Pambazuka News 373: South Africa: Xenophobia and the end of an illusion
Pambazuka News 373: South Africa: Xenophobia and the end of an illusion
President Thabo Mbeki has given the go-ahead to the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) to step in and assist police quell the attacks on foreign nationals. The attacks have left at least 40 dead, and thousands others displaced. "President Thabo Mbeki has approved a request from the South African Police Service for the involvement of the South African National Defence Force in stopping on-going attacks on foreign nationals," a statement issued on Wednesday from the Presidency read.
Girls within armed groups have generally been neglected by scholars, governments and policymakers. This Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) paper traces the experiences of girls in armed conflict in Angola, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Uganda. It finds that girls in fighting forces are rendered invisible and marginalised during and after conflict, although they are fundamentally important to armed groups. They experience victimisation, perpetration and insecurity, but are also active agents and resisters.
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) are pleased to announce their joint initiative to host a major conference on the vexed question of the causes and consequences of corruption in Africa and to invite interested researchers and policy intellectuals to submit abstracts and paper proposals for consideration for presentation at the conference. The conference is one of the major activities being organized to mark the 50th anniversary of UNECA. It will be held at the United Nations Conference Center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, from 29th to 31st October, 2008. The working languages for the conference would be English and French.
Despite a marked improvement in the security situation in Burundi in recent years, some 100,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) remain in settlements throughout the country, in addition to an unknown number living with host families. Many IDPs seem to have to a large extent integrated into the communities of neighbouring towns and villages, but there is little information on their situation, their needs or their aspirations.
As Zimbabwe braces for what many fear will be a bloody run-off election next month, ZANU-PF’s powerful central committee has shifted into top gear to make sure President Robert Mugabe reverses the electoral defeat he suffered on March 29. In addition to widespread intimidation spearheaded by militias in areas where voters backed Morgan Tsvangirai and the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC, the authorities are tightening up control over the state media.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called on Sudanese authorities to lift the ban on Arabic-language newspaper Alwan, which has been accused of publishing “sensitive military information harmful to the country’s security” linked to a recent attack on the capital city Khartoum by Darfur rebels.
The Electoral Commission (EC) has outlined the qualification for both presidential and parliamentary candidates for Elections 2008, stressing workers of government offices and chiefs were barred by law from contesting while in office.
According to press reports in Spain, the government and army of Morocco are making preparations for a military attack on the territories controlled by Western Sahara's Polisario Front since a UN-brokered ceasefire in 1991. The alleged "preparations" are to be a reaction to the increased civilian activities by Polisario in its "liberated territories".
During the Pan African Parliament (PAP) deliberations, which concluded this week, Fatima Hajale, a South African parliamentarian, argued that PAP’s peace and security policies should focus on human rather than state security. During PAP’s consideration of the report of the electoral observer mission to Zimbabwe, the leader of the mission, Swaziland parliamentarian Marwick Khumalo, stated that power-sharing between Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai may be the only solution to curb human rights violations in the country. As Zimbabwe prepares for a runoff election on June 27th, Human Rights Watch has echoed the call of African civil society organisations for the African Union (AU) to send election observers and human rights monitors to promote free and fair voting during the election and to publicly call for an immediate end to all forms of violence.
In further peace and security news, the AU praised, this week, the progress made in Comoros since the successful military intervention of the Union army with the support of the AU on the island of Anjouan to oust Colonel Bacar. The AU’s longer term peacekeeping aspirations will depend largely on regional contributions toward the African Standby Forces, which are due to be active by 2010. However, in the southern African region (SADC), the contribution will depend largely on South Africa, yet “the clash between the over-deployment of SANDF [South African National Defence Force] and the reality of its funding and capabilities means that troops committed to the SADC brigade might not be available”.
In regional news, Erastus Mwencha, secretary general of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), announced this week that COMESA, the East African Community (EAC) and SADC would meet later this year to attempt to harmonize trade policies so that “Africa can compete more effectively on world markets”. In West Africa, representatives of international organizations involved in agricultural development and water resource management have been invited to a one-day extraordinary meeting of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) ministers of trade, agriculture and finance to discuss and propose solutions to mitigate the effects of soaring food costs.
Further, in East Africa, the heads of electoral commissions met to discuss the harmonization of electoral processes throughout the region. The meeting recommended the formation of a forum of electoral commissions to “initiate development of policies, strategies and programmes that promote the culture of democracy and adherence to the rule of law in East Africa; to harmonize the laws, policies and strategies of National Electoral Commissions with a view to sharing information, expertise and election materials; and to share and harmonize their electoral calendars and road maps”. The heads of electoral commissions further recommended that a study be commissioned on the cost of conducting elections, with a view to reducing costs, and the initiation and implementation of a regional capacity building project for strengthening political and governance institutions in the region. In addition, East African ministers recently concluded a visit to China “to learn from the Chinese experience in infrastructure development and to garner support and partnership in developing the region’s infrastructures”. The outcomes of the visit will feed into the EAC Infrastructure Development Plan. While, at present, the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) is holding its sixth sitting in Nairobi this week. The Assembly will debate and approve the budget estimates and the appropriation bill 2007. A seminar for legislators on “aid effectiveness, political parties and media” organized by the Association of Western European Parliamentarians for Africa will follow the EALA sitting on May 24.
Meanwhile, as the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) will conclude its session in Swaziland on May 22, the Forum on NGO participation has issued its report and resolutions. The Forum highlighted the state of human rights and democracy in Africa as well as the rights of specific groups. During the Forum, strategies to strengthen collaboration between the mandates of the United Nations and ACHPR were developed. Similarly, strategies for the ratification and implementation of the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Women in Africa were shared. Thematic special interest groups sessions were also held relating to refugees and internally displaced persons; minorities and indigenous peoples’; human rights defenders; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex peoples’; impunity for violence against women and girls; among many others. An overarching theme during the Forum was the need for civil society to work together, and with the ACHPR, between sessions of the Commission to make activities more effective.
With civil society preparing for the Egypt summit of the AU, the 15% Now campaign has launched a countdown aimed at mobilising national and continental support to urge African leaders to restate their commitment to and urgently implement the Abuja 2001 pledge to allocate 15% of national budgets to health. Civil society organisations will also participate in a parallel forum on aid effectiveness during the Accra high-level summit in September. Pre-registration for the forum is required before June 15.
In this vivid and personal account, a trade unionist walks through the unfolding xenophobic attacks in South Africa.
19 May 2008:
Friends, this is simply an account of what I saw and experienced in a twenty four period. It might be incomplete. It is not an analytical piece as such, but I hope a small step towards trying to understand what had taken place in this city, in this country that I have come to love.
Last night as we drove from the centre of Joburg to the eastern suburb of Kensington, we wondered why the police helicopter was circling over Jeppes Town, the historic centre of this city built on gold. The area is now mostly an industrial relic and has seen far better times, part wasteland, part small enterprises and a big part, home of one of the largest mens hostels in the City.
We had been discussing earlier the violence in Alex, the eruptions in other parts, and what we felt was the cause, and the inadequate response of the State. We had participated earlier in the day in a demonstration called by our Union Federation to protest against rising food prices, and against xenophobia, an issue that had been tagged on after foreigners had been brutally attacked in Alexandria township and other places. We had taken our son and his friend, and their enthusiasm had helped to minimise the disappointingly low numbers who had turned up.
We slept that night within earshot of police sirens and the whirring of helicopters and wondered what we would wake to.
At 9.00am Lesego rang the bell. A small boy for his sixteen years, wirey but capable of dribbling a football as if his feet had magnetic powers. I let him in, and he looked terrified. He had traveled from Soweto, as he did every fortnight, to come and do odd jobs to earn an allowance that he depends on to survive. We would normally have a talk about his schooling, the continuing absence of contact with his mother, and his living conditions. We hoped this might help him be capable of getting through the next hurdles he inevitably faced.
But this morning, it was fear that was etched on his face. Scrunched up in his pocket was the small round hat favoured by members of the Moslem community. Getting off the taxi at Jeppe Station, he noticed a crowd of men beating two people on the ground with knobkerries. One of those doing the beating looked up, saw him and shouted, ‘Hey you, alien, come here’. He didn’t wait to answer. Snatching the hat from his head, he sprinted like a springbok, and ran the kilometre to our house in sheer terror.
A quiet and reserved young man, we somehow managed to calm him down with sweet tea and reassurances. He was thinking hard before he finally spoke.
‘These people have not been educated’ he said. ‘They think it is the foreigners who are to blame. I fear them, but I also feel sorry for them. They think that killing poor people like themselves is going to make it better for them’.
Later I dropped him in town to connect with his taxi to Soweto, and the shack where he lived alone without electricity to read his homework and prepare for his exams the next day. Without the means to cook himself even a simple supper.
As I circled town to return home I came across hundreds and hundreds of bedraggled people, milling around an infamous taxi rank area. I pulled up next to a police woman on duty. I asked her what was going on. ‘It’s the Zimbabweans’ she said matter of factly, ‘They have come out of the Methodist Centre because there is trouble there’ And when I asked her what sort of trouble she simply said ‘Something to do with Bishop Verryn’.
Some months earlier, the Methodist centre managed by the Bishop as a makeshift refuge for hundreds of destitute Zimbabweans, had been raided by the police in a military style operation that belonged to another era. Purportedly looking for ‘illegals’ the police had unceremoniously thrown the destitute and their few possessions into the street, had publicly assaulted perfectly innocent people, and then arrested many of them on completely spurious grounds. Bishop Paul and others were later to respond by having the entire action severely criticized by a court of law, and declared completely illegal. But the damage had been done.
The leadership of the police had given a very public indication that they regarded ‘aliens’ as unworthy of fair treatment under the law. Refugees, wherever they were from, were to be treated as if they were less than human, and therefore human rights guarantees under the famed South African Constitution, were not to apply.
Worse, they sent a clear message to the persecuted Zimbabwean community. Do not look to the police for protection. These thoughts returned many times over the next few hours.
By now, radio news reports had started to tell what had happened the previous night, but not before my partner had phoned them and reminded them of their duty to report what was happening on our doorsteps. When approached, the public broadcaster listened carefully and promised to increase reportage, and did by the time of the next hourly bulletin. The commercial station was less receptive, and continued to air a truncated and inaccurate report for three more hours.
As I drove up Main Street in Jeppes Town, events of the previous night were clear to see. Buildings, once occupied by tens of families were still smouldering, a fire engine stood nearby, several police cars with lights flashing had blocked roads leading to the Jeppe Hostel.
Jeppe Hostel, as it is known locally, had been at the centre of other storms in the past. In the tumultuous eighties and nineties it had been the centre for Inkatha Freedom Party activity in the area. ANC and COSATU activists who ventured there took their life in their hands. So called ‘black on black’ violence that resulted in dozens of deaths were centred on the train station in Jeppes Town.
The hostel itself is now chronically overcrowded, squalid and seriously unfit for habitation, it houses thousands of poor working class men and some of their partners. It is surrounded by an urban squatter camp, made up of once busy outlets, workshops and factories that are now lived in by those who cannot or who are unable to live in the hostel. Adjoining factory floor space is divided by makeshift curtains to mark the living spaces of the working and unemployed poor. Sanitation, electricity, clean water, privacy, safety are all luxuries in this community.
As I continued up the road I noticed that despite the police presence, large groups of men carrying ‘cultural weapons’ (various clubs, machetes, bottles) were standing on the corners, watching, waiting. Many others, mostly family groups, were standing in their doorways looking anxiously out.
Further up the road still, I slowed to pass the building where Lesego had witnessed the beatings and from where his pursuers had emerged. A miserable building of perhaps ten electricity deprived flats. A large group of men, some middle aged, others in their early twenties were standing and watching passers by, their weapons visible for all to see. The police it seemed were keeping a safe distance.
Back at home, we listen to the news reports, and start to receive anxious calls from friends. One comrade, Paul, who worked for the trade unions in Zimbabwe for many years is here to receive treatment and staying with his brother in Cleveland, a working class suburb close by. He and his brother’s family have sought refuge in the local Catholic church. He described how he witnessed mobs of drunken men from the large Denver Hostel moving from house to house asking the occupants questions in Zulu. If the reply was made in Zulu, then the visitors asked for money and moved to the next house. If not, the house was looted, the occupants assaulted, and thrown out onto the street to make a hasty escape as best they could. In between these raids, dozens of people are ‘arrested’ by the same mobs walking in the street, and are interrogated, systematically robbed and assaulted. Calls to the police for protection produced nothing.
‘Are you safe in the church’ I enquire. ‘Well we have nothing’ he replies, ‘and we have heard that our place was raided for a second time an hour ago, and so we don’t expect to find anything left, if and when we return. Right now we are at the mercy of the Salvation Army and the Red Cross. They are bringing food and blankets’.
I think to myself, the Red Cross are saving people in suburban Johannesburg.
Later in the morning I pulled into a garage to buy newspapers and see almost fifty men in groups talking on phones and to each other in a very excited manner. I started a conversation and discover that these are all displaced Nigerians who live in the Malvern suburb of Johannesburg. They mostly left their homes last night. Some slept at friends, and others in their cars. One had his car burned out when trying to escape, and managed to run into the back of a supermarket and hide. They describe how the night before, hundreds of hostel dwellers chanting ‘Zula Nation’ surged into their neighbourhoods and started breaking into houses and cars, and assaulting those walking the streets.
One older man told me of a South African neighbour who climbed over the garden fence and provided an escape route through a broken fence into a park. For most of the men, their anxieties centre on the plight of their families who they had left behind. Many had South African partners and their children stayed behind in the hope that they would be able to ‘pass the Zulu test’, make a cash ‘contribution’ and be left in peace.
One middle aged man who works in the local hospital as a radiographer’s assistant told me that his wife speaks Zulu and his children too. He left them behind last night as the neighbourhood shop was being ransacked and destroyed. In a distressed state he said, ‘I couldn’t take them with me. If we had been caught they would have been treated like foreigners, and who knows what would have happened. This is truly horrible. This would never happen to you people in Nigeria’ he said.
This is certainly an instance of cell phone technology being a life line. I noticed that a pump attendant has run an extension cord around the back of the garage to the place where the Nigerians were huddled, and they are busy recharging their phones.
I ask a small group if they have plans to somehow try and organize to protect one another and their communities, to ensure that they do not become victims. A young man of around thirty takes his time to reply. ‘Can you imagine the reaction of the police, the media and the government if we organised a self defense or community safety organization? We would become the target, not those who are attacking us. The police hate us already, the newspapers call us drug barons and pimps, and who do you think ordinary South Africans are going to believe?’
Everyone was silent. A phone rang. The same young man answered, listened carefully and then said, ‘The Nigerian High Commissioner has told us all to stay calm’.
As I return home I pass another group outside a local church. They have the look of North or East Africans, and I pull up and ask if they are OK. ‘The priest is coming to meet us here’ says one. I ask where they have come from, and they point towards Bez Valley, another working class suburb near by. They are Somali’s and I ask if they have experienced any trouble. No, they say, but rumours are making them afraid. Last night there was gun fire close by, and they know they will be targets if the situation worsens. We look like foreigners says one.
Later in the afternoon I receive more calls from Paul and his Zimbabwean family from inside the church haven in Cleveland. They have had news that a neighbour tried to resist a forced entry, and has been murdered. Stabbed repeatedly and left in the front garden of his house.
At four thirty, I travel with a friend to Malvern to help evacuate a Rwandan family who settled in South Africa after the genocide in that country. Small groups of young men are walking up and down the surrounding streets. Police sirens and shouting can be heard nearby. The family gather up a few belongings and are resettled in a local hotel courtesy of the NGO who employ the mother. We take the children, and the parents follow closely behind in their own car. It’s a solemn drive for the three children and our attempts at humour are politely tolerated.
I have a conversation with another Rwandan and he tells me that some people might think that evacuation is an over reaction, but he says, ‘We have learnt to smell danger of this type. The marauding gangs, the inability of the police to keep control, the under-reporting on the radio, the pent up frustrations, the absence of neighbours ready to help or warn. All of these things we have seen before, and now we can smell them’.
At five thirty I make my way back towards Jeppes Town to collect my son from his friend’s house where he had spent the night. He had heard shooting earlier, and the police sirens and had seen the helicopter circling. They had stayed within the grounds of the closed estate, and played football. On the way home, I fielded dozens of questions from him about what had been happening, and as if on cue he said ‘If you are poor, how can you blame others who are also as poor as you, it doesn’t make sense Dad?’
Later that night, we drove down Jules Street and saw municipal workers starting to clear up the mess left behind from shop burnouts and looting. A row of ten shops was completely destroyed, and small groups of men carrying clubs were still to be seen in full view of the police. We came away from the scene feeling that this was not over. There was more and possibly worse to come.
On the news late last night, the police said they had restored law and order in most parts, and that arrests of suspects had been made, and serious charges would be made against them.
This morning, my Zimbabwean friend called to say that two more people had been killed a short way from the church where he was hiding, and that gunshots and screams had kept everyone awake all night.
The newspapers carry a front page photograph of a man who was set alight by a mob. It reminds me of the Buddhist monks who campaigned against the war in Vietnam. Is this a war?
Meanwhile the politicians and media commentators proffer explanations and condemnations, and it suddenly dawns on me that the only people I have not spoken to or have heard from are the perpetrators. And I wonder, what on earth do they think they are hoping to achieve?
22 May 2008:
Three days later, and it seems everyone is aware of the gravity of the crisis. The President of the country has sanctioned the use of the army though they are not yet deployed to keep the peace.
Two days I ago I went to visit my comrade Paul from Zimbabwe, who had been sleeping in Germiston Town Hall for the past two nights. He is a born organiser and has been serving on the committee that manages the food, sanitation, facilities for children, and security.
He takes me on a tour of the Town Hall, a place we have used in the past for May Day rallies. It’s a little run down but still maintains some of its former glory. Now it is one massive bedroom. More than three thousand people are staying here, and most are very afraid. I speak to many others, and hear very similar stories of extreme bullying, violence, theft, and a sense that they have been abandoned to their fate. My friend has been sleeping on a chair because floor space is limited, and its getting cold. Not everyone has a charity blanket, and there is not enough food to feed all. In the absence of proper communications, rumours ripple like Mexican waves across the multitude that are assembled outside, and generate fear.
One large room has been reserved for women, and many are carrying small children and receiving baby food and nappies. It’s clear that many are in a traumatized state, and barely smile when greeted. One can only shudder when thinking about what they have gone through.
I have a brief conversation with a couple of municipal workers inside the building who are members of my union, and am struck by their sympathy towards the refugees despite the increased workload, and near impossible conditions. The toilets have limited capacity, and the kitchen has never had to be put to use to feed such numbers, but union members are working hard, being decent and helpful. One of the shop stewards tells me ‘Everyone here is so grateful for the little that we can do, but I cant stop feeling ashamed that this is happening in my locality. No one deserves to be treated like this’
Paul collects his few possessions and we leave for home where he will stay for the foreseeable, but not before he says a tearful farewell to his committee members, and is reassured that his relatives and others are in relatively safe hands.
This morning the news reports of attacks on communities seem to be more sporadic, although they do appear to be spreading into other Provinces.
Another demonstration has been called for Saturday, by a conglomeration of left groups and community campaigns. I am hoping that there can be a united response, that is inclusive, and non sectarian. I hope the unions will support it despite difficulties that exist between the left groups and the trade union movement.
There is a great deal of speculation about the ‘troubles’ being started by a ‘third force’, some form of underground organization bent on subverting the peace and creating disharmony. It’s mostly speculative. It is clear however that many of the attacks have been coordinated, and especially at a local level. Similar sized groups have been moving from house to house on assigned streets for example, and of course, chanting and demanding the same things. But there are also attacks that appear more opportunistic, and often following a rally or large gathering.
Much of the commentary and analysis from both left and right seems to me to be very simplistic, as if the analysts are not talking to people on the ground, are not asking questions like for example, why in the gatherings of the xenophobic there are so few women? What does this tell you about the men of this country? Why for example, there has been virtually no action against white people? What does this tell you about what is happening in communities that experience grinding poverty? So many questions. So much to be done.
A lot has been said in the media about the ongoing violent attacks on foreigners, described as ‘Xenophobia.’ However, in accordance with the elitist method of news making, adopted by almost all mainstream media outlets, which puts too much emphasis on ‘expert’ opinion, mainly petty bourgeois analysts and commentators have been invited on major talk shows to analyse the situation and suggest solutions. Of course, their views, while very narrow and shallow, vary vastly.
Some Pan Africanist ‘Azanians’ feel that ‘black consciousnesses’ could be the solution. Blacks are killing each other because of a colonial mentality, the argument goes. Many others have linked the attacks to the country’s socio-economic conditions. Typically, the analysis on the root cause of the country’s scandalous poverty fails to bring in the necessary structural element. Others, including the DA, have blamed it on, amongst others, our immigration policies and failure to ‘protect our borders.’
While all this discussion is going on, we are losing out on a wonderful opportunity to get to the bottom of the issue. Mainly, because, the people at the centre of all the violence, both the foreigners and the ‘xenophobic’ South Africans, are not part of the debate.
And, in true denialist South African style, the government has absolved itself from any responsibility and has vehemently condemned claims that this is as a result of frustration linked to poor service delivery.
Instead, going as far as attributing the chaos to a ‘third force’ and the IFP, they have vowed to bring to book the ‘hooligans’ and the ‘thugs’ that are behind the atrocious attacks. In the midst of this, as part of the ongoing struggle for power between Luthuli House and the Union Buildings, the new populist ANC leadership has contradicted the government and has linked the attacks to government’s ‘failures.’
The politicians, pundits and everyone else has spoken. But, strangely, the people at the centre of the dispute have not. None of the radio or television talk show hosts which have been discussing the matter for more than a week now have bothered getting the opinion of the people at the centre of the dispute. In newspaper columns, the usual columnists have written page long philosophical, sometimes abstract, analysis of the problem.
In Alexander for example, to get to the bottom of the problem, should the media not be attempting to secure the views and opinions of people who attended, or organised the meeting that decided foreigners should be driven out of the impoverished township? And, surely, in all the other areas where the violence has spread, there are ‘ringleaders.’ Should these people not be the ones at the centre of media discussion around the issue? Why are they attacking foreigners? Should we not be striving to hear it directly from the ‘horse’s mouth’? Has anyone in the press even attempted to locate the perpetrators?
Clearly, if we are to resolve many of the widespread socio-economic problems of the ‘new’ South Africa, there must be a departure from the current method of news gathering. For far too long, we have been listening to ‘intellectuals’ and to fat cat turkey necked cabinet ministers, very out of touch with reality, in their chauffer driven vehicles and designer outfits. And, given that many of the problems have remained and even worsened, most of their talk has proved nothing but ‘cheap’ and populist.
Is it not about time we listened to the people at the centre of the news whose desperate pleas to the government, in the last fourteen years, have fallen on deaf ears? Or are we too afraid what they might say may be too ‘politically incorrect’ and ‘counter revolutionary?”
http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/372/48212burn.jpgThe mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding, write Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji looking at the background to the explosion of xenophobia in South Africa. The situation is the culmination of policies that have made the rich richer, and the poor poorer. But "the ruling elite is not South Africa. There are many within South Africa who are in solidarity with those under attack, and are opposed to the conditions that feed xenophobia."
The mythologies we have constructed around us are imploding. There is no point in running away from this. The edifices we have of Truth and Reconciliation, post-apartheid healing, rainbow nations and multi-party post-dictatorship democracies are coming down all around us.
What is more, the edifices are crushing down into a sea of ruin. Kenya, Zimbabwe, Somalia, and now South Africa are burning alongside bigger fires in Darfur and the Congo. And where a fragile peace now reigns in countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone, the poverty is so extreme that unless tackled decisively, the slide back into civil war will continue to loom threateningly in the background.
But South Africa especially represents a collective tragedy because, and perhaps naively, it has represented our collective hope for Africa. This land where, as of today, at least 42 Africans from other countries have been killed and thousands are fleeing, businesses destroyed and homes burnt, where the army is being deployed in the poor townships just like the days of apartheid, this is the land that produced Steve Biko, Chris Hani, Ruth First and others.
This is the land that produced a militant and revolutionary Mandela, a Mandela so sure of the righteousness of his struggle that at his treason trial, he described the ideal of a South Africa where “all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities”, and as one that he was prepared to die for. That was in 1964. In 1990, when he was released from prison, and with apartheid broken, the promise of his struggle became a possibility. And the new South Africa became our collective hope. We clung to that hope all the more because in the same year as South Africa held its first democratic election – 1994 - was also the year in which we witnessed the genocidal slaughter of nearly a million people in the space of a few months in Rwanda. Hope and tragedy – these are elements that hover concurrently in our collective consciousness across the continent. In the rest of Africa, we have lived with those contending emotions, but somehow South Africans believed themselves immune.
But history is not without irony for in that same statement that he submitted at the beginning of his prison trial, Mandela said:
“The whites enjoy what may well be the highest standard of living in the world, whilst Africans live in poverty and misery. Forty per cent of the Africans live in hopelessly overcrowded and, in some cases, drought-stricken Reserves, where soil erosion and the overworking of the soil makes it impossible for them to live properly off the land.
"Thirty per cent," he continued, "are laborers, labor tenants, and squatters on white farms and work and live under conditions similar to those of the serfs of the Middle Ages. The other 30 per cent live in towns where they have developed economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards. Yet most Africans, even in this group, are impoverished by low incomes and high cost of living.”
That was the Mandela of 1964, but he might as well have been speaking about the South Africa he helped create. For the Mandela of the 1990’s was followed by Mbeki who answered the challenge of this vast economic and social inequality by throwing at it the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy followed by the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) plan. These social and economic policies have enriched a minority, and impoverished the many. The poor have remained poor, but part of the class that Mandela in 1964 identified as developing “economic and social habits which bring them closer in many respects to white standards” have been the only ones who benefited, and grown rich, from BEE.
That the ANC struggle would not have succeeded without sacrifices from fellow Africans is well known. As is the fact that the South African economy from the days of apartheid has been kept afloat by migrant labor. So how did we reach this point where xenophobia has turned violent? As in any situation – keep an eye on who benefits.
A government with policies that reward the haves - those who during apartheid already had something - and punishes those who had nothing to start with, has a good reason to find xenophobia useful. What racism did for apartheid, xenophobia serves for the new ruling class – its unjust policies, its failures, its betrayal of poor South Africans, are all blamed on the amakwekwere.
What should we expect? We now know that the even in exile, some ANC members were more equal than others. The elite of the ANC today was the elite in exile. Blind to the poor of Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique or Angola when in exile, how can we expect them to see them today from the high offices of government? And if blind to the cries and struggles of poor South Africans, surely the poor immigrant is invisible.
The Mbeki government has for the short term deployed the army to assist the police. The government will do what all other governments do – criminalize: it will criminalize the youth in the slums in the same way that the Kenyan, Zimbabwean and Nigerian governments have, in the same way the American government has criminalized African American youth in the ghettoes. The structural inequalities will remain, individual youths will be thrown in jail as criminals.
But let us remember this: the ruling elite is not South Africa. There are many within South Africa who are in solidarity with those under attack, and are opposed to the conditions that feed xenophobia, opposed to the policies that attack the poor and reward the rich. There are many who understand, as did Steve Biko, that because of the vicious inequalities in South Africa, justice cannot come without redistribution of land and wealth.
Anticipating the violence,, PASSOP (People Against Suffering Suppression Oppression and Poverty) together with COSATU and other organizations marched against xenophobia on the 17th of May. Announcing the , PASSOP said that it is “appalled by the reports of recent xenophobic attacks in Alexandria and Diepsloot. We are appealing to all political parties and social movements within South Africa to address and clarify their stances towards the important issue of xenophobia. Foreigners in townships across South Africa live in fear, much like the Jews during the Nazi Regime. Their homes are vandalized, their stores looted and even their lives are taken. This inhumanity cannot be allowed to continue.”
The Social Movements Indaba (SMI) – “a coordinating national body of social movements, civil society and activist organizations – is organizing with its affiliated organizations and immigrant communities to roll back the groundswell of xenophobia” on 24th May. Recognizing the “origins lie within the conditions of poverty in which the majority of south Africans live” and that the struggle is “for a change to the neo-liberal capitalist system that has created this reality” SMI maintains that a “rearguard struggles for safety and security of immigrants in the country must continue.”
Abahlali baseMjondolo, (Shack Dwellers) Movement says it is time for us to ask seriously the question “why it is that money and rich people can move freely around the world while everywhere the poor must confront razor wire, corrupt and violent police, queues and relocation or deportation.” Abahlali baseMjondolo which began in Durban, South Africa is the largest organisation of the militant poor in post-apartheid South Africa that includes tens of thousands of people from more than 30 settlements. It is this organization that says “A human being cannot be illegal!”
In this issue of Pambazuka News, we carry some of the courageous reports that have arisen for those who ally themselves with the oppressed. Below is a partial list of articles on xenophobia carried Pambazuka News in the recent past. They illustrate that xenophobia is not new to South Africa. But it had to blow eventually.
* Further articles on racism and xenophobia
*Mukoma Wa Ngugi and Firoze Manji are co-editors of Pambazuka News.
*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
Onyekachi Wambu looks at post-liberation South Africa and the contradictions of promise and reality and duly warns that the ANC government might very well be condemning South Africa to repeat Zimbabwe's mistakes.
This story has been brewing since the mid-1990s, and, as usual, we have ignored it our peril.
Despite all the 'Rainbow' dreams, everytime I have visited SA since 1992 I have been more & more worried about the real fundamentals - a very poor, and increasingly angry people, amidst great wealth which is not distributed equitably. African people are very patient but it usually takes about 10 -15 years after independence (see Zimbabwe) for people to realise that they can't eat 'freedom', and for real politics to kick in.
The economic facts in SA are this - the deal that buried apartheid in 1994, contained no redistribution of economic power. Black empowerment would only come if the economy expanded and through some mild forms of positive discrimination (BEE). Affirmative action (see what it has done for white women in the US) only really benefits a small minority of middleclass, educated, or (politically) connected Africans, just as it has done in SA. So it meant, that for the vast majority to benefit - the economy needed to expand more than 5%. At 5% it would just about absorb those coming onto the job market, not soaking up the historic apartheid unemployed.
Now watch what happened in the real world. Between 1994 - 2004 growth averaged around 3%. In 2004 it reached 4%. By 2005 (eleven years after apartheid ended) it finally reached 5% and only went beyond that in 2006 and 2007. Even then the last 3 year growth has not been pro-poor growth, but has benefited the already rich, selling commodities, etc.
Nevertheless the SA government by 2005, alongside its enormous house building, water and electrification programmes, was finally in a postition to deal with its historic unemployed and those coming onto the job market
Only it wasn't. Because at the same time over the last 13 years, 5 million new migrants had come into the country (3 million from Zimbabwe alone), many of them better educated and working for less money than native South Africans. So even the growth of the last 3 years has not really made an impact on those native unemployement figures and the anger has continued simmering.
This anger has been expressed all along since 1994 as a crime problem - I always feared what would happen eventually when a 'demagogue' would exploit it and make it 'political'. I thought when this happened, the emergent 'political' campaign to gain traction would target the whites -as in Zimbabwe. But I guess SA is different. People there can see the economic disaster in Zim, when international capital and white expertise fled, and do not want a repetition (although for how long?).
Most voters are still reluctant to punish the ANC government (which has given many a pension, houses, water, electricity) for this state of affairs. This reluctance is reinforced by the fact that there is not a viable opposition (the main ones being all nationalist/ethinic minority parties DA,Inkatha, PAC, etc).
So the mob scape-goat and attack foreigners.
Perhaps as William Gumede suggests elsewhere, it might be time for the ANC to break up and for a wing of it to become a workers party -championing the poor and another wing to represent the interests of the middle-class. Politics would then be about finding a balance that satisfies all and could then be done peacfully through votes and street protests, not through violence and killing, as in so much of Africa.
This might even be the best option, given the reluctance of Southern African liberation movements to concede legitimacy to other forces that did not 'win' the liberation war and establish the new post liberation state. Different traditions within the ANC would thus represent the different emerging interests following the national liberation phase.
The ANC need only to look over the horizon to Zimbabwe, to see a liberation party that still seeks to manage within itself, the tensions and contradictions within the nation. Having failed to do this and people went elsewhere to establish another possibility, ZANU-PF, wanting to continue monopolising power, decided not to recognise that alternative, deepening the original crisis even further.
Presideent Mbeki, having failed to heed the real meaning of the Zimbabwe crisis (how to transit from liberation to ordinary politics), might be doomed to repeat Zimbabwe. And the catalyst for the unravelling crisis in SA might be those self same Zimbabwe migrants who have fled because they cannot find a space to engage in peaceful politics back home.
*Onyekachi Wambu's lastest publication is 'Under the tree of talking - leadership for change in Africa' (2007, British Council). This article first appeared in the Africa Without Borders Forum.
*Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
A heavily pregnant woman who was three months away from giving birth was bludgeoned to death in a ‘horrific, brutal and frenzied attack’ that left her almost unrecognisable. Rosemary Maramba’s body was found in Nhakiwa village in Mutawatawa in Mashonaland central. Maramba is one of three people linked to the MDC, who were murdered in the area over the weekend.
State agents in Murehwa town abducted the MDC candidate for ward 6 on Thursday morning, as they continued to terrorise Murehwa district. A party supporter who was with him said Shepherd Jani was beaten severely by 4 men as they dragged him into a blue twin cab, registration number AAA 9248. Our contact said the vehicle was familiar and he believes it is the same car that was used in the abduction of Langton Mafuse, the MDC candidate for ward 10 Murehwa North, who was taken from his home last week and has still not been located.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) has noted with concern the rising tide of violence leading to loss of human life, destruction of property and livelihoods, against foreign nationals in the Republic of South Africa.
War on Want, a dynamic organisation working in solidarity and partnership with people across the developing world while undertaking cutting edge anti-poverty campaigns in the UK and beyond, is recruiting for the position of International Programmes Director. Responsible to the Executive Director, the appointee will lead in the planning, implementing and monitoring of War on Want’s international programmes work, as well as contributing to the overall management of the organisation as a member of the senior management team.
Northern Uganda leaders returned empty handed last week from South Sudan after waiting in vain for days to meet Joseph Kony, right, the elusive commander of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA. Kony’s no-show was the second time in two months that he has snubbed peace negotiators and appears to have killed what hope remained that a peace deal, 22 months in the making, will be signed.
Africa’s growth rate could be derailed by the current global rise in food prices, the African Development Bank (AfDB) chairperson, Donald Kaberuka has warned. Africa’s overall growth in 2007 was 5.7 percent, almost double the rate in 2000. It is however, hoped that growth for 2008 will rise to 5.9 percent, remaining steady throughout 2009.
In 2006, the United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution 61/149, decided to convene in 2009 a review conference on the implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action. To this end, it requested the Human Rights Council to prepare this event, making use of the three existing and ongoing follow-up mechanisms, to formulate a concrete plan and to provide yearly updates and reports on this issue starting in 2007.
The UN refugee agency on Wednesday provided 2,000 blankets and 2,000 mats to victims of a wave of xenophobia in South Africa's Gauteng province. The distribution, aimed at meeting immediate humanitarian needs, was conducted in several police stations in the province in north-east South Africa. Attacks on foreigners since last weekend have left dozens dead and caused an estimated 13,000 people to flee their homes. Most are migrants from other nearby African countries, but there are also refugees and asylum seekers among the displaced.
A regional conference on refugee protection and migration in the Gulf of Aden wrapped up in the Yemen capital on Tuesday with delegates stressing the need for more assistance to support refugees in host countries."For 16 years, I feel that the world forgot about us, so I appeal to all of you – and especially to our Arab brothers – to help us, support us and visit us in Yemen," said an emotional Somali refugee woman, who has been living in Yemen for the past decade. "Yemen, a poor country, has borne the main burden of hosting us, so please help us."
Egypt has appointed its first female official to certify marriages and divorces. The move has been met by public debate and opposition from some Muslim clerics who say women shouldn't serve in the role. Seventh in a series on women and Islam.
Poverty and tradition help fuel a potent business in human trafficking in East Africa, where a girl can sell for $20. Most kidnapped children are not as lucky as Saffi, who returned after her mother bought TV ads. Many disappear without much notice.
Although progress has been made on Debt since the issue was pushed to the top of the G8 agenda in 1998 ($88bn of debt has been cancelled) this paper from the Jubilee Campaign asserts that far more needs to be done in order to effectively tackle global poverty.
How committed are world’s richest countries to the development of Africa, the world’s poorest continent? While rich countries are most often compared on the basis of foreign aid as a percentage of their GDP, finding the real answer involves so much more. Using the same methods as in the global Commitment to Development Index (CDI), this paper ranks the world’s 21 richest countries in a new CDI for Africa based not only on their foreign aid, but on their trade, investment, and migration policies as well as their commitments to the environment, to security, and to technology.
While Africa still lags behind other continents in telecommunications, the growth in recent years in mobile phones and internet connectivity has been extraordinary. Six countries - South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, and Kenya - have more than 10 million mobile phones each, with South Africa and Nigeria each topping 40 million mobile phones. Seven countries -- Seychelles, Gabon, South Africa, Tunisia, Botswana, Mauritius, and Libya, have more than 70 mobile phones for each 100 persons, ranging from 89 percent in the Seychelles to 73 percent in Libya.
As homophobic hate crimes escalate in the country, the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) community is concerned about certain information purported in relation to the gay community. It is the government’s responsibility to ensure that information disseminated is balanced so that people understand its stance.
The community of Motala Heights, set on the edge of Pinetown between the factories and the hill that runs up to Kloof, dates back to the early years of the last century and has a rich history. For the last three years it has been under sustained and violent attack from a local gangster businessman who seems to be able to direct the local state, including the police and the Municipality's Housing Department, at will.
Reporters Without Borders and its partner organisation in Democratic Republic of Congo, Journalist in Danger (JED), are relieved to learn that the two friends of journalist Serge Maheshe who were with him when he was murdered last year in Bukavu, in the eastern province Sud-Kivu, have been acquitted on appeal of instigating his murder.
Reporters Without Borders is concerned about the detention of freelance journalist Al-Ghali Yahya Shegifat, who has been held incommunicado in an unknown location since 14 May. Neither his family nor his lawyer have been able to contact him and it is not known what he is charged with.
There are close to 3.5 billion mobile phones in circulation around the world. In many countries, especially in the developing world, mobile phones are the easiest and least expensive medium to communicate, and are far more pervasive than the Internet. Mobile phones are also bridging the digital divide in developing countries at a rate much faster than most other technologies to date.
The 8th CIVICUS World Assembly will be held in Glasgow, Scotland, from 18th to 21st June 2008. The theme for the World Assembly is ‘Acting Together for a Just World: People, Participation and Power’. This focus is in response to the need to look at civil society's capacity to act in concert to realise shared goals while recognising there are allies in government, business, media and donor bodies who are working towards the same end and from whom strength can be drawn.
In the same week that the Johannesburg High Court declared prepaid water meters to be "unconstitutional and unlawful", the City of Cape Town indicated it intends to roll out more than 20 000 water meters within the next year. Previously, Judge Moroa Tsoka found the City of Johannesburg's imposition of meters that cut off residents' water supplies once they reach the free basic monthly limit to be "unlawful and unreasonable".
The new African Union (AU) commissioner for science and technology has put education firmly at the top of his agenda. Jean-Pierre Onvéhoun Ezin, a mathematics researcher at Benin's National University, took office last month (29 April).
The wireless school connectivity project is an initiative that has connected a secondary school in a poor township of Harare to the internet, using wireless technologies. The genesis of this project was a result of the wireless skills training workshop, which took place in Pretoria, South Africa in 2005 and was facilitated by APC. Muroro Dziruni of Connect Africa in Zimbabwe tells the story of how wireless technology can work in Africa, when everyone joins in and cooperates.
In a move which could potentially plunge Guinea into political and social turmoil, President Lansana Conté sacked his internationally-backed prime minister Lansana Kouyaté on 20 May, replacing him with long-time ally Ahmed Tidjane Souaré. The change over was ordered by presidential decree and announced on the state-run television’s evening news.
ganda's remote northeastern Karamoja region is facing a humanitarian emergency due to widespread food shortages, with some local people already starving, senior officials said. "We witnessed people starving," Aston Kajara, the government minister in charge of Karamoja development, told reporters in Kampala after visiting the region last week. "People are eating rats, others are eating leaves."
Two soldiers were killed and two others injured on 20 May when their army patrol in the Casamance region was attacked by armed men allegedly from the rebel Mouvement des Forces Démocratiques De Casamance (MFDC), an spokesman for the army told IRIN.
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has called for a moratorium on the expansion of large mechanised farms in Sudan's central semi-arid regions, sounding a warning that it was a "future flashpoint" for conflict between the farmers and pastoralists. Northern Sudan's huge commercial farms have been blamed for fuelling conflict, driving small-scale farmers off the land and into menial jobs, environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
With governance in limbo and post-election violence spreading beyond control in Zimbabwe, rights groups and think-tanks have warned of a military coup, martial law or even civil war. Hope that a run-off after disputed presidential elections will bring reconciliation is fading, and calls for urgent pan-African intervention are increasing.
Muslim leaders in Kenya's North Eastern Province have resolved to campaign against the promotion of condoms as a means of preventing HIV. The decision was made after a recent meeting on the theme of "Islam and Health", attended by more than 60 Muslim scholars and teachers in the provincial capital of Garissa.
Why are condoms so unpopular? This question has baffled and discouraged health experts for a decade, but in Swaziland the mystery of why men and women refuse to use condoms is slowly being unravelled by a project that is getting Swazi men to open up about their condom use, or lack thereof.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has begun the voluntary repatriation of Ugandan refugees in Zambia, some of whom have lived in the southern African country for over two decades. The first group of 39 Ugandans, out of a total of 200 settled in the country, were repatriated by commercial flight on 21 May under the terms of a tripartite agreement between the governments of Zambia, Uganda and UNHCR. The programme is expected to run until the end of the year and cost US$210,000.
Tuareg rebels attacked an army camp in north-eastern Mali where 17 rebels and 15 soldiers were killed in one of the bloodiest clashes to date in a revolt by the desert insurgents, the government said on Thursday. A Defence Ministry statement said an "armed band" assaulted the camp at Abebara, 150km from Kidal during the night of Tuesday to Wednesday in Mali's remote north-east, where Tuareg fighters have carried out a series of raids and ambushes.
Pambazuka News 371: Challenges of democratic transitions in Africa
Pambazuka News 371: Challenges of democratic transitions in Africa
TransAfrica Forum calls on the Government of Zimbabwe to immediately release jailed leaders of the Zimbabwe Coalition of Trade Unions, Lovemore Matombo and Secretary General Wellington Chibebe. The two were arrested on May 8 and charged with allegations of "inciting people to rise against the government," following speeches made during a May Day rally.
The National Internally Displaced Persons Network of Kenya is deeply concerned with recent moves by the Government of Kenya to forcibly close IDP camps across the country in violation of the international Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and basic human decency. Operation "Rudi Nyumbani" seems to be based on no policy or legal framework but instead uses the force of the provincial administration to prematurely close the IDP camps.
A major new partnership has been launched to provide smallholder farmers and small agricultural enterprises with the financing they need to break out of poverty and build viable businesses. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), in partnership with Equity Bank Limited, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) and the Kenya Ministry of Agriculture signed an agreement for a loan facility of US$50 million (3 billion Kenyan shillings) to accelerate access to affordable financing for 2.5 million farmers and 15,000 agricultural value chain members such as rural input shops, fertilizers and seed wholesalers and importers, grain traders and food processors.
An African leader has dismissed the UN's food agency as a "waste of money" and called for it to be scrapped. President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal spoke out days after the UN announced an emergency plan to bring soaring world food prices under control.
Differential impact on men and women: The Gender and Climate Change website states: "Climate change is not a neutral process; first of all, women are in general more vulnerable to the effects of climate change, not least because they represent the majority of the world's poor and because they are more than proportionally dependent on natural resources that are threatened. The technological change and instruments that are being proposed to mitigate carbon emissions, which are implicity presented as gender-neutral, are in fact quite gender based and may negatively affect women or bypass them.
The David Astor Journalism Awards Trust (DAJAT) is inviting nominations for its second round of professional development awards. The deadline is 30th May 2008. DAJAT searches for exceptionally promising and talented early-career East African print journalists working in English who have great potential and determination to excel in the profession, invests in their long-term career development, and aims to build an enduring peer-support network to promote strong independent journalism in the region.
The Women PeaceMakers Program is an annual selective program that allows four women on the frontlines of efforts to end violence and secure human rights to have their stories documented. Deadline for 2008 Women PeaceMakers' Application is May 23,2008
Offered by the Center for Women's Studies in Education of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, from May 30, 2008 to July 8, 2008, this five-week human rights institute brings feminist perspectives and an activist orientation to the issues of peace, human rights and development.
Aimed at building leadership, advocacy and technical expertise of women - particularly HIV positive women - who are working on the frontlines in the fight against AIDS throughout Nigeria, this intensive, three-week workshop represents a collaboration between the Centre for Development and Population Activities (CEDPA) Washington D.C., and Africa regional master trainers who have graduated from CEDPA's past training programs.
The theme of the conference is The Nigerian Trade Union Movement: Retrospect and Prospects. The keynote speaker isDr. Festus Iyayi, Department of Business Administration, University of Benin, Benin City, Nigeria. Date: 30-31 May 2008.
The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a joint programme of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), requests your urgent intervention regarding the following situation in Egypt.
On 6 May 2008, about a dozen armed, plain-clothed policemen from the Niger State Command (in north-central Nigeria) raided the head office of "Leadership" newspaper in Abuja, Nigeria's Federal Capital, and arrested the newspaper's deputy editor, Danladi Ndayebo, over a feature article published by the paper.
There is a country in Africa which, in a few years, has achieved more peace than most formerly war-ravaged countries around the world - much more than Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, or Afghanistan. There was a comprehensive ceasefire and a power-sharing among former fighters, tens of thousands of whom have been disarmed and re-socialized. Thanks to peaceful, free and fair elections and a new constitution, it has a democratic government for the first time in its history, and it has leadership and one with many women. Its human rights record has improved markedly.
The struggle which culminated in the murder of Deyda Hydara, an ardent critic of the regime of President Yahya Jammeh, three years ago, has been given meaning with the launch of his biography in The Gambia. The book entitled: “A Living Mirror: The Life of Deyda Hydara” focuses more on the life of the journalist, rather than his death. It was jointly published by Demba Ali Jawo, former Gambia Press Union (GPU) president and Aloa Ahmed Alota, a Nigerian journalist based in The Gambia and Editor at The Point Newspaper.
Since the last report on the 25th of April, our members have reported a dramatic escalation in incidents of organised violence and torture with the number of victims documented in the post election period now standing at over 900. This figure grossly underestimates the number of victims presenting countrywide as the violence is now on such a scale that it is impossible to properly document all cases. There have been 22 confirmed deaths but at least double that number have been reported but are yet to be confirmed. It is alleged that some of those killed have been buried on the orders of state agents before documentation can take place.
This landmark book encompasses a comprehensive quantitative analysis and assessment of the extent of potential economic impacts of future climate change, and value of adaptation measures in Africa for different zones, regions, countries and farm types.
‘Why write a book about Somaliland, a lightly populated region on the edge of Africa which, if the international community had its wish, would be reincorporated into a federal Somali state?’ The author, Mark Bradbury, answers his own question by filling an important gap in the literature on Somali studies. The book, written by someone who has been deeply engaged with the region for many years, provides a comprehensive and inspiring account of how people in Somaliland and its diaspora ‘debated, defined and created a new polity’ in the aftermath of war, and in so doing challenged normative assumptions about what states look like and how they are built.
The book tells the story of the process of state-building in Somaliland from the start of European colonisation in the early 19th century to the holding of multi-party elections in September 2005. Two notable characteristics of the political system that has taken shape in Somaliland since it declared its independence from Somalia on 18 May 1991 are its fusion of modern and traditional forms of political organisation and its strong roots in society.
The Somali National Movement (SNM), which fought against Siad Barre’s regime in the north-west during the 1980s, published its political manifesto in 1981. It proposed ‘a new political system built upon Somali cultural values of cooperation rather than coercion’. This challenged the political orthodoxy of the time, as the author explains, because the clan was then regarded as incompatible with a unified, modern state. From 1988 a council of clan elders, or guurti, acted as an advisory body to the SNM’s central committee. After the war this evolved into the upper house of a bicameral parliament thus, uniquely in Africa, incorporating a traditional institution within the formal structure of the state.
Somaliland’s lack of international recognition, and the west’s preoccupation with events in the south of Somalia after the fall of Siad Barre, forced Somalilanders back on their own resources. The succession of clan conferences in the first half of the 1990s which cemented the peace and fashioned the new state were led by elders and financed from domestic or diaspora sources. This strengthened their legitimacy, as did the use of customary processes of dialogue and consensus-building and the highly visible nature of the discussions. With the country’s limited access to external aid and finance, funds from the diaspora have been essential to the survival of many families. They have also underpinned the rebuilding of public institutions, from universities to hospitals, and the regeneration of key sectors such as telecommunications and housing.
Support for the path Somaliland has taken is by no means universal, even within Somaliland. Despite his evident respect for what has been achieved, the author also makes an honest assessment of the shortcomings and challenges. The government’s detention of its critics, restrictions on the media, and use of emergency laws to prohibit public debate on sensitive issues (such as the prospects of reunification with Somalia) have been widely criticised both within and outside the country. Its writ barely extends over the eastern regions of Sool and Sanaag. Its finances remain highly dependent on tariffs on a single export (livestock). Neither the clan-based system of political representation nor the multi-party system which replaced it has so far shown much concern for the rights of women and minority groups. And what were once some of the system’s strengths are now showing signs of weakness: the moral authority of the guurti, for example, has been undermined by being institutionalised within government, leaving elders vulnerable to accusations of having a vested interest in the regime’s survival.
Nevertheless, throughout the 17 years since Somaliland revoked the 1960 Act of Union, its people have shown a remarkable level of political maturity. Three elections have been held since 2002: district, presidential and parliamentary. All were found by external observers to be reasonably free and fair, while power passed peacefully on the death of one president to another, even of a different clan. The ruling party won the presidential elections in April 2003 by a whisker – just 80 votes – and yet the party which was narrowly beaten into second place chose to contest the results (and eventually accept them) using constitutional means. The multi-party parliamentary elections in 2005 created a situation in which – uniquely in Africa, according to the author – the ruling party does not control the legislature. Although Somaliland slipped back into civil war between 1994 and 1996, on the whole the preference has been to resolve problems through dialogue rather than violence. Time and time again, religious leaders, civil society activists, elders, poets and businessmen have joined together to mediate between conflicting parties when the political system has reached an impasse. These achievements are rightly given their due recognition in this book.
The literature on the state often draws a distinction between juridical and empirical statehood. In the case of Somalia, it is the Transitional Federal Government in Mogadishu – the product of an externally driven process of negotiation, and now surviving only with the military support of Ethiopia and the West – that enjoys juridical statehood in the eyes of the international community. But it is Somaliland, unrecognised under international law, which has achieved the greater degree of empirical statehood, and it has done it with only a fraction of the resources that have been directed in search of peace and stability in the south. The comparison may not be entirely fair, given the differences in context, but as Mark Bradbury points out, the West’s line on Somalia – that the solution to its problems must lie with Somalis themselves (including the resolution of Somaliland’s current ‘diplomatic limbo’) – is rather undermined by its heavy-handed intervention against the Union of Islamic Courts. Bradbury does not use the word, but a fair degree of humbug has for a long time characterised the West’s dealings with Somalia/Somaliland.
In a recent article in the International Herald Tribune, two staff from the International Crisis Group commented on the distorted priorities of those crafting resolutions at the UN, seemingly more concerned with piracy off the Somali coast than with the suffering taking place on land. ‘Strange how an African country can be moving from prolonged chaos to violent collapse and no one in the world notices until a couple of European boats get seized by armed gunmen,’ they wrote. All too often the good news out of Africa receives similarly short shrift. The world is starting to wake up to what has been happening in Somaliland and to what its people have achieved on their own terms. This book will make a major contribution to that process of enlightenment.
Bradbury, M. (2008) 'Becoming Somaliland'. Progressio, in association with James Currey, Indiana University Press, Jacana Media, Fountain Publishers and East African Educational Publishers. Softback, 271 pages.
*Izzy Birch works for Fahamu
* Please send comments to or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/
In response to the recent extract from William Gumede's book "Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC" published by Zed Books (http://zedbooks.co.uk), Patrick Bond suggests that there is a need to go beyond the individual reasons and look at the structural forces that have informed Mbeki's AIDS policy such as international and domestic financial markets, pharmaceutical manufacturers and a large reserve army of labour.
With millions of South Africans dying early because of AIDS, the battle against the disease would become one of the most crucial tests of the post-apartheid government. Its systematic failure to address AIDS, and especially its ongoing sabotage of medicinal treatment for HIV+ patients, led to periodic charges of ‘genocide’ by authoritative figures such as the heads of the Medical Research Council (Malegapuru William Makgoba), SA Medical Association (Kgosi Letlape), and Pan Africanist Congress health desk (Costa Gazi), as well as leading public intellectual Sipho Seepe.
Aside from Mbeki, Pretoria’s main saboteurs were health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang and trade minister Erwin; the latter two were accused by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) of culpable homicide during a March 2003 civil disobedience campaign. Even in the weeks before the 2004 election, Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang continued to practice denialism, obfuscation, delays, bureaucratic manoeuvres, and withdrawal of resources for treatment. Educational campaigns like LoveLife’s were based upon fatuous marketing to hip-hop youth, and there was virtually nothing done to combat domestic violence, rape, multiple partners and patriarchy. Across Africa more generally, the ‘ABCs’ of abstinence, being loyal and condoms were particularly ineffectual within the confines of male-dominated marriage, leading to the tragedy that young women’s infection rate was twice as high as that of men.[1]
A great deal has been written about Pretoria’s malfeasance.[2] The point of revisiting it here while documenting South Africa’s elite transition is to provide a structural explanation for the crisis. Beyond the oft-cited peculiarities of the president himself, there are three deeper reasons why local and global power relationships mean that the battle against AIDS has to date mainly been lost.[3]
One reason is the pressure exerted by international and domestic financial markets to keep Pretoria’s state budget deficit to three per cent of GDP. Recall the telling remark of the late Parks Mankahlana, Mbeki’s main spokesperson, who in March 2000 justified to Science magazine why the government refused to provide relatively inexpensive antiretrovirals (ARVs) like Nevirapine to pregnant, HIV-positive women: ‘That mother is going to die and that HIV-negative child will be an orphan. That child must be brought up. Who is going to bring the child up? It’s the state, the state. That’s resources, you see.’[4] Instead of saving lives, Mbeki’s finance ministry adopted higher priorities: slashing corporate taxes, redeploying state resources to purchase high-tech arms, and repaying roughly $25 billion of apartheid-era foreign debt and a bit more in apartheid domestic debt, which could have been declared ‘odious’ in legal terms. Local and international bankers generally approved such examples of fiscal laxity, in contrast to expanding state health spending and other social budgets, which they have explicitly not supported.
The second structural reason is the residual power of pharmaceutical manufacturers to defend their rights to ‘intellectual property’, i.e. monopoly patents on life-saving medicines. This pressure did not end in April 2001 when the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association withdrew their notorious lawsuit against the South African Medicines Act of 1997. That Act allows for parallel import or local production, via ‘compulsory licences’, of generic substitutes for brand-name antiretroviral medicines. Big Pharma’s power was felt in the debate over essential drugs for public health emergencies at the November 2001 Doha World Trade Organisation summit, and ever since.
The third structural reason for the ongoing HIV/AIDS holocaust in South Africa is the vast size of the reserve army of labour, for this feature of capitalism allows companies to replace sick workers with desperate, unemployed people instead of providing them with treatment. The latter point deserves elaboration, simply because so many lives are at immediate risk, and so much evidence has mounted that corporate South Africa’s preferred approach has been, in essence, mass murder by denial of medical benefits.
This was the initial conclusion reached after a year of study at Africa’s largest company, Anglo American Corporation. Anglo has 160,000 employees, of whom 21 per cent are estimated to be HIV-positive. Once Big Pharma appeared to retreat from its lawsuit, the company announced that it would provide antiretroviral medicines to its workforce, which meant literally tens of thousands of lives might be saved in the short term. But in June 2001, the Financial Times reported on Anglo’s ‘plans to make special payments to miners suffering from HIV/AIDS, on condition they take voluntary retirement.’ However, in addition to bribing workers to go home and die, Anglo told the Financial Times, ‘treatment of employees with antiretrovirals can be cheaper than the costs incurred by leaving them untreated.’ In August, Anglo’s vice president for medicine, Brian Brink, bragged in Business Day about a ‘strategy [which] involved offering wellness programmes, including access to antiretroviral treatment.’ According to that report, ‘The company believed that the cost of its programmes would eventually be outweighed by the benefits its received in gradual gains in productivity, [Brink] concluded. Although it was indeed a risky strategy, it was the only one Anglo could pursue in the face of such human suffering.’
Then in October 2001, Anglo simply retracted its promise, once cost-benefit analysis showed that 146,000 workers just weren’t worth saving. According to the Financial Times, Brink ‘said the company’s 14,000 senior staff would receive antiretroviral treatment as part of their medical insurance, but that the provision of drug treatment for lower income employees was too expensive.’ Brink explained the criteria for the fatal analysis: ‘[Antiretrovirals] could save on absenteeism and improved productivity. The saving you achieve can be substantial, but we really don’t know how it will stack up. We feel that the cost will be greater than the saving.’ As the Wall Street Journal recorded:
‘In a controversial move that could have wide ramifications for how companies in poor countries handle AIDS, mining giant Anglo American PLC has put on hold a feasibility study to provide AIDS drugs to its African work force, according to people familiar with the situation. When it disclosed its plans for the study a year ago, Anglo garnered wide praise because it was one of the first major corporations to reveal measures aimed at treating AIDS cases among its rank and file African employees.’[5]
A few months later Anglo changed its mind once again, as AIDS ravaged the middle layer of the workforce, and the multi-class TAC raised consciousness sufficiently high as to get trades union support for members’ treatment. Indeed, in the cases of both Anglo and Coca Cola, the other factor that appeared in 2002 was the spectre of consumer protest over the firms’ refusal to treat employees. I was reliably informed by insiders that for Anglo, the prospect of demonstrators at the August 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development dragging up many other bits of dirty laundry intimidated the company’s executives into taking pre-emptive action on the AIDS front. Coke’s main bottler in South Africa had also failed to insure two-thirds of its 4,000-strong workforce at a sufficient level to allow the HIV-positive workers access to ARVs, and was subject to international protest over African AIDS policies.
However, even though the costs of HIV/AIDS - absenteeism, declining productivity, payouts for early death - soared to as high as 25 per cent of payroll by 2003, according to the Financial Times, most employers are still hesitant to provide ARVs:
‘Untreated, HIV typically takes four to five years to manifest itself as full-blown AIDS, and companies are reluctant to pay for a risk that they cannot see… Persuading managers to part with fees [AIDS treatment programmes] today for costs that will hit company earnings years down the line has been a hard sell.’[6]
In sum, no matter the effectiveness of activism against government, Big Pharma and the corporate employers, all three structural factors are still deterrents to the provision of treatment. By late 2003, each was slightly mitigated, however, and that led to an ostensible change of policy by Pretoria. The budget deficit was projected to climb from just over one per cent of GDP during the early 2000s to nearly three per cent in 2004-05, allowing extra leeway for AIDS spending. Pharmacorps were cooperating more closely with the World Health Organisation, the Global Fund, the Clinton Foundation and governments to lower prices for Africa. Canada’s former prime minister Jean Chretien - spurred by the dynamic, outspoken UN advisor Stephen Lewis - even introduced path-breaking legislation to promote generics (although a sabotage clause was later included in the draft law to support patent rights, in turn attracting a new round of solidarity protests). And employers began waking up, in part because of the dramatic rise of AIDS-related disability claims as a percentage of all disability claims, from 18 per cent in 2001 to 31 per cent in 2002.
These factors converged in a November 2003 cabinet statement, finally endorsing a roll-out of antiretrovirals. Pretoria cited factors which included:
‘a fall in the prices of drugs over the past two years…new medicines and international and local experience in managing the utilisation of ARVs… [sufficient] health workers and scientists with skills and understanding… and the availability of fiscal resources to expand social expenditure in general, as a consequence of the prudent macro economic policies pursued by government.’
However, these factors were minor compared to intensive activist pressure, which Pretoria did not dare mention lest it encourage further protests. TAC’s victory statement was explicit: ‘The combination of the Constitutional Court decision on mother to child transmission prevention, the Stand Up for Our Lives march [of 15,000 people on parliament] in February, the civil disobedience campaign and the international protests around the world have convinced Cabinet to develop and implement an ARV roll-out plan.’
Another factor, of course, was the 2004 presidential election, which Mbeki would win easily but which would be characterised by high levels of apathy and no-vote campaigning by the Landless Peoples Movement. An AC Nielsen survey in November 2003 confirmed that Mbeki’s AIDS policy was hurting the chances of the ruling African National Congress of turning out the vote. The cabinet statement promised that ‘within a year, there will be at least one service point in every health district across the country and, within five years, one service point in every local municipality.’ In addition to medicines, the state would provide an education and community mobilisation programme, promotion of good nutrition and traditional health treatments such as herbal remedies, support for families affected by HIV and AIDS, and funds for upgrading health infrastructure. The health system was already massively overextended, with far too few essential medicines, much less ARVs, available in South Africa’s under-funded rural clinics.
As TAC was the first to concede, ARV availability could generate negative unintended consequences. One would be non-compliance with treatment regimes by poor people, and the concomitant emergence of drug-resistant strains. Another would be the black market smuggling of cheap drugs to Europe and North America which would reduce access in Africa. Another would be that, although stigmatisation would decline given the availability of hope-giving drugs, so too might the practice of safe sex. These would remain major challenges to TAC and other health-sector groups, although the Khayelitsha operation of Médecins Sans Frontières was already proving high levels of treatment compliance.
Moreover, the conflict between neo-liberalism and life, so explicit in the case of access to AIDS medicines, was severely compounded by patriarchy, traditional and modern sexual practices such as multiple partners for men, and domestic violence against women. Rape continued at scandalous levels.
But the primary contradiction involved the regime in Pretoria. In February 2004, TAC attacked President Thabo Mbeki in the wake of more government prevarication on AIDS treatment.[7] Claiming that Mbeki ‘misrepresented facts and once again caused confusion on HIV/AIDS’ on national television, TAC’s Zackie Achmat accused him of ‘denialism.’ Moreover, Pretoria had originally promised to distribute AIDS medicines to at least 50,000 people within a year, and to reach everyone in need of treatment within five years. Tshabalala-Msimang blamed slow drug procurement – Pretoria’s own fault – and the lack of qualified health personnel. TAC strategist Mark Heywood commented, ‘Many hospitals have the capacity, they just don’t have the medicines.’ The finance ministry also cut the budget dramatically for medicine purchases in February 2004.
At the same time, Tshabalala-Msimang suggested that while HIV-positive people waited for medicines, a diet of lemons, beetroot, (extremely expensive), olive oil and garlic would improve the body’s immune system. A week earlier, the minister had come under fire by the SA Medical Association, whose chairperson Dr Kgosi Letlape accused her of ‘dividing the profession when we have gone to great lengths to unite it.’ The minister unsuccessfully attempted to halt a protest march of 2,000 medics against poor conditions in public health facilities by implying that the demonstrating doctors were white, whereas black medics supported the government.
Mbeki continued supporting his minister, no matter how outrageous this became. He told the SA Broadcasting Corporation on 8 February 2004 that the major problem was inaccurate mortality statistics, which made it impossible to know whether AIDS was as fatal as claimed. According to Mbeki, his doctors informed him that diabetes is also an epidemic, and he questioned why no-one talks about diabetes. Achmat replied:
‘Drugs for treating diabetes are heavily overpriced; there should be a campaign for their reduction. But unlike HIV until November 2003, diabetes is treated in the public health sector. However, the President should be aware that according to an initial investigation into the burden of disease estimates in South Africa released in 2003 by the Medical Research Council, AIDS was responsible for 39 per cent of lost life-years in 2000 - more than the next 10 worst diseases. Diabetes is the 12th worst disease and is responsible for slightly more than one per cent of lost life-years. The two diseases are incomparable in scale.’
Achmat also ridiculed Mbeki’s claim that ‘few countries can hold a candle to South Africa’s HIV/AIDS programme.’ Achmat replied:
‘A number of developing countries do much better than South Africa when it comes to HIV prevention and treatment, often with far fewer resources. Currently, South Africa treats approximately 1,500 people in its public sector, who are not on drug trials, paying for their own medicines or being sponsored. By contrast, Brazil’s government treats over 100,000 people and has less than a quarter of South Africa’s HIV infections. Botswana is treating approximately 15,000 and Cameroon approximately 7,000 people.’
In March 2004 the need to harass Pretoria to ensure roll-out was confirmed again, when TAC was forced to threaten an urgent court interdict in order to permit the urgent acquisition of antiretroviral medicines consistent with the November 2003 cabinet decision. Tshabalala-Msimang was sufficiently threatened by yet more embarrassing court proceedings that she finally agreed, just before a deadline provided by TAC lawyers. TAC declared victory, though remarked that ‘by implementing the interim procurement mechanism and thereby avoiding a three-month delay of the treatment programme, approximately 6,000 excess deaths could be avoided.’ [8]
What is the way forward, given persistent presidential denial, state bureaucratic sabotage, and structural factors that mitigate against access to treatment? One major stumbling block would probably emerge in subsequent months and years: the nature of political alliances within South African politics. TAC had been effective in attracting support from the most forward-looking trades unions, the SA Communist Party, churches, NGO activists and technical supporters (lawyers, health workers, academics, journalists). Yet these alliances did not stray far from the ANC. Would TAC forge sufficient linkages to non-ANC communities, especially those devoted to building the new independent left? In coming years, would the myriad of problems that cause opportunistic infections, especially dirty water and air (thanks to coal/wood/paraffin), also be addressed? At a time that the South African government was disconnecting water and electricity at a lethal rate, alongside evictions for those who could not afford expensive rental and mortgage bond payments, the need to address the links between AIDS and the diseases of poverty/homelessness was obvious.
Moreover, would TAC and its allies make the case that access to ARVs is a human right and that people should not pay user-fees or partial cost-recovery for the medicines? By 2004 they were taking this position, but only in the event that people were too poor to pay for medicines. Yet means-testing of black South Africans with irregular informal incomes is notoriously difficult. In contrast, a more explicit ‘free lifeline’ strategy would parallel the demands of the water and electricity campaigners.
Nevertheless, whether or not TAC continues to tackle the three structural impediments to ARV access – neo-liberal fiscal policy, pharmacorps and corporate control of health perks - the immediate victory of November 2003 will potentially make a huge difference. For the half million South Africans who are symptomatic with AIDS or who have a CD4 blood count less than 200, there was suddenly hope. Across the world, for three million people who die each year of AIDS, and for 40 million others infected, the treatment activists and their international allies deserve a standing ovation.
* Patrick Bond directs the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban. This article is an extract from his book 'Elite Transition: From Apartheid to Neoliberalism in South Africa'.
**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
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Henning Melber looks at the possibilities for a people-centred opposition and ultimately a true liberation in Namibia and Zimbabwe, after years of misrule by the liberation movements-turned-ruling parties.
‘There is a need for a healing of the nation. The process of national healing and reconciliation is unlikely to proceed as long as society is still polarised. In addition, without also addressing past crimes, corruption, marginalisation and poverty, it is unlikely that reconciliation can be achieved.’
This insight was contained in the Kenya mission report of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM). It was submitted by the APRM panel of eminent persons to the continent’s heads of state at the African Union summit in July 2006.[1] One and a half years later, Kenyan society was traumatised by the worst violence since independence and its people more divided than ever. The (allegedly orchestrated) civil war-like situation erupted over disputed election results. It showed that, beneath the surface of a seemingly peaceful society, deep-rooted antagonisms could be mobilised to unleash blind hatred and massive destruction of property and lives between people who had hitherto lived in relative peace with each other. In such circumstances an assumed socio-political stability proved to be treacherous, fragile, and prone to easy manipulation.
Many societies in Africa are confronted with similar challenges. Since the mid-1990s national reconciliation initiatives have emerged in a series of African countries. These were inspired by the widely praised Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa, which symbolised the country’s collective effort to come to terms with a past that still dominated its present and could have a lasting impact on its future. Despite all its limitations, the TRC has been widely perceived as an encouraging initiative, as a lesson in bringing skeletons out of the closet and dealing publicly with the lasting effects of violence and counter-violence. Far from solving structurally rooted historical legacies and their daily impact on the lives of ordinary citizens, or ending discrimination, or bringing to task many of the perpetrators, it brought to the fore the need to address history in the present.[2] Similar initiatives were taken in other war-torn societies marred by organised repression and mass violence, which had left festering wounds and scars among people now longing for healing and seeking a common future.
Two former settler societies neighbouring South Africa are among the countries whose governments did not follow this trend and refused to seek national reconciliation by means of public debate and transitional forms of justice and reconciliation. Zimbabwe and Namibia achieved their independence through long anti-colonial struggles led by liberation movements. In both cases the final defeat of colonialism was not achieved through the barrel of a gun (although the military dimension had an important role in forcing the colonial power to the negotiating table) but through agreements reached between the parties for change. These provided a transitional framework which limited the space for social transformation and the redistribution of wealth.
As a result of this negotiated decolonisation, the former liberation movements (Zanu PF in Zimbabwe and SWAPO in Namibia) were elected as legitimate governments in 1980 and 1990 respectively and have held absolute political power and control over the state bureaucracy since then (although, as we can currently see in Zimbabwe, not for eternity). In contrast to South Africa’s democratically elected government under the ANC, the Zimbabwean and Namibian political leadership never pursued anything similar to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Instead, they proclaimed national reconciliation as some kind of pragmatic agreement which became effective with independence. Their policy was to leave the past behind, with no public debate or dialogue over the injustices committed (although selective reference to colonial crimes was made when needed and commemorated as part of the liberation gospel).
In both societies the justification for casting this kind of official smokescreen over the colonial past was rooted to some extent in the argument that the repressive machinery of colonial occupation had been staffed and executed by many who at independence could no longer be held accountable. This was either because of an amnesty declared for those on all sides of the conflict, or because some of the worst abusers of human rights had retreated to their British or South African countries of origin. National reconciliation was defined in terms of closing the colonial chapter without seeking justice through institutionalised hearings or other forms of coming to terms with the past. The cleansing process, which to some extent was initiated and implemented in the South African TRC, was conspicuously absent. Not so, however, the collective blame placed on colonialism for all subsequent failures in post-independence nation-building and re-structuring of society, which (despite some relevant aspects) was often used as an excuse to evade responsibility for ‘good governance’.
This seemingly pragmatic (and rather self-righteous) approach denied the need and missed the opportunity to deal with failures in the ranks of the liberation movements themselves. This had never been the main issue in the TRC, but was unavoidably brought to the fore when the excesses of the apartheid regime were laid open. Even though the degree of self-critical examination of human rights violations within the ANC was rather limited (and hampered the final process of publicising the TRC report’s findings), it nevertheless became an issue for which President Nelson Mandela apologised to the victims and their families. Having been imprisoned for almost three decades since the early 1960s, Madiba was a charismatic leader and moral role model who could apologise for failures in the exiled ANC, for which he was obviously not personally responsible, nor perhaps even aware. This sign of remorse and indirect moral responsibility only added to his aura.
In contrast, both Robert Mugabe of Zanu PF and Sam Nujoma of SWAPO were active leaders in exile, deeply involved in internal power struggles. They were not only an integral part of the authoritarian hierarchy but its personification. In ultimate charge of the command structures dominating their liberation movements, they were to some degree personally accountable for the abuses and malpractice within their ranks. As heads of state they were not inclined to address such issues. Instead, past injustices on all sides would be put to rest. By doing so, however, the liberation movements sacrificed the moral high ground they had been able to occupy vis-à-vis the oppressive colonial regimes. Their own failures remained unfinished business and left festering wounds within the new post-colonial societies. The dominant mindsets emerging at independence represented more of an old order than a new one and showed the limits to liberation.[3]
In Zimbabwe, violence within and between the liberation movements escalated soon after independence in organised massacres in Matabeleland (the western part of Zimbabwe occupied mostly by Ndebele-speakers considered in large part to be supporters of the Joshua Nkomo-led ZAPU, which competed with Zanu PF for power). Between early 1983 and late 1986, an estimated 20,000 people were killed in horrific acts of barbarism carried out by the Fifth Brigade of the Zimbabwe National Army, trained by North Korean military advisors. Although known and reported at the time, the massacres went largely ignored, even by the former colonial power. Described by Robert Mugabe as Gukurahundi (‘the rain that washes away the chaff before the summer rains’), this organised mass violence was a defining moment for his regime. The Catholic church in Zimbabwe was a lonely voice in revealing the scale of the atrocities.[4] Since then, the openly violent character of Mugabe’s rule has drawn worldwide attention. However, it only became a concern for the international community (represented by Western countries) when the so-called fast-track land reform process dispossessed most of the commercial farmers and portrayed the conflict (misleadingly so) as one between a remaining white settler minority and the government. This suggests a moral selectivity in Western perceptions, which the populist rhetoric of the despotic regime managed to exploit.
As part of the Namibian independence process, several hundred members of SWAPO in exile, who were accused of being South African agents, were released and repatriated in mid-1989. Known as ‘ex-detainees’, they shared their plight with the Namibian public at home. Since the early 1980s several thousand were thought to have been imprisoned, tortured and raped in camps in southern Angola. Many did not survive the ordeal; others remain missing. Ever since their return, these ex-detainees have asked for rehabilitation and an apology from SWAPO for the human rights violations committed.[5] But the liberation movement in power has applied a policy of denial, on the grounds that this would open wounds and thereby put peace and stability at risk. Moreover, SWAPO argued, the atrocities by the South African regime and its local collaborators would also need to be scrutinised in return, which would undermine national reconciliation. Instead, and similar to the official narratives cultivated by Zanu PF in Zimbabwe, SWAPO started a ‘nation-building project’ guided by what has been termed ‘patriotic history’, which cultivates the gospel of an organisation and its leaders as the morally impeccable liberators of the people.[6]
In both Zimbabwe and Namibia the former liberation movements in political power were also granted the power of defining the national interest. But the political and ideological hegemony assumed at independence is now deteriorating, with governments failing to maintain control over the one-dimensional collective identity constructed and imposed earlier on. This has been evident since the turn of the century in Zimbabwe, with the emergence of the MDC as a meaningful political opposition, suggesting that the liberation gospel has an expiry date. The coerced legitimacy of the government has been eroded, provoking intimidation, an ever-growing culture of fear, and ultimately rule based on state terror. As we know from history, these kinds of dictatorial regimes sooner or later come to an end through the same popular movements that they intimidated and oppressed for so long.
In Namibia, an opposition emerged towards the end of 2007 from within the belly of the beast. Former high-ranking SWAPO officials formed the Rally for Democracy and Progress (RDP) to challenge the undisputed dominance of the former liberation movement. The next presidential and parliamentary elections, scheduled for the end of 2009, could result in SWAPO’s loss of its two-thirds majority in parliament, and hence absolute control over the country’s political and legal decision-making process. Nervousness is mounting. Leading office-bearers in the Namibian government warn of a Kenyan situation and blame the new opposition for fuelling ethnic rivalries. This is an argument which resorts to the culture of fear rather than seeks reconciliation and common ground; it names and shames others rather than identifies common denominators as Namibians. Such a knee-jerk response to political challenge also suggests an inability to deal with one’s own shortcomings and failures.
Leaders of the Namibian Lutheran churches have responded to the growing polarisation by means of a pastoral letter read out during sermons on 23 March 2008 and later published. In light of the violence that erupted between the two main rival parties, triggered by a local election campaign, the bishops of the three churches expressed their fear that the country is moving backwards rather than forwards in terms of freedom and democracy. The bishops wrote in their letter of ‘intolerance, verbal and physical attacks and counter attacks’. They warned that ‘failure to redress this situation now can lead to mass loss of lives country wide’. ‘What we say as leaders… is the seed which bears the consequential behaviour for violence and peace… Political opponents are not enemies, but participants in a democratic set-up.’[7] This is the first time since independence that the church has commented on the country’s politics in this way. Alarm bells are ringing, but Namibians still have the opportunity to learn from the sad lessons in Kenya and elsewhere – not least in neighbouring Zimbabwe, which in many respects is so close to home.
*Henning Melber is Executive Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation in Uppsala, Sweden. A son of German immigrants to Namibia, he joined SWAPO in 1974. This text is a contribution to 'New Routes – A Journal of Peace Research and Action' vol. 13, no. 2, 2008, to be published by the Life & Peace Institute.
**Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
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Christian Aid's new report seeks to expose the scandal of a global tax system that allows the world's richest to duck their responsibilities while condemning the poorest to stunted development, even premature death. The situation is stark and urgent. Our report predicts that illegal, trade-related tax evasion alone will be responsible for some 5.6 million deaths of young children in the developing world between 2000 and 2015. That's almost 1,000 a day. Half are already dead.
Egyptian authorities should immediately investigate and prosecute those security officials responsible for beating Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, Human Rights Watch have said. Maher, a 27-year-old civil engineer, used the social-networking site Facebook to support calls for a general strike on May 4, 2008, President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday.
Mass arrests in Khartoum of perceived supporters of a Darfur rebel group and other political opponents raise fears of mistreatment, Human Rights Watch has said. The arrests by Sudanese security forces of more than 100 people followed an attack on Sudan’s capital by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) on May 10, 2008 that left dozens of civilians dead or severely injured.
The latest report from the International Crisis Group, examines the local conflict’s root causes, including unequal access to land and unfair sharing of revenues from exploitation of natural resource. It analyses in detail a district that has too often been ignored by Kinshasa and which now needs a strategy involving national and provincial institutions, with the active support of the UN Mission in Congo (MONUC) and donors.
The community of Motala Heights, set on the edge of Pinetown between the factories and the hill that runs up to Kloof, dates back to the early years of the last century and has a rich history. For the last three years it has been under sustained and violent attack from a local gangster businessman who seems to be able to direct the local state, including the police and the Municipality's Housing Department, at will.
The Independent Review Commission (IREC) was established to assess a number of aspects of the 2007 General Elections in Kenya. As part of its mandate, it is required to examine the conduct of the Electoral Commission of Kenya and make recommendations aiming at improving the fure electoral process in the country. To assist the Commission in its endeavour, IREC wants to apply a well qualified electoral researcher.
As women and men in the Caribbean Region, in the wider diaspora, and in many parts of the world, we are writing to urge you to make resources available without delay for the search for Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, and to do everything in your power to secure his safe return to his family and community. As you may know, Lovinsky Pierre-Antoine, the internationally respected Haitian human rights activist who is well loved by his family and community, has been missing in Haiti since the evening of August 12.
Breaking News Kenya
Breaking News Kenya provides a link to an article in Business Daily about the increasing use of the Internet by Kenyan employers to screen job applicants:
“Local figures are hard to trace, but in a recent survey of executive recruiters by execunet.com, 77 per cent of respondents said they used the Internet to uncover additional information about candidates…
Job seekers who have more “presence” online are generally expected to be more believable as the employer can often verify content on an applicant’s CV, such as where they went to school or if they really worked for companies they lay claim to…
A third of the managers polled by execunet.com said they would eliminate applicants based on what they found out about them online, saying scandalous photos, political commentary or inappropriate videos found on websites such as Flikr, in blogs or on YouTube would have a negative impact on the candidacy of an applicant.”
Mother City Living
http://www.mothercityliving.co.za/20080514/food-gardens-on-the-cards-for-the-western-cape-its-about-time/
Mother City Living comments on proposed solutions to the burgeoning world food crisis:
“For the past week I’ve heard people debating the food crisis until they’re blue in the face. Increase the number of VAT-exempt food items, they said, issue food stamps, put a cap on food prices.
Not once did I hear anyone saying what I thought would be the most obvious option: get people growing their own food.
But, happily, today I read an article on Iafrica that gives me hope. In short, according to the report, Western Cape premier Ebrahim Rasool has proposed the launch of a “food security campaign” with “concrete initiatives” that would include:
‘…making state land at hospitals and schools available for community food garden schemes, setting up food co-operatives , distributing seed packs to vulnerable households, and increasing the school nutrition budget by R5-million.’
Hallelujah! Now, here’s hoping this gets off the drawing board, and out into the community. It’s about time.”
Magharebia
...
The new federation's plan to raise awareness within parliament, political parties and the government is already beginning to see results. Some political parties now promise to give women greater participation during next year's elections.
...
Voters disagree as to women’s ability to run public affairs. While many young people say they will make their choice based on clearly-defined criteria, irrespective of the candidate’s gender, older people make no secret of their preference for male candidates.
Think Ghana
http://blogs.thinkghana.com/2008/05/12/welcome-ghana-correctional-service/
Think Ghana comments on the state of correctional facilities in Ghana and plans to change the name of the Ghana Prisons Service:
“The Prisons Service, like many other public institutions, has over the years suffered under the proverbial ‘No funds’ syndrome and those who know the system very well, will admit that there is very little correction in our prison system.
Overcrowding, poor sanitation and lack of learning and training facilities have made the prisons more of concentration camps than centres of reformation...
In Ghana, very few can claim that they came out of our prisons better equipped than when they went in. Some claim spiritual development, which only confirms the physical deprivations they went through while in prison custody…
These deprivations and the stigma associated with prison life have seriously contributed to the situation where most convicts come out from the prisons ready to exert revenge on society…
We know the problems of the Ghana Prisons Service… So why do we think by giving an old institution a new name, everything will change for the better overnight?”
Omar Basawad
http://omar-basawad.blogspot.com/2008/04/kidepo-ugandas-hidden-wonder.html
Omar Basawad writes about one of Uganda’s ”hidden jewels”, the Kidepo National Park:
“Very few people visit the Kidepo National Park in Uganda. Even fewer tourists ever visit the rugged, breathtaking Ugandan hidden wonder, tucked away in the triangular North Eastern part of the country…
Of all Ugandan national parks and game reserves, Kidepo is the most remote and has the most unique wilderness and terrain. Karamoja too, is the most dry and the hottest part of Uganda; it has a most unique people too: the Karamojong, whose warriors, tall and black, still walk and graze their cattle while almost totally naked; they seem too, to have a liking for AK47 rifles. The Kalashnikov seems to be the only modern technology that Karamojong men have accepted; unlike in most parts of Uganda where the mobile phone is.
Sadly, semi arid Karamoja, though large and has great potential for development, is the poorest and the most undeveloped district of Uganda. I very much hope that the authorities concerned will do more for Karamoja and its people; and make the remote, isolated magical Kidepo more secure… Any one visiting Uganda and has the time and means, should visit enchanting, breathtaking Kidepo and experience not only some of the most spectacular sceneries Uganda and Africa has; but also feast on the abundant unique mix of wildlife that Kidepo boasts.”
Scribbles from the Den
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The Bush administration has slipped a controversial ingredient into the $770 million aid package it recently proposed to ease the world food crisis, adding language that would promote the use of genetically modified crops in food-deprived countries. The value or detriment of genetically modified, or bio-engineered, food is an intensely disputed issue in the U.S. and in Europe, where many countries have banned foods made from genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.
The 11th African Union (AU) Summit will be held in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt, between June 24 and July 1, 2008, under the theme of “Meeting the Millennium Development Goals on Water and Sanitation”. The Permanent Representatives’ Committee will be held between June 24 - 25, the Executive Council between June 27 -28 and the Assembly of heads of states and government between June 30 and July 1. The draft agendas for each of these sessions are available to download at In addition, the Citizens and Diaspora Directorate of the AU Commission will hold an AU-civil society meeting on June 17-19, in Sharm el Sheikh.
The Center for Citizens’ Participation in the African Union (CCP-AU) has written an essential policy brief for civil society detailing the key issues that will be discussed during the summit as well as providing logistical information for civil society participants. Among the issues highlighted are the adoption of a social policy framework for Africa, peace and security in Africa, the union government proposal and the audit of the African Union. Indeed, the Executive Council of the AU has just concluded an extraordinary session to discuss the audit report of the union. During this meeting, the chairperson of the African Union Commission (AUC), H.E. Mr. Jean Ping, noted that: “The Commission of the African Union agrees with the bulk of the Panel’s recommendations and would wish to see them implemented as soon as possible. In other areas, we have reservations based on experience and our own contact with the facts on the ground”. Also in preparation for the summit, the Committee of heads of states and government will meet later this month in Arusha, Tanzania, to discuss the union government proposal.
As civil society continues to advocate for African Union (AU) intervention in Zimbabwe, urging the AU leadership to call for the immediate cessation of violence and the protection of the Zimbabwean people as well as to deploy an exploratory mission of experts into Zimbabwe to assess the electoral environment, the African Union issued a statement on the situation in Zimbabwe following an official visit to the country by the chairperson of the AUC. Within the statement, the AU “urges the ZEC to ensure that the said run off [election] is undertaken as provided for in the Electoral Act”; “re-emphasizes the need for Zimbabwe to implement the conditions set out in the Declaration on the Principles Governing Democratic Elections in Africa; urges that agreements reached and the conditions prevailing prior to the 29 March polls be upheld; appeals to all the Zimbabwe political actors to conduct their activities in a free, transparent, tolerant, and non-violent manner to enable eligible Zimbabweans exercise their democratic rights”. Further, “the AU will continue to play an active role in assessing all further developments in preparing for the effective observation of this election with a view to providing an independent judgment on its outcome.
Following the presentation on peace and security in Africa by the chairperson of the Committee on Cooperation, International Relations and Conflict Resolution at the session of the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) this week, Hon. Euggene Kparkar of Liberia charged PAP to be firm and decisive on issues related to Heads of State, adding that “even though PAP must be commended for sending election observer missions to both Kenya and Zimbabwe, African leaders must be told in the face that too much of staying in power brews conflict. Therefore, they must always prepare their minds to vacate the presidential seats whenever their time is due”. However, recognizing the weaknesses of PAP’s mandate, the chairperson of the committee noted that PAP cannot hold African presidents entirely to account because it is currently an advisory, and not yet legislative, organ.
In further peace and security news, the AU has condemned the attacks on the Sudanese capital of Khartoum by the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) from the Darfur region, saying that their actions could jeopardize efforts to find a political solution to the crisis and escalate regional peace and security tensions. The chairperson of the AU Commission and the Peace and Security Commissioner Ramtane Lamamra are expected to visit the country.
As continued economic growth is predicted in 2008 and 2009 by the African Development Bank, the Monetary Affairs Committee of the East African Community has said high interest rate spreads, budget deficits, high domestic debt and relatively high levels of non-performing loans continue to be major challenges that need to be addressed before a monetary union can be realised. Seeing information and communication technology as central to African development, the AUC is engaging development partners to fund nine flagship projects under the Africa Regional Action Plan on the Knowledge Economy programme. While, Jose Graziano da Silva argues that “agro-energy emerges from the current financial crisis as a safe haven of real consistency and strategic continuity”, further stating that “agro-energy can help sustain the expansion of poor countries and usher in a new dynamic of trade independence by industrialising biofuel crop farming and creating bridges between family agriculture and a peak sector of the global economy that is here to stay.” Lastly, as African leaders will attend the Tokyo International Conference on African Development this month, Felix Osike explores the courting of Africa by so-called emerging powers such as Japan, China and India.
I have been avoiding the feeling that there is an agenda at work here, in which Southern African countries, i.e., Zimbabwe and South Africa, are in the crosshairs. I do not see any article on Bongo, in Central African Republic, or the Cameroonian President who is going to be declared the lifetime "head of state", the fact that in Liberia, local elections were called off the reason being given, " a lack of resources" yet these "resources" could be found to entertain and welcome President Bush.
I have wanted to avoid the feeling that pambazuka was being financed and used as a tool, but find myself wishing to have a question answered by the Editor, "Why is the focus solely on Zimbabwe and South Africa, and all the issues being discussed are those on the agenda of the alleged, "civilized world"? Why does one not see articles on the plight of the Somalis who have been invaded by a foreign state, and are being bombed from US warships along the coast? Why are we not hearing of the plight of those Somalis starving, and let us not forget those in the Ogaden region of Ethiopia? When the focus of your organization is solely on countries in the crosshairs of neo colonialists and imperialists, who now covert the wealth of Africa, and are concentrating all their resources into destabilizing and undermining legitimate African governments, one wonders who are you serving? AFRICA or foreign interests that are hostile to African aspirations?
I do not wish to discontinue receiving your newsletter and other information, since it does provide a window into just how entrenched and scary the control of information and real news on Africa and real African interests is. I mean for what one is now constantly reading on your website, one could as easily read the BBC, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post and all the other corporate controlled media in the West.
Just throwing this out there. Keep on sending the stuff, it is, for lack of a better word, "fascinating!!!!"
Editors: We look forward to your articles on the topics you feel we are not covering adequately.
As long as the legacy of Apartheid has not been fully erased, and the playing field levelled so that ALL South Africans benefit from the alleged Independence and the end of apartheid, I would say, Jeremy Cronin - Why South Africa will never be like Zimbabwe; better believe that the Jewish saying, "from your mouth to God's ear," is in place.
I am always fascinated by those who regard the current state of South Africa as being the best that can be, for the masses of black and brown South Africans. I even went to a lecture at an American graduate school, where a white American had gone and used a pool of 1000 different people. He came back to give a talk on how South Africans of color are wishing apartheid would return, since things were better for them. I also find alot of skilled black South Africans still in exile, or in the diaspora, because they are being told that dual citizenship is the problem or some other excuse. I see nothing in the quality of life of the majority of South Africans of color to make me believe that their patience with the "Tommorrow" that even one of my siblings used to describe the slow changes will continue indefinitely.
There is also something else, the world is getting very hostile to those of a different hue, setting up Fortress Europe, and the Fence along the US border, etc. etc. It becomes harder and harder to accept that we, Africans, who have been exploited and abused for so long, and even after the alleged dismantling of apartheid, will continue to tolerate the stories that come out, throwing the kaffir to the lions, abuse on farms, forcing workers to eat...
We read about South Africans being used as laboratory animals for experimental drugs, and then read about the disasters created by this. We read and hear about South Africa being turned into a place where Brazilians are brought for the their organs to be harvested for a market that is not in South Africa, and knowing the legacy of apartheid; this is just a small part of what is really happening.
We see the disasters that are happening in the mines, and the fact that many miners where let go to a bleak future whilst DeBeers moved its trading to the UK and now has a huge flagship store in New York...
The only constant is change, and South Africa still has the chance to avoid a Zimbabwe, but from what one hears and sees, Apartheid is still alive and well, and doing a brisk business. So, I do not see anyone forcing the redressing of wrongs, whites never give up what they deem theirs by some right of skin, or belief in a god that has made the earth theirs. I do not see or hear anything from South Africa that shows that the "droit de seigneur" that whites feel has changed. Instead, one sees the slow attempts to continue the 'cape to cairo' fantasy of Rhodes and the other imperialists. The recolonization of Africa that is now being implemented.
My parents gave up alot in leaving their homeland, and took us with them. I was born a month before Apartheid became the law, and saw what it did to ALL of us of color. I was also in Zimbabwe when the Federation of Rhodesias and Nyasaland was dismantled, and the Ian Smith era.
I still have not been fortunate to go home, though my siblings have returned. I do not read or see anything that makes me in a hurry to go home, though life in the diaspora is no paradise. My father advised me on his return to South Africa, not to come home yet, and I will follow his advice, it would be difficult to go home to the same "For Whites only" system. So, Jeremy Cronin, I do hope you are right, and believe the redressing of a lot of the wrongs of the Apartheid era would go far in preventing a Zimbabwe, but from what I hear, "it is too soon, ten more years!!" I find myself not as optimistic, the Wheel turns, and lost opportunities can come back to haunt those who believe that "South Africa will never be like Zimbabwe," it could in fact be a lot worse.
Mr. Fletcher did you protest against the illegal sanctions placed Zimbabwe? [Zimbabwe: Black America must not be silent; []
Did you write that African-Americans should not be quiet about these illegal sanctions? Furthermore, I feel that you should speak to the leaders in that region, if you have not already done so, because they have not put great pressure on Mugabe. In fact, President Mbeki of South Africa said there is no crisis. Many African-American leaders really scare me because of their love for Rome (I mean America). They are usually used against the interests of African people.
Ian Angus looks at the various forces behind the food crisis in Haiti. During previous waves of food price inflation the poor often had at least some access to food they grew themselves, or to food that was grown locally and available at locally set prices. Today, in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, that is just not possible. Global markets now determine local prices, and often the only food available must be imported from far away. Food is not just another commodity, he argues. It is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that it tries to prevent starvation, and above all that it does not promote policies that deny food to hungry people.
‘If the government cannot lower the cost of living it simply has to leave. If the police and UN troops want to shoot at us, that's OK, because in the end, if we are not killed by bullets, we'll die of hunger.’ (A demonstrator in Port-au-Prince, Haiti)
In Haiti, where most people get 22 per cent fewer calories than the minimum needed for good health, some are staving off their hunger pangs by eating ‘mud biscuits’ made by mixing clay and water with a bit of vegetable oil and salt.[1]
Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government is currently paying $225 for each pig killed in a mass cull of breeding swine, as part of a plan to reduce hog production. Hog farmers, squeezed by low hog prices and high feed costs, have responded so enthusiastically that the kill will likely use up all the allocated funds before the programme ends in September. Some of the slaughtered hogs may be given to local food banks, but most will be destroyed or made into pet food. None will go to Haiti.
This is the brutal world of capitalist agriculture, a world where some people destroy food because prices are too low, and others literally eat dirt because food prices are too high.
Record prices for staple foods
We are in the midst of an unprecedented worldwide food price inflation that has driven prices to their highest levels in decades. The increases affect most kinds of food, but in particular the most important staples: wheat, corn, and rice.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation says that between March 2007 and March 2008 prices of cereals increased 88 per cent, oils and fats 106 per cent, and dairy 48 per cent. The FAO food price index as a whole rose 57 per cent in one year; most of the increase occurred in the past few months.
Another source, the World Bank, says that that in the 36 months ending February 2008, global wheat prices rose 181 per cent and overall global food prices increased by 83 per cent. The Bank expects most food prices to remain well above 2004 levels until at least 2015. The most popular grade of Thailand rice sold for $198 per tonne five years ago and $323 per tonne a year ago. On 24 April the price hit $1,000.
Increases are even greater on local markets. In Haiti, the market price of a 50kg bag of rice doubled in one week at the end of March. These increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who live on less than US$2 a day and spend 60 to 80 per cent of their incomes on food. Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat. This month, the hungry fought back.
Taking to the streets
On 3 April demonstrators in Haiti’s southern city of Les Cayes built barricades, stopped trucks carrying rice and distributed the food, and tried to burn a UN compound. The protests quickly spread to the capital, Port-au-Prince, where thousands marched on the presidential palace chanting ‘We are hungry!’ Many called for the withdrawal of UN troops and the return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the exiled president whose government was overthrown by foreign powers in 2004.
President René Préval, who initially said that nothing could be done, has announced a 16 per cent cut in the wholesale price of rice. This is at best a stop-gap measure, since the reduction is for one month only and retailers are not obligated to cut their prices.
The actions in Haiti paralleled similar protests by hungry people in more than twenty other countries. In Burkino Faso, a two-day general strike by unions and shopkeepers demanded ‘significant and effective’ reductions in the price of rice and other staple foods. In Bangladesh, over 20,000 workers from textile factories in Fatullah went on strike to demand lower prices and higher wages. They hurled bricks and stones at police, who fired tear gas into the crowd. The Egyptian government sent thousands of troops into the Mahalla textile complex in the Nile Delta to prevent a general strike demanding higher wages, an independent union, and lower prices. Two people were killed and over 600 have been jailed. In Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, police used tear gas against women who had set up barricades, burned tires and closed major roads. Thousands marched to the President's home, chanting ‘We are hungry’, and ‘Life is too expensive, you are killing us.’ In Pakistan and Thailand, armed soldiers have been deployed to prevent the poor from seizing food from fields and warehouses.
Similar protests have taken place in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Madagascar, Mauritania, Niger, Peru, Philippines, Senegal, Thailand, Uzbekistan, and Zambia. On 2 April the president of the World Bank told a meeting in Washington that there are 33 countries where price hikes could cause social unrest.
A Senior Editor of Time magazine warned:
‘The idea of the starving masses driven by their desperation to take to the streets and overthrow the ancien regime has seemed impossibly quaint since capitalism triumphed so decisively in the Cold War.... And yet, the headlines of the past month suggest that skyrocketing food prices are threatening the stability of a growing number of governments around the world. .... when circumstances render it impossible to feed their hungry children, normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose.’[2]
What’s driving the food inflation?
Since the 1970s, food production has become increasingly globalised and concentrated. A handful of countries dominate the global trade in staple foods. 80 per cent of wheat exports come from six exporters, as does 85 per cent of rice. Three countries produce 70 per cent of exported corn. This leaves the world's poorest countries, the ones that must import food to survive, at the mercy of economic trends and policies in those few exporting countries. When the global food trade system stops delivering, it's the poor who pay the price.
For several years, the global trade in staple foods has been heading towards a crisis. Four related trends have slowed production growth and pushed prices up.
a) The end of the Green Revolution. In the 1960s and 1970s, in an effort to counter peasant discontent in south and south-east Asia, the US poured money and technical support into agricultural development in India and other countries. The ‘green revolution’ — new seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, agricultural techniques and infrastructure — led to spectacular increases in food production, particularly rice. Yield per hectare continued expanding until the 1990s.
Today, it is not fashionable for governments to help poor people grow food for other poor people, because ‘the market’ is supposed to take care of all problems. The Economist reports that ‘spending on farming as a share of total public spending in developing countries fell by half between 1980 and 2004.’[3] Subsidies and R&D money have dried up, and production growth has stalled.
As a result, in seven of the past eight years the world consumed more grain than it produced, which means that rice was being removed from the inventories that governments and dealers normally hold as insurance against bad harvests. World grain stocks are now at their lowest point ever, leaving very little cushion for bad times.
b) Climate change. Scientists say that climate change could cut food production in parts of the world by 50 per cent in the next 12 years. But that isn't just a matter for the future. Australia is normally the world's second-largest exporter of grain, but a savage multi-year drought has reduced the wheat crop by 60 per cent and rice production has been completely wiped out. In Bangladesh in November, one of the strongest cyclones in decades wiped out a million tonnes of rice and severely damaged the wheat crop, making this huge country even more dependent on imported food. Other examples abound. It is clear that the global climate crisis is already here, and that it is affecting food.
c) Agrofuels. It is now official policy in the US, Canada and Europe to convert food into fuel. US vehicles burn enough corn to cover the entire import needs of the poorest 82 countries.[4]
Ethanol and bio-diesel are very heavily subsidised, which means, inevitably, that crops like corn (maize) are being diverted out of the food chain and into gas tanks, and that new agricultural investment worldwide is being directed towards palm, soy, canola and other oil-producing plants. The demand for agrofuels increases the prices of those crops directly, and indirectly boosts the price of other grains by encouraging growers to switch to agrofuel. As Canadian hog producers have found, it also drives up the cost of producing meat, since corn is the main ingredient in North American animal feed.
d) Oil prices. The price of food is linked to the price of oil because food can be made into a substitute for oil. But rising oil prices also affect the cost of producing food. Fertiliser and pesticides are made from petroleum and natural gas. Gas and diesel fuel are used in planting, harvesting and shipping.[5] It has been estimated that 80 per cent of the costs of growing corn are fossil fuel costs, so it is no accident that food prices rise when oil prices rise.
By the end of 2007, reduced investment in third world agriculture, rising oil prices, and climate change meant that production growth was slowing and prices were rising. Good harvests and strong export growth might have staved off a crisis — but that isn't what happened. The trigger was rice, the staple food of three billion people.
Early this year, India announced that it was suspending most rice exports in order to rebuild its reserves. A few weeks later, Vietnam, whose rice crop was hit by a major insect infestation during the harvest, announced a four-month suspension of exports to ensure that enough would be available for its domestic market.
India and Vietnam together normally account for 30 per cent of all rice exports, so their announcements were enough to push the already tight global rice market over the edge. Rice buyers immediately started buying up available stocks, hoarding whatever rice they could get in the expectation of future price increases, and bidding up the price for future crops. Prices soared. By mid-April, news reports described ‘panic buying’ of rice futures on the Chicago Board of Trade, and there were rice shortages even on supermarket shelves in Canada and the US.
Why the rebellion?
There have been food price spikes before. Indeed, if we take inflation into account, global prices for staple foods were higher in the 1970s than they are today. So why has this inflationary explosion provoked mass protests around the world?
The answer is that since the 1970s the richest countries in the world, aided by the international agencies they control, have systematically undermined the poorest countries' ability to feed their populations and protect themselves in a crisis like this. Haiti is a powerful and appalling example.
Rice has been grown in Haiti for centuries, and until 20 years ago Haitian farmers produced about 170,000 tonnes of rice a year, enough to cover 95 per cent of domestic consumption. Rice farmers received no government subsidies, but, as in every other rice-producing country at the time, their access to local markets was protected by import tariffs. In 1995, as a condition of providing a desperately needed loan, the International Monetary Fund required Haiti to cut its tariff on imported rice from 35 per cent to 3 per cent, the lowest in the Caribbean. The result was a massive influx of US rice that sold for half the price of Haitian-grown rice. Thousands of rice farmers lost their lands and livelihoods, and today three-quarters of the rice eaten in Haiti comes from the US.[6]
US rice didn't take over the Haitian market because it tastes better, or because US rice growers are more efficient. It won out because rice exports are heavily subsidised by the US government. In 2003, US rice growers received $1.7 billion in government subsidies, an average of $232 per hectare of rice grown.[7] That money, most of which went to a handful of very large landowners and agribusiness corporations, allowed US exporters to sell rice at 30 to 50 per cent below their real production costs. In short, Haiti was forced to abandon government protection of domestic agriculture, and the US then used its government protection schemes to take over the market.
There have been many variations on this theme, with rich countries of the north imposing ‘liberalisation’ policies on poor and debt-ridden southern countries and then taking advantage of that liberalisation to capture the market. Government subsidies account for 30 per cent of farm revenue in the world's 30 richest countries, a total of US$280 billion a year,[8] an unbeatable advantage in a ‘free’ market where the rich write the rules. The global food trade game is rigged, and the poor have been left with reduced crops and no protections.
In addition, for several decades the World Bank and International Monetary Fund have refused to advance loans to poor countries unless they agree to ‘Structural Adjustment Programmes’ (SAP) that require the loan recipients to devalue their currencies, cut taxes, privatise utilities, and reduce or eliminate support programmes for farmers. All this was done with the promise that the market would produce economic growth and prosperity. Instead, poverty increased and support for agriculture was eliminated.
‘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.’[9]
During previous waves of food price inflation the poor often had at least some access to food they grew themselves, or to food that was grown locally and available at locally set prices. Today, in many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, that is just not possible. Global markets now determine local prices, and often the only food available must be imported from far away.
Food is not just another commodity. It is absolutely essential for human survival. The very least that humanity should expect from any government or social system is that it tries to prevent starvation, and above all that it does not promote policies that deny food to hungry people.
That is why Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez was absolutely correct on 24 April in describing the food crisis as ‘the greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model.’
*Ian Angus is the editor of 'Climate and Capitalism'. This article first appeared at
** Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org
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I cannot agree with Armele Choplin that "Mauritania is awash with Maghrebin extremists whose influence continues to grow" (Mauritania: Between Islamism and terrorrism; ). The attack on French tourists in December 2007 was claimed as the work of organised terrorists operating from Algeria, but this was never proven.
There is much alarmist talk of Al Qaeda in the Sahel, which has been used to justify a significant US presence and involvement in the region. It was, incidentally, a supposed fear of links with Al Qaeda that led the US to promote and support the invasion of Somalia, to crush the Islamic Courts Union there.
Certainly, the continued poverty of the ordinary Mauritanian people, in the face of growing oil revenues and a government which so far, despite its promises, has failed to ensure any significant re-distribution of wealth or mprovement in basic welfare, has led to a degree of radicalisation. So-called 'food riots' reveal how far ordinary people are angered by the failure of the new elected government to assure its people's well being, as well as being hard hit by rising food prices and continued poverty.
The implied 'social contract' in a democracy - that the people elect the government to ensure their wellbeing - has been broken yet again. Islam offers hope to young people, especially, as Armell Choplin rightly points out, to young harratin, and it also focuses the anger and disappointment. But this has nothing to do with terrorism and more to do with popular protest at government failure.
The Africa Public Health 15% Now Campaign has launched a 30 day countdown to the mid year African Union summit which holds in Egypt from the 24th of June. The 30 day countdown which starts from the 15th of May to the 15th of June is aimed at mobilising national level and continental support for a civil society message to urge African Heads of States to restate their commitment to and urgently implement the Abuja 2001 pledge by African Heads of State to allocate 15% of national budgets to health.