventive designs to dehumanize, suppress, and subsequently enslave persons for economic or sexual purposes.’ Fernandez reported that the women live-in domestic workers she interviewed were ‘on-call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and working between 10 and 20 hours daily.’ Some of the women pulled ‘double duty - that is, cleaning or doing laundry for a second household, usually a relative of their employer.’ Most of these women got ‘only one day off a month, or no break at all.’ Many of these women experienced ‘complete physical exhaustion’ and often suffered ‘mental breakdown’ unable to ‘tell what day of the week it was, or what time it was.’ They faced extreme physical, mental and sexual abuse..

Fernadez further found that that ‘verbal abuse by employers is commonplace’ including ‘racial insults and discriminatory behaviour (such as separate food and dishes for them) as is non-payment or underpayment of wages. To escape their conditions, some are forced to become ‘runaways’. They end up doing ‘live-out domestic workers, brewing and selling illicit liquor, or engaging in sex work.’ But they are trapped. Fernandez explains, ‘Their lack of legal status makes them vulnerable to greater exploitation if they are detected, as they risk blackmail, imprisonment, and/or deportation. If they wish to leave voluntarily, they often have to pay high fines for exit visas.’

TEARS OF THE ETHIOPIAN MAIDS

In a recent Youtube video, an unnamed Ethiopian woman confronts a representative of the regime of Meles Zenawi in a meeting hall in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). She complains about the mistreatment and dehumanisation she and other maids continue to face in life and in death in the UAE, and laments the depraved indifference of her ‘government’ to speak up, defend and protect them from gross abuses of human rights.

‘…If we run away from [our abusive employers], there is a chance we can die. There is a woman who tells us to run away. But they don’t help us. If [we] run away, we need money to pay for rent and food. [We] don’t have to run away. As much as possible, it is better to help [us]. When we live in this country [UAE], sometimes we die. Many of us are buried here. Why must an Ethiopian be buried in the Emirates? Why is that our government does not check on us, follow up on our conditions, ask about us? Why should I be buried in a foreign country? It does not matter if we are Christian or Muslim. This question has deprived me sleep. When I bow to pray, I have not been able to do so properly. Only God knows. All I do is cry. Even our dead bodies must not be buried in this country. [There was a domestic worker accused of killing her employer.] It is possible she may have done something wrong. Her government should stand and defend her and advocate for her. She should be punished as appropriate [if she is guilty] by her family or the law…We learned [within a few days of her arrest] that she was killed by the authorities [in the Emirates].’

As she concluded her statement, this young woman cries out in pain, her voice quivering, tears in her eyes and pleading for an answer from someone, anyone:

‘Where is Ethiopia’s flag? I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take it anymore…’


THE RESPONSE OF ZENAWI’S REGIME – BLAME THE MAIDS

The response of Zenawi’s regime to the plight of these women is morally calloused and depraved. Fernandez reported: ‘The term “runaway” was used in a pejorative sense by one Ethiopian government official and several of the PEA [private employment agency] representatives during interviews, to describe these women as delinquents who abandon their contractual responsibilities because they do not want to work hard, and want an easy life.’ Beydoun argues that the ruling regime’s efforts to combat trafficking in Lebanon were symbolic and ineffective despite the fact that an inter-agency anti-trafficking task force had been established to deal with the problem. He concluded, ‘Trafficked women are particularly vulnerable where their own governments fail to adequately protect them.’

Since 1998, Zenawi’s regime has put in place a ‘Private Employment Agency Proclamation No. 104/1998’, which provided for licensing of private employment agencies and the prosecution of illegal brokers. In 2009, this Proclamation was repealed and updated by the ‘Employment Exchange Services Proclamation No. 632/2009’, which required private employment agencies, among other things, ‘not to recruit a job seeker below the age of 18 years; not to terminate the contract of employment before acquiring the consent of the worker in writing; get approval from the Ethiopian embassy or consular office to form a new contract or to modify the existing one; register a worker sent abroad, within fifteen days, with the nearest Ethiopian embassy or consular office.’ The ‘private employment agency which sends workers abroad’ is mandated to ensure that the working conditions in the host country not ‘be less favorable to an Ethiopian than the rights and benefits of those who work in a similar type and level of work in the country of employment.’ The foreign employer is required to pay the ‘visa fee of the country of destination, round trip ticket, residence and work permit fees and insurance coverage’ for the worker. Moreover, ‘any private employment agency which sends a worker abroad for work’ must deposit cash or post bond in the minimum amount of USD$30,000 for up to 500 workers ‘for the protection and enforcement of the rights of the worker.’

The real penalty for violation of the Proclamation No. 632 is suspension, revocation or cancellation of license of the employment agency. Though various stiff criminal penalties are provided in Article 40, there is little evidence of serious prosecution of human traffickers. According to a 2010 State Department report, ‘Between March and October 2009, the Federal High Court’s 11th Criminal] bench heard 15 cases related to transnational labor trafficking, resulting in five convictions, nine acquittals, and one withdrawal due to missing witnesses. Of the five convictions, three offenders received suspended sentences of five years’ imprisonment, two co-defendants were fined, and one offender is serving a sentence of five years’ imprisonment.’

Similarly, according to a 2011 UNHCR report, ‘The [Ethiopian] government showed only nascent signs of engaging destination country governments in an effort to improve protections for Ethiopian workers and obtain protective services for victims.’ Moreover, ‘although licensed employment agencies must place funds in escrow in the event a worker's contract is broken, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has never used these deposits to pay for victims' transportation back to Ethiopia.’ But the regime has readily come to the rescue of other victims of human traffickers according to the same UNHCR report: ‘In 2010, Ethiopia granted asylum to 1,383 Eritrean refugees deported from Egypt, many of whom claim to have been brutalized by Rashaida smugglers operating in the Sinai - including conditions of forced construction labor - or have fled Eritrea to escape situations of forced labor associated with the implementation of the country's national service program.’ While it is noble and morally commendable to assist any victim of human trafficking and human rights abuse, it is also true that charity begins at home.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

The international movement of labour is a fact of international life. For a poor country such as Ethiopia where unemployment is high, workers who migrate abroad are a source of much needed financial support for their families, and a source of remittances for the country in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. But slavery, including contract slavery, is still slavery. It is just as cruel, oppressive, exploitive, dehumanising and degrading. These women are extremely vulnerable and have no rights and no means of support to vindicate their rights. Various commentators have argued that the demand for Ethiopian domestic workers will continue as they are considered cheaper and more obedient. In other words, they are considered ‘model maids’ who put up with a lot of abuse in quiet desperation.

One can point to international legal and moral obligations to help out these women and effectively combat human trafficking camouflaged as migrant labour. But discussion of legal and moral state obligations under these obligations would be an exercise in futility. Talking law or morality to those who thumb their noses at the rule of law is a waste of time.

If the problem of ‘contract slavery’ in the Ethiopian ‘maid trade’ is going to be addressed effectively, serious criminal investigations and prosecutions must be pursued against violators. The aggressive crackdown that has long been directed at the independent press in Ethiopia should be re-directed to the gangs of criminal human traffickers.

Various scholars and researchers have offered other effective recommendations to deal with the problem, including domestic skills training to Ethiopian women in an attempt to lessen their vulnerability, working with NGOs as partner organisations to monitor their working conditions and working with host countries to make it easy for these workers to use the banking institutions. Some have suggested ways of improving access to the criminal justice system of the host country by providing a confidential complaint reporting process for abuse and wage payment related issues and legal assistance; expanding victim services such as shelters and hotlines; and engaging civil society and faith-based groups to offer assistance.

SLAVERY BY ANY OTHER NAME

Slavery was not abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen until 1962. A year later it was abolished in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). In the 1950s, Saudi Arabia had an estimated 450,000 slaves, nearly 20 percent of the population. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that ‘contract slavery’ of domestic servants continues in these countries. The deep tracks of slavery do not vanish easily in the desert sand in a mere 50 years. The vast majority of the Ethiopian domestic workers end up in these three countries. In 2009, ‘over 74,000 people risked their lives to enter Yemen en route to Saudi Arabia, of which 42,000 were Ethiopians.’ The ‘kafala’ or sponsorship system in the Gulf States gives disproportionate power to the sponsor (employer) in the ‘contract’ relationship. If the worker breaks her contract, she bears the cost of her return ticket and will likely pay fines and pay debts to the employment agency that arranged the sponsorship. There is no running away from ‘contract slavery’ particularly since the migrant worker is required to surrender her passport (if legally in the country) to the employer. Through the maids may be able to run away from their cruel employers, they cannot hide. They are frequently arrested as fugitive workers, not unlike fugitive slaves of yesteryears. Unable to change their circumstances, these women endure in quiet desperation often for years.

Slavery by any other name is still slavery. In truth, there can be no ‘contract slavery’ since only free men and free women can enter into any contracts, which leaves many of Ethiopian domestic workers as nothing but slaves and at best indentured servants. Article 4 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees that ‘No one shall be held in slavery or servitude, slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.’ We must all do what we can to help our Ethiopian sisters to rise up from ‘contract slavery’.

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* Alemayehu G. Mariam is professor of political science at California State University, San Bernardino.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

The Garowe principles: a solution or a deepening of the Somali crisis?

Osman D. Osman

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/79220

cc A EA Somali National Consultative Constitutional Conference took place in December 2011 and issued the Garowe Principles. The jury is out on whether the principles will have any impact on the Somali crisis.

A document referred to as the Garowe principles came out of the Somali national consultative constitutional conference held in Garowe city in the semi-autonomous region of Puntland on 21-23 December 2011. While many are skeptical of the potential implementation of this document and view the outcome of the Garowe conference as rehashing and recycling principles of the Embagathi conference, others question its legality from a constitutional stand point. So, is the unintended consequence the reinvention of yet another crisis, so as to follow again the devolutionary cycle that has been intrinsic in the Somali conflict, a sort of dé·jà vu Embagathi?

THE MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

In early December 2011, 280 members of the Transitional Federal Parliament (TFP) voted to oust the speaker Sharif Hassan Sheikh Aden in a non-confidence vote, and within a week nominated an interim speaker. In the same week the office of The United Nations Political Office for Somalia (UNPOS) released a communiqué in which it acknowledged the TFP crisis, and within two days UNPOS hastily called for the Garowe conference to be held in the week of 21-23 December 2011 without addressing the TFP crisis.

Members of the Parliament advised the office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General (SRSG) that it would be illegal to open discussions on components of the road map without first deliberating it in parliament and having it ratified after being voted on by MPs. They were told by the office of the PM that it would be voted on in parliament on 19 December 2011, the same day the office of the SRSG announced the Garowe conference.

From the perspective of the legislature, they argue that firstly it is illegal to begin the implementation of the road map without ratification by the TFP - and that this would amount to violation of the Transitional Charter. Secondly, they argue that the SRSG opted for the easy way out and sided with the former speaker, so the former speaker’s wishes converge with the exit strategy of UNPOS. In retrospect, instead of addressing the TFP crisis, the office of the SRSG committed an error in judgment with its facilitation of the Garowe conference, which in the views of many deepens the Somali crisis.
Moreover, the MPs contend that the SRSG was looking for an exit strategy as the donors are questioning the $60-million spent on the draft constitution - and what is better than asking the speaker to go along with the implementation of the road map illegally without its ratification by the TFP.

THE OUTCOME

Despite its questionable legitimacy, another problem associated with this conference is its questionable outcome. Compare the Garowe outcome of 2011 with the Embagathi agreement of 2004: in principle, the number of MPs are almost identical on both agreement, the election process remains the same and uses the 4.5 formula. There is no clear interpretation of how the 20 per cent quota assigned for female MPs will be allocated among clans and this further complicates the process.

With respect to the ratification of the draft constitution, it has not been widely shared with the Somali population and the committee of experts (CoE) only met once. Only four out of the nine member committee showed up, yet they are directed to hand over the draft constitution to the Independent Federal Constitution Commission (IFCC) no later than 15 May 2011.

Additionally, the draft will be heavily influenced by the National Democratic Institute, which is contracted out for the draft of the constitution as well as the salaries of the CoE. Already the MPs are questioning the impartiality of its country director Mohamed Abdirizak, who served as an advisor and chief of staff to the former president of Somalia Abdullahi Yusuf, who hails from Puntland.

While there is general consensus on ending the transition, it is the Garowe principles that will dictate the outcome and the shape of the new political dispensation after the end of the transition. A careful examination of the Garowe principles exhibits the following intrinsic deficiencies:

a) If the end of the transition was intended to replace the current state of affairs of the TFG system with a system of good governance, the Garowe principles failed to achieve that objective by injecting a flawed process whereby only the signatories of the Garowe principles are entrusted with the fate of Somalia; a draconian system of governance will be the end result of such flawed process.

b) The bicameral legislature, if adopted as per this principle, will contradict with the flawed process of selecting MPs based on the 4.5 formula, and thus will complicate the reconciliation process and may even open up old wounds. As bad as the 4.5 formula is, the addition of the upper chamber will also reflect on clan accommodation and thus will again inflate the numbers of the bicameral legislature to close to 400 MPs.

c) The Garowe principles, in the view of the majority of Somalis, is a joke and it is the SRSG who is pushing this process to leave a legacy of destruction. How else does one explain the notion of harmonising state and federal constitutions when Somaliland is not even at the table, a retreat that is only reminiscent to the night of long knives.

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* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Ayanda Kota has laid a charge of assault against the police

Unemployed People's Movement press statement

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/79217

Ayanda Kota was released from custody on Friday afternoon. Bail was set at R500. The judge made it clear that he considered the charge of 'theft' for failure to return borrowed books to be ridiculous. Although this was not mentioned in court, the fact that Ayanda has repeatedly offered to replace the books in question makes the charge even more ridiculous. The prosecutor did not even have a docket on the charges of resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer but he requested more time for 'further investigation'.

Since his release Ayanda has had the bruises, abrasions and swellings from the assault photographed and he has been to a doctor to complete the J88 form which lists the marks left on his body. The doctor's finding is that the marks left on his body are consistent with an assault. Yesterday he returned to the Grahamstown police station to lay a charge against the officers that assaulted him on Thursday afternoon last week. Brigadier Govender, the station commander, and the officers in the charge office were very polite and helpful and one of them even remarked that it just takes a few bad police officers to undermine the good work of the others. The case number is 282/1/2012.

We wish to confirm what happened on Thursday. Ayanda was asked to come to the police station to meet Detective Zulu to respond to a charge of theft that was laid against him in August last year by Rhodes Sociology lecturer Claudia Martinez-Mullen after he had misplaced three books that she had lent him – The Communist Manifesto and a selection of writings by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and another one by Antonio Gramsci. He was asked to be at the police station before four in the afternoon and didn't have time to take his six-year-old son home as he was coming directly from a meeting at Masifunde. He went to the station voluntarily and asked Richard Pithouse to go with him.

At the police station Ayanda met Detective Zulu and asked to be able to show Zulu sms's to Martinez-Mullen offering to replace the books. But Zulu was very aggressive and just said that he was taking Ayanda straight to the cells. Ayanda then said, calmly, that if he was going to be taken to the cells then the police must either allow him to phone his sister to collect his son or they must drop his son off with his family before taking him to the cells. At this point Zulu began an unprovoked assault on Ayanda with punches to the head and the body. Ayanda was sitting down at the time while Zulu was standing. Ayanda, still sitting down, threw one punch in defence after receiving three or four blows from Zulu. Other officers then joined the assault. Ayanda was very quickly pushed to the ground and was held down as he was kicked and punched. His trousers were pulled down and he was then dragged out of the room and down the corridor. He was visibly bleeding. There is a camera in this corridor. While Ayanda was being dragged down the corridor he was punched some more and one officer called others to 'come and see the newsmaker of the year now'. We are requesting that the video footage from the camera in the corridor be made public.

As the UPM we wish to thank all those people and organisations who responded to the arrest and the assault with solidarity. Professor Saleem Badat, the Vice Chancellor of Rhodes University, came straight to the police station as soon as he heard the news. Professor Fred Hendricks brought a lawyer and food to the holding cells. Students for Social Justice, the Right to Know Campaign, the Democratic Left Front, Abahlali baseMjondolo and the Mandela Park Backyarders all responded with statements of support. George Kahn represented Ayanda in court. Members of the UPM, the Women's Social Forum and Students for Social Justice were all in court along with Ben Mafani, the well-known activist from Glenmore, and representatives from Masifunde and Jubilee. Bishop Rubin Philip alerted the local Anglicans to the situation from Durban and Rev. Mzi from the Anglican Cathedral here in Grahamstown was in court. There were also a number of Rhodes academics in court. M.P. Giyose from Jubilee paid the bail and Neil Overy photographed Ayanda's injuries after he was released. We also want to thank the media for their interest in this matter, Amnesty International and all those people who have been advocating in solidarity with Ayanda on Facebook. We especially want to thank Richard Pithouse. Comrade Richard walks the journey of this struggle with us and is always there for us.

Our next step will be to lodge a civil case against the Minister of Safety and Security. We will approach the Socio-Economic Rights Institute in Johannesburg for legal support in this case. Detective Zulu has been successfully sued before and we are confident that this will be the second successful civil case against him.

This is not the first time that Ayanda has been assaulted by the police. Ayanda was beaten and pepper sprayed in a police van after he was arrested for protesting outside the opening of parliament in Cape Town in February 2010. The charges against Ayanda were later dropped.

In February 2011 he and two other activists were arrested as they arrived on the scene of a road blockade in the Phaphamani Squatter Camp here in Grahamstown. They were arrested and handcuffed while other people were shot with rubber bullets. Again the charges were dropped.

This pattern of arrest, often followed by assault, and then charges being dropped after six or seven court appearances is faced by grassroots activists all over the country. All the movements of the poor know it well. It has become normal.

The ANC tries to put across a convincing picture of democracy but the reality is that this democracy is not for everyone. Poor people that ask questions and enter debates are repressed with violence from party structures and the police. We are not only struggling for service delivery. We are also struggling for democracy, for the right to organise.

A lot of people have been asking how Martinez-Mullen could do this to our movement. She wanted to support us at one time. But she became very angry with us saying that “UPM are not Marxists”. We can't organise our struggle to fit other people's theories. Our struggle does not exist for Martinez-Mullen or for her theories. It exists for us. It is based our lives, our oppression and our resistance. When there are important issues on the ground we have to respond to those issues. When our members have a strong opinion about a certain matter we have to respect that.

It is well known that Marx himself said that he was not a Marxist. On our understanding Marx was an important thinker in the communist movement and while there are important things that we can learn from Marx we won't find all the answers to the questions that we face in Marx. Anyway, Marxists are always debating between themselves. We are happy to bring ideas from Marx, Fanon, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Biko and other thinkers into our movement but our movement can never be dictated to in the name of any theory or thinker. Our movement is made up of living human beings and our struggle has to start and end with them and their lives. We will not accept that someone can demand to be a boss over our struggle just because they say that they know Marx. We welcome comrades who want to struggle with us but we will not welcome bosses that want to rule over us. We support what S'bu Zikode calls a living politics – a politics that comes from the ground up, stays close to the lives of the people and is owned and controlled by the people.

We have to speak truth to the left. There is a very damaging sectarianism on the left in South Africa. When people disagree they should be free to debate issues openly but this must done in a context of mutual respect. We can all learn from such discussions. But the sectarians don't do this. They try to destroy people and movements that don't accept their rule. They try to character assassinate people and movements. They lie. They even support state repression. Many of them are white people who think that they have a right to dictate to black movements because only they know the right theory. In Durban they became the biggest propagandists for state repression. This left, the left that Abahlali baseMjondolo calls the regressive left, is not a useless left. It is a dangerous left. It has become part of the system that oppresses us. We are very clear about this and we are asking the left in South Africa to take a clear stand against the sectarianism that has done so much damage to our movements.

We note Martinez-Mullen's recent allegations about UPM and wish to make it clear that we have democratic processes in place – processes that include the election of the leadership and a rotation of responsibilities amongst elected office bearers. The next election is scheduled for March 2012. We note further that neither our members nor our comrades in other movements have ever complained about our democratic processes.

Our struggle continues. We are very pleased to announce that at a meeting between UPM and the Women's Social Forum (WSF) yesterday we have agreed that from now on the WSF will operate from the UPM offices. We are holding a mass meeting in the Glenmore community hall tomorrow at 5:30 in the afternoon and hope to announce protest actions in support of the Glenmore community and against police brutality and police repression of activists soon. We are committed to working to uniting the struggles of the poor in Grahamstown, the Eastern Cape and across South Africa.

Sekwanele! Geneog! Enough!

For more information contact: Siyanda Centwa 078 571 5507; Asanda Ncwadi 071 010 5441.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Free Nigerian Activists and Prisoners of Conscience

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/79226

Osmond Ugwu and Raphael Elobuike are Nigerian labour activists and human rights defenders currently spending their second month in Enugu Federal Prison in South East Nigeria. They are being detained on charges of attempted murder of a policeman following their arrest at a workers rally on 24 October 2011 at Enugu.

The goal of this campaign is to reach 20,000 signatures and we need more support. You can read more and sign the petition here.

Somaliland: Free detained journalists, stop attacks on media freedom

ARTICLE 19

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/79248

18 January 2012

ARTICLE 19 is concerned about the ongoing media freedom crackdown and wave of journalist arrests in recent weeks in Somaliland. Following the arrest and detention without charge of 25 journalists, 24 have subsequently been released, but ARTICLE 19 remains concerned for the welfare of the remaining journalist being held.

The sweep of arrests followed a protest by the journalists after the Somaliland police raided the offices of the privately owned Horn Cable TV forcing all the media workers and journalists to leave on 14 January and suspending the TV station from broadcasting.

"While we welcome the release of the majority of journalists, we note that these arrests and detention are unlawful and an outright violation of their freedom of expression and media freedoms. We call on the Somaliland authorities to respect fundamental human rights and hold all those responsible for intimidating journalists accountable," said Henry Maina, ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa Director.

Ali Aareye Waheen is the journalist still in custody after he was arrested on 12 January 2012 for allegedly taking photographs of a petrol station owned by Abdirahman Abdullahi Ismail, the vice president of the breakaway autonomous region of Somaliland. Borama was scheduled to appear in court on 14 and 15 January but the hearing was delayed until 17 January. Ali was not produced in court yesterday.

ARTICLE 19 strongly calls for the unconditional release of journalists still in custody and the immediate lifting of the ban on Horn Cable TV. We also urge Somaliland authorities to exercise restraint and allow critical journalists and dissenting citizens to exercise their right to press freedom and freedom to association without undue restrictions.


FOR MORE INFORMATION: For more media interviews please contact: Henry Maina, ARTICLE 19 Eastern Africa Director, via email or call on +254 20 3862230/1/2

Resolving the food crisis: Assessing global policy reforms since 2007

A new policy report from GDAE-IATP, January 2012

The Oakland Institute

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/79222

The spikes in global food prices in 2007-8 served as a wake-up call to the global community on the inadequacies of our global food system. Commodity prices doubled, the estimated number of hungry people topped one billion, and food riots spread through the developing world. A second price spike in 2010-11 which drove the global food import bill for 2011 to an estimated $1.3 trillion, only deepened the sense that the policies and principles guiding agricultural development and food security were deeply flawed.

How well has the international community responded to these challenges? In this policy report from the Global Development and Environment Institute and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Timothy A. Wise and Sophia Murphy argue that the recent crisis has been a catalyst for important policy reforms, but they conclude that governments have yet to address its underlying causes. They warn that the international community is avoiding deeper structural reforms, leaving the world at risk of another devastating spike in global food prices. Wise and Murphy call for urgent attention to three issues:

* Reducing financial speculation on commodities markets - Reforms have been limited, leaving commodities markets prone to wide price swings. Proposals to increase the use of food reserves to limit volatility have been largely rejected.

* Limiting the further expansion of crops and land dedicated to biofuels - Over 40 percent of US corn now goes to ethanol production, backed by a range of government subsidies and incentives. Similar programs spur biofuel expansion in other industrialized countries, contributing to the underlying demand-growth that is driving agricultural prices steadily upward.

* Halting ‘land grabs’ - As food-producing resources become more valuable, resource-constrained countries and speculative investors have bought or leased millions of acres of agricultural land in Africa and in other developing regions. This unregulated new market compromises the long-term food-producing capacity of developing countries while dispossessing those who have traditionally worked the land.

The report is based on a comprehensive assessment of the policies and actions taken since 2007 by four international groups of actors: the UN, the G-20, the World Bank and international donors. The authors document the welcome renewal of attention to agricultural development and to the contributions of small-scale farmers and women. They also find encouraging signs of improvement in the attention to environmental issues, including climate change. But they warn that policy reforms fall well short of what is needed to meet the world's current and future food needs in a sustainable way. Wise and Murphy put the onus on rich-country governments to take responsibility for their agricultural policies that are contributing to the fragility and volatility in food systems around the world and to support the renewed interest in many developing countries to increase agricultural development and reduce dependence on food imports.

Download ‘Resolving the Food Crisis: Assessing Global Policy Reforms Since 2007’.
Download the Executive Summary.
Read ‘Resolving the Food Crisis: Global leaders fail to make crucial reforms’ an op-ed by Wise and Murphy.
See an interview with the authors on Real News Network.

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* The Oakland Institute is an independent policy think tank, bringing fresh ideas and bold action to the most pressing social, economic, and environmental issues of our time. P.O. Box 18978, Oakland, CA 94619

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Reclaiming Muthurwa Dallas Social Hall

Patrick Kamotho

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/advocacy/79207

Kenyan youths have on several occasions put their country on the world map through sporting prowess. In the World Cross Country Championships held in Poland in March 2010, Kenya won 21 medals, 16 of which were Gold. In the recently concluded All African Games in Maputo, Kenya performed well in athletics, but a dismal performance was recorded in indoor sport such as boxing. With increasing commercialisation of sporting activities and greater opportunities for young professional athletes, many young Kenyans are engaging in sports as a way of improving their standard of living rather than simply as a pastime.

In the history of pugilism in Kenya, Muthurwa Dallas, a Kenya Railways Corporation estate, was famous as a boxing power house. The youths from this community formed a larger part of Kenya National Boxing Team; this crème de la crème group natured their talent at Muthurwa Dallas Social Hall.

Around 2006 the government of Kenya and the City Council of Nairobi were faced with a problem of relocating thousands of small-scale traders (hawkers) operating within Nairobi Central Business District. That year the government allocated Ksh800 Million from the national budget for construction of a major market. The most convenient area that could accommodate this populace was Muthurwa estate on Kenya Railways Corporation (KRC) land. A controversy ensured over the sale of the said 15 acres by KRC in partnership with Kenya Railways Staff Retirement Benefit Scheme (KRSRBS). Corruption and controversy marred the exercise, undervaluation of the land ensued. Going by market value then an acre was about Ksh65 million. The land could have fetched more than Ksh975m (2008/2009 financial report: Kenya Railways Staff Retirement Benefit Scheme by Delloite and Touche).

In 2006/7 election campaign, the President Republic of Kenya visited Muthurwa for the groundbreaking ceremony of the proposed market. Community representatives petitioned the president to spare the historic Muthurwa Dallas Social Hall. The request was made to the president by then Mayor of Nairobi Dick Wathika and reinforced by then Minister for Local Government Musikali Kombo. Verbally the president directed that the facility be spared and returned to the community for recreational and educational purposes once the market was completed.

In March 2008 when the market was officially opened by then Minister of Local Government Uhuru Kenyatta, the community reiterated their request to the minister. But when they tried to access the facility they were informed that the market was incomplete and still under construction, therefore the social hall was unavailable as the contructor, Ongata Construction Company Ltd, was using it.

Several months later after the market was operational, several banking institutions tried to open branches within the facility and this led the community to petition the government, President, the Attorney General and Minister for local government. The City Council of Nairobi through the office of Town Clerk and the local councilor have collaborated in denying the community access and use of this historical sporting facility. On the other hand the community had highlighted this request in the media.

Come 2010, the residents of Muthurwa estate instituted a court case, petition No 65 0f 2010 challenging the government, KRC and KRSRBS on the basis of the Bill of Rights, economic and social rights Article 43 (b) to accessible and adequate housing, and to reasonable standards of sanitation. Hon justice Musinga in his ruling observed that. “Under International law general comment number 4 of the United Nations, office of High Commissioner for Human Rights, the right to housing comprises various elements. These include availability of services, materials, recreational facilities and Infrastructures, location which allows access to employment options, health care services, schools, child care centers and other social facilities.”

According to 2009 national census Kamukunji Constituency had approximately 180,000 households, residing in Nairobi City Council’s 15 estates. With this population the number of public recreational facility are three, that is St.Theresa Catholic Church Hall, YMCA Shauri Moyo Hall and Pumwani Social Hall.
Several petitions have been submitted to the government by the community reclaiming the facility but with no success. The campaign to reclaim the facility was highlighted when the community participated in the Ministry of Housing 2009 National Housing competition dated 24 -29 June under the banner, ‘Saving Kenya Railways Assets and Land’. A certificate of participation was awarded, and the Minister for Housing noted the important role such a facility played to advance youth development. The same year the community submitted a project titled, ‘Reclaiming Muthurwa Dallas Social Hall’, on United Nation International Year of reconciliation, a program run by the Foundation for Subjective Experience and Research.

It’s noteworthy that in 1986 the first Olympic Gold Medal in boxing came through Robert Modest Wangila Napunyi whom resided within the estate and regularly trained at the facility. Among many other outstanding personalities to emerge from the facility in 1980s Commonwealth Champions were Steve Muchoki (Dessty) Gold Medalist, Mike Irungu (Stone) Common Wealth Bantam weight-Gold Medalist, Michael Mutua (Spinks). Kings Cup – Gold medalist-Ibrahim Bilali Senior (Surf), 1986 Olympics Heavy weight- Gold medalist Robert Napunyi Wangila, 1988 All African Games Championship - Gold Medalist-David (Harish) Ouma, Kings Cup – Gold medalist - Light weight - Kaleb Kuya, All African Games - Gold medalist. Ali Athumani, Intercontinental Championship Gold medalist bantam weight Olympics Sydney silver medalist Suleiman Bilali (Sere), among others.

With an estimated 9,520 voters in Muthurwa Ward several national, regional elections and by-elections have been held in the facility. The community requested Kamukunji Constituency Development Fund (CDF) to renovate the facility. A shoddy job was done at Ksh1.5 Million.

The community representatives are of the view that a Public Private Partnership (PPP) in managing the recreational facility will assist the community to own and initiate more educational and recreational amenities, this will supplement efforts in advancing youth involvement in sporting opportunities and job creation thus it will contribute towards mitigating the youth’s drug use and abuse.

The Muthurwa residents plan to work closely with several institutions such as Kenya Judiciary, Ministry of Sports and Youth Affairs, Ministry of National Heritage, Ministry of Gender and development and Ministry of Local Government.

Since its understandable that the market carries with it a social-fabric implication we intend to work closely with the government to implement several proposed projects, among them offering active indoor recreational amenities such as pugilism, Karate, Judo, tae-kwondo, weightlifting, and others.
There is also a plan for multi-generational activities, groups training on public safety, crime reduction and prevention strategies and corresponding and networking with youths from international and national educational groups. Others are plans to training groups on human rights, right to adequate housing prevention of forced evictions, strengthening the citizen’s security of tenure, secure tenancy and adequate housing.

We also intend to create avenues on gender equality and social inclusion in job opportunities and sports, women’s empowerment and access to resources (control) offering women safety strategies, strengthening and collaborating on probation and rehabilitation of petty offenders and offering counseling to delinquents. The community plans to establish a lawyers complaints desk to address the issues of irresponsible lawyers especially those involved in land cases and accident compensation. We plan to train the youths and community on disaster management/emergency responsiveness, offering various civic awareness programs on governance, economy, health crises, and conflict and terrorism education .Youths will be regularly trained on first aid, emergency response and post-disaster rehabilitation.

Among the opportunities that will be realized will be investment development, capital formation and entrepreneurship training, cooperative formation opportunities and micro-credit access. Vocational trainings will be offered to (after school tuition) enterprise development program to (formal and informal) groups.

On environmental management we plan to focus on pollution reduction, environmental sound technologies remediation, environmental health, ecological sustainability, Green accounting and control. Environmental upgrading programs with youth focus initiatives. Since the country is moving towards new strategies on ICT, we plan to establish a Cyber Café and a movie theatre.

In line with the above amenities we plan to offer prevention and advocacy strategies to mitigate on the spread of HIV/AIDS ,foster care, PLWHA orphans child headed families support, holding Peer to Peer Exchanges and learning opportunities, young children’s will also benefit from child focused development initiatives.

Currently the facility is used for church ceremonies and other meetings. The community request to use the facility attracts a charge of about Ksh 5000.The overseer of the facility is a kin to the area councilor. According to the Kenya Gazette Notice No.12582, Vol CX11-No 102 dated 15-October,the Muthurwa Dallas Social Hall has not been listed as a City Council of Nairobi facility. A full council meeting resolution by the Social Services and Housing Committee on 3 February 2010directed the facility to be subdivided into five areas: that is boxing hall, taekwondo hall, youth recreational center, youth boutique and public social hall. But the area councilor in collaboration with businessmen within the market are the major obstacle in in the community’s quest.

Several organizations advocating for human rights and social justice have tried to intervene. Recently the community engaged the new Chief Justice Dr.Willy Mutunga about the community quest to reclaim and manage the facility. He consented to assist community representatives to engage the Attorney General in settling this matter. We hope through this intervention the community will be able to enjoy the facility.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Patrick Kamotho is a Fahamu Pan African Fellow.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

2011: End of the beginning in Swaziland?

Africa Contact

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/79208

‘The end of the beginning? 2011, a year in the struggle for freedom in Swaziland’[/url] by Richard Rooney is a new book published on 31 December 2011 and available free-of-charge online. You can read on screen or download it to your computer to print out.

Tuesday 12 April 2011 may yet go down in history as a watershed in the struggle for freedom in Swaziland. To borrow the words of Winston Churchill, it might not have been the day that the struggle for freedom in Swaziland ended in victory for the people. It might not even have been the beginning of the end. But it was, perhaps, the end of the beginning. After this day things would never be quite the same again in Swaziland.

It was on April 12 that Swaziland saw its biggest demonstration in living memory. It was to be the start of three days of protests across the tiny kingdom in southern Africa. Ordinary Swazis were fed up with the regime of King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch. They’d had enough of being denied their basic human and civil rights and were ready to fight for their freedom. They wanted an end to the corruption of the King and the governments he appoints. They wanted the freedom to meet, to demonstrate, to form political parties and to choose their own government – all things denied to them by the King.

A group of people, unaffiliated with any of the existing political parties or lobby groups, created a Facebook site and called it the ‘April 12 Swazi Uprising’. April 12 was the day in 1973 that King Sobhuza II, the father of the present king, tore up the country’s constitution and began to rule by decree. Despite the signing into law of a new constitution in 2006, people in the kingdom still live under the yoke of that decree.

The April 12 group caught attention in Swaziland and across the globe. It called for an uprising to start on 12 April 2011 and soon prodemocracy activists, trade unionists, journalists and progressives from all over the world were watching the kingdom.

Swaziland had seen many street protests before, but this one was to be different. This was meant to be the beginning of the end.

This one was also to be the first to be played out on the Internet. Members of the April 12 group claimed they were a real on-the-ground organisation with at least three full time organisers. Perhaps they were, but mostly their battle was fought in cyberspace using social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and blog sites.

The uprising was brutally put down by police, but the struggle for democracy in Swaziland continues. This book looks at what happened in 2011. It is compiled from the pages of Swazi Media Commentary, the blog that contains information and comment on the fight for human rights in Swaziland.

As well as the events of 12 April, the book covers in much detail the massive meltdown of the Swazi economy, caused by the governments handpicked over the years by King Mswati; and also caused in no small part by the greed and corruption of the King himself and his close supporters. The economic meltdown has sensitised many people in Swaziland to the need for root and branch political reform in the kingdom.

This book starts with a section on the April 12 uprising, followed by the account of the economy. There then follows separate chapters looking at events in each month of 2011. These events include many protests, including the Global Week of Action held in September. They also highlight the numerous violations of rights suffered by the poor, children, women and by sexual minorities, among others, in the kingdom.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* This article was first published in Swazi newsletter by Africa Contact.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Sudan’s shifting frontier

A review of ‘Sudan looks East: China, India and the politics of Asian alternatives’

Stephen Marks

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/books/79216

Global perceptions of Sudan and Sudan-China relations have been dominated, especially in the West, by the conflict in Darfur and the International Crimianl Court arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Bashir. For many this optic has tended to colour and determine the assessment of China’s African involvement as a whole. And this in turn has had its impact on China’s conduct on Sudan itself.

The merit of this collection of essays is to take a step back from the predictable starting point, not least by integrating its view of China’s role into the broader context of Sudan’s other Asian partners, in particular Malaysia and India, whose combined share of Sudan’s oil output equal’s China – with 34 percent to Malaysia and 10 percent to India – but attracts much less international attention and odium.

The perspective is also broadened beyond oil to look at the impact of the oil sector and of Sudan’s Asian partners on the rest of Sudan’s economy, society and politics. In this broader perspective Sudan appears not that different from other oil states, except that the West has excluded itself.

Sudan’s oil supplies less than one percent of China’s total energy needs, though oil represents 90 percent of Sudan’s total exports, of which 82 percent goes to China. Of the rest Japan with nine percent is the largest buyer, with the UAE at four percent and the rest at five. This in itself should prompt reflections on the relation between oil foreign direct investment and the desire for direct ownership of oil supplies as ‘equity oil’. Japan as the second-largest buyer has nonetheless no significant ownership stake, while Malaysia and India, the other two significant investors, do not appear to be major buyers.

Sudan’s oil is of course of major importance to the Chinese company CNPC which, however, appears to sell much of its Sudanese oil on the global spot market. As the editors of the book point out, ‘the commercial rewards of oil investment stand out rather than Sudan acting merely as a direct source for China to satisfy its burgeoining oil import needs’.

But for both China and Malaysia, oil has been the bridgehead for expansion into the service sector. The editors point out that ‘the services provided by CNPC’s subsidiaries can at times be more profitable than the company’s actual oil production’. Sudan is also the largest overseas involvement of Malaysia’s Petronas. Sudan’s own initiative plays a key role, with India actively sought out as a partner by Khartoum to balance the influence of China and Malaysia. For all three Asian partners ‘relations have progressively gone beyond oil and into mining, infrastructure, agriculture and the service sector’.

Indeed, despite its key role in Sudan’s international economic position, oil still constitutes only seven percent of Sudan’s GDP and, as several contributors point out, agriculture could assume increasing importance as oil output declines, especially for the north which has lost most of its oilfields with the secession of the south.

The issues of land grabbing, dispossession and environmental degradation which all too often accompany agribusiness and land acquisition by foreign investors also accompany the exploitation of oil resources and here too Sudan has been no exception. The impact in South Sudan as described here by Leben Nelson Moro from the University of Juba appears depressingly similar to that in so many other oilfields, with some refugees returning from the north finding their homelands so devastated that they have turned around and returned to the north.

Other chapters give detailed analyses of the involvement of India and Malaysia. This reviewer was amused to note that India’s acquisition of its initial stake was only made possible by risk cover provided by HSBC Insurance in London. Britain’s oil companies could not sully their hands by continuing involvement in Sudan, but clearly the City of London had no inhibitions about taking its cut!

Roland Marchal in his chapter ‘From Islamist students to rentier bourgeois’ gives an interesting comparison of the role of Islamist ideology in Sudan and in Malaysia. In both countries a form of relatively pragmatic Islamism serves as a development ideology for a rising bourgeoisie. A comparison with Turkey would have been interesting. So also would the question of the role, if any, of Malaysia’s large Chinese community in the country’s Sudan involvement and its possible interface with private mainland Chinese capital both here and elsewhere in Africa.

Harry Verhoeven’s chapter, ‘Dams are development’, casts light on the Khartoum elite’s passion for dam-building as the key to development – a passion shared of course by China, whose construction companies are world leaders in the field. Among the fascinating details teased out in his account is the key role of Egyptian consent in enabling the dam programme to go ahead under the treaties governing Nile water allocation.

It is clear from this and other contributions that a crucial role in Sudan’s evolution was the ousting of Hassan al Turabi following the embarassment of the failed assassination of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995. The abandonment of the attempt to spread radical Islamism made possible a rapprochement with Egypt, which enabled the programme of dam development to go ahead. It also led to a rapprochement with the Gulf states whose capital investment was attracted by the prospect of dam-enabled agricultural development.

As Verhoeven points out, ‘The petro-dollars generated by Khartoum’s oil sales are thus critical in paying back the loans given by Saudi, Kuwaiti and Emirati creditors for the dam programme. There is an interesting triangular relationship at work between Beijing, Cairo-Riyadh-Kuwait-Abu Dhabi and Khartoum that involves oil money, food production, cheap loans, dam construction, contracts and mutual diplomatic support. This division of labour – Sudan’s land and water, thanks to irrigation through Chinese-built dams will produce food for the Gulf Arabs who are to be paid back with Sudanese export crops and Chinese petrodollars by Al-Ingaz – is extremely beneficial for all the national elites involved. Its impact on the local population is far more questionable’.

The importance of this strategy for Khartoum is increased by the secession of the South and the long-term prospect of the decline of oil output, north and south. Meanwhile in the South, as Daniel Large points out, China’s image has suffered substantial reputational damage as a result of Beijing’s support for Khartoum in the oil war and as a supplier of arms and of weapon manufacturing capacity.

Nonetheless China, along with other Asian players, has been quick to establish links with Juba. Chinese entrepreneurs were on the scene even earlier, some coming up from East Africa. As a comparison, China’s position in Angola seems to have overcome any damage caused by its past support for UNITA though it is true that this association was less consistent and persistent than China’s alliance with Khartoum.

More widely Sudan does indicate the problems and complexities ahead for China’s twin policy pillars of non-interference in internal affairs and economic non-conditionality. China’s behind-the-scenes pressure on Khartoum played an acknowledged role in bringing about Sudan’s acceptance of international peacekeeping forces. Alexandra Cosima Budabin in her chapter attributes this shift to the international and US-based Save Darfur Campaign and its pressure for a boycott of what it labelled the ‘Genocide Olympics’.

China’s dual ‘hands-off’ approach is justified by the argument that national sovereignty, political stability and hard infrastructure are the essential preconditions of economic development and therefore of broader human rights. This collection brings out how this approach has developed and changed and will continue to do so under the pressure of global economic and ecological pressures and their erosion of national barriers.

BROUGHT TO YOU BY PAMBAZUKA NEWS

* Stephen Marks is a former co-ordinator of the Fahamu Emerging Powers in Africa Programme and has edited and contributed to several Pambazuka and other publications on China and Africa.
* ‘Sudan looks East: China, India and the politics of Asian alternatives’ is edited by Daniel Large and Luke A.Patey. James Currey ‘African Issues’ series. Special offer price £12.74 to 31 January.
* Please send comments to editor[at]pambazuka[dot]org or comment online at Pambazuka News.

Correction

Can Durban recover from city-scale neoliberal nationalism?

Rozal Damoense

2012-01-19

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/letters/79228

Mike Sutcliffe has never been Mayor of Durban. Instead Mike Sutcliffe was Municipal Manager. Stay well.

The Editor replies: Thank-you for the correction. We apologise for this error, which was made in the editing process.

Africa Today: 'Have you heard from Johannesburg'

2012-01-23

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/76755

In this episode, Africa Today interviews Connie Fields and Gregory Scharpen of Clarity Films on their film 'Have You Heard From Johannesburg', the epic story of the global anti-apartheid movement and also speaks with Christine Nyanda ChaCha, the executive director and founder of African Immigrants Social and Cultural Services.

Mr Jonathan, Oga, your luck is no good for Nigeria!

Gado

2012-01-18

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/cartoons/79211

Zimbabwe: Court rules that WOZA kidnap case must continue, despite no evidence

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/xSMDQJ

A magistrate in Bulawayo ruled on Monday 16 January that activists Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu will have to defend themselves against kidnap and theft charges, even though the key witnesses denied the incident ever happened and contradicted police statements. Williams and Mahlangu, leaders of Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA), were in the Bulawayo Magistrates Court for a ruling on their application to have the case dropped without having to present a defence.

Zimbabwe: Mujuru guard stuns court

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/wJqt9m

A security guard employed at the late General Solomon Mujuru’s farm, Clemence Runhare, stunned a court when he said he heard what sounded like gunfire two hours before he was alerted to a fire that killed the former army commander in August last year. Runhare was testifying at the Harare Magistrates’ Court on the first day of the inquest into the death of Zimbabwe’s most decorated commander. He also told the inquest, presided over by regional magistrate Walter Chikwanha, Gen Mujuru was in the company of an unidentified male passenger when he arrived at his Alamein Farm in Beatrice around 8pm on 15 August. No other human remains were found at the house when Gen Mujuru’s remains were retrieved.

Africa: 'AU submits proposal to reconcile Sudan, South Sudan'

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/z02qQh

The African Union High Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) committee of experts has tabled a proposal that could lead to a settlement for the thorny oil issue between Sudan and South Sudan. The proposal was submitted at the current round of talks in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on post independence issues between the two countries.

Africa: Estimating the costs of FGM complications

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/ytVxU2

In this study, researchers found that the annual costs of FGM-related obstetric complications in six African countries studied ranged from 0.1 to 1 per cent of government spending on health for women aged 15–45 years. In the current population of 2.8 million 15-year-old women in the six African countries, a loss of 130,000 life years is expected owing to FGM’s association with obstetric haemorrhage.

Cameroon: Underreporting, burden of proof foils justice for rape victims

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/AEi7mQ

Although the medical, legal and judicial mechanisms are in place to receive rape victims in Cameroon, the heavy burden placed on victims to prove that the rape occurred and that they didn’t contribute to it makes justice rare. Underreporting also hampers the justice and healing processes.

Global: Can we map gender-based violence without spreading it?

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/x1yqwE

Grady Johnson, on the www.genderit.org site, discusses the issue of whether mapping gender violence online raises the unintended risk of spreading it. 'Feminist campaigners and activists have raised the question of the possible conflicts between the "I don't forward violence" action and the push to map gender-based violence. Does it contradict each other? How can we report on violence without spreading it, and forcing victims to relive their experience?'

Global: Demands for new development paradigm

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/xzTZ6w

Gender equity is a key element of any genuine program towards sustainable development. Analysis included on the Social Watch Report 2012 and the national contributions to the study prove, once again, the stagnation of the fight against these disparities, with disastrous consequences on the struggles against poverty, climate change and food security.

Kenya: Drought, power cuts and soaring costs squeeze women business owners

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zXXzUj

Thanks to generator breakdowns and the worst drought in the Horn of Africa in 60 years, blackouts and frequent power cuts have become common in Kenya. As a result, costs are soaring. Among the groups most affected are women who own small businesses. After putting in years of hard work to build their businesses and become financially independent, some say power cuts are threatening everything they’ve worked for.

Malawi: Vendors strip women of miniskirts

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/AwUahh

A group of vendors in Malawi's capital Lilongwe on Tuesday 17 January went berserk and started stripping naked women wearing trousers and miniskirts claiming they had President Bingu wa Mutharika’s consent to do so. It is said that President Bingu wa Mutharika on 15 January raised concerns on the way women were dressing singling those wearing miniskirts and trousers.

Sierra Leone: Women root for peaceful campaigns

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/zGsRbp

A coalition of Sierra Leone women groups plan to stage a march to push for better security in the country. The women singled out the government for failing in its responsibilities to maintain peace during political rallies. 'Our political leaders are a disgrace,' Yasmin Jusu-Sheriff, one of Sierra Leone's leading women activists, said.

South Africa: Stigmatising pregnant girls not the solution

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/AnEyMX

Helen Zille’s suggestion that men who have unprotected sex with younger girls should be charged with culpable homicide was rightfully condemned as nonsensical, populist and just bad public health, says this article from Sonke Gender Justice. 'Her remarks at the responsibility awards were deeply problematic: they stigmatized girls and women who have had children during their school going years, ignored the social factors shaping the reproductive health choices and intentions of many young women, and they completely neglected to mention the roles and responsibilities of the girls’ male sexual partners.'

Egypt: Mubarak defense claims no evidence to convict as trial continues

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/wGHYj8

The trial of Egypt’s ousted dictator Hosni Mubarak got underway again on 18 January, a day after his defense team said there was 'no evidence' linking Mubarak to orders to shoot protesters during the 18 days of protests that led to his downfall. Farid al-Deeb, the lead lawyer for the 83-year-old former leader, praised Mubarak, and said the court could not convict the man activists and families of those killed in January and February last year say is responsible for their deaths.

Egypt: Push for release of Mubarak-era political prisoners

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/yGzl3P

The Association for Political Prisoners has demanded that Egypt’s incoming parliament push for the release of all 46 political prisoners still languishing in jail from the days of the ousted Mubarak regime. The first session of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak parliament is scheduled to convene on 23 January. Under the Mubarak regime, which was overthrown in the wake of last year’s Tahrir Square uprising, tens of thousands of Egyptians were detained for political reasons.

Kenya: The impact of the ICC

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/ziU0ut

If the ICC process is to contribute to the deterrence of future political violence in Kenya, the court and its friends must explain its work and limitations better to the public, says a new report from the International Crisis Group. Furthermore, Kenya’s government must complement that ICC process with a national process aimed at countering impunity and punishing ethnic hate speech and violence.

Liberia: US newspaper says Taylor worked for US intelligence

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/wxoxIK

A startling revelation made by a US newspaper indicates that former Liberian President Charles Taylor was aided by American intelligence agents to escape from a Boston prison where he was awaiting extradition back to his country. The Boston Globe newspaper this week carried the report which also indicated Taylor worked as a spy for the Americans for many years. He had fled Liberia where he was wanted for embezzling millions of dollars from the government and was awaiting extradition from the US when he escaped from the Massachusetts jail in 1985.

Libya: Human rights groups charge NATO with war crimes

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/yarIiJ

There is strong evidence that NATO carried out war crimes in its eight-month war for regime-change in Libya, according to a report released Thursday by Middle East human rights groups. The report is based upon a fact-finding mission to Libya conducted by the Arab Organization for Human Rights, together with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights and the International Legal Assistance Consortium. The investigators conducted extensive interviews with victims of war crimes as well as witnesses and Libyan officials. The mission carried out on-site field investigations in and around Tripoli, Zawiya, Sibrata, Khoms, Zliten, Misrata, Tawergha and Sirte.

Rwanda: Rwandan facing deportation to remain in custody

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/ys752X

A philosopher accused of inciting mass murder in Rwanda will remain in detention until a hearing that may put an end to his 19 years in Canada – or may keep him here for months. The order by the Immigration and Refugee Board keeping Léon Mugesera in custody cleared up a long weekend of confusion about the next steps in the long-running case.

The Gambia: Call for release of activists jailed for distributing t-shirts

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/zaqKPw

Amnesty International has called for the immediate release of four activists arrested over the distribution of T-shirts calling for an end to dictatorship in the Gambia. One activist, Dr Amadou Scattred Janneh, the country's former Minister for Information and Communication, was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labour for treason. Modou Keita, Ebrima Jallow and Michael Uche Thomas were each sentenced to three years with hard labour for sedition.

Western Sahara: Polisario holds UN responsible for human rights abuses

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/xpO7Zm

Office of the Polisario National Secretariat expressed, in a communiqué issued Saturday, its strong condemnation 'of brutal repression perpetuated by the Moroccan occupation authorities against the defenseless Saharawi citizens, who are peacefully protesting the farce of taking civilians and human rights activists to military trail.' The Office called on the UN to immediately intervene to protect the Saharawi civilians, establish a UN-mechanism to protect human rights and report about it, reveal the fate of more than 651 Saharawi missing, end the Moroccan looting to the Saharawi natural resources and eradicate the military wall that divided Western Sahara Territories, land and people.

DRC: Two deaths in three weeks in Spain's notorious detention centres

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/ySE5cC

In the early hours of 5 January, a 21-year-old man from Guinea-Conraky, died in Barcelona's immigration detention centre after complaining of chest pains or (according to another report) breathing problems. The young man was the second person to die in a Spanish migrant detention centre in less than three weeks. On 19 December 2011, an unnamed woman, aged 41, believed to be from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, died of meningitis hours after her admission to hospital from the Aluche detention centre, in the suburbs of Madrid.

Ethiopia: Forced relocations bring hunger, hardship

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/zgBTw2

The Ethiopian government under its villagization' program is forcibly relocating approximately 70,000 indigenous people from the western Gambella region to new villages that lack adequate food, farmland, healthcare, and educational facilities, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. State security forces have repeatedly threatened, assaulted, and arbitrarily arrested villagers who resist the transfers.

Global: Displaced women's aid needs overlooked

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/wmhL0f

Aid agencies and donors are failing to take into account the relief and security needs of women displaced by disasters and conflicts, according to Elisabeth Rasmusson, Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC). For example, in Pakistan's northwest Khyber Pakhtunkwa province, cultural practices mean Pashtun women cannot be seen by men who are not family members. So when the worst floods in the country's history devastated their homes in July, they faced serious problems. Unless the aid agencies on the ground had female assessment teams and other staff in place, these women were 'invisible' and could not even visit the toilets during the day, Rasmusson told AlertNet in an interview.

Global: For the respect of migrants

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/xyM5PY

The unequal development that characterises the world today is forcing vastly more and more people to look for a better future in another country. In the last few decades international migration has grown enormously. The neo-liberal policies that dominate the process of globalisation today have accelerated international migration, providing capital with an ever cheaper work force, says this report from the Human Rights Programme at CETIM.

Global: Tracing the UK's restrictionist asylum policies

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/wa1ekZ

Over the last 20 years, there has been a radical shift in public perceptions of and political reactions to asylum seekers in democratic states across the world. As numbers of asylum seekers have risen, at times dramatically, governments of all political persuasions have implemented restrictionist policies designed to prevent and deter individuals from seeking asylum. This political and conceptual transformation has been particularly marked in the United Kingdom. This paper seeks to examine the development of this restrictionist trend by exploring the conceptual foundations of New Labour’s asylum policies.

Kenya: The rise of Somali capital

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/zIx8DE

In this article from the online journal The Chimurenga Chronic Parselelo Kantai looks at the rise of Somali diaspora capital in Nairobi. 'Somali money was supplanting more established ethnic capital; the Indian and Kikuyu, the two most visible mercantile communities, were being outmanoeuvred. As a result, street panic curdled into open xenophobia.'

Nigeria: Boko Haram displaced fear returning home

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/xEaw9M

Many of the tens of thousands of civilians who have fled their homes following a string of deadly attacks by 'terrorist group' Boko Haram in northern Nigeria over recent weeks have not yet been able to return home - or been offered any shelter by the authorities. Local government authorities are wary of setting up camps for the displaced, says the Nigerian Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), as these could turn into further Boko Haram targets.

Latest edition: emerging powers news roundup

2012-01-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/emplayersnews/79323

1. China in Africa

Chinese President to Inaugurate New African Union Headquarters
Chinese President Hu Jintao is expected to visit Addis Ababa this month to inaugurate a new African Union headquarters financed by China and built largely with Chinese labor. The project was launched when Moammar Gadhafi was maneuvering to move Africa's diplomatic capital to Libya.
Read More

Is Free Zones Board sleeping allowing a Chinese company to scam Ghana?
When questions were first asked about the relationship between the Ghana Free Zones Board and China Hasan International Holding, in relation to the Sekondi Industrial Estate, the focus was on whether the Chinese company, which had been awarded a license to develop the free zone enclave in Sekondi, had the requisite financial capacity to do so (see: IMANI here). A detailed analysis of its recent activities suggested that China Hasan did not have the capacity to raise the finance for the estimated $4 billion project.
Read More

China calls for dialogue between north & south Sudan on oil dispute
The Chinese government on Monday called on the neighbouring states of Sudan and South Sudan to act in “calmness and restraint” as they go through a dispute over the issue of oil that so far shows little sign of resolution. Last week South Sudan accused its northern neighbour of “stealing” its oil by forcing a foreign oil company to load 650,000 barrels of crude onto one of its vessel.
Read More

'Strong China - Uganda ties boosting business'
With over 50% of the entire Ugandan population below 30 years, very few were born by the time China and Uganda established diplomatic missions . Now, 50 years down the road, Uganda has received a fully renovated sh19.5b hospital and sh61b presidential offices as China moves to strengthen political and economic ties between the two countries.
Read More

Euro crisis ‘has little effect’ on Chinese interest in SA
Worsening of the global economic climate, caused in part by European debt crisis, could affect M&A but is not likely to stop Chinese activity. Companies in sectors such as construction and resources are being targeted by Chinese investors wanting to use SA as a base to leapfrog into Africa, Standard Bank said yesterday.
Read More

2. India in Africa

India to help Africans start small businesses
India will set up 10 incubation centres for Rs 50 crore this year with an aim to provide a platform for people in Africa to start small units. National Small Industries Corporation (NSIC) will execute the project in 10 African countries, including Zimbabwe.
Read More

India counters China in Africa
China may be gradually spreading its tentacles in Africa, but India too is spreading its wings quietly and stealthily to counter its neighbour’s increasing presence there. So as China aggressively targets Africa’s natural resources, India too has been busy expanding its footprints on this vast continent through various development and infrastructure projects.
Read More

3. In Other Emerging Powers News

Russia considers withdrawal from South Sudan force: UN
Russia is considering withdrawing its military helicopters servicing the U.N. peacekeeping force in South Sudan after voicing alarm at attacks on Russian personnel there, a senior U.N. official said.
Read More

SA minister a strong candidate, says Russia
Russia says Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma is a "strong candidate for the highly contested post of African Union Commission chief, although it did not explicitly endorse her candidacy.
Read More

Russia's deputy foreign minister on Mideast and Northern Africa
The situation in the Middle East and in Northern Africa remain among major challenges for the UN in 2012, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Gennady Gatilov, who is responsible for the country’s ties with the organization, told Interfax.
Read More

4. Blogs, Opinions, Presentations and Publications

China’s Economic Engagement In Africa: Changing Approach In Mozambique – Analysis
China’s economic engagement with Africa has undergone a significant change in recent years, following criticism of its policies and protests against its projects in some countries. For instance, in Mozambique, both domestic and international criticism contributed in positive ways to change both the local government’s attitude and Beijing’s approach towards their relationship.
Read More

Angola: Dos Santos keeps succession open

2012-01-17

http://reut.rs/Aemnkp

Long-serving Angolan President Jose Eduardo dos Santos is keeping his country and the world guessing about whether he will bid for re-election in 2012 in Africa's No. 2 oil producer. Speculation over Dos Santos' intentions - under the country's new 2010 constitution he could remain in power until 2022 - has reached fever pitch among analysts, investors and oil companies watching one of Africa's fastest-growing economies.

Egypt: Brotherhood wins parliamentary polls

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zOKxCZ

The Muslim Brotherhood's party has won 47.18 per cent of seats in the Egyptian parliament, the electoral commission announced on Saturday as it gave the final results from marathon polls. The Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) won 235 seats in the new People's Assembly, or 47.18 per cent, committee head Abdel Moez Ibrahim said. The ultra-conservative Salafist Al Nur party is in second place with 121 seats or nearly 25 per cent, while the liberal Wafd Party follows with nearly nine percent.

Egypt: First post-Mubarak People's Assembly convenes

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/yzeBg3

This page has live updates of the political posturings and the response of the street, as protesters organise marches to voice their demands to MPs, as Egypt's newly elected People's Assembly opens for the first time since Hosni Mubarak was toppled.

Gambia: Jammeh sworn in, threatens major crackdown

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zY8oNJ

Gambian President Yahya Jammeh has been sworn in for a fourth term and says he will crack the whip on laziness and corruption as he bids to turn Africa's smallest mainland country into an economic powerhouse. Jammeh, who came to power in a coup in 1994 aged 29, also said his government would not tolerate any terrorist or racist acts. 'I will be more dangerous in the next five years than when I was, even in uniform, because people have to change their attitude to work,' he earlier said on state TV Wednesday, promising that people would see 'a different Yahya Jammeh'.

Kenya: Kenya on alert ahead of ICC verdict on poll violence

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/wfTQAl

Security forces in Kenya are on high alert ahead of a decision by the International Criminal Court on whether to try senior government officials for masterminding violence in 2007-8 which killed 1,200 people, the Daily Nation reports. The ICC’s verdict is likely to have a significant political impact in Kenya as both men plan to vie for the presidency in the next election, which could be as soon as August. The so-called Ocampo Six are accused of murder, forceful displacement of people, torture and rape. The ICC will deliver its ruling on 23 January.

Madagascar: Ravalomanana party suspends role in govt

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zjV2DZ

The party of Marc Ravalomanana has decided to suspend its role in Madagascar's unity government, after a plane carrying the exiled leader home was turned away, a top official said. The main parties on the Indian Ocean island formed a power-sharing government in November, with strongman Andry Rajoelina remaining president until new elections are held, in theory later this year.

Swaziland: King continues ban on opposition parties

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/w9JJWH

King Mswati III of Swaziland is to fly in the face of international opposition and continue his ban on political parties at the national elections next year (2013). Political parties have been banned since 1973 when Mswati’s father, King Sobhuza II, tore up the Swazi constitution and ruled by decree.

Nigeria: The mystery of the missing fuel

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/x9ZmoZ

The ad-hoc committee investigating the petroleum subsidies saga continues to unravel one bombshell after the other. The lastest discovery is that Nigeria over-imported petrol on a daily basis to the tune of 24 million litres in 2011. The difference between fuel consumed and fuel imported is 24 million liters. Nigeria pays subsidy on this 24 million litres that is not even utilised by Nigerians.

Rwanda: Rural Rwandan communities fight corruption

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/zS9PdZ

Often, victims of corruption find it difficult to step forward and report, particularly citizens in countries where infrastructure, public transport or uneasy internet access means they have to travel far from their home towns to make a report. Transparency International’s Legal Advice Centres are trying to bridge this gap by creating district and mobile centres to support citizens in rural areas and remote regions to make people aware of their rights and step forward to complain about corruption. District centres offer citizens a more accessible and confidential access to support, legal advice and follow-up on the corruption issues that affect their communities, with a supportive staff and in a trustworthy environment.

South Africa: R20bn of public cash wasted

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/wQmcRd

The Auditor-General’s audited results of government and provincial departments and public entities have painted a picture of huge amounts of public funds being misused by departments and public entities. More than R20 billion spent by national and provincial departments has been found to have been unauthorised, irregular, wasteful and fruitless expenditure.

Africa: Africa sees positive economic growth in 2011

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/xP5Us6

Africa saw good economic results in 2011 with average growth of between 5.5 per cent and 6 per cent, African Union (AU) commission chairperson Jean Ping said on a visit to Libya. 'Africa progressed on average between five and a half and 6 per cent. We are nearly at 6 per cent, and seven countries are between seven and 11 per cent,' he said on his first trip to Tripoli since Muammar Gaddafi's fall.

Egypt: Lending to repression, again

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/z5EPxl

For three decades Western governments and lending institutions bankrolled a corrupt regime in Egypt that trampled human rights and stifled democracy. Now they appear ready to do it again, say critics of the military council that has ruled since removing president Hosni Mubarak last February. 'Foreign aid should not be used to support a repressive regime,' says Amr Adly, political economist at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR). 'It’s in nobody’s interest to throw Egypt’s economy into a deeper crisis, but international creditors have to be quite strict when it comes to transparency.'

Global: World Bank warns of global growth slowdown

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/yyPptr

The World Bank has warned the international community to brace for slow growth and economic challenges in 2012 stemming partly from Europe's debt woes. The bank substantially cut its forecasts for growth in both developed and poorer nations in its twice-yearly report.

South Africa: Door shuts on Zim imports

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/wPobkh

Zimbabwean exporters must scramble to find new markets or risk commercial peril after South Africa slapped an effective import ban on a raft of products in a bid to protect local producers. South Africa is Zimbabwe’s leading market, accounting for about 56 per cent of all exports with China and the United Arab Emirates coming a distant second at 6 per cent. However, under a deal agreed between the government, labour and business organisations, at least 75 per cent of all procurement in Africa’s largest economy must now come from local companies.

Tanzania: Activists submit recommendations on EPA

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/zHfcdd

Tanzania Ecumenical Dialogue Group (TEDG) has presented to the government a statement calling for Tanzania not to sign the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with Europe until contentious issues in its framework are sorted out. Addressing a press conference in Dar es Salaam on Tuesday, the TEDG Coordinator, Ms Jesca Mkuchu, said the statement had called for Tanzania to strictly consider the interests of its citizens including making sure the contents in the agreement are clearly known to the majority Tanzanians first.

Tanzania: How 17 industries were privatised only to die

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/yUU521

Some 17 erstwhile public firms that were privatised under a plan initiated in 1993 in a bid to revamp production have so far been shut down after failing to deliver, a report released recently by a technical committee has revealed. The government had at that time decided to sell the wobbling public companies to private investors who, it was presumed, could revive them following the State’s lack of capacity to run them. According to the report which has been submitted to the Parliamentary Public Organisations Accounts Committee (POAC), 17 firms out of 74 which were privatised have since stopped operations altogether.

Global: Dangerous abortions 'on the rise', says WHO

2012-01-19

http://bbc.in/zuTxKY

A rising proportion of abortions worldwide are putting women's health at risk, researchers say. The World Health Organization study suggests global abortion rates are steady, at 28 per 1,000 women a year. However, the proportion of the total carried out without trained clinical help rose from 44 per cent in 1995 to 49 per cent in 2008.

Global: Moving beyond aid to set the global health agenda

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zcHeBC

This year, a well-known international meeting on global health research will adopt a provocative new theme. The subtitle of Forum 2012, the successor to the conferences organised by the former Global Forum for Health Research, will be ‘Beyond Aid’. No longer will the conference focus mainly on the use of funds from traditional donors and funders of health research in Europe and North America to improve the developing world’s morbidity and mortality statistics. Instead, the meeting will consider a funding model in which poor countries develop their own contracts and partnerships, and use their own resources.

Kenya: The downside of male involvement in PMTCT

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/xRUM67

Involving men is increasingly being promoted as a key element in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV, and while its benefits are well-documented - in one Kenyan study it reduced the risks of vertical transmission and infant mortality by more than 40 percent compared with no involvement - it can occasionally lead to domestic discord and even violence.

Ethiopia: Drought, floods hit education

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/yyzz2O

Parts of Ethiopia are still reeling from the effects of recent drought, flooding, conflict or a combination of the three, resulting in increased numbers of children dropping out of school, say officials. At least 385,000 school-children need 'emergency education assistance this school year', Alexandra Westerbeek, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) communication manager in Ethiopia, told IRIN. 'In addition, 70,000 children among [the] refugee population also need emergency education assistance.'

Malawi: Lecturers resume work, but tensions persist

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/w6mTXZ

Lecturers in Malawi have resolved to return to work to end nearly a year of academic freedom protests during a long-running impasse with the government. But with tensions and mistrust persisting, lecturers have been firm about setting out the conditions under which they will resume classes. In an exclusive interview with University World News, the spokesperson of the Chancellor College Academic Staff Union, Jessie Kabwila, 'We are in talks with lawyers of opponents of academic freedom. They are still trying to intimidate and silence us but we are reminding them every day that this is a principle [and that] we have no problem reverting to the academic freedom impasse mode at any time and for longer than 260 days.'

Global: International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia 2012

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/yBWgWY

The International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) Committee is seeking organisation's activities for the next International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia in 2012 and have issued a letter relating to the day which can be read through the link provided.

Nigeria: LGBTI activists and the fuel strike

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/zkGg88

What did the removal of the fuel subsidy mean for the LGBT community in Nigeria amongst other Nigerian citizens? The strike and protests had one positive effect for the LGBT community in that they brought mainstream civil society activists closer to LGBT activists, something that would have been unthinkable a couple of months ago when the anti-gay bill was brought to the Nigerian parliament and no voices from the wider civil society spoke out against it. Some local LGBT activists told Behind the Mask that they regard the current situation as an opportunity to buy time and make allies in their advocacy against the anti-gay bill.

South Africa: Pretoria conference discusses LGBTI and human rights

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/zyOYDA

The Aids and Rights Alliance of Southern Africa (Arasa) has organised a meeting for rights organisations to discuss human rights issues with a focus on LGBTI issues. It brings together human rights defenders from Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Mozambique, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and South Africa.

Ethiopia: Israeli school bus driver recorded spewing racist slurs at Ethiopian children

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/yeF3Hz

As thousands of Israelis have been protesting racism directed at Ethiopian Israelis recently, a new recording revealed Wednesday an Israeli school bus driver in Jerusalem spewing racist slurs at schoolgirls of Ethiopian origin. 'People tell you that you smell bad, deal with it. Put on deodorant every day. You’ll smell better,' the driver was heard saying in the recording. 'You need to respect us. We were living here before you, our lives are much more modern.'

Global: Emissions cuts also offer quick health and crop benefits

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/yC0fjc

Reducing methane and black carbon emissions could quickly tackle climate change while improving food security and people's health, especially in developing countries, a study reports.Scientists identified 14 emission control measures that, when applied together, could reduce global warming by around 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, avoid up to 4.7 million premature deaths, and boost crop yields by up to 135 million metric tonnes by 2030.

Kenya: Key lakes succumb to human activities

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/xjui1x

Several years ago, Lakes Kamnarok and Ol Bollosat in Kenya were vibrant water bodies that supported and shaped the ecosystems around them. But today they are shells of their former selves, due to heavy siltation caused by human activities. 'Siltation is still happening, the lake is drying up and this is threatening Lake Kamnarok and the wildlife with extinction, besides affecting the lives of people around it,' Elijah Chemitei, senior warden in Baringo County, in the Rift Valley Province, told IPS. 'Much of it is caused by upstream activities like tree-felling and charcoal-burning, agricultural activities, grazing and sand collection.'

Swaziland: Fledgling environmental authority up against big business

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/xn2dg3

Recently hundreds of dead fish floated to the surface of a stream which was the only water source for a rural community in Swaziland's drought-prone eastern region. A local sugar processing plant admitted to accidentally discharging toxic effluent into the stream, and brought in water tanks to supply the community until clean-up operations could be completed. Communities like this one were at the mercy of polluters until the Swaziland Environmental Authority (SEA) was established five years ago. An environmental watchdog group comprising 16 scientists from various fields, SEA is tasked with enforcing Swaziland's 2002 Environmental Management Act as well as various international environmental treaties to which Swaziland is a signatory.

Zimbabwe: Mining activity in and near to Hwange National Park

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/yRMb6w

Last year, a fly over of Hwange National Park (HNP) revealed increased mining activity in and around the Sinamatella area, reports www.sokwanele.com 'In addition to the mining carried out by Hwange Colliery Company Limited there are now at least 3 other coal mining developments, two adjoining HNP and one actually within the Park...This mining activity is of grave concern. The associated building of roads and increased human activity is bound to lead to an increase in poaching as the area is opened up, access becomes easier, and there are more people in the area to carry out the poaching and to buy the poached meat.'

Ethiopia: Indian agri-company Karuturi’s Ethiopia operations flagged

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/xH7qbN

Karuturi Global Ltd., the world’s largest exporter of cut roses with 250,000 acres under rose cultivation in Ethiopia, is under the scanner of New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), which in a new report highlights the forced eviction of thousands of indigenous people in the African country’s Gambella region, where Karuturi is a key operator. Bangalore-based Karuturi, in a letter to Human Rights Watch and in a conversation with Mint, denied any wrongdoing.

Mozambique: Families protest against Brazil's Vale

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/zLW3sR

Families resettled by Brazilian mining giant Vale in the Tete region of Mozambique have protested that the company had failed to keep promises it made to them in 2009. About 700 families, resettled approximately 60 kilometres away from the Moatize coal mining site, demonstrated against the lack of access to water, electricity and agricultural land at their resettlement Cateme area.

West Africa: The downside of foreign land acquisitions

2012-01-22

http://bit.ly/yEfiao

Population growth and rising consumption by a minority of people around the world are fuelling global land acquisitions and Africa is a 'prime target', says the International Land Coalition. 'The best land is often being targeted for acquisition. It is often irrigable, with proximity to infrastructure, making conflict with existing land users more likely,' says a 14 December 2011 report. Africa accounts for 134 million hectares of reported land deals. Worldwide, between 2000 and 2010, deals under consideration or negotiation amounted to 203 million hectares, the Coalition says.

Ethiopia: Blogger, journalists convicted of terrorism

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/wStVqL

Two journalists and a US-based blogger who was tried in absentia were convicted on charges of terrorism in Ethiopia recently and could be sentenced to the death penalty, according to news reports. Reeyot Alemu, a columnist with the independent weekly Feteh, Deputy Editor Woubshet Taye of the now-defunct weekly Awramba Times, and Elias Kifle, exiled editor of the Washington-based opposition website Ethiopian Review, were convicted in Federal High Court in the capital, Addis Ababa, according to news reports. The journalists were charged in September with lending support to an underground network of banned opposition groups, including Ginbot 7, that the government had designated terrorists, according to CPJ research.

Senegal: Journalists given suspended prison term

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zlFEP6

Two Senegalese journalists with the private daily Le Quotidien have been handed suspended prison sentences in a criminal libel case over their coverage of an armed insurgency in a separatist province, according to the New York-based media watchdog, Committee to Protect Journalists(CPJ). A statement from CPJ said a magistrate in a criminal court in the capital, Dakar, handed Le Quotidien editor Mamadou Biaye and reporter Mamadou Ticko Diatta suspended three-month prison terms.

Somalia: Media crackdown condemned

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/ygcpgG

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has condemned the arrest of 25 journalists in Somaliland recently, accusing the authorities of waging a campaign of intimidation to silence independent reporting. Reports say that 21 journalists were detained over the weekend by security forces and held in Hargeisa, Borame and Las Anod police stations. They were released 16 January, according to the National Union of Somali Journalists (NUSOJ), an IFJ affiliate, but four who had been arrested earlier remain in custody.

Sudan: Two private newspapers closed

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/xaN7Cz

Within the past two weeks, two independent and opposition newspapers, Alwan and Rai al-Shaab, have been closed by security forces without explanation. 'These latest two newspaper closures show the government of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir has yet to overcome his chronically repressive instincts aimed at silencing the media,” Reporters Without Borders said.'

Tunisia: Call for protection of journalists

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/zYhkdi

On the anniversary of the revolution, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange Tunisia Monitoring Group (IFEX-TMG), a coalition of 21 IFEX members, urges the Tunisian government to revoke its recent controversial appointments giving media personnel close to the deposed President key posts in the public service media. The IFEX-TMG also further reiterates its call for journalists to be allowed to freely carry out their work, after another journalist was attacked during a demonstration last week.

Angola: Southern Angolans demand own schools

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/w00X89

Masses of Angolan nationals that daily trek to Namibia for health and education services want their government to construct hospitals and schools in Angola to reduce their reliance on Namibian schools and hospitals. During a meeting recently by two Angolan governors, Eusebio de Brito Teixera, of Kuando Kubango and Antonio Didalelwa of Cunene Pro­vince and Ohangwena Governor Usko Nghaamwa at Olupale village of Kuando Kubango Province in Angola, Angolan citizens said it was time that their government constructed schools and hospitals for them.

Senegal: Forced begging, time for change

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/xVGA9d

This short report examines the practice in daaras (Koranic schools) of sending boys as young as five years old out to beg for several hours a day. Often living far from home and in squalid conditions, talibés are frequently subjected to abuse if they fail to meet their begging quotas. The report updates the information used in Begging for Change (Anti-Slavery International, 2009) and recommends action to bring an end to this situation in Senegal.

Uganda: Parliament stops new power tariffs

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/wCvJut

Parliament has directed the Electricity Regulatory Authority (ERA) to halt a 47 per cent power price increase which was announced last week. Legislators on the parliamentary ad hoc committee on energy slapped a moratorium on the implementation of the new power tariffs after officials of ERA failed to produce minutes of the special board meeting, which sanctioned the new tariff regime.

Zimbabwe: Street vendors’ protest sparking a revolution

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/AzQvRm

There are some unlikely comparisons between the work lives of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian fruit seller who sparked the Arab revolution, and Francis Tachirev, a fruit seller in Zimbabwe. Like Bouazizi did, Tichareva earns a modest living pushing his fruit cart along Harare’s central business district, selling his wares. And like Bouazizi too, Tichareva lives in fear of the local police.

DRC: Concerns over fresh violence in east

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zxFXtL

The UN refugee agency is concerned about fresh violence in the eastern regions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo that has forced more than 100,000 civilians to flee their homes since November. In North Kivu province, an estimated 35,000 people have been displaced as a result of attacks and clashes between rival militia groups in Walikale and Masisi territories. At least 22 people were reported killed and an unknown number of women raped during the fighting, UNHCR said in a statement from Kinshasa, DRC, Friday.

DRC: Rebuilding the lives of children associated with armed groups

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/xJKPVm

A partnership of humanitarian organizations working with community volunteers in South Kivu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), has helped demobilize thousands of children formerly associated with armed groups in the province, says the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF). At least 33,000 children have been demobilized across the country with UNICEF's assistance since 2004, according to Alessandra Dentice, UNICEF's chief of child protection in the DRC.

East Africa: Aid dithering doomed tens of thousands, says report

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/A5ah40

The deaths of tens of thousands of people during the drought in east Africa could have been avoided if the international community, donor governments and humanitarian agencies had responded earlier and more swiftly to clear warning signs that a disaster was in the making, according to a new report.

Eritrea: UN clears Eritrea over ‘arming’ Shabaab

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/ywdthe

Eritrea has been cleared of allegations that it was arming Al Shabaab militants in Somalia late last year.
A preliminary report by the Somalia and Eritrea Monitoring Group (SEMG) to the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) concludes that the allegations were untrue.

Mali: Army repels Tuareg rebel attacks

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/xhlrl3

Mali's army has said it fought off attacks by Tuareg rebels, some of whom recently returned from fighting in Libya and have launched an offensive to seize several northern towns. Fighting erupted in the towns of Aguelhok and Tessalit, keeping residents indoors as gunfire was exchanged, a day after the army said it had fought off an attack in the town of Menaka by bombing rebel positions.

Nigeria: Death toll rises in Nigeria's Kano blasts

2012-01-23

http://aje.me/zJzNsS

The death toll from co-ordinated bombings and gunfire in the northern Nigerian city of Kano has risen to at least 178, medical sources said, making this the deadliest attack claimed by the radical Islamist group Boko Haram. Gunfire continued to echo through some areas of Kano on Saturday, despite a strict curfew imposed on Friday night which will remain in place until further notice, local officials said.

Rwanda: Top army officers arrested for 'indiscipline'

2012-01-19

http://bbc.in/wyapcF

Rwanda has suspended and put under house arrest four of its top military officers, an army spokesperson says.They are being investigated over 'acts of indiscipline' concerning alleged business dealings in mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo. One of those arrested is the military intelligence chief, who has also advised President Paul Kagame on security issues.

South Africa: What warship? Zuma claim holds no water

2012-01-19

http://bit.ly/yGv97z

President Jacob Zuma does not want the South African military to equip itself with an aircraft carrier -- despite reports suggesting otherwise. A newspaper report claimed that Zuma had personally authorised the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to acquire an aircraft carrier as part of a project codenamed 'Project Millennium'. It was alleged the programme was established to procure a warship that could operate 'more than a dozen helicopters' and 'vertical take-off jets'.

South Sudan: Dozens killed in South Sudan violence

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/AoO3Qc

Around 47 people have been killed in tribal violence in South Sudan, the latest in a cycle of attacks that have displaced some 60,000 people in the new African nation, officials said. A youth armed group from the Murle tribe attacked Duk Padyet in Jonglei state late on Monday, mostly killing young children, women and old people from the Lou Nuer tribe, said Philip Thon Leek Deng, a local leader and member of parliament.

South Sudan: Oil-production halt ordered

2012-01-23

http://aje.me/y433OQ

South Sudan has said it ordered the halt of oil production that provides some 98 per cent of its revenue, amid a deepening dispute with the Sudanese government over pipeline fees. Sudan admits to taking some South Sudanese oil destined for export as compensation until an agreement, but the South has said this is theft. 'The government has instructed the minister of petroleum and mining to proceed with arrangements for a complete shutdown of oil production,' Barnaba Marial Benjamin, South Sudan's minister of information, told the AFP news agency on Friday.

Global: New report on internet and democracy is dedicated to the Arab revolutions

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/ya1U5j

The Global Information Society Watch 2011 report investigates how governments and internet and mobile phone companies are trying to restrict freedom online - and how citizens are responding to this using the very same technologies. 'Written by internationally-renowned experts, the report brings its readers easy-to-read and yet comprehensive articles, many with policy proposals, on the most important challenges protecting human rights on the internet is facing today,' says lawyer Matthias C. Kettemann, co-chair of the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition.

Kenya: Google apologies for data scraping

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/zaGNfB

Stefan Magdalinski, the CEO of Mocality, in an update on his blog, has indicated that the company is currently not considering filing formal charges against Google. Mocality, a Kenyan Business Listing Directory, broke into international limelight after the company found that callers from Google were promising Mocality clients free websites through a non-existent partnership and without Mocality's knowledge. The data scraping allegations have embarrassed the search giant with senior executives in the company admitting wrong doing and publicly apologising to Mocality.

South Africa: Beware the 'false knowledge' kindled by Twitter, says Mbeki

2012-01-17

http://bit.ly/zdOO69

Former president Thabo Mbeki has said he was sceptical about Twitter being a great conveyor of reliable knowledge. 'If you want to discuss knowledge which has got to do with the betterment of society I don't think it is appropriate ... Even the internet in general, blogging and so on, is not the place where you can … put all these things under theories.' In his speech Mbeki questioned whether knowledge had become 'less democratised and more compromised' as an instrument for the improvement of society. He said traditional media institutions were unable to control which political rhetoric 'caught fire' with the public.

South Africa: Remembering the social costs of digital transition

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/x9ccWE

Digital migration offers many benefits. However, it should be understood that these benefits will not be uniformly distributed without government intervention and civil society participation in the process. 'The challenges of the digital transition are both cultural and social,' said one stakeholder. 'Consideration should be given to the danger of privatisation and the audiovisual content of telecommunications on the national level, as this falls under national sovereignty. The digital dividends garnered by the digital transition are a common good, an important resource, the destination and use of which require vigilance.'

Africa: Award encourages female scientists in developing world

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/wsrt3b

An award for young women scientists in developing nations is helping to motivate female researchers and assist them in overcoming cultural barriers. The 2011 OWSD (Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World) Award for Young Women Scientists from the Developing World recognised biologists, physicists, chemists and mathematicians from Argentina, Bangladesh, Cuba, Egypt, India, Jordan, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa; mathematicians and physicists from India and Mexico; and chemists from Egypt and Nigeria.

Global: The Mobile Media Toolkit, making media mobile

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/ycGyIw

The Mobile Media Toolkit, published by MobileActive, is a resource to help professional and citizen journalists, news outlets, and media development organisations find, evaluate, and deploy tools for reporting and sharing content on and to mobile devices. The web-based toolkit contains a set of five primary sections, supplemented by additional features and resources that offer users articles and examples specific to certain elements of mobile media production.

United States: The African Activist Archive Project

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/wQpnul

The African Activist Archive Project is preserving records and memories of activism in the United States to support the struggles of African peoples against colonialism, apartheid, and social injustice from the 1950s through the 1990s. The project is reaching out to the hundreds of organisations and individuals that supported African liberation struggles and is urging them to preserve their vital records and to make selected materials available to the public on this website. The project also assists groups and individuals to deposit their archives in public repositories, including the African Activist Archive in Special Collections at Michigan State University Libraries.

Call for Proposals: Research frontiers in the study of Africa

The African Studies Association

2012-01-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/79325

The African Studies Association is soliciting proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables. Presentations may focus on the theme of 'Research Frontiers in the Study of Africa' or on broader social science, humanities, and applied themes relating to Africa.
African Studies Association

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

55th Annual Meeting 

RESEARCH FRONTIERS IN THE STUDY OF AFRICA

November 29-December 1, 2012
Marriott Philadelphia Downtown Hotel, Philadelphia, PA

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: March 15, 2012

PROGRAM CHAIRS:

Tejumola Olaniyan, Departments of English and African Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin-Madison (asameeting2012@gmail.com)

Staffan Lindberg, Departments of Political Science at University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and University of Florida (asameeting2012@gmail.com)

ABOUT THE MEETING

We are soliciting proposals for papers, panels, and roundtables. Presentations may focus on the theme of “Research Frontiers in the Study of Africa”or on broader social science, humanities, and applied themes relating to Africa. We strongly encourage the submission of formed panels. This year the ASA will make every effort to provide AV equipment to as many applicants as possible who indicate such needs in their application.

HOW TO SUBMIT A PROPOSAL

PLEASE NOTE: If your proposal is accepted, the conference pre-registration fee must be paid by May 1, 2012 by ALL participants. Payment of the pre-registration fee will result in a final acceptance. Failure to pay the pre-registration fee by May 1, 2012, will result in an automatic rejection.

New! We have added a shopping cart feature which will allow individuals to purchase membership and pre-registration at the same time.

Instructions for submitting proposals are online.

JOIN THE ASA OR RENEW YOUR MEMBERSHIP

Join the ASA or renew your membership. Again, we have added a shopping cart feature which will allow individuals to purchase membership and pre-registration at the same time.

ABOUT THE AFRICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION

Established in 1957, the African Studies Association is the largest organization in the world devoted to enhancing the exchange of information about Africa. Our members include scholars, students, teachers, activists, development professionals, policy makers, donors and many others. We encourage interdisciplinary interactions with Africa. We provide access to pathbreaking research and key debates in African studies. We bring together people with scholarly and other interests in Africa through our annual meeting and seek to broaden professional opportunities in the field of African studies. The organization publishes two leading interdisciplinary journals on Africa, African Studies Review and History in Africa and promotes an informed understanding of Africa to the public and in educational institutions as well as to businesses, media, and other communities that have interests in Africa.

We welcome your participation in this exciting conference and in the ASA!

Forum 2012

24-26 April 2012, Cape Town, South Africa

2012-01-23

http://bit.ly/zmV9Ye

Forum 2012, to be held 24-26 April 2012 in Cape Town, is the beginning of an exciting new series of the well-known and respected Global Forum for Health Research meetings. Under the theme of 'Beyond Aid...Research and Innovation as key drivers for Health, Equity and Development', COHRED and the Global Forum for Health Research will focus on potentials, solutions, and developing capacities - specifically in low-and middle-income countries and emerging economies - and how global collaboration canleverage this for a new era of global development support.

Frantz Fanon: The Forgotten Algerian Revolutionary

Algeria Solidarity Committee

2012-01-24

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/79361

Media and governance in developing countries seminar series

2012-01-23

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/566/media.doc

This seminar series explores the role the media play as political actors in developing countries and fragile states. It gathers scholars from a variety of disciplines to examine how old and new media are used to support different political agenda: from foreign countries trying to win the hearts and minds of a local population to local governments aiming at increasing their ability to communicate with, but also exercise control over, their citizens.

Third People's Health Assembly

6-11 July 2012, Cape Town, South Africa

2012-01-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/79326

The People’s Health Assembly (PHA), organised by the People's Health Movement (PHM), is a global event bringing together health activists from across the world to share experiences, analyse global health situation, develop civil society positions and to develop strategies which promote health for all. It will look at forms of action to address identified challenges and build capacity among health activists to act.
Third People's Health Assembly

WHAT

The People’s Health Assembly (PHA), organised by the People's Health Movement (PHM), is a global event bringing together health activists from across the world to share experiences, analyse global health situation, develop civil society positions and to develop strategies which promote health for all. It will look at forms of action to address identified challenges and build capacity among health activists to act.

It is an opportunity for the People’s Health Movement as a whole to reflect on the global struggle, to review and reassess, to redirect and re-inspire. This through analysing our situation, reflecting on pathways, barriers and strategies, sharing of experiences and crystallising out new directions, slogans, commitments for the movement. PHA3 is not just about developing our movement. It is also about impacting directly in the struggle for social change: for health for all, decent living conditions for all, work in dignity for all, equity and environmental justice.

The PHA takes place every 5 years. The First PHA was organised in Dhaka (Bangladesh, 2000) and the Second in Cuenca (Ecuador, 2005). During the first PHA, the People’s Charter for Health was developed and endorsed. The second assembly, the Cuenca Declaration was developed. visit www.phmovement.org for more information

WHEN &WHERE

The Third People’s Health Assembly will take place 6-11 July 2012 in Cape Town, South Africa.

Venue: University of the Western Cape - South Africa. We look forward welcoming you all to celebrate our years of activism, to re-asses and re-inspire our movement and to set an agenda for the future. For more information on the programme structure, please visit our website. www.phmovement.org

University of Oxford: Part-time Masters in International Human Rights Law

Admissions open for five scholarships for candidates from African Commonwealth countries

2011-11-03

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/courses/77659

The Department for Continuing Education and the Faculty of Law at Oxford University are very pleased to announce that admissions are now open for five scholarships for candidates from African Commonwealth countries to study for the part-time Masters in International Human Rights Law at the
University of Oxford, starting September 2012. The course website can be found at http://bit.ly/s37dHr and details about the scholarships, including eligibility criteria and how to apply, can be found on the Fees and Funding pages at http://bit.ly/ugKcPf

African Agenda: Issue Vol. 14 No. 4

Special joint edition with Pambazuka News

2012-01-18

http://bit.ly/yhSDql

This edition of African Agenda published by Third World Network-Africa in collaboration with Pambazuka News examines the Durban climate change conference in November.

Researchers - Middle East and North Africa

Amnesty International (AI)

2012-01-23

http://pambazuka.org/en/category/jobs/79339

About the job

As a research-based campaigning organization, investigating and documenting human rights issues is fundamental to our advocacy and lobbying work. Our Middle East and North Africa Programme requires 5 researchers to take the lead in initiating human rights research and action in the region by providing regional and thematic expertise, excellent research skills and sound political judgement. A campaigning-oriented approach to your work is essential. You will be required to conduct and co-ordinate research activities, monitor, investigate and analyse political, legal and social developments and human rights conditions, give authoritative advice on these areas and prepare human rights action materials.

About you

With experience of working on human rights issues, you must have first-hand in-depth knowledge and experience of the relevant region or country and an understanding and awareness of its cultures. You’ll have a background in either activism, academia, law or journalism with the ability to identify and thoroughly investigate human rights issues and ensure our voice has authority. You will need proven research and communication skills, impartial political judgement, coupled with strong strategic thought. Fluency in English, including excellent writing skills, is essential, as is the ability to speak and read Arabic fluently.

About us

Our aim is simple: an end to human rights abuses. Independent, international and influential, we campaign for justice, freedom and truth wherever they’re denied. Already our network of over three million members and supporters is making a difference in 150 countries. And whether we’re applying pressure through powerful research or direct lobbying, mass demonstrations or online campaigning, we’re all inspired by hope for a better world. One where human rights are respected and protected by everyone, everywhere.

To find out more about this and all our other opportunities, and to apply online, please visit www.amnesty.org/jobs

Closing date: 19th February 2012

CVs will not be accepted.

Fahamu