Pambazuka News 224: The Changing Development Discourse in Africa
Pambazuka News 224: The Changing Development Discourse in Africa
Only 12 of 53 African countries have abolished the death penalty. On occasion of the World Day Against the Death Penalty, on October 10th, different NGOs, all members of the World Coalition against the death penalty are organizing different actions against the death penalty. You may also send letters to the different governments still practising such a penalty or you may sign a petition-appeal to the Governments of Africa at: http://www.abolition.fr/ecpm/french/petitionscoalitiongb.php?ref=11
Scientists have found a way to breathe new life into an old anti-malarial drug which had been rendered almost useless. Chloroquine was hugely successful in combating the disease when launched in the 1950s - but the malaria parasite gradually became resistant. Now Australian researchers have found combining the drug with another preparation, Primaquine, seems to restore its effect.
Will the MDG targets be met if current development trends continue? Not according to the 2005 Human Development Report (HDR), which cites inequality as the issue of prime concern in the fight against poverty. The report argues that economic development alone will fail to produce sustained poverty reduction. The focus needs to be redirected towards improving equality - narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor, men and women and eliminating regional disparities.
The 1980 Lagos (Nigeria) conference attended by African heads of states, recommended the creation of an African common market, with the objective of launching it in 2020. Each African region was asked to consolidate its own regional organization to support the creation of an African common market. The latter would eventually lead to the creation of an economic community of Africa, seen as a vector which would lead to a viable and sustainable solution to Africa's numerous economic problems. However African economic integration has remained weak. This paper from the Global Development Network asks why integration has not progressed and what the current perspectives for African countries in the confinement of the New Partnership for the Development of Africa (NPDA) are.
“Kenya aims at being an industrialized nation by 2020. For this to happen crucial sectors of the economy need to be revived and promoted. And attempts are underway. But they will all be nullified if Kenya signs an EPA with the European Union”, warns Peter Aoga from EcoNews Africa. On 27th September 3 years ago, negotiations on so called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the EU and ACP regions were launched. These negotiations aim at creating Free Trade Areas between some of the world’s richest countries and some of the poorest – and it is obvious who will benefit.
For too long the policies of developing countries have been based on the priorities of external donors. Many studies have confirmed that these have often been misguided or inoperable. The structural adjustment years at the World Bank and IMF pushed policies that left the poor and vulnerable even more poor and vulnerable. A new report from Eurodad finds that the IFIs are still not living up to commitments to opening up policy space in developing countries. The promised poverty and social impact analysis to be done before reforms is not working as it should.
The persistent colonial legacy of relying on foreign direct investment has distorted African economic development and locked in low value-added, limited reinvested earnings and volatile inflows, yet it is being seen as an answer to today's problems, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) says in a new report. "In the face of inadequate resources to finance long-term development in Africa and with poverty reduction and other Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) looking increasingly difficult to achieve by 2015, attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) has assumed a prominent place in the strategies of economic renewal being advocated by policy makers at the national, regional and international levels," it says.
SOAT deplores the failure of the international community to impress upon all parties to the conflict in the Darfur the urgency of a resolution to the conflict and the immediate need for an end to the violence in the region. SOAT whilst acknowledging the right of the armed groups, Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) to defend themselves, notes that these groups cannot commit gross human rights violations with impunity.
If a return to armed conflict in Liberia is to be avoided, the new government to be elected on October 11 must ensure that those responsible for past atrocities are brought to justice and that human rights abusers are kept out of the police, army and civil service, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released this week. On October 11, Liberia will hold its first national elections since the signing of a peace agreement in 2003. At stake in the polls are the presidency, the 30-seat Senate and the 64-seat House of Representatives. While preparations, registration and campaigning in the October elections have been free of major irregularities, leaders in the country's incoming government will need to pay more attention to the critical issues of justice and human rights than they have on the campaign trail, Human Rights Watch said.
As the world's financial leaders gathered in Washington for the annual meetings of the World Bank (Sept. 24-25), help for Africa was high on the agenda. But the Bank's biggest dam project in Africa, the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) – sold as a way of pulling Lesotho out of poverty while supplying water to South Africa – is, according to the Bank itself, failing those who sacrificed everything for the project. Poverty is increasing in communities directly affected by the scheme's dams, and project-affected people are resorting to marching in the streets of Lesotho's capital to call attention to their plight.
When a huge country is littered with mines and has seen its roads disappear during decades of war, getting refugees back to their homes is not an easy task. The 236 Angolans are the last of the 2,500 who returned in August and September in an organised manner from settlements in Kasangulu, in the western part of the DRC. They come from 15 of the 18 Angolan provinces – excluding only Zaire, Cabinda and Luanda provinces – and are headed to the south, east and west of country that is 1,246,700 square km.
Who are the very poor and is health policy in developing countries leaving them behind? What strategies are there for reaching the very poor within the health sector and what are the challenges? Can strategies outside the health sector work better? A new dossier from the DFID Health Resource Centre/Eldis Health Systems Resource Guide addresses these key questions.
The combination of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, extreme poverty and weak agricultural systems has led to a "chronic, ongoing emergency" in Southern Africa, and the U.N. World Food Programme is seeking $150 million for the nearly nine million people who could run out of food in the coming months, NPR's "All Things Considered" reports. The countries most affected by drought are Malawi, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Swaziland, and parts of Mozambique and Zambia.
Even if the Group of Eight industrialized nations fulfilled pledges they made at their annual summit in July to increase funding for HIV/AIDS, the amount still would fall short of what is needed to fight the pandemic worldwide, U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis warned on Monday, the Financial Times reports. During the summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, leaders of the G8 nations agreed to an immediate doubling of overall aid to Africa to $50 billion annually by 2010 to fight poverty and disease on the continent.
Confessions of the mind - ( http://confessionsofnneka.blogspot.com/)
has an interesting piece on Christianity and Africans with particular reference to Nigeria, which criticises the trend of commercialising religion and the growth of churches on the continent and “the hypocrites who come to church to see and be seen”, though I cannot agree with her comment about women “luring catholic priests into committing sin”.
"Then a couple of months later you see they have built a roof to ward off merciless sun, then a year later, they have an actual building, the pastor is looking fatter, the congregation more presentable. But the pastor is still preaching give to the lord for he is good. Next thing the pastor is driving a hummer or Mercedes truck fully Air Conditioned, Suits by Armani, shoes by Prada, monogrammed hanky, house in Lekki and still telling people, who have come with their whole families on a bike to give unto to the lord and still collecting church funds from these people and using himself as an example of how the lord blessed his life because he was “giving to the church”".
African Bullets & Honey - African Bullets & Honey (http://bulletsandhoney.blogspot.com/2005/09/why-western-visions-of-utopi...) believes that “fighting the aid industry in its many forms is one of the great moral crusades of our time” and I have to agree with him on this. He draws on an article by William Easterly writing in “Foreign Policy” magazine which discusses the utopianism of “economists, politicians, and rock stars in rich countries have pleaded for debt relief and aid for the world’s poorest countries“.
Congo Watch - Congo Watch (http://congowatch.blogspot.com/) reports on the recently discovered remains believed to be those of Congolese and Rwandan Hutus killed by Rwandan soldiers in 1996.
Kenyan Democracy Project - Kenyan Democracy Project (http://demokrasia-kenya.blogspot.com) has a message to the Kenyan “Postponent Proponents” - “Postpone your Duplicity”.
“This essay is going to suggest that the “Tuhairishe Kura ya Maoni” aficionados are nothing more than closeted Yes supporters who have developed running stomachs in the face of the Hapana avalanche that threatens to bury many of the parliamentary turncoats in humiliating defeating in 2007- if not sooner“.
Black Star Journal - (http://popeyeafrica.blogspot.com/2005/09/amnestyisia.html) reports on the recent referendum held in Algeria for a “Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation”.
Allegedly 97% of voters approved the project with a reported 79% turnout... though the opposition and journalists dispute the latter figure ...The opposition called for a boycott of the plan.
The charter is controversial as it absolves the Algerian military from any role in the disappearance of thousands of Algerians during the civil war.
As Nigeria celebrates its 45th year of independence, Black Looks - Black Looks (http://okra soup.typepad.com/black_looks) reports on the recent arrest of the Bayelsa State Governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha in London for money laundering.
The whole sordid shameful saga has undermined the ongoing call for 50% derivation of oil monies to the Niger Delta states of which Bayelsa is one and the calls of self-determination and autonomy.
Over the second half of the 20th century, Morocco has evolved into one of the world's leading emigration countries. Moroccans form one of the largest and most dispersed non-Western migrant communities in Western Europe. Although Moroccan policymakers and the media stress the temporary, transitory character of sub-Saharan migration, an increasing proportion of these officially "temporary" migrants might become permanent settlers. These African migrants to Morocco face substantial xenophobia and social and economic marginalization. At the same time, their presence confronts Moroccan society with an entirely new set of social and legal issues typical for immigration countries, issues that do not yet resonate with Morocco's self-image as an emigration country.
Several hundred refugees from the Central African Republic (CAR) have crossed the border in the last few days. UNHCR believes that 150 to 200 persons are currently present in Komba village. The local authorities, however, are reporting that a total of 467 people crossed the border last week following an attack on Markounda in northern CAR on 27 September. Other inhabitants from Markounda apparently fled elsewhere in northern CAR.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres called on the international community to join forces to fight intolerance, preserve the institution of asylum and bridge the gap between humanitarian relief and long-term development so that millions of uprooted people can rebuild their lives without fear of renewed conflict and displacement. Guterres said combating intolerance is perhaps the most difficult challenge faced today by UNHCR and its partners.
Barely two months after being removed from Killarney and Ngozi mine squatter camps by police during the internationally condemned government exercise, Murambatsvina, close to 200 people have returned to these shanty towns in the periphery of the city. Those interviewed say they were dumped by government in the ‘middle of no where’ in rural settings alien to them as most of them are of foreign origin and the only place they call home are the shacks that were razed by government agents.
For a large part of its history, UNHCR became involved in the response to Internal Displacement in an ad-hoc case-by-case manner, focusing especially on those situations where IDPs were mixed with, or in close proximity to refugees or returnees and shared much the same needs and vulnerabilities. It has now agreed to take on global lead responsibility for ensuring adequate and effective responses to situations of conflict-induced internal displacement in the key areas of protection, camp management and emergency shelter. This approach was endorsed on 12 September by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee, the main international humanitarian coordination body, and is expected to be tested in two to three major new emergencies starting in 2006.
2004-2005 saw an upsurge in seed industry takeovers and a shake-up in rankings. Today, the top 10 companies control half of the world's commercial seed sales. With a total worldwide market of approximately US$21,000 million [$21 billion] per annum, the commercial seed industry is relatively small compared to the global pesticide market ($35,400 million), and it's positively puny compared to pharmaceutical sales ($466,000 million). But corporate control and ownership of seeds – the first link in the food chain – has far-reaching implications for global food security.
The latest update from the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa (EISA) looks at the key issues pertinent to Tanzania's 2005 parliamentary and presidential elections. "In many cases, a review of a country's elections is unlikely to undergo an all-encompassing assessment of the relevant elections matters, leaving aside other dominant issues that influence the delicate democracy within the analyzed elections. That said the subsequent analysis will contain a set of election issues reviewed via a justifiable list of topics."
Based in the New York office, the Senior Officer for Communications has primary responsibility for ensuring the clarity and excellence of publications, announcements, and other written materials. The Senior Officer develops, oversees and edits all published and internet-based communications, publications, press releases, and announcements as well as relevant internal communications of the Justice Initiative.
This is a well-written piece of work (See Congratulations.
However the following points are missing:
1. The few permanent staff who are lucky enough to have remained in those privatised firms are turned into casual labourers with very little salaries.
2. Some of the loans given to new investors are a kind of a gift because the lack of transparency makes it difficult to know if they will ever pay back.
3. The removal and exporting of the machineries in such industries has been alarming and shocking.
4. The involvement of the "honorables" as in the case of Longuza Forests makes it difficult for local people to object.
5. The high speeds that such exercises take also raises doubts.
In the G8 debate which was aired live on BBC, it emerged that that there are conditions attached to the loans and debt cancellation. How true is that?
The Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU) reports that the District of Apac is typical of most of Northern Uganda, almost completely un-industrialised with few urban centres of any size. In a report, 'Land Rights: Where we are and where we need to go' LEMU states that the population is rural and depends entirely on agriculture for its livelihoods. Mechanisation is rare, so the only productive assets which most households own are land, a few hand tools and livestock.This is described as 'traditional' and has in recent years seen changes. The report reviews the situation of land rights in the Apac District and looks at opportunities for land rights protection work. It examines the 1998 Land Act and its implementation in practice and finds that the protection clauses for women are proving ineffective.
By the end of the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society this November in Tunis, the role to be played by civil society in bridging the digital gap and democratising communications will be clearly defined. But many activists are less than optimistic about the eventual outcome, reports Inter Press Service. Until now, governments have included civil society and the private sector in discussions on all of the themes addressed, including the most controversial ones, like the issue of Internet governance. Nevertheless, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have doubts about whether this cooperation will be maintained in the future.
"At the Monterrey and Millennium summits governments worldwide pledged to achieve a series of important poverty-related goals by 2015. Among other important measures, the industrialized world promised to increase aid flows to enable increased social investments by those countries that are struggling to guarantee a future to their citizens. While it is encouraging that a number of governments have announced increased aid levels in recent years, we are very concerned that many governments are falsely inflating their aid figures by including debt write-offs. Export credit debts alone increase the stated aid total of many countries by one quarter of their real amount."
Pambazuka News has helped to update my knowledge on current issues in Africa and in my work on issue of health like HIV/AIDS.
The International Foundation for Science (IFS) is an independent international research council that is based in Stockholm, Sweden. The mission of IFS is to strengthen the scientific research capacity of developing countries in science fields related to
the sustainable management of biological and water resources. Since 1974, IFS
has provided support to more than 3500 IFS Grantees in some 100 countries
in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean.
The Soul Buddyz series is a television programme under Soul City Institute for Health and Development in South Africa and is aimed at young people (school going age) in South Africa. It explores critical topics and aims to educate and inform youngsters on issues such as peer pressure, sexuality, health, rights, discrimination and racism. Due to its success in reaching the youth, Soul City commissioned Jonathan Jansen to write a paper on Racism and Xenophobia in South African schools.
The purpose of this course is to ensure that planners and managers from different kinds of organisations and project teams are exposed to and engage with a wide range of participatory planning tools and methods, which could be applied at a national, provincial, district and local levels of society.
Low-cost satellite-based Internet responds to the access crisis in Africa and provides a potentially affordable opportunity for connectivity. Every square inch of Africa is covered by satellite bandwidth. However, restrictive telecom policies stop this from supporting Africa's development. To achieve Africa development goals and overcome the restrictions on access to bandwidth there must be an open skies policy.
“We recognise the importance of teachers in the dissemination of ICT knowledge and propose enhancing the ICT competence of teachers in the developing world through establishing innovative learning and knowledge communities of teachers and defining a professional development model to enhance ICT competence of teachers in order for them to utilise ICT in pedagogically meaningful ways.” A project proposal related to this goal reportedly involves Helsinki University of Technology, the Universities of Helsinki, Mauritius, Botswana and Geneva - through appropriate centres at each - as well as Botswana's Ministries of Education, and of Science and Technology.
While satellite television often attracts the lion's share of analysis about new media and their effect on prospects for democratization in the Middle East and North Africa, another technology may already have had at least as large an impact: the Internet. In Morocco, where the regime has severely constrained, controlled or silenced independent print media through direct and indirect censorship, the Internet has become an important instrument for unrestricted flows of information, which in turn is leading to the emergence of a more vibrant public sphere.
Yellow flames from oil rigs light up the night sky, helping Richard Vuadi guides his boat as he sets out to cast his nets along the Democratic Republic of Congo's coast. Oil rigs that dot the horizon have polluted the water, so much that fishermen say they pose health risks. "We have no choice, our families must eat," says Vuadi, a 50-year old fisherman, as he steps out of his dugout canoe in the morning with a bucketful of fish that he caught overnight. He says many of the fish are contaminated.
With oil prices rising worldwide, African oil-producing countries are expecting windfall earnings. But a new report from South Africa's GroundWork questions the fundamental structure of the oil industry on the continent. The new report by the South African environmental group, which has a long record of research and protests against the environmental damage from the refining industry in South Africa, goes beyond the common critique that corruption and bad governance block the productive use of oil income. Analyzing both "upstream" production and "downstream" processing on the continent, the report charges that "the oil industry is providing the context for bad governance and corruption," in the words of Nnimmo Bassey of Nigeria's Environmental Rights Action.
In 1990, Burkinabe linguist Benoit Ouoba used his own funds to set up a teaching programme with a difference: it focused on using local languages to develop literacy, rather than the customary French. Fifteen years later, the 'Tin Tua' method of teaching has significantly improved literacy in the eastern Gulmu region where it was introduced, attracting the attention of international donors in the process. Tin Tua, meaning 'Let's Develop Ourselves by Ourselves', is drawn from Gulmancema - one of the most widely spoken languages in Burkina Faso.
Since 2000, the United Nations has launched four global initiatives, all of which focus on education. A new publication explains the common values and ideals of these initiatives. The four initiatives are the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Education for All (EFA), the United Nations Literacy Decade and the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development. UNESCO is the coordinating agency for three of the four goals. While the initiatives are distinctive in many respects, they have common traits: a concern with the improvement of the quality of life and the promotion of human rights, a commitment to education (especially primary education), and an emphasis on the importance of the participatory role of each human being in education and development.
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) recently carried out a situation analysis in Darfur, Sudan on the effects of the ongoing conflict on the health and well-being of the 1.64 million girls and women who are affected by the war. Around the world, the devastating impact of conflict has been recorded and its specific impact on women and children documented. In a departure from the normal practice of providing an analysis by experts or 'outsiders,' the UNICEF/UNFPA study analysed the perceptions of the directly affected community; the people of Darfur. The reason for doing so, according to the report, is to help guide international response to the conflict, based on what the community perceives they are experiencing and what they feel is right for them, rather than imposing solutions from outside. The situational analysis, however, was not intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the health situation in the area.
Follow the link for a report by six women's organisations working for change in a local context. The starting principle was that awareness of sexual and reproductive rights is essential for achieving the MDGs: a major focus was on the reproductive health of women affected by HIV/AIDS. The partner organisations wanted to know what relevance the two gender related MDGs had to women's work, and consequently how to make them more applicable to the local context. (Of the 7 countries included, 4 are in Africa - Kenya, Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland.)
As crucial World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks approach in December, concerned citizens are invited to join a mass lobby in London on 2 November 2005 to demand that the UK government supports the call to make poverty history by delivering trade justice. The lobby is being organised by the Trade Justice Movement (TJM), in partnership with the Co-operative Bank. Another mass rally is planned for Brussels on 21 November 2005.
Governors and other top public officials who may have large sums of money stashed are running scared as Interpol’s dragnet widens. This is coming on the heels of moves by President Olusegun Obasanjo’s economic team who may have seized the initiative to push aside corrupt members of the political elite in the battle for 2007 presidential succession.
By the end of the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society this November in Tunis, the role to be played by civil society in bridging the digital gap and democratising communications will be clearly defined. But many activists are less than optimistic about the eventual outcome. Until now, governments have included civil society and the private sector in discussions on all of the themes addressed, including the most controversial ones, like the issue of Internet governance. Nevertheless, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have doubts about whether this cooperation will be maintained in the future.
African scientists have formed a network to give them a unified voice on policies touching on global environmental change affecting the continent. The African Network for Global Environment Change was established during a meeting in Nairobi at the weekend. Professor Eric Odada, of the University of Nairobi, told the participants that Africa lacks long-term and stable intergovernmental support for research into global environmental change.
The Government has handed back Amboseli National Park to the Maasai in what appears to be a move to woo the community into the Banana camp before the November 21 referendum. President Kibaki on Thursday directed that a legal notice be issued to ensure the park was returned to the community as trust land. Through a special gazette notice issued on the same day by Tourism and Wildlife minister Morris Dzoro, the park now becomes a national reserve and will be run by Olkejuado County Council.
Corruption is costing Africa's oil industry billions of dollars annually says Peter Eigen, founder and chairman of Transparency International (TI) -- a non-governmental group based in Berlin which monitors and fights graft. He made the comment to journalists Friday at a gathering organised by TI South Africa in the commercial capital of Johannesburg. Eigen was in the country to attend the 18th World Petroleum Congress, a five-day meeting held in Johannesburg which attracted more than 4,000 delegates. Oil-rich Angola, Chad, Libya, Nigeria and Sudan all fared poorly on TI's Corruption Perceptions Index for 2004. This annual rating ranks various states according on the extent to which graft is viewed as having taken hold there.
Rwanda's commitment to promote women leadership has greatly made the country popular on the international scene. Officiating at the launch of Women Waging Peace Project in Rwanda recently, the founder and chairperson, Ambassador Swanne Hunt said most people in the outside world did not know Rwanda but because of achievements of gender equality, the country has become famous.
A new project managed by AfriAfya and supported by Exchange is using information and communication technologies (ICTs) to communicate about health and development. A health communication project engages the knowledge of marginalised people in Kenya. The project started in February 2005 and the first phase included intensive planning and training workshops. It builds on AfriAfya's experience of managing a central health communication "hub" in Nairobi and setting up regional field sites, which are based in locations ranging from primary schools to ministry of health offices.
In what appears to be a political move to thwart the business growth of the Zimbabwe Independent and Standard newspapers, the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (Zimra) has for the past six months kept under lock and key a satellite dish and accessories belonging to the group at its container depot in Beitbridge. Zimra is demanding that the equipment must first be licensed before it is released. The equipment does not require licensing since it is used to receive news, not to transmit it.
The Star has suspended news reporter Alameen Templeton because he testified on behalf of the state in the so-called lion murder trial in Phalaborwa, according to a report in the newspaper. The paper is to investigate his decision to testify. His testimony on Thursday was led in sentencing deliberations during the trial of Mark Scott-Crossley and Simon Mathebula for the murder of Nelson Chisale, who had been thrown into a lion's enclosure and killed. Templeton was immediately pulled off the case because his impartiality had been compromised by his testimony.
A private Ghanaian radio station has just launched an operation to raise funds for the purchase of police equipment. Kumasi-based Kapital Radio is hoping this project will raise 150 million cedis (8.99 million CFA francs). The manager of the station said that the initiative was designed to help the security forces improve their fight against criminality. Local police chiefs welcomed this "noble idea" and have already donated 5 million cedis (299,000 CFA francs) to the fund. This amount was matched by the management of Kapital Radio.
The Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Botswana chapter has launched the Setswana version of the African Charter on Broadcasting. This is part of the African Charter on Broadcasting's effort to encourage countries in the region to promote their indigenous languages. The African Charter was itself launched in May 2002 as one of the products of the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights and serves as one of the modern blueprint for policies and laws determining the future of broadcasting and information technology in Africa.
Intelsat has been selected by the African Virtual University (AVU) as its strategic communications partner in an initiative to establish a higher education bandwidth consortium which will make Internet bandwidth more widely accessible to African universities. Using Intelsat's GlobalConnexSM Internet Trunking Service, this initiative will deliver cost-effective, reliable bandwidth to students, academics, and other users at 11 universities and two consortia in six African countries, initially.
On 29 September at Wits University, over 400 trade unionists gathered to pay tribute to 100 of their number who have successfully graduated from a demanding one year advanced trade union education programme. The programme, which is formally accredited by Wits University, is provided by the union-owned Development Institute for Training, Support and Education for Labour (DITSELA). Ditsela is Sotho for Pathways, and its slogan is 'Pathways to a Strong Labour Movement'. It is set to celebrate its tenth birthday next year, and has been responsible for providing training for literally thousands of worker leaders over this period. Though primarily funded by the Department of Labour, it is an independent learning institute that is owned and controlled by COSATU and FEDUSA, the two largest federations in the country.
Following the G8 Summit, Global Campaign for Education campaigners turned their attention to the Millennium +5 World Summit in New York . It was originally conceived as an opportunity for Heads of State to review progress in meeting the Millennium Declaration of 2000, strengthen the UN and commit countries to peace-building measures. During 2005 the Summit became a major campaigning moment for anti-poverty activists, especially the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, demanding that governments of rich and poor countries deliver on past promises to end the scandal of global poverty. Following hard on the heels of the G8 Summit, hopes were originally high that it would be an opportunity for world leaders to spell out real action on aid, trade, debt and poverty reduction strategies. Sadly, these aspirations were dashed as Summit negotiations descended into farce following a last-minute intervention by the US.
The Special Investigations Unit (SIU) has prevented government from losing an estimated R3.527 billion through corruption. The unit also recovered R12 million government could have lost in this regard, this financial year, unit head Willie Hofmeyr said. Addressing the Pretoria Press Club this morning, Mr Hofmeyr said through their investigations, they were able to ensure 45 civil proceedings, 165 criminal proceedings and 207 disciplinary proceedings. "We aim to work more with government departments to assist them to fight corruption more effectively," he said.
The Western Regional Minister, Mr. Joseph Boahen Aidoo, has given conflicting accounts about the exact amount spent for the renovation and refurbishment of his brother-in-law's private bungalow at Wassa Akropong, to serve as residence for the DCE for Amenfi East. Besides a whopping ¢830million that was used to refurbish the DCE's residence, another issue that has raised eyebrows in the area is a ¢920million that was also spent and captured as amount used to refurbish the District Coordinating Director (DCD) bungalow.
A Nigerian governor from oil-producing Bayelsa state was charged in London on Wednesday with laundering £1,82m, a court official said. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was arrested on September 15 by London's Metropolitan Police. The police later found £1m in cash in the governor's London house. He was charged at Bow Street magistrate's court with laundering money on three occasions: £420000 in September 2001, £475724 in March 2002 and £920000 in September this year, court documents showed.
A leading Islamist activist in Morocco says she is eagerly awaiting her trial on charges of insulting King Mohammed VI. Nadia Yassine, of the outlawed but widely-popular Justice and Charity Group, could face up to five years in jail if convicted. She was put on trial earlier this year for saying that she would prefer a republican system to Morocco's hereditary monarchy.
The Committee to Protect Journalists has condemned the jail sentence given to a magazine journalist who reported on alleged corruption in the distribution of food aid during this year's famine in Niger. On September 27, a court in the northern town of Agadez convicted Abdoulaye Harouna, publication director of the monthly Echos Express, of defaming the local governor, Yahaya Yendaka. The court sentenced him to four months in jail and fined him 520,000 CFA francs (US$950).
In a bid to advance self-regulation in the press, veteran media practitioners and stakeholders have set up a board to prepare for formation of an independent media council in Uganda, writes Evelyn Lirri in the Daily Monitor. The council, which will be controlled by journalists and media stakeholders, will be independent of government control and will become operational by July 2006.
An African Development Bank (ADB) loan to the tune of US $34 million has given Namibia's 'Green Scheme Project' a major boost. The ADB said the cash injection would provide a vital lifeline to the agricultural sector and assist in making the arid country "greener" through irrigation and crop development initiatives targeting the 70 percent of the country that relies on agriculture.
Pambazuka News 223: What price human rights?
Pambazuka News 223: What price human rights?
This paper seeks to show how donors from the UK can support policy leadership in developing countries without imposing their own views. The contention is that, when donors and developing country governments agree on the purpose of the aid, both parties will have a shared understanding of how aid will help reduce poverty, and how they can be held publicly accountable for delivering on their commitments.
This paper examines the role of public and private sectors in the development of contraception and other pharmaceutical products. It also explores the obstacles to availability of these products in developing countries, as well as further research needs. The paper finds that, despite growing private sector involvement, the public sector is the main supplier of contraception in developing countries. Funding from bilateral agencies and foundations to public sector Research and Development (R&D) programmes has resulted in expansion of contraceptive choice for developing countries. With the exception of China, Brazil and India, there has been little R&D of products for reproductive health (RH) in developing countries.
Who are the very poor and is health policy in developing countries leaving them behind? What strategies are there for reaching the very poor within the health sector and what are the challenges? Can strategies outside the health sector work better? "Meeting the health-related needs of the very poor", a new dossier from the HRC/Eldis Health Systems Resource Guide addresses these key questions by bringing together the perspectives of health policy, social protection, and poverty reduction.
According to the World Health Organisation malnutrition is associated with about 60 percent of deaths in children under five years old in the developing world. The WHO has developed guidelines to improve the quality of hospital care for malnourished children in order to reduce deaths. The guidelines suggest ten steps for routine management of severe malnourishment. These will require most hospitals to make substantial changes.
The world must address once and for all the grave security threats posed by the Forces Démocratiques de la Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, says the International Crisis Group. In letters to regional and international leaders Crisis Group President Gareth Evans urged them to agree on a dual track approach to the FDLR, offering members - apart from those clearly guilty of the most serious crimes - real incentives for repatriation to Rwanda while simultaneously threatening military action against those that refuse.
On 16 September 2005, armed militias in military uniform, allegedly the Janjaweed, attacked and raped one girl and a woman, 2 km West of Kalma Internally Displaced (IDP) Camp in Nyala. During the attack, the women were flogged before being raped, says the The Sudan Organisation Against Torture (SOAT). SOAT has strongly condemned the continual attacks and sexual violence against women and girls in Darfur. "In light of evidence that attacks on civilians have subsided in the areas where African Union (AU) observers have been deployed, SOAT is particularly concerned that women and girls continue to venture outside IDP camps to undertake their regular tasks including fetching firewood and water without protection by AU observers stationed inside these camps."
Human rights watchdog Amnesty International has expressed concern over mounting political and ethnic tensions in the North-Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) - warning that this might spark renewed conflict in the country. In a report issued Wednesday, the group says additional fighting could undermine the DRC's uncertain peace process, and lead to human rights abuses in a region that has already become a byword for violations.
As African leaders gear up for two successive summits to salvage peace efforts in Cote d'Ivoire, the country’s president Laurent Gbagbo has ruled out any mediation role for his fellow West African leaders. The 15-nation Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) has invited heads of state from across the region to the Nigerian capital, Abuja, on Friday for “talks on the situation in Ivory Coast.”
Some 100 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa made it Tuesday over the high fences separating Morocco from the Spanish enclave of Melilla on the southern coast of the Mediterranean sea, while another 400 were kept out by the Civil Guard. The storming of the border occurred just a few hours before the media in Spain aired a video filmed by the children's rights organisation PRODEIN, which shows Civil Guard agents in riot gear violently repelling a similar concerted attempt by migrants on September 20.
Egypt's first multiparty elections early this month did not yield any surprises as incumbent President Hosni Mubarak retained his position. Despite being declared far from free and fair, the poll was still described as a step forward for a country where opposition candidates have never been given room to operate. “There are violations but in comparison to before, it's much better than we expected,” said Gasser Abdel Razeq, of the Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights and a vocal government critic. At different polling stations, Mubarak supporters were seen standing over voters as they cast their ballots, while at one polling station, the only person in charge was a party representative sporting a Mubarak button.
One of Africa's unrecognised countries, Somaliland, held parliamentary elections at the end of September - it's third since it seceded from Somalia and declared independence in 1991. The major setback for the otherwise peaceful state has been lack of international recognition, which has been reserved for fear it might trigger instability in the region. “Please give us credit for being disciplined, self-administering people. It is unfair to keep us away from the world until the warlords in Somalia agree on something. Bringing back Somaliland to former Somalia is like attempting to bring back the former Soviet Union,” said Awil Ali Duale, the finance minister.
The General Confederation of Worker's in Mauritania (CGTM) has increased its female membership from 15 to 30% through a massive recruitment of women in the informal sector. 'The aim [of recruiting informal workers] is not only to ensure an improvement in the working conditions of these women but also in their living conditions, which will benefit their families too,' says Abdallahi Ould Mohamed, CGTM General Secretary. 'The women flooded to our union because they were carried by the hope of an improvement - however small - in their extremely difficult conditions.
September was a bad month for Nigeria. First Chima Ubani, 42, director of the country's premier human rights NGO, the Civil Liberties Organisation, died in a car crash. Then, veteran activist Dr Yusuf Bala Usman died on September 24. Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem remembers the lives of two extraordinary activists and calls for their spirit of struggle to be remembered.
The past week has not been a good one for the endangered species of committed progressive people in Nigeria. In the middle of the week there was the tragic death, by yet another road accident, of Comrade Chima Ubani,42, director of the country's premier human rights NGO, the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO), a foremost defender of the poor, and a shining star for consistency and total commitment to the struggle for the liberation of the ordinary people in the face of the successive autocratic military regimes of the 80s and 90s in Nigeria and the creeping elective dictatorship of Obasanjo since 1999.
Ubani died in an accident between Maiduguri and Kano in the north-east part of the country, where he had been part of the key leaders of civil society and the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) mobilizing support for a successful series of national strikes across the country against yet another increase in the price of petroleum products. His body was returned to Lagos on Saturday.
That same day (Saturday 24 September, 2005) yet another tragedy struck at the Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital, with the death of a senior comrade, veteran struggle activist, radical historian and organic intellectual in the tradition of Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral: Dr Yusuf Bala Usman.
Many people outside of Nigeria may not have known him personally but more would have become aware of him by reputation and remember and mourn the sad loss. It was an inconsolable weekend. For my generation of student activists Bala Usman was the icon of our times whose radical scholarship and political activism caused us to ask very uncomfortable questions about the kind of knowledge we were being taught and the society we were living in.
The 70s and 80s were full of epic battles and the cold war was at its peak. In Africa, the liberation of Southern Africa, including the former Portuguese colonies of Angola and Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau on the West coast, Zimbabwe and South Africa from settler regime and apartheid were prominent on the agenda.
The struggle against neo-colonialism was also intense and anti imperialist struggles were being waged across the underdeveloped world from Africa through Asia to the Middle East and Latin America. These were days before donor-driven formalized struggles that have today turned many revolutionaries into ‘resolutionaries’. They were periods when imperialism was called its proper name and not disguised under euphemisms like globalisation, friends or partners!
Bala and his peers of equally committed scholar-activists from across the continent who were teaching in various universities in Nigeria in those oil boom days opened our eyes and ears to the world around us and inspired us to believe that we can change it for the better.
There were many radical scholars, some of them exiles and refugees from the Idi Amin and Obote 2 regimes in Uganda, including Prof Yolamu Barongo, the indomitable Okot a P'itek and Ocello Oculi. There were others like Yusf Bangura, AB Zack Williams and others. There were radical scholars from the Diaspora too like Dr Patrick Wilmot who was later deported from Nigeria by the Babangida regime. People Like Ali Mazrui were regular guest lecturers on Nigeria's campuses, trailing one controversy or the other. By no means were all the radical lecturers only Africans or people from the Diaspora.
The high point of this was the Centenary of Marx conference held at Ahmadu Bello University in 1983. Some of the sectarian political and intellectual battles that were to decimate the left forces can be traced to this period. Bala was very prominent in these debates and enjoyed for many years the status of first among equals. He was born into the royal house of Katsina in northern Nigeria and did not have to do anything to survive. He could just have demanded and be given anything he wanted by way of personal pleasures and riches by virtue of being a royal and growing up at a time when the Emirs held sway.
Bala could have combined his royal spoon with his academic erudition and choosen to be part of any government or ruling clique across the country and feed fat on the sweat and blood of the people of Nigeria. But Bala chose to side with the masses. He became a traitor to his class. He committed class suicide and remained a revolutionary throughout his life. He could have checked out of the country like many of us (some voluntarily, some of us stranded, and others through coercion or for tactical /strategic reasons) but he did not. He believed that he was best able to contribute directly from the home front.
Whatever political or intellectual disagreements anyone may have developed with Usman in a life steeped in struggles on many fronts, even his worst critics will pay him the tribute of saying he remained true to his convictions.
Nigeria is indeed made more impoverished both intellectually and politically now that the loud and very clear and thunderous voice of Bala will no longer be there to speak unpleasant truths to power in a potentially great country damned by successive little-minded leaders impervious to any knowledge that could go beyond their noses.
It is perhaps befitting to a life of struggle that Bala's last public duty that many will remember for its high drama was at a conference last month called by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on corruption. Bala was one of the participants. President Obasanjo was the chief guest and he addressed the audience with his usual monologue and holier-than-thou pomposity.
At intervention time Bala was on the floor and he, as was characteristic of his fearless and fierce intellect took on Baba Iyabo (Father of Iyabo, as Obasanjo is also known in Nigeria) and tore into the empty shrines of his timid anti-corruption crusade and leader-centric governance. As we all know, Obasanjo is such a big 'democrat' that he cannot understand or continence anyone disagreeing with him.
He ordered his security goons to seize the microphone from Bala. Somehow the security heavies could not find the over 6 feet tall Bala who was standing with a microphone in a hall full of all the high and mighty in Nigeria. The conclusion of many was that even the security guys were sympathetic to Bala's lampooning of President-Know-All.
That was Bala Usman: Bold, full of guts and fearless before those who think of themselves as our lords and masters. Of course the hypocrisy of conspicuous grief after death of a public figure is already suffocating the country. The President was one of the first to send condolences on the two departed comrades declaring one “a brilliant young activist” and the other “a statesman”. It is customary to pray for the departed: May the spirit of Bala and Chima remain restless and continue to haunt us to continue the struggle for which they lived and died actively serving.
* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa. ([email protected] or [email][email protected])
* Please send comments to [email protected]
Fighting in northern Uganda has displaced just over 41,000 people in one district alone in the past year, according to an IOM-Danish survey just finished. Attacks by the rebel Lords Resistance Army (LRA) on refugee settlements and villages in Adjumani district which adjoins the more conflict affected region in Northern Uganda, have become more frequent over the past 18 months and has led to a permanent insecure living environment. However, the exact number of internally displaced people (IDPs) in Adjumani district has been unclear as has a true picture of the humanitarian situation there.
The first millenium development goal - to halve global poverty by 2015 - has become an unlikely prospect. If poverty is to be significantly reduced, its terms of definition, measurement, explanation and resolution need to be re-examined and reformulated. The new human rights instruments need to play a vital role in this process. They can have a huge impact on the measurement of poverty, deprivation, exclusion, and development.
To all at Pambazuka - most definitely well deserved for winning the non-profit category of the sixth annual Highway Africa awards.
Compared to the verbal commitment of world leaders to human rights issues, the amount of money actually allocated to human rights within the United Nations system is pitiful. “If the role of the United Nations, through the work of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, cannot be sustained, then any other system is also doomed to failure, irrespective of what form the ‘new and improved’ UN is going to take,” writes Vinodh Jaichand.
The United Nations has often been criticised as being an ineffective body. The Secretary General, Kofi Annan, called for a debate on the possible reform of the United Nations in September 2003 due to the deep divisions among member states on the use of force in response to security threats. During this past week there have been major discussions on reforming the United Nations so that it might be better equipped to deal with the larger challenges, including the Millennium Development Goals. The UN is often portrayed as an independent institution with regard to peace and security when, in fact, it is an instrument of its collective membership [Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, The Role of the United Nations in International Peace and Security 841 at 842]. While it operates under the rules of diplomacy, the UN has been expected to be the defender of human rights in the world.
With a membership of 191 states under its Charter, the United Nations is the main international institution tasked with protecting and promoting human rights. Within the United Nations system the office assigned the main responsibility for human rights activities is the High Commissioner for Human Rights who is expected to engage with governments on human rights issues nationally and internationally with the aim of improving their respect and practice.
In a report undertaken by the Joint Inspection Unit of the United Nations [Management Review of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (JIU/REP/2003/6) prepared by Armando Duque Gonzalez ], it revealed that despite the strategic importance of human rights for the United Nations system, which has been highlighted in numerous documents, the resources allocated through regular budget appropriations have not reflected such strategic importance.
Indeed, the resources assigned decreased in percentage and absolute terms from 1996 to 2001 and increased in absolute terms in the 2002-2003 biennium. In the latter period the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights budget amounted to 1.75 per cent of the United Nations total budget. From 1996 at no stage did the amount received ever rise above 1.79 per cent of the United Nations total budget. At the same time the lack of regular resources has been compounded by an increase in the number of activities undertaken by the Office which require special representatives, special rapporteurs and independent experts. Therefore the Office is heavily dependent on voluntary contributions from states to fund core and mandated activities that should remain within the regular budget.
As a result, any disruption in the voluntary contributions received has impacted negatively on the core, the mandated activities and the extra-budgetary ones. The General Accounting Office of the United States Congress criticized the trend, preferred by the wealthier countries including the United States, towards voluntary contributions from Member States to fund human rights and other United Nations programmes. It said that the practice had left UN agencies lacking in stability for long term planning and has harmed the morale of staff [UN Changes Get Blocked by Rifts, a Congressional Report Finds by Jess Bravin, Wall Street Journal].
Does the Income Match the Ambition?
Under the Charter of the United Nations all Member States have an obligation, arising from the international treaty they ratified, to pay a portion of the budget for the functioning of the organisation. Each State’s contribution is calculated on the basis of its share of the world economy according to an assessment formula which is reviewed on a regular basis. Once a budget is finalized all Member States review and approve the budget in the General Assembly which, since 1988, has been approved by consensus [Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights website].
The five largest contributors to the UN regular budget are USA ($341,4m or 22% of the total), Japan ($263,5m or 19,5%of the total), Germany ($131,9m or 9,8% of the total), France ($87,3m or 6,5% of the total) and the United Kingdom ($74,7m or 5,5% of the total.
The United Nations regular budget for 2002-2003 amounted to $2.6 billion and for 2004-2005 an amount of $3 billion has been proposed as a preliminary regular budget. [Poor Nations First to Pay Up Dues for 2003 by Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service, January 2, 2003]
The payment of the contributions, both regular and voluntary, to the UN has sometimes been treated by Member States as an undue burden for membership, or as a donation for which there must be some gratitude or leverage due, despite the transparency in the process under a treaty obligation. There are many reported instances of this type of reaction. A few examples, which are not intended to be exhaustive, will be raised at this point to illustrate this.
As a result of the last review of the budgetary allocations in December 2003 Japan had to pay 19.5 percent of the UN budget although it accounts for 13 per cent of the global economy, while the United States paid only 22 percent for 30 percent of the world gross domestic product. Japan was reported to have been angry and frustrated because it does not get enough “bang for its buck” compared to other contributors to the UN budget and expected a seat on the Security Council for its higher contribution [Squeezed Japan Threatens Cuts to UN Agencies by Thalif Deen, Inter Press, January 7, 2004].
The United States withdrew from UNESCO for nearly twenty years when the Reagan administration pulled out as a result of the then director-general alleged anti-US stance because he proposed a more balanced flow in the content of news between developed and developing countries. In early January 2004 Congress approved the payment of $71 million for the United States contribution to UNESCO. It is believed that UNESCO can be used effectively to promote more pro-western values in the educational systems of Arab countries [Foreign Aid Bill to Fund Controversial UN Agencies, OneWorld US, January 27,2004].
The lead writer of a UN report on freedom and governance is reported to have said that the United States threatened to cut off funds to the UNDP to the value of $100 million because it was unhappy with sections of the report which refer to the occupation of Iraq and the activities of Israel in the Occupied Territories [US Threatens UN Agency Funds Over Report-Writer by Jonathan Wright, Reuters, December 18, 2004].
The focus on UN funding sharpens when we consider what payments are owed to the organisation by major debtor countries. The United Nations and all its agencies and funds spend about $10 billion each year or about $1.70 for each of the world's inhabitants. Many Member States have not paid their full contributions and have cut their contributions to the UN's voluntary funds. As of November 30, 2004, Members arrears to the regular budget topped $695 million, of which the United States alone owed $530 million, which amounts to 76 percent of the regular budget [Global Policy Forum]. The other Member States who owe money in the top five include Japan, Ukraine, Brazil and Argentina.
Are There Sufficient Resources?
To place these figures in some kind of context the regular budget of the United Nations in 2005 is the same as the largest single donation by the United States in 2004 to Israel for $3 billion in mostly military assistance [Foreign Aid Bill to Fund Controversial UN Agencies”, OneWorld US, 27 January 2004]. There have been numerous proposals for alternative ways to fund the work of the United Nations. Proposals include instituting a global tax on currency transactions, while others propose environmental taxes and taxes on the arms-trade. However, Member States responsible for the highest contributions are reluctant to reform the system, fearing they would lose political leverage [Global Policy Forum].
For the cost of the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent attempts to rebuild that society, calculated at $150 billion and rising each day, the United Nations could have fully funded global anti-hunger efforts for 6 years or a world-wide AIDS programme for 15 years, or ensured that every child in the world was given basic immunization for 50 years [National Priorities Project]. Certainly, that amount of money could assist numerous countries, including the countries in South East Asia affected by the Tsunami where the UN has called for some $950 million in short term-aid for the purpose of rehabilitation [Officials gather in Jakarta for tsunami aid talks, International Herald Tribune, 6 January 2005] Indeed, based on the current operations of all the work of the United Nations from regular and voluntary contributions, the amount being spent on the invasion of Iraq would operate all the United Nations programmes for at least 14 years.
Aid Relief in Focus
How does one measure the cost, in actual dollar terms, of one life whether that person is the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights in Iraq or a child born in a tree during the floods in Mozambique? The loss of one is impossible to quantify, yet the rescue of the other can be measured in the cost of fuel and operation for the helicopter and personnel involved in the mission. Human rights and humanitarian action are often intertwined because if the victims do not survive the right to life or the right to food, as components of individual human rights, is meaningless. Both lives are equally valuable, no doubt, and are invaluable in dollar terms. Perhaps my inquiry is misdirected because the more appropriate question in many of these cases would be: What is the cost of not intervening? Should the cost be measured only in terms of a reaction to things gone wrong or should they be gauged by proactive measures which can prove too costly later?
We often calculate the cost of remedial action in the aftermath of one or other humanitarian intervention. Hurricane Katrina reversed the trend of the United States as an aid receiving country from the perceived view of an aid dispensing one when it received offers of aid in cash and kind valued at one billion dollars from about 100 countries and international organisations. Amongst them was Sri Lanka with a donation of $25 000 and $1 million cash offers from Bangladesh. The recent South East Asia Tsunami disaster saw an outpouring of public assistance through record public donations which have forced many governments to revise their aid packages. The British government found itself playing catch-up with public sentiment. The public donated more than 100 million pounds. According to John Pilger, in the New Statesman of 6 January 2005, both Bush and Blair increased their “first driblets of “aid” only when it became clear that people all over the world were spontaneously giving millions and a public relations problem beckoned.
The three states which provided the highest aid for South East Asian Tsunami victims were Australia ($765 million), Germany ($ 665 million) and Japan with $500 million. The United States government came in fourth with $350 million with the American public reported to have raised over $200million. The complete rebuilding of the South East Asian countries is projected at around $200 billion. Journalist John Pilger observed that the United States and Britain were giving less to the Tsunami victims than the cost of a Stealth bomber, or a week’s occupation of Iraq. The bill for George Bush’s presidential inauguration party would rebuild much of the coastline of Sri Lanka [The Other, Man-Made Tsunami by John Pilger, New Statesman, 6 January, 2005 ].
It appears that the United States is sometimes of the view that it carries the major portion of the burden without the credit for doing so. In January 2000, Senator Helms in an address to the UN Security Council argued that: “The UN lives and breathes on the hard-earned money of American taxpayers,” and he resented the “lack of gratitude” shown to the United States [Chantal de Jonge Oudraat, The Role of the United Nations in International Peace and Security, 841 at 850] The objective facts however do not sustain that view based on Gross Domestic Production (GDP). The European Union provides over 36 percent to the United Nations budgets. Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom contribute nearly as much as the United States, $910 million against the $920 of the United States. The combined GDP of these countries is 21 per cent of the world total as opposed to 30 per cent of the United States. If the formula for burden sharing at the United Nations, which we observed earlier has been voted on by consensus and reviewed regularly, is skewed, then the affected countries ought to propose another which is more equitable.
The facts cited do not support the view that the promotion and protection of human rights is as important for Member States because the practice of payments of contributions to the United Nations does not match the ambition or the rhetoric of protecting human rights. If the role of the United Nations, through the work of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, cannot be sustained then any other system is also doomed to failure, irrespective of what form the “new and improved” UN is going to take. No amount of diplomatic practice can rescue it either. No system for the protection of human rights can function without a minimum of resources. Compared with the resources for other concerns, the resources needed for enabling an international mechanism for the protection of human rights to function are less than minimal at 1.79 per cent of the total regular budget. Even then, the minimum is not made available for expenditure [Marc Bossuyt, International Human Rights Systems: Strengths and Weaknesses, 47 at 5]. That is a very high price to pay for human rights.
* Vinodh Jaichand is from the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland, Galway
* Please send comments to [email protected]
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) SMS is being used to monitor child rights violations. In Argentina indigenous communities are using SMS to halt the bulldozers that destroy their forest livelihoods. And in the Philippines, angry activists have used SMS to hold government to account. The power of cellular technology is no longer up for debate; what remains to be discussed is how to maximize it for social good. Mobile Active Convergence, held recently in Canada, did just this.
The goal of the first ever conference on using cell phones and SMS in campaign, human rights, and political work was to “help speed the dissemination of innovative practices and technology by skill and knowledge-sharing among participants”.
What came out of the three-day event, held in Toronto, Canada between 22-25 September, went far beyond this expectation, as a diverse group of people from around the world banged their heads together, mixed their ideas and thrashed out a vision for just how far cellular technology can go in creating a better world. The end result was new ideas, the formation of a lasting network and the production of a body of knowledge available to many beyond the confines of the conference.
Organised by Green Media Toolshed (http://www.greenmediatoolshed.org/) and Aspiration (http://www.aspirationtech.org/), 40-odd participants from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia explored strategies and tactics for the use of cell phones as an organizing tool towards the end of helping civil society activists capitalize on the global wireless phone infrastructure for advocacy communications and organizing.
Key areas addressed by the conference included tactics, networking and funding. The conference produced guides on how to use SMS in organizing work, discussed organizing challenges in the South and addressed issues of language and access. (Read the full conference proceedings by visiting http://www.mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Proceedings) The conference produced a declaration on the use of mobile phones entitled “Without the people mobile tech means nothing”, which can be read at (http://www.mobileactive.org/wiki/index.php?title=Without_the_people_mobi...)
The stories told below were related to Pambazuka News by three participants at the conference, each of whom are using cellular technology in their work to confront power and create change.
* Bukeni, Ajedi-Ka-Child Soldier Project, DRC
“My name is Bukeni and I am from the eastern part of the DRC, South Kivu Province, Uvira. I am a director of a local NGO called Ajedi-Ka-Child Soldier Project and am also a filmmaker. I make films on child soldiers in the DRC and started working on this issue in 1998.
In my town many children were abducted by the RCD-Goma during the conflict in the DRC. There was a militia called the Mai-Mai which was recruiting children by force. At that stage I was a student in Bukavu in 1998. Parents began to send me letters asking me to advocate for information about their children.
I went to the chief commander to talk to him. It was hard to reach him but eventually I got an audience. The list of children that I got from parents contained 22 names and I showed him the list. After discussion he agreed to do what he could and we agreed to meet in a week. When I returned I had to give the bodyguards cigarettes to be able to get an audience with the commander, who provided a list of 11 children who had been found. They said they could not do anything else and warned me not to insist - they threatened they would shoot me. I asked what message I should take to the parents and they told me to tell them that I had found nothing. I sent a letter to the parents telling them what I had found out.
By that time it was Christmas holidays and some parents came to thank me when I returned home. After that I tried to contact some friends to see what could be done to advocate. But the problem was that in the villages there is still a great deal of insecurity. However, we knew relatives in these villages and so we went to them to find out from other parents who had the same problem. We met again after 10 days and in that time had collected the names of 110 names of children who had disappeared. We decided to set up an NGO. Our primary goal was to advocate for these children and to monitor abuses.
In 2 000, I established a transit centre to accommodate children being demobilised from camps. In the training camps I would find hundreds of children and would speak to the commanders to get 3,4,5, or 6 children back. Up to last year we have been able to demobilise 310 children. Primarily we are doing demobilisiation and reintegration by uniting the children with their parents. We also do advocacy to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers.
Advocating in the camps is not without risk. I have been arrested four times and beaten twice.
In 2003 I introduced the use of video as a tool of advocacy. Some parents have encouraged their children to join militia because they believe that it will help to protect them. I began to try to go into the camps to make footage and in 2003 made my first film. The quality was not good, but in 2004 I found a partner in Witness, who specialise in using videos as a tool of advocacy. The video I made had the goal of sensitising the local community to prevent the recruitment of child soldiers. Since June 2005 the video has been screened in villages and sometimes 1000 people come to watch it.
In the villages people often don’t have access to TV. They are sometimes just fascinated to see the images so we often screen it twice so that the message sinks in the second time. The video has been a huge success.
This year in May I also made a video focusing on girl soldiers. The real reason for their recruitment is sexual exploitation. I addressed it to the international community because we need international action because our courts are not effective. Last year the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said the DRC would be the first country investigated before the ICC. The video called on the ICC to take into consideration the recruitment and use of child soldiers because that is a war crime under the ICC. The video raised the necessity of prosecuting those responsible.
In our activities we also do reporting and monitoring activities on child rights. In 2000 we implemented village committees for child protection whose role is in reporting and monitoring on child rights violations. Each committee has five members and are established in each village and are known by the community. Usually when there is a situation they compile a report and send it by mail to our office, but this can take 4-5 days.
During May I got a small grant from a New York based organisation called Watchlist on Children and Armed Conflict. I submitted a small proposal that asked if they could provide us with cellphones so that the village could provide reports. We now have 15 committees in 22 villages. They report by cellphone and SMS about abductions and maiming, who is responsible and who the victims are.
For example in a village called Akwe, there was a girl who was shot by militia. Information was collected about who shot her and it was reported to our office. We alerted the local authorities and asked them for quick intervention to make sure that an arrest was made and an investigation done. This was all through SMS and cellphones. It was very fast. Unfortunately, the authorities could not arrest those responsible because in our area there is impunity. We collect about two reports a week, but also do verification.
I have a passion for working on this issue. I am working voluntarily. These children are our children. Let us do something to solve the problem – what we can do is advocate for a cessation of impunity and of violations of child rights and maybe then these children can build a better future for the whole nation.”
* Trixie, TXTPower, The Philippines
“We were initially a consumer advocacy group formed in 2001. This was the year that President Estrade was ousted and one of the tools that we used was SMS. It took SMS to mobilise people to go out on the streets and vent their frustration.
During that time if you were a mobile phone subscriber you received 100 free SMS messages. When companies saw how much people were texting, they looked at decreasing the amount and in August 2001 this is what they proposed. Activists felt that something had to be done.
We formed TXTPower and one of the ways in which we fought against this was through a text boycott. At that time 100 million messages were being sent a day. One text message equals one peso so that was a loss of $2m a day for the companies. Almost immediately the companies made a public announcement saying they would not remove the text allocation.
The next major thing we did was in 2003 when the country was in the middle of a financial crisis. An IMF suggestion was to tax text messages. We said that this was really not going to happen. If something is already free, how are you going to tax it?
This led on to August 2004 when we picketed congress and sent messages out saying ‘Texters Revolt! Say no to text tax!’ We got the cellphone number of the speaker of the parliament and told people to text messages to that number. We also had overseas workers join in the campaign. It became front page headlines in the newspapers in September and it forced the speaker to declare that he would not tax text messages. There are still proposals to tax messaging but we are monitoring it closely. We had some complaints from the speaker because he could not use his cellphone for some time!
Last year we extended our engagement to the May 2004 national elections where we supported progressive party list groups. Cheating and vote-buying were common place. We therefore focused our activities on monitoring and had a central area where we set up a computer to receive messages from people in the regions telling us if there were problems or vote buying. A quick reaction team would be composed of a lawyer, a human rights worker and representatives from different parties.
Our most notorious activity was a few months ago. In the elections there were allegations of cheating. There were wiretaps of the president speaking to an election official. The Department of Justice declared that anyone in possession of wiretap recordings could be arrested at any time. A few days later people made a ring tone out of the tapes and were playing it on their phones. We had the idea of loading the ring tone up onto our website. We had to consult on the legal implications, but eventually we went ahead with it. There was an overwhelming response – we had 300 000 hits on our website in two days. Others emailed us different versions of the ring tone. Sometime later the president apologised for talking to the official.
Anger motivates me. We are an angry bunch of people. The economy is bad – the government does not care about the people. The cellphone is a way for people to express how they feel. Our government hides a whole lot of truth from its people – we have a right to know the truth and advocate to get the government to act in the interests of the people. For this we have been called cyber-terrorists.
We are just a loose group of people. We have no money and no offices. It’s just a group of really angry activists.”
* Oscar, Greenpeace, Argentina
“One of the many campaigns is against forest destruction and we work very closely with indigenous people. In this area the indigenous communities are fighting for the right to their land and are facing trouble because land owners buy up land to cultivate Soya, which is 99% genetically modified. These communities have a long history of resistance to eviction and the destruction of the forests.
One of the problems we detect is that there are no landlines to stay in contact if landowners are trying to destroy homes and forest. We gave mobile phones to different leaders in the communities and are using them to get messages from people.
When we get warnings that the forest is being destroyed we go into action with motorbikes to stop the bulldozers. We blockade the bulldozers with chains and demobilise them. SMS is also used to network and for organising protests. It is a good tool for remaining in close contact with local communities because one of the problems is that the communities are remote and don’t know each other. We now have around 50 leaders with mobile phones and they represent around 10 000 people.
Sometimes the bulldozer operators transmit that we are in action and they call the police, who wait for us at the entrance to the forests. Sometimes we take videos to show the media what is happening. We also have a helicopter which we sometimes use for escape. The Plan B is that we are arrested and one person escapes with the footage in order to get it to the media. Sometimes the police are violent and don’t respect the laws.
The circumstances of these people is that they are very poor and have no access to water or energy. They live in small communities of 5-10 families inside the forest. The forest is very important to them because it is a source of water and food.
According to legislation, the indigenous people have the right to their land but the problem is that they don’t have papers to show that the property belongs to them. Actually the government is selling the land to big landowners who have 10 or 50 000 hectares of land. In some cases it is difficult to know how many hectares of land they own. Once it is sold the bulldozers build routes and then deforest the area and grow Soya. The soil is very fragile and after a few years it becomes a desert.
Soya is a big international business and one of the reasons for the recovery of the economy is the export of Soya. Indigenous people are being evicted and end up on the borders of the big cities to live in very poor areas.
We are winning the local fights. We have stopped the sale of forests in a legal way and stopped the bulldozers with strong local resistance. We are now in a deadlock – they are not going ahead but they are not surrendering. This is the situation now. But Soya expansion means money and a ‘good’ economy.”
* Patrick Burnett works for Fahamu.
* Please send comments to [email protected]
“You have to be a genius to make a loss in a beer business,” writes Issa Shivji as he critiques the false logic behind privatization on the African continent. The first entities to face privatization were those that were most successful, he notes, with the subsequent argument for further privatization pushing the line that privatization led to a quick turnaround in the fortunes of ailing state enterprises.
The privatisation mania has gripped us like an unpreventable plague. The privatisation list is being expanded inexorably. Whether we admit it or not, and whatever the language we may use to rationalise it, the fact remains that privatisation is thrust down the throats of African governments by the BWIs (Bretton Woods Institutions) and the dominant Western powers. Even the so-called debt relief by the G8 is predicated on privatisation as one of the conditionalities. And the BWIs have a peculiar way of arguing.
The failures of privatisation are used to argue for more privatisation of more resources. The argument goes, “if you don’t privatise enough, you cannot reap its benefits”. And, of course, the success of privatisation per force calls for more privatisation. Either way, the argument is self-fulfilling.
The first rationale was that loss-making parastatals were a burden on the taxpayer. Privatisation would ensure that they were turned into efficient, tax paying enterprises. Yet, of course, the first parastatals to be privatised, like the breweries, were not loss making. You have to be a genius to make a loss in a beer business. Their “quick successes” in terms of turnover and tax revenues were used to justify other privatisations.
Obviously, no private investor would want to buy a loss making enterprise. So they have to be sold at dirt-cheap prices without liabilities and losses. Liabilities have to be taken over by the state, which means the very taxpayer who was supposed to be rescued from the loss making parastatal in the first place. Invariably, one of the first casualties of privatisation is workers, thousands of whom are made redundant. The new owners refuse to pay retrenchment benefits. The government has to do it, if at all. So the taxpayer assumes another liability while at the same time some of the tax payers fall out of the tax payers list as they join the queues of job-seekers.
No private profiteer would want to put in his capital unless he makes profit, and, not just profits, but high rates of profit. Africa today offers very high rates of return on capital, what with its rich resources and dependent governments. As Mwalimu (Julius Nyere) once said, Africa attracts only missionaries and mercenaries: missionaries to console its poor, and mercenaries to oversee its pillage.
But profit-making assumes certain minimum conditions. It is the state which has to take on the burden of creating the enabling environment for capital to make profits: build the infrastructure and supply water and electricity and telecommunications at cheap rates; control recalcitrant workers; maintain law and order and facilitate various service providers - from the entertainment industry to catering to security companies - to service the new “community of expatriates”. It is believed that Africa today has more expatriates than at the time of independence.
But then our water and electricity and telephone parastatals are not efficient. Their tariffs are high. Our markets are below standard; our meat is not hygienic and our tomatoes and onions and oranges do not meet the minimum size. So utilities too have to be denationalized, if not by outright sale, then via leasing and management contracts. Squatters have to be cleared to make way for supermarkets and expatriate villages to supply roasted meat from South Africa and cereals from Switzerland.
But it is not easy to turn around utilities into profit making ventures. Their plants and machinery are outdated. Their billing systems have lots of leakages. Since profits or commissions depend on revenue, more efficient water meters and electric meters have to be imported. Once again the state is called upon to provide enabling finance for rehabilitation. It is obliged to take loans from the World Bank and elsewhere to help the investor to import the necessary machinery. Of course, the loans have to be serviced and repaid from the taxpayer’s money – whether the existent or yet-to-be-born. While public debts mount private profits rocket, all in the name of development.
But corporate profit making has to look for new terrains constantly. From producing commodities to turning pubic goods into commodities, the corporate capital moves from manufacturing to public services, education and health and water and energy and from commoditizing land to privatising forests.
Privatisation and commercialisation of forest products is the new trend. A recent story in Tanzanian newspapers reported the deal to lease out the Longuza Teak Plantation to Kilombero Valley Teak Company (KVTC) and is only a tip of the iceberg. Forests have become important to corporate capital not only for timber resources but for bio-resources. By the same token, the implication of delivering forests to corporate capital go beyond the issues of deforestation, as corporate capital turns them into producers of raw material for their veritable workshops of genetic engineering.
Privatisation of forests and forest products has elicited a lot of resistance in Latin America and Asia and even some developed countries including Canada and the United States. The implication and effects of privatising forests are far reaching. These have been debated and discussed in other countries.
We need to learn from the experience of others and re-assess our own. Let the Longuza incidence open up a wide ranging debate on the issues of privatisation generally, but more particularly, the implications of privatising – in whatever form – one of the most important resource and heritage, our forests.
Let us not deliver our future livelihoods into the hands of corporate pirates.
©Issa Shivji. Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
* Please send comments to
Two weeks ago in Pambazuka News 221, Mukoma Wa Ngugi expressed disappointment with the constant comparison of New Orleans to the Third World in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In a compliment to that article Khalil Tian Shahyd argues that the application of human rights standards in relation to the debate over the terms ‘refugees’ and ‘internally displaced persons’ could help America deal with the crisis.
Listening to the many news reports and coverage of the disaster left by Hurricane Katrina, it is easy to get frustrated from the lack of depth of discussion. The absence of intelligent debate can be witnessed particularly around the latest hot bed issue, the use of the term, 'refugees'.
Many African-American leaders quickly responded to its use in denunciation. Charging that it devalued a people who are 'American' citizens and taxpayers to the national economy, these leaders demanded the survivors be referred to as 'victims' or simply 'survivors'. The cries from Black leadership grew so loud that President Bush himself had to clearly state in a recent interview his opinion that in fact we are citizens, not refugees.
While being trained academically in the field of International development, the word refugee is one we discussed and used very often, without negative connotation or stereotype. This personal background led me to ask the question as to whether all the fuss against the use of the term was actually motivated by a latent 'American exceptionalism' whereby 'refugee' was a label unfit for people of such high international social status as American citizens. Perhaps the term, although widely used around the world, was meant to be reserved for the 'unfortunate' global majority born in the Global South, sometimes called the Third or Developing World. If this were the case then the advocacy against use of the term can only be termed as some form of humanitarian snobbery.
However, what the discussion on the subject shows in a less evident way, is the overall lack of interaction and integration of international human rights standards, tools and methodology into the repertoire of American civil society, political leadership, media and intellectuals.
While it is hard to say which came first, what should be noted however, is the existence of a circular cause-effect relationship between the lack of involvement of US based civil society and advocates in international rights discussions, and the US refusal to sign even the most basic commitments to human rights such as the CEDAW treaty on women's rights and the Child Rights treaty among others. Our continued lack of involvement plays into the interest of US foreign policy nationalists who continue strong arm tactics at the UN to achieve the interest of a narrow fundamentalist nationalism over internationally agreed mandates. Our isolation from international discussion has left us unaware into the happenings and possibilities for change that exist at the international level.
Not once since the controversy arose have I heard anyone -whether in the media or on internet blogs - use the internationally recognized standard label and definition of 'Internally Displaced Persons'. In fact the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has an entire agency, the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division (IAIDD), whose mission it is to:
"…coordinate an effective response to the needs of the internally displaced people worldwide." (http://www.reliefweb.int/idp/)
The IAIDD bases its work on the UN Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights', Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. (http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu2/7/b/principles.htm)
Although not legally binding, these principles are increasingly recognized as international standards by which all Internally Displaced People can measure and judge the effectiveness and extent of governmental response to their circumstances. This makes the principles a useful frame of analysis for advocates and defenders of the rights of the internally displaced from the Gulf Coast. As in all human rights legislation, which exists with little capacity for or assurance of implementation, the international pressure of shame is the best way to get governments who otherwise wouldn't, to implement their obligations.
A brief summary of some of the most relevant articles in the guidelines follows.
The first section covers principles 1-4 and gives a basic overview of the rights of IDPs to protection, and sets forth to identify the national government as obligated to positively enforce these rights. What this means simply is that realization of these rights requires government action, while inaction is tantamount to a denial of rights. Now perhaps it will become clear to advocates how these standards and language can be used. The section also explicitly warns against discrimination in the guarantee of these rights, and speaks to the special needs of women, children and the elderly for protection.
Section two, which covers principles 5-9 highlights, the obligation of the national government and international authorities to prevent circumstances that would require displacement. Principle 7 Article 2 states that authorities have an obligation to ensure adequate accommodation for those displaced, such that:
"…such displacements are effected in satisfactory conditions of safety, nutrition, health and hygiene, and that members of the same family are not separated."
Further, if displacement occurs in an emergency as is the case in the Gulf Coast, the authorities are responsible to ensure all people full disclosure of information as to where they will be relocated and about the extent of compensation. We have all heard and read accounts of people forced to board busses with no prior knowledge of where they are going and not being allowed to leave after finding out.
Principle 9 outlines the special obligations states have to minority groups and indigenous people who hold 'special' dependency to their native land base. The uniqueness of New Orleans' Afro-Creole culture, nurtured by the streets and climate of the city, can meet the status of 'special' dependency.
Section 3 deals extensively with the obligations of authorities to protect those displaced from violence and harm. Although primarily written with the context of a war situation in mind, it is easily transferable to the context found in the Gulf, particularly New Orleans, where the lack of response and deficit of organized community institutions opened an opportunity for the breakdown of civility in some cases. Principle 16 in this section proclaims the right of IDPs to know the whereabouts of family and obligates authorities to gathering and relaying this information. It appears through news reports that this is one area of some success so far, within obvious limits.
Again, principle 17 declares the obligation of authorities to reunite separated families, which from what I can tell from news reports is happening fairly consistently.
Principle 18 regards the rights of IDPs to adequate standards of living, food, water, clothing and shelter, medicines and sanitation. All these completely broke down for about six days into the aftermath. Attached to this principle is the special emphasis on the involvement of women in the planning and distribution of these basic needs, which makes sense being that it is women who are overwhelmingly responsible for meeting these needs for families. The positive psychological effect of having control over redistribution could be important as well.
Further principles deal with rights to education, and possessions.
Section 5, the final section, deals explicitly with the rights to return, and the conditions upon return to their homes. It sets forth the obligations of authorities to create the conditions that will be necessary for this return, which has been proposed in some instances. Principle 28 Article 2 states clearly that:
"Special efforts should be made to ensure the full participation of internally displaced persons in the planning and management of their return or resettlement and reintegration."
This statement I feel marks the major battle to be fought in the coming months and years as the business elites, real estate developers and local chambers of commerce will move to solidify their advantage within the redevelopment process. This section also calls on the authorities to commit to full compensation for those returning or those choosing to resettle in another area.
I hope this outline of the International Human Rights Standards on IDPs might deepen the stagnant debate and ranting over the right legal definition for the people of the Gulf Coast affected by Hurricane Katrina. It could in fact be that the reluctance of the administration to use the term is precisely for fear of being bound or called into account based on these very standards. How and if they are to be used in the debates to come will need to be decided by civil society and supporters in the Gulf region. What I hope will be gained from this is that people will realize the possibility and existence of rights beyond the narrow base upon which American constitutional rights are based.
I hope I have been able to contribute to making advocates aware of tools they may not otherwise have thought to consider.
* Khalil Tian Shahyd is from New Orleans, a community activist and graduate student of Sustainable International Development with a focus on Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Community Development in the Lower Mississippi Basin Region. He is currently in New Delhi with the UNDP working on state-level Human Development Reports. He plans to return to New Orleans and organize an HDR on the Lower Mississippi Basin region. He can be reached at: [email][email protected]
* Please send comments to [email protected]
Hello, I work on gender, Pambazuka News is great for me as a speaker of English, but we are very short of information in French on gender. We have created a Francophone network (www.genreenaction.net) to try and remedy this. Could you say something about it in your newsletter/site?
Pambazuka News replies: Thanks for your email. Readers of Pambazuka News - especially French readers - will be pleased to know that we have plans for a French edition of the newsletter in the near future. Watch Pambazuka News for details in the coming weeks.
EDITORIAL: There’s lots of rhetoric but little cash for human rights, notes Vinodh Jaichand
COMMENT&ANALYSIS: Three inspiring stories from the DRC, Argentina and The Philippines on how SMS is being used to confront power
- Issa Shivji critiques the myths behind the arguments for privatisation
- Human rights standards need to be applied in the US response to Hurricane Katrina, says Khalil Tian Shahyd in response to Mukoma Wa Ngugi’s article two weeks ago
PAN-AFRICAN POSTCARD: Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem remembers two Nigerian activists who died during September
CONFLICT&EMERGENCIES: Warning over DRC tension; Sudan peace efforts slammed
HUMAN RIGHTS: Adoption of an international treaty against forced disappearances a step forward, says rights groups
REFUGEES&FORCED MIGRATION: UNHCR helps South Africa tackle huge asylum backlog
ELECTIONS&GOVERNANCE: Somaliland elections go unnoticed
WOMEN&GENDER: Groups dismayed by “shameful lack of political will” at UN summit
DEVELOPMENT: EU Urged to Halt Regional Agreements
HEALTH&HIV/AIDS: ARV’s and the big pharmaceutical party in Africa
EDUCATION: Free schooling starts with huge logistical problems
ENVIRONMENT: Kenyan MP wary of GM crop trials
MEDIA&FXI: Free expression groups to mark global right to know day
PLUS…News about the internet, advocacy campaigns, courses, jobs and books and art.
Zimbabwean doctors, who routinely strike for more pay, are bitter that President Robert Mugabe's government has awarded them paltry monthly salary increases equivalent to the price of three loaves of low-quality bread. The Hospitals Doctors Association (HDA) said it was now consulting its membership with a view to staging more industrial action.
Ugandan army soldiers fighting a 19-year insurgency by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in the north of the country torture civilians as a method of enforcing discipline and extracting information from suspected criminals during interrogations, the Ugandan government human rights watchdog has said. "In 2004, the commission received 108 complaints alleging torture by soldiers of the UPDF [Uganda People's Defence Forces, the national army]," the Uganda Human Rights Commission said in its annual report for 2004, released on Tuesday.
The four parties that make up Ethiopia's largest opposition alliance, the Coalition for Unity and Democracy (CUD) have merged to form one party, an official of the coalition said last Thursday. The All Ethiopia Unity Party, the Union of Ethiopia Democracy Party, Rainbow Ethiopia and the Ethiopian Democratic League announced their unification on Saturday. It elected Hailu Shawel to continue as chairperson of the new party and Birtukan Mideksa to serve as vice-chair.
A polio vaccination campaign in remote areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), which was initially to start on 24 September, finally got underway on Tuesday after the project overcame logistical problems. The administrator of the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) vaccination project, Dr John Agbor, said the three-day campaign was aimed at some 10 million aged under five years in six provinces in the northern and southern parts of the country.
At least 800 people have been killed in a cholera epidemic which has struck nearly 50,000 in West Africa, many since mid-year, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Tuesday. Outbreaks of the water-borne disease were triggered by a particularly heavy rainy season, compounded by increased population movements, according to Claire-Lise Chaignat, WHO's global cholera coordinator.
"As the UN Heads of State and Government gather in New York for the UN Millennium +5 Summit key issues of concern to civil society organizations working in Africa continue to emerge. The Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) in Africa is deeply concerned that the draft outcome document is a betrayal of the world’s poor, particularly those in Africa. The declaration neither reviews progress nor addresses the challenges faced by governments in their efforts to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. It does not make any clear commitment to accelerating flow of resources neither does it demonstrate the political commitment that is required to do this."
The Liberia Democratic Institute in collaboration with other community-based grassroots groups on Saturday, September 10, 2005, on World White Band Day II joined the global community in the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) to pressurize the world richest countries to make their promises authentic and eradicate poverty. The march climaxed the series of activities that started on Tuesday, September 8, 2005. The White Band Day observation, the first of its kind in Liberia was launched not only to call the world riches nations attention to the acute poverty and hardship experienced by poor countries around the world but also to set the stage for positive mass citizen’s movement informed by calls for effective good governance practices in Liberia.
Bantubonke Biko once said, "it is better to die for an idea that will live than to live for an idea that will die.” In the noughties/zeroes/post-nineties I believe the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP) is that idea. It is what the Anti-Apartheid Movement was to the eighties. While no-one is calling on anyone to die (since enough people are dying because of poverty anyway), the Call is certainly an idea that should bring all global citizens, across the economic barriers, to action. While there is no doubt that GCAP is a brilliant idea, there definitely have been some questions on whether GCAP as a campaign should continue.
Like all great revolutions in recent memory, GCAP is an idea that was articulated by the middle class. Using the very minimalist Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), GCAP activists have pushed so that the upper classes, as personified by the global political and economic leaders, can make the end of poverty a reality. However, GCAP is in danger of becoming just another cool thing for the middle class symbolized by the very cool-looking white band unless and until we get the lower classes and the people affected on a day to day basis by poverty involved. The poor people, do, after all, constitute the majority of the world’s population.
It is true that coalitions in countries such as Bangladesh and Kenya have managed to take the MDGs to the people but much more needs to be done globally. Again to give comparison to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, being an anti-apartheid activist at that time meant death, jail time, or constant watch by the Special Branch and therefore a sacrifice of one’s self or freedom if one was in South Africa. To those that were elsewhere it meant being in constant danger of receiving a parcel bomb and boycotting the very tasteful South African wine (and other South African goods) in order to bring the South African economy to heel. It was the combined actions in South Africa and abroad together that managed to bring about the end of apartheid. Somehow I do not see the same sacrifices being made by GCAP activists and yet I feel that, if GCAP is to be successful and to continue, we need to do the same. It is true that many of us have participated in marches globally but when one marches and places their feet in a foot spa at the end of the march, they cannot really relate to a woman who has to walk ten miles back and forth to fetch water daily and feed her family.
Granted we live in a different world than the one that existed two decades ago yet it seems that much more was done then and more needs to be done now. We need to sensitise ourselves to poverty through working with the poor and thereafter we can better appreciate this very noble cause that we claim to be working for. For instance my comrades in the north can volunteer an hour at the soup kitchens or be a mentor to some child in a children’s home while we in the south can take time to volunteer with the ground organisations in the tents of Manila, the favelas of Sao Paolo, or the mkhukhus of South Africa. That way, when we tell Bretton Woods institutes to cancel the debt, when we tell them that 1.2 billion people are living on less than a dollar a day, we will be saying it with conviction because we would have walked the talk. An additional bonus is that we will no longer be talking for the poor people. They will be able to talk for themselves when they have been politicized to their poverty. As it is, while we sleep in five-star hotels and ask for an increase in aid on their behalf – they have absolutely no idea what the MDGs are and probably could not care because nobody has cared to communicate with them and show them their importance to the cause.
It is up to us, we who are living in these times to become that great generation that is revolutionary enough to ensure that the Global Call to Action against Poverty becomes, “an idea that will live." Together, across the economic barriers, we can!
Please find below details of a new publication:
Title: Genocide in the African Great Lakes States. Challenges for the International Criminal Court in the Case of the Democratic Republic of Congo
Author: Kalere, Jean Migabo
Source: International Criminal Law Review, Volume 5, Number 3, September 2005, pp. 463-484(22)
Publisher: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers
This ground-breaking book with a foreword by Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and UN human rights commissioner, uniquely distils the complex issues surrounding Africa as it enters the 21st century. A substantial introductory essay by the editors measures the distance Africa has travelled and the lessons it has learned since Africa in Crisis, the classic Earthscan book, was published in 1985.
The 9th Poetry Africa International Poetry Festival hosted by the University of Kwa- Zulu Natal's Centre for Creative Arts takes place in Durban from 10 - 15 October 2005. Thirty poets from fifteen different countries will descend on Durban for a groundbreaking experience of words and rhythms. The participants represent a diversity of poetic styles ranging from the lyrical genius of Lemn Sissay (UK) to the 2005 Daimler-Chrysler Award-winner for South African Poetry, Gabeba Baderoon. Fellow Daimler-Chrysler Award nominee and editor of Timbila, Vonani Bila is included in the South African line-up of poets, together with Sunday Independent Arts Editor, Robert Greigand former editor of New Coin, Joan Meterlekamp.
A one day workshop on networking opportunities in digital creative practices in Africa was held on 4 September 2005 at Arts Electronica 2005 (Linz, Austria). Discussions focused on pilot projects to support and develop creative practices in Africa through the use of information and communication technologies. Furthermore, an Africa Infopack, was also launched in the Electrolobby on 5 September 2005. This Infopack is a tool to find people to join the network of DigiArts Africa and to contribute, participate and gain from the network of key network agents.
Skinning the Skunk refers to a saying in Shona, kuvhiya kadembo. The Zimbabwean writer Stanley Nyamfukudza uses it here to illustrate how important problems, like the legacy of violence, are avoided in Zimbabwean public discussion. Terence Ranger writes on the new policy of rewriting the history of Zimbabwe, in the name of "patriotic history", through which the Zanu-PF government tries to assert hegemony and achieve "a total change of the mindset". To talk about Zimbabwe today also means to talk of the large diaspora. Beacon Mbiba presents a study on what is colloquially called "Harare North", that is London (and the rest of the UK).
Student Partnership Worldwide (SPW) is a youth led development charity that empowers young people from the North and South to work together as volunteers in rural areas of Africa and Asia. These peer educators deliver Health Education and Community Resource Peer Education Programmes empowering local youth to take control over their own lives and shape the future of their communities. 85% of SPW peer educators come from programme countries. SPW is offering Opportunity Africa participants the unique opportunity of applying for a bursary to go on their Uganda or India Health Education or Community Resource programmes. The bursary is for young people who are living/ working in London and aged between 18 and 28.
The incumbent will work to improve awareness and accountability for human rights violations against women in sub-Saharan Africa by, among other things, conducting fact-finding missions; writing and publicizing reports; and developing and implementing strategies to change abusive laws, policies, and practices.
The post-holder will coordinate a 3-year project on enabling minorities in Africa to use international standards and mechanisms, primarily the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights. S/he will have project management experience and good English and French.