Thank you for the interview Dear Mandela (http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/comment/46432).

The topic of the documentary-in-making hits a very painful nerve: the tragic social crisis in post-Apartheid South Africa. It is indeed the poorest of the poor who do not get real opportunities to change their lifestyle. They are so often denied adequate access to safe and healthy living space or proper official representation, despite the apparent window dressing orchestrated by the ruling government. I hope this project, Dear Mandela, is completed soon. May the full length documentary be shown to many viewers so that its message can disseminate an unpleasant truth about our country's poor. Hopefully it will open the eyes of many to the sad state of poverty of too many of my country's men and women and awaken a national conscience to act against the suffering of many like those reflected in this film. We need to redress past wrongs in my country, not repeat them!

The following memorandum was prepared by members of the Merti Range Users Association in northern Isiolo, Kenya. It expresses their concern about concessions recently granted to a Chinese company to prospect for oil in the rangelands. It illustrates the potential threats of this kind of external investment on the ecosystem and local livelihoods, and the lack of transparency in the negotiations.

Memorandum submitted by the Merti Range Users Association of Isiolo, Kenya, in relation to a Chinese company undertaking oil prospecting activities in the area

To: Hon. Kiraitu Murungi, Minister for Energy
Hon. Mohamed Abdi Kuti, MP Isiolo North
The Director, NEMA
The District Commissioner, Isiolo District
All Councillors, Isiolo County Council

Whereas Rangeland Users Association is an institutional framework developed for the purpose of the welfare of the pastoralist people living in Merti division of Isiolo district;

Recognizing that pastoralism is the mainstay of the economy of the area and thus the majority of the population are therefore members of the association;

Further noting that a Chinese company is now said to engage in undertaking oil prospecting activities in the heartland of the rangeland on which the pastoralists raise their livestock and manage the environment, its fauna and flora;

Apprehensive that the said prospecting activities will lead to massive environmental destruction, thereby destabilizing an already fragile ecosystem that is constantly pressurized by the vagaries of ever-changing climatic conditions;

Further noting that the said Chinese company is undertaking these activities in total exclusion of the local people and its leadership;

Realizing that this oil prospecting activity will ultimately lead to not only destroying the existing ecosystem, its economy and the people depending on it but have serious long-term negative effects on the environment on which we derive our livelihood;

And having further realized that the said Chinese company is not willing to engage the local population, its leadership and institutions on any of the issues,

We therefore submit the following:

1. That an urgent immediate action be taken by the elected leadership to engage the relevant government organ/department to ensure the above-raised concerns are addressed in the following manner.
2. That the Chinese company is practising unethical labour procedure in total contravention of international labour conventions, Kenyan labour laws and rules of natural justice. This they do by engaging persons without any signed papers, not informing them of their renumerations, working long extensive hours without commensurate overtime payments, tight social restrictions bordering on enslavement and human rights abuse. This is all supposedly happening in your own country and village. This must be urgently redressed and corrected.
3. That any further employment opportunities must be given to the local people unless such expertise cannot be sourced locally.
4. All sourcing of goods and services must also be given to the local people as propriety.
5. That the oil company should pay for the havoc they will cause to the local economy in view of the destruction their activities are going to occasion to the environment, economy and infrastructure in the area such as roads.
6. That the process of granting concessions and rights by the government must involve the local pastoralist communities whose livelihood depends wholly on this land and the natural resources found thereon.
7. That these are grave matters touching on lives and livelihoods and should be addressed with the urgency they deserve.

*Signed for and on behalf of 68 elders representing all the localities of Merti division, Diba Golicha Galma, Chairman, Range Users Association, Merti.

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

I just ratified the petition and was completely surprised when I saw Cameroon as one of the red flagged countries that have refused to sign this incredible petition.

I am a Cameroonian and from the North West Province and really ashamed of my country. We have a female population of almost 3/4 the total population and relies heavily on the works of these ladies to keep the Socio-economic landscape of the country vibrant. Yet the dictatorial regime in power has decided to place Cameroon at the forefront of every bad thing happening in world. Cameroon is now well known for its Pro corruption and Anti-Human Rights stands in the world. US State Department Country Reports and Amnesty International depict a Cameroon where Women are still consider as second class citizen and highly discriminated against.

We (Cameroon) now pride ourselves to be among the very few countries resisting the protection of Women's rights. We the citizens of Cameroon deserves better. I have four sisters and do not see why they should have less protection than I do in many aspects in life. I am calling on the good youths of Cameroon to challenge Mr. Biya and his puppet Parliament to do the right thing at this defining period in history by signing the PROTOCOL TO THE AFRICAN CHARTER ON HUMAN AND PEOPLES' RIGHTS ON THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN IN AFRICA.

I personally applaud your initiative and will do my utmost best to make my parliament see reason to sign the petition.

Please do well to let me know if there is any thing we the youths of Cameroon in and out of the country can do, to bring this issue on the media table.

Girma Berhanu reviews the book IQ and the Wealth of Nations, written by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen. He critiques the authors’ major assertion that a significant part of the gap between rich and poor countries is due to differences in national intelligence. The authors claim that they have evidence that differences in national IQ account for substantial variation in per capita income and growth of a nation. This essay review debunks their assumptions that intellectual and income differences between nations stem from genetic differences.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/46564report.jpgKjell Havnevik, Deborah Fahy Bryceson, Atakilte Beyene and Prosper Matondi look at the destructive role the world bank has played in African agriculture and food production

Agriculture’s dominant role in Sub-Saharan Africa’s local, national and regional economies and cultures throughout pre-colonial history has been foundational to 20th century colonial and post-colonial development. No other continent has been so closely identified with smallholder peasant farming. Nonetheless, smallholder farming has been eroding over the last three decades, perpetuating rural poverty and marginalizing remote rural areas. Donors’ search for rural ‘success stories’ merely reinforces this fact. Certainly many farmers have voted with their feet by increasingly engaging in non-agricultural livelihoods or migrating to urban areas. In so doing, the significance of agriculture for the majority of Africa’s population has altered.

The World Bank has played a prominent role in shaping agricultural policy in Africa. Under structural adjustment conditionality of the 1980s, the World Bank’s prescriptions became largely mandatory for the debt-ridden national economies of the continent. Its influence over a country’s policies is now generally in direct inverse proportion to that country’s economic strength. Thus, most African countries have to greater or lesser degrees espoused and implemented World Bank development policy for the last 25 years, and African agricultural sectors, in effect, demonstrate through continuous low growth rates and deepening rural poverty, the impact of World Bank policies.

A recent evaluation of the World Bank’s research output, chaired by Angus Deaton, challenged the institution’s reputation as the world’s ‘knowledge bank’ referring to its habit of taking ‘new and untested results as hard evidence that its preferred policies work’, singling out the flagship World Development Reports published annually as a medium through which advocacy of the World Bank’s favoured policy recommendations sometimes takes precedence over balanced analysis.

On the face of it, the WDR 2008 espouses a continuation of World Bank rural policies of the last quarter century. First, it argues that agriculture is key to poverty alleviation, especially for African smallholder farmers. The majority of Africa’s poor live in rural areas and farm to varying extents. Second, it stresses that liberalized national markets will remain the primary force for achieving productivity increases and poverty alleviation.

Accelerated growth will be achieved through agricultural productivity improvement but the ‘green revolution’ model of state investments and subsidized support for agricultural inputs are discounted. African states are seen to be seriously flawed and therefore best restricted in scope and decentralised to preclude government intervention in the national economy. Smallholder households will participate in commodity, capital, land and labour markets, to seek multiple pathways out of poverty; either through encompassing agricultural production, rural non-agricultural enterprises or out-migration.

Beneath these entirely business-as-usual policies, there are starkly contradictory objectives: the humanitarian concerns of poverty alleviation clash with a Darwinian market fundamentalism. ‘Market fundamentalism’ is defined here as the unshakeable belief in the innate nature of the market as a prime mover of exchange and optimizer of production without regard for the political imbalances and social biases of markets as historical institutions. States are seen as potential concentrations of vested interests and power in stark contrast to markets as neutral forums of exchange.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/46564agri.jpgWill African peasant farmers’ lot improve or decline further? The report has a casual way of not distinguishing the radically different policy needs of small as opposed to large-scale agriculture. In global agricultural commodity markets, African smallholder producers have been losing market share continually over the last three decades. Africa’s traditional export crops, the beverage crops: coffee, cocoa, tea, as well as cotton, tobacco, cashew, etc. have steadily declined to now quite negligible export levels. The comparative advantage that African smallholders held in these crops has been undermined by far more efficient producers elsewhere. There is no evidence provided to suggest that the broad masses of African small-scale peasant farmers will experience anything other than continuing difficulties in meeting the rigours of global commodity market chains with their highly regulated standards and time schedules.

Paradoxically, the World Bank has a long tradition of championing smallholder farmers. Structural adjustment policies were implemented in the name of ‘getting the prices right’ to promote market efficient resource allocation for the benefit of smallholders. Consistently World Bank agricultural policies have displayed contradictory tendencies and a glaring discrepancy between stated objectives and actual outcomes. Nonetheless, the World Bank has rarely been held to account. Peasant farmers have been too dispersed and without a voice whereas heavily indebted African governments are too dependent on the World Bank’s conditional aid to criticize the policies it enforces.

WORLD BANK POLICY AND AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY

African agriculture was in the World Bank’s spotlight 25 years ago with the publication of the Berg report entitled Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Agenda for Action (1981) and the World Development Report 1982 on the theme of agriculture. These reports identified African state policy intervention, particularly in the form of producer subsidies and parastatal marketing, as key problems to resolve in order to achieve higher agricultural productivity. The encouraging improvements in maize yields from the improved input and fertilizer packages that several African governments were distributing on a subsidized basis went unacknowledged, while the dramatic change in terms of trade following the oil crises of 1973/74 and 1979 and the subsequent world market economic shocks that the continent experienced were largely sidestepped – internal rather than external causes of the African economic crisis were stressed.

In the aftermath, as African countries one by one fell into heavy debt and SAP conditionality was imposed, the blooming of a potential green revolution fostered by policies of several African states during the 1970s was nipped in the bud. Unlike the green revolution of India, Indonesia and the Philippines, which had afforded its farmers several years of state-supported input subsidy, Africa’s green revolution was stillborn.

In stark contrast to Asia, Africa remains seriously food insecure. The investment in improved agricultural input packages and extension support tapered and eventually disappeared in most rural areas of Africa under SAP. Concern for boosting smallholders’ productivity was abandoned. Not only were governments rolled back, foreign aid to agriculture dwindled. World Bank funding for agriculture itself declined markedly from 32 per cent of total lending in 1976-8 to 11.7 per cent in 1997-9.

But some form of an agricultural revolution is vital to the future of today’s African smallholders. This is not because of their need to remain in the agricultural sector, although this may be the desire of many. Rather it is because the food security afforded by a green revolution provides the necessary foundation and insurance for individuals, rural households and nation-states to develop non-agrarian occupational specializations as well as constituting an important impetus for the growth of other sectors.

Reviving African attempts to rekindle African green revolution efforts, are ruled out. The World Bank’s refusal to endorse a concentrated state-coordinated and international donor supported effort to raise African productivity is likely to preclude the African rural poor’s agriculture from expanding beyond basic subsistence. There is, however, one notable concession in the WDR 2008. African smallholders may be allowed ’smart’ producer subsidies, which must be restrictively targeted and delimited primarily to fertilizer. Considering that farmers in OECD countries have kept their agricultural subsidies relatively intact throughout the last 20 years as African farmers saw their far more modest subsidies whittled away, this is a small consolation. The average support to OECD agricultural producers fell from 37 per cent of gross value of farm receipts in 1986-88 to 30 per cent in 2003-2005. While this represented a 7 per cent decline, the total amount of support increased over the same period from $242 billion a year to $273 billion a year (WDR 2008).

LARGE VERSUS SMALL-SCALE AGRICULTURE: CONTRACT FARMING AND RURAL WAGE LABOUR

Under current market fundamentalist thinking, large-scale agriculture is deemed to be competitive, not small-scale family production. The WDR 2008 infers that the lack of competitiveness of African smallholder commodity production will necessarily catapult many farmers into contract farming or agricultural wage employment. The wider relevance of contracting in an African context lies in its potential for increasing economies of scale and assuring quality.
Contract farming and agricultural wage labour are recommended when accompanied with fair remuneration and working conditions. The question remains how such just conditions are to be secured. Large-scale farms and agri-business are not charities. A deluge of farmers, exiting the smallholder sector as ‘refugees’, and flooding rural labour markets, will meet with extremely low returns and harsh working conditions.

Contract farming is usually selective in its outreach, often restricted to locations near big cities or major roads. Socially, over time it tends to exclude smaller, poorer producers, and the crops grown are primarily export cash crops rather than food staples. It constitutes a top-down take-it-or-leave-it approach with limited technical transfer. Undoubtedly it can benefit some farmers, but it is not an omnibus solution to low productivity and food insecurity for the majority of African peasant farmers.

Similar arguments are made for the efficiency of large-scale farm and plantation production. In relinquishing their autonomy, do smallholders gain in terms of income and security of employment? Smallholders’ bargaining power in contract farming can be very limited particularly in relation to the increasing influence of supermarket value chains. Agricultural wage labourers tend to have even less room for manoeuvre with casualization of the agricultural wage labour a common tendency. The WDR 2008 admits that agricultural wage labourers have been known to face highly exploitative working conditions.

Meanwhile, African states have initiated a host of incentives (tax rebates, physical and moral security) for foreign investors to attract foreign currency into the country. Historically, the majority of investors and European settler farmers were concentrated in Southern Africa producing commercial export crops as well as food products such maize, wheat and beef. More recently, they have ventured into horticulture, safari ranching and tourism.

The WDR 2008 suffers from a logical inconsistency between its acclaimed goal of poverty alleviation for African smallholder farmers and its conviction that large-scale commercial farming is the inevitable future of farming. African small-scale family farmers must meet the productivity levels, rigorous product standards and delivery schedules of international value chains to compete effectively, yet without necessary support.

At present hundreds of millions of African peasant smallholders are not competing successfully in global commodity markets. The World Bank adopts a matter-of-fact position that they will relinquish their autonomy as agricultural producers and work as contract farmers or wage labours in large-scale agribusiness or alternatively leave agriculture to seek their livelihood elsewhere. Their sanguine attitude towards peasant labour redundancy does not tally with their professed concern for the African rural poor. Beneath the WDR 2008’s public relations spin about poverty alleviation, they are conferring carte blanche support to a ‘survival of the fittest’ economic trajectory in which the grossly imbalanced commercial interests of large-scale OECD subsidized farmers, supermarket chains and agribusiness have full scope to compete against unsubsidized peasant farmers engaged in rural ways of life that that have managed hitherto to endure for millennia.

LAND FOR THOSE LEFT BEHIND

African smallholders have a ‘loser’ status in the WDR2008, but the World Bank appreciates that allowing the global market to fully decimate African peasant agriculture would spell political and human disaster in the weak African national economies where farmers’ only option is to join over-crowded rural and urban informal sectors where average levels of capitalization, skills and productivity are exceptionally low. Thus the African countryside of the future is in effect likely to be relegated to a large ‘holding ground’ to ensure basic welfare of the rural population and provide labour for other sectors of the economy as and when needed.

In a significant departure from the World Bank’s otherwise consistent efforts to promote the extension of market relations throughout African commodity, labour and capital exchange the World Bank now stresses that a rural pro-poor agenda requires attention to customary tenure rights and land management systems. The World Bank position is now supportive of evolutionary land tenure, seeing customary tenure as central for ensuring the poor’s security as local tenure regimes evolve towards market-based practices. To stave criticism that it is supporting traditionalism, the World Bank has tried to press for reforms of the traditional authorities safeguarding customary land tenure, and in so doing asserts that customary land tenure can strengthen women’s land rights, promote decentralized land institutions, and raise productivity – features rarely if ever formerly identified with customary tenure in the past.

The reality is that customary land rights are no longer the central issue in many African countries. Smallholder farmers are often in competition with large-scale farmers who receive preferential state support. Small farmers have already been or are currently being pushed into vulnerable ecological areas outside their traditional home areas.

SMALL HOLDER MARGINALIZATION

The World Bank has not been held accountable for the agricultural policy misjudgements and blunders they have enforced in Africa over the last 25 years through structural adjustment policy and debt conditionality. Now, with impunity, they are throwing their weight behind the rapid redundancy of a potentially massive number of peasant smallholders in the name of African development.

The World Bank is recommending global capital’s destruction of an independent smallholder agricultural sector in the absence of clear employment prospects. This is radically different from the rapid depeasantization process currently underway in China. There, members of rural households are leaving the farm to work in booming industrial and service sectors of the national economy. Given the constricted parameters of African national economies, smallholder alternative options outlined by the World Bank are not convincing.

Rural non-agricultural activities are performed primarily on the basis of self-employment. The risks are high and financial capital and over-supply are the over-riding constraints. The rural informal sector is already heavily over-subscribed and known for its low, unreliable fluctuating levels of remuneration. Finally, there is the option to migrate to an urban area to seek employment. In most cases the outcome is very similar to that of participating in rural non-farm activities without the safety net of having farming members of the family nearby.

The WDR 2008 advocates the above listed options as escape routes to avoid directly experiencing the disintegration of peasant smallholder farming, but there is a realization that not all African rural dwellers will manage to join the exodus. For those who are left behind, the policy will have to be ‘social protection’ rather than ‘economic development’. In this sense the WDR 2008 marks a major departure in World Bank rural policy – African rural development policy will no longer centre on smallholder agency. Rather those who constitute the ‘relic population’, could be availed, a continued subsistence farming base, facilitated by the World Bank’s recent switch to acceptance of the historical evolution of customary tribal-based land tenure.

In other words, those left in the countryside live on tribal communal ‘holding grounds’, akin to the Bantustans of the apartheid period of South African history, eking out an existence on the basis of exceptionally low-yielding, uncapitalized agriculture. Like the Bantustans, these holding grounds could function as labour reserves for the mainstream national economy and would most likely be based on conservative tribal customary legal frameworks not only with respect to land but in wide array of other spheres as well. It is indeed an irony that such a possibility resurfaces little more than a decade after South Africa managed to rid itself of this ‘separate and unequal’ model of rural exploitation in the name of development.

*Kjell Havnevik is a Senior Researcher with the Nordic Africa Institute, Uppsala

*Deborah Fahy Bryceson is a Research Associate at the African Studies Centre, Oxford University

*Atakilte Beyene has a PhD in Development Studies, and is affiliated with The Stockholm Environment
Institute, Stockholm, Sweden

*Prosper Matondi works in the Centre for Rural Development, University of Zimbabwe

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

(The US ‘War on Terror’ Exported to Rwanda)

Rwanda and Burundi, the fight between the Hutu and Tsutsi, have always been their own unique legacy of the preferences exercised by their former colonial masters and the consequences of that preference for the lighter and more European looking Tsutsi over the Bantu Hutu. I remember once first hearing of this was in the fifties when we, in Southern Africa heard of the 7'Tsutsi been shortened at the knees by the Hutu, I do not know if it was a myth, but that is my first recollection of hearing about the Hutu and Tsutsi, unless my memory serves me wrong, the two were once one country. One watched the unfolding saga of what is now termed by those who were directly responsible for the disaster the "genocide in Rwanda". One was wondering why the calls for action by France and the then commander in the region for intervention by the United Nations was blocked by the US and its allies calling this a cynical move by France.

The US Ambassador, who, just female, as the the Ambassador in Iraq before the first Gulf War, (both women who had sinced passed away) also asked for assistance. None was forthcoming, as one watched this nightmare unfold, one began to see the purpose to the madness. This was a carefully orchestrated move to include DRC in the Master plan that now, includes Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda, a recolonization of the North Eastern and Central African region. Mombasa and the the cost of Tanzania and let us not forget Djibouti would then allow control of the waterways and ocean at the Horn of Africa, the recolonization of Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia would provide a foothold in the Gulf of Guinea.

When one hears the Security Council is now acting as the League of Nations did before WWII, supporting so called members of the international community, "civilized world" euphemisms for former and current Aryan Power flirts and 21st Century fascists. They are now, with a weak and ineffective African Union, to lay claim to our natural resources and rights. Tsutsis never were or are part of DRC, they now have a country that was created and supported by the so called "civilized world" the "market" that was just opened by Kagame, is being set up to be the the clearing house of wall that is now, supposedly, since we Africans seem incapable of preventing what our fathers, mothers and elders have gifted to us, the recolonization of Africa. The destruction of the rail links and the disruption of the trade network between those countries has caused the panic, since all that we hear about assisting Africa has nothing to do with Africa and Africans but the pillaging and rape of our continent.

We need to confront the Kagame, Museveni, Nkunda, the gentleman in Ethiopia and what now is appearing to be the inclusion of Kenya and Tanzania, we need to demand that those who claim to represent and lead our countries be held accountable by those who have had the luxury of an education, especially legal education. We need Africans to speak up for Africa. Why are we having alleged hollywood movie stars, and irish singers and many ngos and the rest speaking for us? What happened to all of us who were educated after decolonization? Why are we stuck in the West, driving taxis, doing jobs that just keep us alive when we could have those of us on the continent agitate for the return of the skilled workers, Africans abroad? Why are we saddled with so many foreign "aid workers" who really are members of foreign intelligent agencies taking care of our most vulnerable populations?

Something is seriously wrong with US, AFRICANS. We need to take a good look at ourselves, sons and daughters of the soil and ask ourselves are we worthy of the name African? After all, we can see how, with the Fortress Europe and the closing of all the avenues of immigration in the West, and the fish food that our fellow brothers and sisters are becoming attempting to flee the nightmare that life has become in most of our countries, that we have nowhere to run, Africa is OURS, there seems to be a problem with both us and those who would rule us of this truth, this reality, Africa belongs to us, sons and daughters of the soil. There is nowhere else to run, so it would behoove us to start looking at the reality we have allowed, and start implementing African solutions for African problems. Not bush, sarkozy, brown or any other white person, but African solutions to African problems. Time is running out, they have already devoured and exhausted all they stole from the indigenous peoples of the lands they claim as theirs, are we going to allow them back into Africa?

Are you a lecturer in an African university? Do you have responsibility for the teaching of courses on research methods? If so, this announcement is targeted at you. The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa is pleased to announce its initiative targeted at those members of the African social research community who have responsibility in their universities for teaching undergraduate and graduate-level course in social science research methods.

The 2008 summer school will focus on Borders and Border-Crossings in Africa. It will be sponsored by AEGIS-Naples in collaboration with the AEGIS Centres of Bayreuth, Edinburgh and Leiden. The aim of the summer school is: a) to bring together advanced Ph.D. students and teaching staff from AEGIS Centres (and possibly beyond) in order to exchange field and research experience; b) to improve the students’ ability to prepare and present their research in an international context; c) to promote graduate training within AEGIS and stimulate African-European inter-university cooperation. Application deadline 15 March 2008.

For close to two decades, Cameroon was considered a bastion of stability in Africa, that is, until last week when that veneer was shattered by four days of widespread rioting. The riots were triggered by a hike in fuel prices amidst ongoing attempts by the Biya regime to scrap presidential term limits. Here is a review of some of the blogs that wrote about these events.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_01_africannotes.gif goes beyond the immediate cause of the riots to look at the broader issues at stake:

“Cameroon on media? Nothing special! It's not about soccer or les indomitables. This time around it is about riots and Biya…

Seen in the wider perspective, the riots are rather reflections of the public's resentment towards the administration of President Paul Biya. Though he downplayed the demonstrations as a mere game of apprentice sorcerers. That is a typical African big man allegation.

Whenever there is a public anger the leaders rarely try to see the real issue. It is rather a custom to seek a lame excuse for that and scorn the usual suspects like the opposition and human right activists or even neighboring countries. The same thing is happening here. Cameroon is said to be a notoriously corrupt country. The administration should take responsibility for condoning the practice.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_02_africaworksgpz.gifPascal Zachary also blames the Biya regime for the uncharacteristic violence that rocked the country last week:
“The unrest in Cameroon… makes me weep. Among the best endowed nations in the world — both in terms of landscape, fertility of its soil, and talents of its people — Cameroon has been condemned to suffer awful political rule. Even by African standards, Biya’s 25-year reign over this picturesque West African country has been a disaster. While he has rarely organized killing sprees, he quietly has demolished country that ought to be among the most successful, not only in Africa, but in the developing world. Instead of planning a permanent retirement somewhere in Europe (where he seems to spend a great deal of time anyway), Biya wants to inflict more wounds on his long-suffering countrymen. What a shame. Biya is a president who rarely holds meetings with his ministers and he refuses to allow his government to even publish a phony budget. He is indeed a ghost (his nickname in the country). I am sad at the thought he may haunt Cameroon for years more.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_03_princehamilton.gifPrince Hamilton wonders what exactly President Biya hopes to achieve with another term of office when he has little to show for after a quarter of a century in power:
“I am just appalled that President Paul Biya still thinks he will do something despite not having achieved much in his 26 years. I think that with the president’s recent speech and policies, it shows that he has run out of inspiration that never existed in the first place. It is high time he hands over the presidency to another person.

Cameroon is blessed that no Cameroonian has been able to infiltrate the country with weapons, if not the story would have been different. Notwithstanding, you can only suppress a people for a time but at a given time they will look for means to break their shackles than live as eternal slaves.

The government has been using sports as the opium of the people but this time it failed woefully. The raising of gas prices after the Lions won their semi final match against Ghana during the recent African Cup of Nations was a miscalculated opportunism.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_04_cameroongoon.gifCameroon Goon appeals to the Cameroonian community in the US to show up in great numbers for planned demonstrations at the Cameroon embassy in Washington DC:

“Please come out and let's remind Paul Biya and his accomplices that after 25yrs of tyranny, subjection, poverty and intimidation, we are tired and want him to leave peacefully in 2011. He should park out of Etoudi, heading straight to his palace in Mvomeka (his village). Let us come out and remember the 17 people already killed. Let us come out and pray for Cameroonians the world over. Let us pray for our children and remind the Cameroonian government that Democracy means: government of the people, by the people and for the people. We don't want any other forms of democracy, be it 'avancée' or 'moderne'. We just want democracy; the simple type. The type of democracy that would mean there is some form of sustainable economic development ahead for Cameroon and it's people!”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_05_princereport.gifPrince Report publishes the reaction of the “British Southern Cameroonians Restoration Government” (one of the movements advocating for the independence of Anglophone Cameroon) to last week’s events:

“The brutality that was carried out against our citizens this past week adds a sweltering sense of urgency to the restoration of our stolen sovereignty. The most important thing you should do at this time is refraining from involving yourselves in the political affairs of the foreign country next door to us and east of the Mungo River. For these matters in the Cameroun Republic are veritable distractions from our total focus on restoring our independence. Paul Biya's brutality on our citizens this past week should make it even clearer and even more urgent that we should not waver for a single moment from our determination to take our national sovereignty.
[...]
To our neighbors suffering the brutal weight of this Biya regime, we offer our sympathy--since we fully share your grief--and we rise to stand with you as you fight to reclaim your God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Biya's heavy handedness with you continues the state terrorism that Ahidjo directed against your parents in the 1960s. Time has not erased from human memory Ahidjo's genocide which killed more than half a million of your patriotic parents in the first decade of your independence “almost all of them Bassas and Bamileke. Time is not going to erase memory of the massacre that Paul Biya is now carrying out against your children today in 2008. Have no doubt that the world is witnessing that only the name has changed, for Biya's regime is a mere continuation of Ahidjo's 1960s regime.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_06_kenopalo.gifKen Opalo is simply incensed at Biya’s determination to hang on to power no matter the cost:

“The 75 year old has had over 25 years to make the lives of Cameroonians better but failed miserably. Over 40% of his country people still live below the poverty line. Official unemployment figures show that about 30% of the labor force is unemployed. Real figures are much higher than this (knowing how incompetent African statistics bureaus are). One wonders what more this old man has to offer to his country after he gives himself another seven years in office in 2011.

Whatever happened to basic decency? Why is it that our leaders feel that they can do whatever they want and get away with it? Do these people have any shame?

If anyone close to Biya reads this please tell him that third term amendments are kind of last-century. Obasanjo ought to have been the last shameful attempt at this. Africa will not claim the 21st century and indeed not even the fourth millennium if we keep up with this third term amendment nonsense. So get real President Biya. Competition breeds excellence, so let competition thrive.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/353/mar12_07_dibussi.gifIn the same vein, Scribbles from the Den publishes an appeal by a group of Cameroonian writers to MPs of the ruling CPDM, asking them not to go along with attempts to amend the constitution:

“It is not only dangerous but also criminal for the Head of State to play games with the Constitution. Attempting to amend Article 6 of the Constitution of the Republic of Cameroon which limits presidential tenure to two terms is, undoubtedly, one of those crimes for which our country shall pay an onerous price in the future.
[…]
For once show some courage; steer clear of infamy! Our future is priceless; do not gamble with it! Most importantly do not play with fire! Amending Article 6 of the Constitution of the Republic of Cameroon would weaken the institutions that protect Cameroonian citizens against act of barbaric abuse. For too long, we have lived as if we do not see the mishaps that have befallen our neighbors. Suffice it to say that recent incidents in Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia, not forgetting Chad, testify to the fact that a single foul play with the Constitution could plunge the entire nation into insurmountable chaos. The civil strife that these countries have experienced lends ample credibility to our conviction that Cameroon’s social stability is fragile, very fragile indeed. Cameroonians are peace-lovers; do not compromise it! Otherwise, you shall be judged in front of the tribunal of History.”

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

* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Uganda’s Batwa communities have been marginalised for decades. Now they are struggling to cope with extreme weather conditions, and want better homes to protect them from storms and landslides. Among the posh office premises of the Red Cross Society and the court of adjudicature on Muchingo hill, in Uganda's western district of Kisoro, are ramshackle houses in which a community of Batwa people live.

Early one morning in 1993, Wilson Turinawe woke up to the crack of gunfire in Uganda’s Kibale National Park. Paramilitary park rangers were attacking his village. His thatched hut was set on fire. His wife grabbed their infant child and ran. Turinawe was slashed with a machete. He still has the scars. “They came with guns,” he recalls, with a disbelief in his voice that suggests the episode might have taken place just yesterday instead of fifteen years ago.

Five State Agents of The Gambia were expected to appear on Tuesday, March 11, 2008 before the Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in Abuja, Nigeria in the ongoing case of a detained Gambian journalist, Chief Ebrima Manneh. This followed an order from the Community Court for the agents to appear before it to answer their alleged roles in the arrest and subsequent detention of Manneh, a former reporter of the pro-government Banjul-based Daily Observer newspaper, who has been “disappeared” since July 2006.

On this 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and at the initiative of the World Forum of Civil Society Networks — UBUNTU, we wish to emphasize that all Human Rights are universal, indivisible and interdependent, in full accordance with the Declaration of the World Conference on Human Rights made in Vienna (United Nations, 1993).

The beleaguered UN peacekeeping mission in Sudan, handicapped by lack of troops and helicopters, has come under fire for its unusually high costs. Alpha Oumar Konare, chairman of the African Union Commission, says it is "scandalous" to spend 2.0 billion dollars annually on the upkeep of a proposed 26,000-strong joint African Union-UN Mission in Darfur (UNAMID), when Africa's urgent needs are elsewhere.

Leading female power-brokers from around the world have appealed for a larger political role for women in solving conflicts and poverty. Over 50 participants, including leaders, foreign ministers, lawmakers, first ladies and top European Union and U.N. officials participated at the talks to promote women's empowerment ahead of International Women's Day.

Journalists in Sierra Leone are challenging laws that criminalize free speech and authorize prison terms of up to seven years for those who criticize the government. The Sierra Leone Association of Journalists (SLAJ) filed the lawsuit with the country's Supreme Court last week, seeking to overturn Sierra Leone's criminal libel and false news laws. The laws allow prison sentences for expression that "excite(s) disaffection" against the government or "injure(s) the reputation" of the government or individual officials.

UNDP Regional Service Centre now have a possibility for an internship in Democratic Governance/Aid Effectiveness at the centre in Johannesburg, for Southern and Eastern Africa. The internship will be unpaid, preferably for a minimum of 6 months, and starting in March or April. Women and candidates from Southern or Eastern Africa are especially encouraged to apply.

To apply, interested individuals are asked to send a cover letter to [email][email protected] with their stated preference for work or focus within Governance, Aid Effectiveness, Corruption or a related area, identifying how this would relate to any academic work they have pursued or will be pursuing in this period, if applicable. Kindly attach a CV. Preference will be given to candidates who reply by 10 March.

Governments must take active steps to protect the rights of women to housing and land, and integrate these protections into their strategies to ameliorate the negative effects of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, according to the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE)

Yahya Dampha, a Gambian journalist, who is in exile in Senegal, on March 10, 2008 escaped a kidnapping attempt by suspected agents of the notorious National Intelligence Agency (NIA) of The Gambia. Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) sources reported that at about 12 noon, three plain-clothed agents of the NIA went to Dampha's home in Dakar to abduct him, but through the intervention of his neighbours, the men fled.

Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine has been missing since the night of the 12th August 2007. It is believed that his kidnapping was politically motivated and someone in the Haitian government and or the UN forces in Haiti led by Brazil must know what happened to him and where he is. This petition calls for information on his whereabouts and for his release.

In Burundi, land is a source of power. Many members of the Batwa pygmy community blame their subordinate status on the fact that they do not own property. Having once enjoyed a symbiotic relationship with the rainforest environment, most Batwa today have been squeezed out of their hunter-gatherer existence and work as casual labourers on other people’s land.

Is decentralization consistent with development goals? What can we learn from Uganda? This paper from the Economic Policy Research Centre, Kampala, reviews Uganda’s experience of decentralization to highlight its effects on the empowerment of local leaders and residents, local elite capture, service delivery and the promotion of sector responses.

International Budget Project (IBP) is pleased to announce the release of its latest publication, "Our Money, Our Responsibility: A Citizens' Guide to Monitoring Government Expenditures." This Guide documents pioneering methodologies used by civil society organizations around the developing world to hold their governments to account for the use of public resources.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the seventh session of its Annual Social Science Campus, and invites applications from African scholars for participation in the programme which, this year, is scheduled to hold in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, from 29 September, 2008 to 03 October, 2008. The Campus is conceived as an advanced research dialogue that is both multidisciplinary and intergenerational in nature.

Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) is seeking a qualified and dynamic legal officer for the deputy RSD team leader position. The job of the Deputy RSD team leader is full-time for 35 hours per week. S/he works under the day-to-day supervision of the RSD team leader. Application deadline: March 27 2008.

As part of its Interventions series, CODESRIA invites younger researchers enrolled in post-graduate programmes in African universities or who have completed their doctoral research not more than five years ago to submit essays of between 10,000 and 12,000 words on the theme of The Social Sciences and the New Hegemonism in Global Affairs.

FEMNET is looking for a consultant to design and write a booklet on advocacy approaches and experiences that SOAWR has used over the past years to campaign for the ratification, popularisation and implementation of the protocol. The consultant will be contracted for 45 days to carry out this duty and will report regularly to FEMNET’s advocacy officer.Deadline for applications is March 30, 2008.

In this report, the Special Rapporteur acknowledges the legislative achievements of South Africa, such as the Constitution that is often cited as an example for the protection of economic, social and cultural rights, including for the right to adequate housing. He notes that South Africa has put in place a number of progressive legislative measures and policies aimed at fulfilling the right to adequate housing. Yet, a significant number of South Africans do not have access to this basic human right.

A reconciliation meeting held on February 29, 2008 in Kachibora, Trans-zoia district between the Marakwet and the Kisii communities saw the first batch of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the area return home on Monday March 3, 2008.

the Center for Citizens’ Participation in the AU (CCP-AU)is seeking to recruit a coordinator to be based in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The deadline for applications is 18 March 2008.

Dear Friends, May the spirit of International Day in Solidarity with the Haitian People continue to spread!
If the more than 10,000 people killed in the 18 months that followed the February 29, 2004 coup d’état could speak, what would they say? Would they join voices with the young women raped and sexually assaulted since the coup?

The inaugural conference within the CODESRIA initiative on African History is planned to hold in Nairobi, Kenya, from 13 – 15 August, 2008. The theme around which it is proposed to organise the conference is: Re-Reading the History and Historiography of Domination and Resistance in Africa. The choice of this theme for the inaugural conference has been informed by a number of considerations, five of which are outlined in this conference announcement.

The suffering of the women in the Congo, particularly in the east of the country has long reached biblical proportions, yet and still the silence continues throughout the global community. Hundreds of thousands of women have been violently raped, mutilated and terrorized by a host of culprits (Rebel Groups, Rwandan Soldiers, Congolese Soldiers, civilian population and even the United Nations).

President Robert Mugabe has signed a law requiring all foreign companies operating in Zimbabwe to give majority equity to black Zimbabweans, a move analysts see as the final nail in the coffin of the country's economy. More than 200 British and South African firms that have invested heavily in Zimbabwe will be affected, including Lever Brothers, Barclays Bank, Standard Chartered Bank, Standard Bank, Stanbic Bank, Impala Platinum, Angloplat, Mettalon Gold, Rio Tinto, Edcon, Merchant Bank of Central Africa and several enterprises owned by Anglo American.

SAA has been branded a human rights violator for failing to provide adequate boarding equipment for disabled passengers at airports. The SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) revealed that disabled passengers were transported to and from SAA aircraft in adapted catering vehicles and manually loaded on to and off planes. On Sunday, a group of disabled people were forced to crawl out of the plane or be carried out at OR Tambo International Airport.

More women are working than ever before, but they are also more likely than men to get low-productivity, low-paid and vulnerable jobs, with no social protection, basic rights nor voice at work according to a new report by the International Labour Office (ILO) issued for International Women’s Day.

Is the Uganda government set to become an efficient deliverer of services to the 28 million Ugandans out there? At least this is what the nationals are supposed to believe if the benefits that accrue from the completion of the first phase of the National Data Backbone is anything to go by.