The Sudanese ambassador to the UN told reporters on Thursday (26 October 2006) that the head of the United Nations Mission in Sudan, Jan Pronk, who was expelled from the country for remarks in his personal web-blog, had not supported the Khartoum government. Responding to questions on Pronk's status, Sudanese Ambassador Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem said, "He was a failure as far as we are concerned. He was not supportive, he was abusive, he became part of the problem rather than the solution."

Despite repeated promises to eradicate hunger, the number of people going hungry continues to grow - now more than 852 million - with a child dying every five seconds from malnutrition and related diseases, an independent United Nations expert said today. It is a "shame on humanity," especially when the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) calculates that our planet could feed twice the current population of 6 billion if there were better food distribution, the UNHCHR Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Jean Ziegler told a press conference.

Salih Mahmoud Osman, a lawyer who has defended and given free legal aid to hundreds of victims of human rights abuses in Darfur, Sudan for the past two decades will receive Human Rights Watch's highest award on November 7. Osman, who is from the Darfur region of Sudan, has provided legal representation to those who have been arbitrarily detained and tortured by the Sudanese government, regardless of which ethnic group they are from.

Latin America and the Caribbean leads the developing world in the provision of pre-school education, according to the annual Education for All Global Monitoring Report, published by UNESCO last week. However, despite well-documented benefits for child development and well-being, the Report finds that this area remains the forgotten link in the education chain in many regions, and that half the world’s countries have no early childhood care and education policy for children under age three.

Central African non-governmental organisations are urging states within their region to ratify the protocol on the African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights to bolster the fight against impunity and corruption. "It is time civil-society organisations in central Africa mobilised together to get our states really engaged in the establishment of the African Court," Loamba Moké, the central Africa coordinator and focal point for the coalition advocating the establishment of the court, said.

SABC board members did not agree unanimously with the way the state broadcaster handled its response to the report of a commission of inquiry on allegations that it blacklisted political commentators, Parliament’s communications committee heard yesterday. Board member Prof Alison Gillwald said she understood a board decision for an ad hoc committee to draw up a statement meant that board members would have an opportunity to scrutinise it before its release.

The lecturers strike bit harder as another university was closed, while some institutions refused to release the tutors' salaries. It was a rude shock for some lecturers yesterday (30 October 2006) who had gone to banks to withdraw their October pay, only to be turned away. Investigation by The East African Standard showed that at least three universities have not released the salaries. At Kenyatta University, which has 700 lecturers, only 100, who are also administrators, have been paid.

An aggressive HIV/AIDS awareness campaign has had a positive impact on the sexual behaviour and attitudes of Swazis, a new survey has found. More than 40 percent of the land-locked kingdom's adults are HIV positive. The study was commissioned by the National Emergency Response Council on HIV/AIDS (NERCHA), with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and conducted by the Mexico-based research centre, Community Information and Epidemiological Technologies (CIET).

Massive social mobilization is needed to defeat the deadly resurgence of tuberculosis, says the Open Society Institute’s Public Health Watch in five new reports released today. The studies on TB policy in Bangladesh, Brazil, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Thailand highlight how TB, HIV/AIDS, and poverty combine to cause almost two million preventable deaths each year.

Providing HIV/AIDS treatment and care in countries at peace is hard enough; extending those services to people on the run from conflict or disaster seems, on the face of it, hopelessly complicated. But even during the height of the fighting in war-wracked eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the medical relief group Médecins Sans Frontières was doing it in two clinics in Bukavu, capital of South Kivu Province, developing a model that has been replicated in other conflict areas.

The maternity wing at Harare Central Hospital has been hit by a critical shortage of midwives, seriously compromising service delivery. Out of the required 158, only 41 are at work and are overwhelmed by work so much that they are finding it difficult to cope.

More than one-fifth of all violent crimes in Namibia occurs in the context of domestic relationships. Due to this finding, which forms part of the Legal Assistance Centre, research on the implementation of the Combating of Rape Act and the Combating of Domestic Violence Act that is still underway, the LAC feels that if domestic violence is eliminated from society, women will be significantly safer from this crime.

Two men walk determinedly towards the improvised minibus taxi rank on the Mpumalanga side of the Ressano Garcia border post with Mozambique. One dangles a faded canvas bag leisurely over his shoulder. The other mumbles something in Portuguese and points a finger in the direction of the taxis, his unoccupied arm swinging purposefully as if to remind the two women in tow carrying heavy bags that being a man extricates him from such burdensome preoccupations.

Connecting Africa to the global world, ReConnect Africa is a unique online publication and portal that provides readily accessible information and essential services for employers who recruit, manage and develop African human resources and for graduates and professionals in Africa and the Diaspora seeking opportunities in employment, business and investment in Africa.

The decade since the mid-90s saw a series of changes in the communications environment as African governments moved away from monopoly ownership of national telcom operators to competition among a variety of players offering communications services. Open markets and independent and transparent regulators were increasingly seen as necessary conditions for investment.

A new academic journal will be launched during 2007, dealing with conflict and peace issues from a multi-disciplinary, and distinctly African perspective. The African Conflict and Peace Review will provide a vehicle for African scholars, and those focussing on Africa, to publish their views on issues of conflict and peace affecting the continent.

On more than one occasion over recent months I’ve heard or read something actually defending inequality. After a lifetime of hearing about the idea of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, I was hearing educated people saying inequality is what keeps the system going - a motive force propelling our society to ever new heights.

Last week at the United Nations, the majority of the world’s governments took the first step towards a global Arms Trade Treaty to prevent international arms transfers that fuel conflict, poverty and serious human rights violations. The vote comes three years after the launch of a campaign, which has seen over a million people in 170 countries calling for a Treaty.

Mr Nkhoma has a big smile on his face as we join him in front of his impressive maize field in the village of Kajintchi, 120 km to the north of Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi. He is the president of one of the 42 clubs in the irrigation project implemented by the Malawi Red Cross with the support of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, who supply them with seed, a pump and give technical advice.

In the period since the beginning of the 1990s, CODESRIA has been at the forefront of the quest to harness the efforts of African scholars in both extending the frontiers of knowledge production around issues of gender, and doing so in a manner that ensures that for as many scholars as are active in its networks and at other African sites of scholarly work, gender is integrated into their frames of analyses.

A UNHCR team is heading to Liboi on the Kenya/Somali border Friday (27 October 2006) to arrange the transfer of some 2,000 Somali refugees reported to be waiting there after the shuttling to the Dadaab camps was suspended mid-October. The suspension was put in force after it was discovered that Kenyan nationals were fraudulently presenting themselves as refugees, and that refugees already registered at the Dadaab camps were posing as new refugees with the aim of receiving multiple registration cards and consequently more assistance.

The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) is pleased to announce the eighteenth competition under its Small Grants Programme for Thesis Writing. The grants are intended to contribute to the development of the social sciences in Africa and the strengthening of the research capacities in African universities through the funding of primary research conducted by post-graduate students and professionals.

Health workers are soon to start using their cell phones to track and control the spread of HIV/Aids and other diseases countrywide. This is due to a mobile phone application that has been introduced in Rwanda before any other African country. The application has been introduced under the auspices of Voxiva Inc-US and GSMA. a global trade association for GSM mobile phone operators.

I am currently working on a subproject called FACE Human Rights for which I am creating a wiki-site, a webpage with the same concept as Wikipedia but based on knowledge management for human rights organizations. The concept of this site is for human rights specialists to change the content of the site by making additions according to their knowledge base. The site is still in its early stages but the basic interface and structure have been established and it is a live site ([ur]www.facehumanrights.org/wiki (http://www.facehumanrights.org/wiki>). I would like to invite you to take a preliminary look at the site and make any additions you would like. Thank you.

I am writing in response to the letter from Margaret Kathemba (2006-10-17). She asks the question what does the MDC have to do with the current situation in Zimbabwe. Does she not know that the United States and Britain have implemented sanctions against the country at the invitation of the MDC? These sanctions have much to do with the current situation in Zimbabwe. How can the MDC be a champion of the people if it makes invitations to the West to hurt the people? ZANU-PF is the liberator of the people and understands that the struggle continues. And it appears that the MDC has volunteered to be the puppet of the West. How do members of that organization sleep at night? Shame on MDC. SHAME!

White African reviews five blogs from Uganda. "I don’t know any of these bloggers, but found them all compelling reads in their own way."

The very first World Congress on Communication for Developement got underway on October 25 in Rome. In the course of the WCCD, we will be able to measure if the participants will be able to give 'communication for development' a clear focus and genuine identity, reports the Association for Progressive Communications.

As the crisis in the Niger Delta brews, Ike Okonta looks behind the fragile truce between the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and Nigeria's central government.Pambazuka News publishes here the first instalment of a substantive paper prepared following a recent visit to the blood and oil-soaked region.

The fragile truce brokered between Nigeria’s central government and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) in April 2006, jerked to a bloody halt on 20th August. On that afternoon, soldiers of the Joint Task Force, a contingent of the Nigerian Army, Navy and Air Force deployed by the government to enforce its authority on the restive oil-bearing Niger Delta, ambushed fifteen members of the MEND militia in the creeks of western delta and murdered them. The dead men had gone to negotiate the release of a Shell Oil worker kidnapped by youth in Letugbene, a neighbouring community. The Shell staff also died in the massacre.

The incident occurred five days after Olusegun Obasanjo, Nigeria’s President, instructed armed forces commanders in the region to resort to force and quickly ‘pacify’ the region. This marked a sharp turn-around from the promise Obasanjo gave to representatives of the MEND militia in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, in early April that he would utilise dialogue and carefully targeted development projects to return peace, law and good government to the impoverished Niger Delta.

The streets of Warri, the city where Shell and ChevronTexaco’s western delta operations are based, were thick with tension on the morning of 2 September when Ijo youth converged on Warri Central Hospital in the suburbs to retrieve the corpses of their colleagues and commence the burial ceremonies. The Ijaw are the largest ethnic group in the Niger Delta. The MEND militia draws the bulk of its membership from the Ijaw.

Significantly, there were several prominent Ijaw political and civic leaders at the ceremony. Ordinary people, mainly Ijaw peasant farmers and fisher folk, had left their hoes and fishing nets and travelled from their hamlets in the creeks to pay their last respects to the slain. Spokesmen of the Nigerian government had sought to represent the fifteen militias as ‘irresponsible hostage-takers’ in the wake of the slaughter. But those massed at the hospital that morning spoke only of heroes who had fallen in the battle for ‘Ijaw liberation.’ MEND, it was clear to observers, was firmly embedded in the Ijaw communities from which it emerged in February 2006. MEND continues to enjoy the support of youth and impoverished peasants whose farm lands and fishing creeks – their sole source of livelihood - have been destroyed by half a century of uncontrolled oil production and whose cause they took up arms to champion.

Even so, members of the MEND militia have never seen armed force as a suitable and effective weapon, but only as a tactical tool. They were forced to wield this tool as a last resort after three decades of peaceful entreaty was replied with cynical indifference, from the central government and the oil companies. Leaders of the Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), a civic group with headquarters in Gbaramatu, an Ijaw clan in which MEND’s activities are very pronounced, have served as informal representatives of the MEND militia in negotiations with President Obasanjo and Nigeria’s central government following the abduction of nine foreign oil workers in the creeks of the delta in February. When the author interviewed Oboko Bello, President of FNDIC in Warri in early August, two weeks before the Letugbene massacre, he spoke warmly about the peace meeting he and other Ijaw leaders had had in Abuja with Obasanjo and other government officials on April 5 and 18 2006. He even assured that MEND militants would put their weapons permanently beyond use if the government went some way to address the long-standing grievances of his people. [1]

But it was a sorrowful and stone-faced Bello who addressed his fellow Ijaw during the burial ceremony that afternoon in Warri. He said: “Shell officials were privy to the arrangements Ijaw patriots had made as part of the Joint Investigation and Verification exercise to free the captured company worker and also facilitate the re-opening of the company’s facilities in the creeks. Shell was in direct communication with the commanders of the Joint Task Force, even up to the time our young men set out in their boats to rescue the Shell worker in Letugbene. These young men were not hostage takers. They were Ijaw patriots, selflessly working to repair the damaged peace between the oil company and our people. For this they were ambushed and murdered by soldiers in the service of Shell.” [2]

Oboko Bello ended his one-hour speech on a note of conciliation, arguing that the peace process between the MEND militia and the government begun on 12 March following a meeting between President Obasanjo and prominent Ijaw leaders must not be derailed. But angry voices are rising all over the creeks vowing revenge. These are young men - the volatile, striking arm of the Ijaw political and civic resurgence. Whether moderate voices will be able to rein them in remain to be seen.

For its apart, the central government has adopted a new defiant, militaristic posture, publicly announcing in late August that it was now collaborating closely with the US and British governments to deploy more naval personnel and new hardware to “root out oil rustlers, kidnappers and other undesirable elements from the Niger Delta and the wider Gulf of Guinea.” [3] The MEND militants hunkered down in their heavily fortified redoubts in the creeks, this sounded ominously like an open declaration of war.

FNDIC leaders who spoke to the author shortly after the burial ceremony expressed the concern that the government’s belligerent posture could be an attempt to generate political turbulence in the Niger delta during the general elections, due in April 2007. This turbulence would provide an opportunity for Obasanjo to impose an interim government and extend his tenure beyond the constitutionally stipulated two terms. The elections had been massively rigged in the region (and even more so in the Ijaw areas) by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 1999 and again in 2003. But FNDIC officials continue to hold out hope that fair elections in which the Ijaw would be fairly represented will provide the solution to the political and economic crisis in which they are trapped. They insist they will continue to work zealously to thwart any attempt to prevent free elections from taking place in Ijaw communities next April.

However, elections in Nigeria and the Niger Delta in particular, are usually turbulent affairs, sometimes descending into the bloody and violent. As was the case in the past, politicians are replenishing their arms caches and resuscitating the network of thugs they rely on to intimidate their rivals, coerce voters to do their bidding, or stuff the ballot boxes outright. The region is awash with small arms and hard cash yet again, and the already volatile cocktail of local resentment of the oppressive activities of the government and the oil companies looks set to blend with guns for hire prowling the creeks and sire another bloody inferno.

Spectacle

The MEND militia and its political sponsors set out in the early months of the year to draw the attention of the world to the parlous condition of the Ijaw people, deploying spectacle as a powerful weapon. Images of armed youth in masks wielding sub-machine guns in the creeks and helpless oil workers at their mercy, squatting in the bowels of speedboats, were beamed to the media all over the world through a skilful use of the internet.

These graphic images generated intense emotions in government circles as well as in the environmental and human rights community in the West. Global oil prices surged and fell with the tone of MEND’s press statements and the physical condition of the captives, whose photographs they put out on the net. But the drama invariably ended on a peaceful note, with MEND setting the oil workers free unharmed. After a spate of armed attacks on the facilities of Shell and two other oil companies in the western delta followed MEND’s emergence in February, the militants and the government seemed to have reached an unspoken agreement that this drama could go on. The actors would be permitted to air their grievances on the world stage, as long as the oil workers periodically taken hostage were not harmed.

The outrage with which the Letugbene murders were greeted by Ijaw youth in the creeks, and rising political tensions all over the country, means there is no knowing whose voice will command allegiance in the coming months: the moderates counselling patience and political participation, or the young hotheads eager to return to the creeks and take on the government and the oil companies they are allied with.

Prelude to an uprising

Before the emergence of MEND, the last time the Ijaw took up arms against the Nigerian government in an organised effort to assert their political rights was forty years ago. In February 1966, Isaac Adaka Boro, a graduate of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, formed the Niger Delta Volunteer Service (NDVS), a militia comprising of several young and educated Ijaw men, and declared the Ijaw-speaking areas of Nigeria’s then ‘Eastern Region’ an independent ‘Niger Delta Republic.’ In an eleven-point declaration of independence, Boro stated that “all former agreements as regards the crude oil of the people undertaken by the now defunct ‘Nigerian’ government in the territory have been declared invalid,” and that “ll oil companies are commanded …to stop exploration and renew agreements with the new Republic. Defiance of this order will result in dislocation of the company’s exploration and forfeiture of their rights of renewal of such agreements.” [4]

Although Federal troops, directed from the regional capital Enugu soon quashed Isaac Boro’s uprising, the twelve-day revolt jolted the nation. It focussed attention on the travails of the riverbank communities of the Eastern Region, and re-opened debate about their demand (since the Willincks hearing in 1958) to be separated from the Eastern Region in an independent state of their own. At the time the Eastern Region was dominated by the more populous Igbo ethnic group, obliging the Ijaw, Ibibio, Ogoni and other smaller groups to band together and ask for a new ‘Rivers State.’

Boro and his two associates, Sam Owonaro and Notthingham Dick, were arrested and imprisoned. Developments elsewhere in the country were soon to alter the fortunes of the three militants in a dramatic manner. Nigeria had been convulsed in political crisis following independence from Britain in October 1960. At the heart of the dispute was the unwieldy three-region structure that the departing colonialists bequeathed to the country, ensuring that the Northern region, led by Muslim feudal lords who had cooperated with British administrators in governing the country, were given the largest slice, bigger than the Western and Eastern Region combined.

Northern politicians were quick to turn this numerical advantage into political and economic rewards, introducing a corrupt and authoritarian mode of rule in the country that enabled them to transfer wealth derived from the south to their own region. In January 1966 five young army majors, the bulk of Igbo extraction, staged a military coup in an attempt to overthrow the civilian government and put an end to the drift towards misgovernment. Several leading politicians and senior Army officers, including the Prime Minister and the Premier of the Northern Region, were killed. The bulk of those that lost their lives were northerners. Casualty figures in the East were light, leading to accusation by northern officers that the January coup was a plot by Igbo officers and politicians to take over the government of the country by force.

Six months later, in July 1966, northern officers staged a counter-coup, attempted to pull the North out of the Federation, but then changed their mind at the last minute (under pressure from the British High Commissioner and the American Ambassador). Leaders of the coup had killed the military Head of State, General Ironsi, an Igbo who had taken over the reins of government after the January coup had collapsed as the most senior officer in the Army. Over three hundred other officers, the bulk of them from the Eastern Region, were also murdered. The coup leaders appointed Yakubu Gowon, a lieutenant colonel and fellow northerner, Head of State and declared that the Ironsi government had been overthrown.

The military administrator of the Eastern Region, Col. Emeka Ojukwu, refused to recognise Gowon as Head of State, and insisted that the late Ironsi’s second in command, Brigadier Ogundipe take over. Relations between the two sides deteriorated swiftly. Fearing that the East was about to secede, the Gowon regime hunkered down in the federal capital Lagos, and split the country into twelve new states in May 1967, two for the ethnic minority groups of the Eastern Region. The Ijaw formed the bulk of the new Rivers State. Ojukwu responded a few days later by declaring the East as the Republic of Biafra, a new state independent of Nigeria. Federal troops invaded Biafra and civil war broke out. Isaac Boro and his compatriots were released from prison by Federal troops when they overran the riverside parts of Biafra. He subsequently joined the Federal side as a major and commanded his own unit under the Third (Marine Commando) Division. Boro was to die in battle a few weeks before the war ended.

The bloody civil war that raged for thirty months and in which an estimated three million people died, was to profoundly alter Nigeria’s political landscape. The war ended in January 1970 with a Federal victory. Although the Ijaw had reason to be content, having secured the new state they had been asking for since the 1950s, the euphoria was to prove short-lived. The central government had passed on to a victorious federal army the bulk of whose commanders were from the now defunct Northern Region. These officers quickly turned their attention to the oil wells of the Niger Delta. In cooperation with civil servants, they pushed through a number of military edicts nationalising the delta oil fields, and altering the formula for sharing revenue. Whereas previously fifty percent of revenue went to the region or state from which it was derived, all the states now had an equal share, with the central government in Lagos keeping the lion’s share for itself.

The new fiscal regime, which now left the Ijaw and the other oil-bearing communities of the Niger Delta at a distinct disadvantage, took nearly ten years to achieve. The process began in the heat of the civil war, when the Gowon government enacted Decree 15 of 1969, removing the control of the oil fields from their states of origin and putting this in its own control. By the time the soldiers handed over to a new civilian government in October 1979, a rash of decrees and edicts had transformed the Niger Delta into a colony whose inhabitants bore the brunt of the oil production on which the national economy relied heavily but enjoyed none of the benefits. These edicts included the 1978 Land Use Act that confiscated the oil-bearing land of the delta communities and put this under the ‘protection’ of the central government.

The new civilian government, under President Shehu Shagari, a northerner, was effete, purposeless and corrupt. This ill-fated Second Republic was overthrown in December 1983 by General M. Buhari. On Buhari’s watch, the portion of oil revenue that went to the Ijaw and the other oil-bearing communities of the Niger Delta plunged to a derisory 1.5 per cent, down from 20 two years previously. Meanwhile Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), the local subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch oil giant, and other Western oil companies operating in the Niger Delta continued to benefit from the legislations that had successfully reduced the delta communities to squatters on their own land. Shell had begun to produce oil in 1956, and now accounted for half of the country’s total oil production of two million barrels per day.

According to the provisions of the legal regime guiding oil production, oil companies were not required to obtain the permission of the local communities on whose land and creeks they explored for, and mined oil. They were only answerable to government officials far away in the capital. All that the oil companies were asked to do was pay ‘compensation’ to local people for crops and other valuables destroyed in the course of oil production. Estimation was largely left to the discretion of Shell officials, and they were quick to take advantage of this and undercut the local people. Environmental protection laws were also flagrantly breached by all the companies, resulting in the devastation of the farm lands and fishing creeks on which the Ijaw and the other communities had relied for livelihood for millennia. [5] Previous decades of government neglect had reduced the delta communities to excruciating poverty, but now their very existence was threatened.

General Ibrahim Babangida overthrew General Buhari in a palace coup in August 1985, and introduced a Structural Adjustment Programme, supervised by the IMF. Ostensibly designed to ameliorate the financial crisis into which decades of corrupt and inefficient government had plunged the country, Babangida’s new economic policies only succeeded in plunging the people into worse poverty. The currency was devalued, hiking up the price of imported necessities. Social services were cut. Millions were retrenched from jobs in government and the private sector.

The already impoverished Delta communities felt the new harsh economic climate particularly keenly. There were neither factories nor government jobs in the region. The enclave oil economy employed a handful of local people even as it left environmental destruction in its wake. Hospitals, roads, piped water, schools, paved roads and electric power were non-existent, and where they were supplied, grossly inadequate. As thousands of Ijaw, retrenched from their jobs in the cities and towns began to stream home in late 1980s, the Niger Delta region began to heave. It was clear to the discerning that a political storm was about to break.

The first storm came in the shape of an attempted military putsch, led by Ijaw and other Delta elements in the Army. In April 1990 these young military officers stormed Dodan Barracks, seat of the central government, and reduced its perimeter walls to rubble with mortars and AK47s. But General Babangida managed to escape, rallied senior commanders to his side and mounted a counter-attack. Outflanked and outgunned the coup plotters surrendered. After a hasty trial, closed to the public, they were executed.

The defiant utterances of the young officers as they faced the firing squad, declaring that they had ‘struck a blow for the oppressed people of the Niger Delta in the spirit of Isaac Boro’, and the economic upheavals in the delta and the wider country that led to this bloody episode, were to prepare the ground for the emergence of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) sixteen years later. [6]

• Dr Ike Okonta is a research fellow in contemporary African politics at the University of Oxford. He is co-author of Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil, Verso, New York, 2003.
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

References

[1] Ike Okonta, interview with Oboko Bello, President of Federated Niger Delta Ijaw Communities (FNDIC), Warri, 14th August 2006. In summary, Ijaw representatives asked for the creation of two states, in addition to Bayelsa state, for their people to be carved out of the existing states of Edo, Ondo, Cross Rivers, Rivers, and Akwa Ibom. They also asked that fifty per cent of oil revenue derived from the Niger Delta be given to the communities, that Ijaw businessmen be given a greater pie in the oil industry, and that the central government withdraw armed troops from the region and compel Shell and the other oil companies to put an end to incessant oil spills and gas flaring.
[2] Oboko Bello, ‘FNDIC Presentation During Burial Ceremony of Nine out of Fifteen Illustrious Sons Killed While Serving the Purpose of SPDC in Letugbene Community,’ Presented in Warri, Delta State, 2 September, 2006.
[3] Onyebuchi Ezigbo, ‘Niger Delta: Britain, US Offer Assistance to Nigeria,’ ThisDay, Lagos, 31 August, 2006.
[4] See Tony Tebekaemi, The Twelve Day Revolution, Ethiope Publishing Company, Benin City, 1982, p. 12. See also Kathryn N. Nwajiaku, ‘Oil Politics and Identity Transformation in Nigeria: The Case of the Ijaw in the Niger Delta,’ Unpublished DPhil thesis, Department of Politics, University of Oxford, 2005, for an excellent scholarly study of the political context of Isaac Boro’s revolt in 1966.
[5] For a comprehensive treatment of the social and environmental consequences of oil production in the Niger Delta, see Ike Okonta and Oronto Douglas, Where Vultures Feast: Shell, Human Rights and Oil, Sierra Club, San Francisco, 2001.
[6] Ihuoma Iwegbu, ‘Why they Struck,’ National Concord, Lagos, 24 April, 1990.

Muhammad Yunus is the founder of Grameen Bank which has promoted microcredit for millions, loans to women too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. He is the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for “…efforts to create economic and social development from below.” But there is more hype than substance, says Patrick Bond, behind the claim that micro-credit schemes have been effective in poverty alleviation. There is ample evidence to challenge the claims for the alleged benefits of micro-credit programmes.

What sort of dogmatic free-market ideologue would use poor people’s (often socially-constructed) desire for credit to justify shrinking the already beleaguered welfare policies of wretched Third World states?

Consider this outlandish claim: ‘I believe that “government”, as we know it today, should pull out of most things except for law enforcement and justice, national defense and foreign policy, and let the private sector, a “Grameenized private sector”, a social-consciousness-driven private sector, take over their other functions.’

Grameen is Bangladesh’s ‘barefoot bank’ specializing in group loans to low-income women. And the Vanderbilt University-trained economist who made that statement, Muhammad Yunus (in his autobiography Banker to the Poor), just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Yunus immediately announced to a Dhaka press conference: ‘Now the war against poverty will be further intensified across the world. It will consolidate the struggle against poverty through microcredit in most of the countries.’

Yet this seemingly benign, three-decade old attempt to foster entrepreneurship amongst impoverished women has attracted intense grassroots – and also professional – criticism.

Not surprisingly, the establishment press loves Yunus, nearly as much as do Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Financial Times made this argument, backed by no evident research: ‘Microfinance has played a central part in Bangladesh's success in reducing poverty by almost 10 percentage points over the past five years, to 40%, a rate that puts Bangladesh on track to meet its Millennium Development Goal of halving poverty by 2015.’ Moreover, ‘Grameen's business model is in rude health.’

The Wall Street Journal profiled Yunus on its front page five years ago: ‘To many, Grameen proves that capitalism can work for the poor as well as the rich,’ having ‘helped inspire an estimated 7,000 so-called microlenders with 25 million poor clients worldwide.’

Yet looking more closely, the Journal’s reporters - including the late Daniel Pearl (senselessly beheaded by Islamic extremists) - conceded the prevalence of Enron-style accounting. A fifth of the bank’s loans in late 2001 were more than a year past-due: ‘Grameen would be showing steep losses if the bank followed the accounting practices recommended by institutions that help finance microlenders through low-interest loans and private investments.’

A typical Grameen gimmick is to reschedule short-term loans that are unpaid after as long as two years, instead of writing them off, letting borrowers accumulate interest through new loans simply to keep alive the fiction of repayments on the old loans.

Not even extreme pressure techniques - such as removing tin roofs from delinquent women’s houses, according to the Journal report - improved repayment rates in the most crucial areas, where Grameen had earlier won its global reputation amongst neoliberals who consider credit and entrepreneurship as prerequisites for development.

By then, even the huckster-filled microfinance industry felt betrayed: ‘Grameen Bank had been at best lax, and more likely at worst, deceptive in reporting its financial performance’, wrote leading microfinance promoter J. D. Von Pischke of the World Bank in reaction to the WSJ revelations. ‘Most of us in the trade probably had long suspected that something was fishy.’

Agreed Ross Croulet of the African Development Bank: ‘I myself have been suspicious for a long time about the true situation of Grameen so often disguised by Dr. Yunus’s global stellar status.’

Several years earlier, Yunus was weaned off the bulk of his international donor support, reportedly $5 million a year, which had until then reduced the interest rate he needed to charge borrowers and still make a profit. Grameen had become ‘sustainable,’ self-financing, with costs to be fully borne by borrowers.

He had also battled backward patriarchal and religious attitudes in Bangladesh, and his hard work extended credit to millions of people. The secret was that poor women were typically arranged in groups of five: two got the first tranche of credit, leaving the other three as ‘chasers’ to pressure repayment, so that they could in turn get the next loans.

But at a time of new competitors, adverse weather conditions (especially the 1998 floods) and a backlash by borrowers who used collective power of nonpayment, Grameen imposed dramatic increases in the price of repaying loans. And it is here that Grameen Bank’s main philosophical position – ‘We consider credit as a human right’ – was reduced merely to an argument for access, not affordability.

In that regard, Yunus is entirely different from all the rights-based social movements which have demanded ‘rights’ in terms of free lifeline access to healthcare, education, housing, land, water, electricity and the like.

‘Microcredit is an almost perfect case of a phenomenon that has come to characterise much of development assistance - a widening gap between reality and propaganda,’ argued microfinance consultant Thomas Dichter in a SA Institute for International Affairs publication, ‘Hype and Hope: The Worrisome State of the Microcredit Movement’: ‘Much of Africa offers an infertile context for borrowing as the only customers available to the poorest are other very poor people. In such infertile economic contexts, the people at the bottom are by definition the ones who “need” credit the most, but can do the least with it.’

Dichter continued, ‘In part because of what has been aptly called “microfinance evangelism”, the prospect of significant returns from microcredit made available to solid enterprises has become less likely. This is because those who can really leverage a small loan are not the poorest or the most destitute… An additional limitation is that many microcredit clients are reduced to “copycat” behaviour, everyone selling the same thing, and more sellers saturating the market as more microcredit is made available. In this sense, expanding microcredit can actually lower incomes.’

What about the impact Yunus has made on his home turf? In Bangladesh, according to Dichter, ‘Microcredit is such a common development intervention that many people borrow from one project to repay another. In that context, even if a woman borrower increases her volume of sales by 100% say from 10 bunches of bananas to 20, she is still limited by her inability to add any value to what she sells, limited by her low skills, and the copycat pattern that almost always prevails at the low end of the informal sector.’

Although criticism of Grameen ‘is still a minority view’ and Yunus performed ‘miracles’ in rolling out credit to the masses, according to Munir Quddus, who chairs the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Southern Indiana, the hype needs more investigation than apparently was given by the Nobel committee: ‘The very nature of setting up groups leaves out the very poor who would be perceived by fellow members to have no ability to generate income and therefore high risk.’

Quddus continues: ‘Others have pointed out that micro-credit simply deepens the exploitation of the women since the rates of interest charged by the bank in real [after inflation] terms are quite high; consequently, credit often worsens the debt situation and gives the husbands even more leverage.’

Gaining leverage over women – instead of giving them economic liberation - is a familiar accusation. In 1995, New Internationalist magazine probed Yunus about the 16 ‘resolutions’ he required his borrowers to accept, including ‘smaller families’.

When New Internationalist suggested this ‘smacked of population control’, Yunus replied, ‘No, it is very easy to convince people to have fewer children. Now that the women are earners, having more children means losing money.’

In the same spirit of commodifying everything, Yunus set up a relationship with Monsanto to promote biotech and agrochemical products in 1998, which, New Internationalist reported, ‘was cancelled due to public pressure.’

As Sarah Blackstock reported in the same magazine the following year: ‘Away from their homes, husbands and the NGOs that disburse credit to them, the women feel safe to say the unmentionable in Bangladesh – micro-credit isn’t all it’s cracked up to be… What has really sold micro-credit is Yunus’s seductive oratorical skill.’

But that skill, Blackstock explains, allows Yunus and leading imitators ‘to ascribe poverty to a lack of inspiration and depoliticize it by refusing to look at its causes. Micro-credit propagators are always the first to advocate that poor people need to be able to help themselves. The kind of micro-credit they promote isn’t really about gaining control, but ensuring the key beneficiaries of global capitalism aren’t forced to take any responsibility for poverty.’

Though I have never been to Bangladesh and have only discussed these problems with Yunus once (more than a decade ago when he visited Johannesburg), microfinance gimmickry certainly did damage in Southern Africa.

For example, in 1998, when the emerging markets crisis raised interest rates across the Third World, a 7% increase imposed over two weeks as the local currency crashed drove many South African borrowers and their microlenders into bankruptcy.

The highest-profile local proponent of microcredit is First Lady Zanele Mbeki. But her Womens Development Banking project has not only financed rural women, according to the oil company BP, a supporter. It has also made ‘investments in high-growth businesses’ such as Ceasars Gauteng and ‘Siza Water Company, the first privatised water company’ in KwaZulu-Natal – both of which, arguably, are counter-examples of poverty eradication.

Next door in Zimbabwe, a $66 million flood of World Bank financing during the 1980s (in lieu of land reform) revitalised a rural microfinance sector initiated under late 1940s racist Rhodesian rule. The Bank program ultimately reached 94,000 households. But within a decade, the result was a peasant default rate of 80% in the impoverished ‘Communal Areas’ (equivalent to apartheid Bantustans).

Repayment affordability was a huge factor, since a typical lender’s overhead and collection costs represent 15-22% of the amount of a small loan, including incorporation of a 4% default rate. In Zimbabwe, servicing loans of even just a few hundred US dollars represented enormous burdens when, according to one Agriculture Ministry survey in 1989, the average net crop profit per hour of labour was just $0.15.

Michael Drinkwater’s detailed study of central Zimbabwe showed that ‘improving farmers’ access to credit has placed many of them in serious difficulties’ compounded by ‘an overzealous launching of a group credit scheme’ and the ‘doubtful viability of high cost fertiliser packages’ inappropriate for the erratic climate. ‘The increase in credit use means farmers have to market more to stay solvent... At the household level it is commonly debts not profits that are on the rise.’

To address the crisis, in 1991 the World Bank unsuccessfully promoted even more Grameen-style group credit, albeit with the caveat that ‘Zimbabwe’s experience to date with group lending has not been favourable. The organisation of groups is initially expensive and time-intensive’, and ‘major problems have become apparent.’

Not far away, in Lesotho, anthropologist James Ferguson studied a 1975 World Bank report that guided the country’s development strategy: ‘In a “Less Developed Country”, where the cash economy is on such a precarious basis, there must be [according to the Bank] “a conspicuous lack of credit for the purchase of farm inputs,” and it is obvious that “credit will play a critical role in all future major agricultural projects.”’

Rebutted Ferguson, ‘It is never explained exactly why the need for credit is so critical. It is true that most Basotho invest very little in agriculture probably due to their intelligent appreciation of the low potential and high risks of capital intensive farming in Lesotho but this is usually not a matter of being unable to obtain the cash to make such an investment. Most families have access to wage-earnings or remittances, and this money most commonly comes in large lumps which could easily be used for agricultural inputs, but for the most part is not. Yet in the “development” picture, the need for credit is almost an axiom.’

Ugandan political economist Dani Nabudere has also debunked ‘The argument which holds that the rural poor need credit which will enable them to improve their productivity and modernise production.’ For Nabudere, this ‘has to be repudiated for what it is ? a big lie.’

Even from inside the World Bank these lessons were by then obvious. Sababathy Thillairajah reviewed the Bank’s African peasant credit programmes in 1993 and advised colleagues: ‘Leave the people alone. When someone comes and asks you for money, the best favour you can give them is to say “no”... We are all learning at the Bank. Earlier we thought that by bringing in money, financial infrastructure and institutions would be built up ? which did not occur quickly.’

But not long afterwards, Yunus stepped in to help the Bank with ideological support, as it rejuvenated microfinance with a $200 million global line of credit aimed at poor women in August 1995, just prior to the Beijing gender conference.

The global justice movement’s Attac group has an excellent Oslo branch, which last week published a new book, Economic Apartheid. Its members pointed out to me that that Yunus was strongly supported by his friends in the Norwegian ruling class, including a former top finance ministry bureaucrat and leading officials of Telenor, Norway’s phone company. Telenor owns 62% of GrameenPhone, which controls 60% of Bangladesh’s cellphone market.

At a time when the centre-left Norwegian government has a high profile for partially cancelling illegitimate Third World debt and threatening to defund the World Bank, both of which are applauded by local activists, the people who make these decisions were conscious of how important it is for Norway to project the possibility of capitalism with a human face.

The question is whether they looked hard enough at conflicts generated by credit, thus negating the meaning of the Nobel Peace Prize – and not for the first time.

• Patrick Bond is director of the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His most recent book is Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation, available from Zed Books and UKZN Press.)
• Please send comments to or comment online at www.pambazuka.org/

What do farm and transport animals, companion animals and wildlife have in common? The imagination of editor and animal welfare professional Dipesh Pabari who has, with writers from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ghana, South Africa, Nigeria and Egypt, woven an insightful tapestry reflecting the relationship of sentient (and sapient) species with the human beings who share their African life space. The World Society For The Protection Of Animals (WSPA)Welfare book is an anthology of animal stories inspired by the African environment.

I found the book to be a refreshing, quirky and insightful read.
Readers who meet with the lives of creatures whose narratives are so carefully fashioned will be drawn into reflection, laughter, remembrance, and outrage. The reader may be compelled to note that the struggles, desires, and dreams of existence are not confined to the human species alone. The reader, after a few pages, may even be struck by the thought that dominance of the environment by human beings, the quest for happiness in the battle for rights cannot exclude the perception of the dignity of all creatures great and small, however inarticulate or vulnerable to the whim of human sensibility they are.

Obiero Ojwang’s Three Goats invites the reader to glimpse the knowledge of anguish in the stricken gaze of a goat. Gitonga the bully and Mwangi face off over a leg-saving donkey in Stanley Gazemba’s Unlikely Burden. Aluizah Amasaba Abdul-Yakeen and Karen Menczer’s poignant tribute to Accra’s bats, a grandmother’s prescience and a fight for the right of space reads like a thriller. Dawn James’ wily Cairo Cat who becomes Mish-Mish by dint of feline wiles is a story many readers--some of whom may have bewilderingly became cat owners overnight--will identify with. Irene Ekpeh and Kingsley Aigbona in The Owl ask “Just because something does not sound or look right to you, doesn’t mean it is unnatural. How do you think a goat must feel when it sees you laughing?”

The answer is in there. There are animal characters in the book destined to move out of the book’s pages and continue their lives in the imagination of those who will encounter them.

The book evokes memories of tall animal teaching tales told to children throughout the continent by assorted relatives. These sixteen short stories not only provide fascinating insights into human-animal relationships, but are also contemporary tributes to the lives of animals. The stories avoid the temptation to moralize and are told in eclectic literary styles that should appeal to readers of all ages and cultures.

The African ecological ‘heritage of splendor’ has either been decimated or lost in the murkiness of an appropriated past. The present is often characterized by lurid tales of human-animal conflict that then justify all manner of excesses inflicted on non-human creatures. Several African societies that at their core had incorporated a profound consciousness, knowledge and respect of life in all its forms have relegated the wisdom of trusteeship of a splendid natural heritage to outsiders, in this becoming alienated from that which was once theirs.

This little book is a small but important step in reclaiming the intrinsically African sense of inter-species tolerance and co-existence; a former deeply lived culture of conservation. In a perfect world there is plenty of room for all life’s creatures to forge their shared destinies. In the absence of such perfection, this book is a little dreaming room for the ‘what-ifs” of co-existence among species.

Read the book with your children!

The Unlikely Burden and other stories (Editors: Dipesh Pabari and Lila Luce) can be purchased in Africa through [email][email protected]

For international orders, visit: http://www.canapublishinguk.com/

• Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at www.pambazuka.org

Sokari Ekine’s blog, Black Looks () has been nominated for a Best of Blog Award - you can read about it and cast your vote at: http://www.thebobs.com/index.php?l=en&s=1152971093190346SYYAKHHX

Former South African president Nelson Mandela's lawyer has been accused of profiting from corruption proceeds involving Zambian ex-leader Frederick Chiluba, court documents obtained yesterday show. Iqbal Meer, a partner in the London-based firm Meer, Care and Desai, is among those being sued by the Zambian government for allegedly stealing about £13.5 million in state funds, according to documents.

Tajudeen Adbul-Raheem explores the reaction from the lovers and haters of Fidel Castro to news of his recent illness.

The following examination brings to light the significant barriers to self-reliance for refugees in the settlement system in Uganda, the inconsistent conceptualisation of self-reliance embedded in the program and the flawed approach to refugee empowerment.

The existing Aliens Restrictions Act and the Immigration Act are inadequate to deal with the changing dynamics of refugee situation, in line with international agreements that Kenya has signed. The Immigration Act was enacted to govern migration and deal with matters incidental to immigration. It provides for entry permits for refugees within the framework of the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.

On the eve of a historic vote to begin work on an Arms Trade Treaty in the UN General Assembly's First Committee, 15 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates including the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, Oscar Arias and Amnesty International have called on governments to support the Treaty in order to stop irresponsible arms exports "which are causing the peoples of the world so much pain and destruction". The appeal is contained in a letter released today at the UN.

Kenya will be hosting the second meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP/MOP 2), in conjunction with the twelfth session of the Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention (COP 12), in Nairobi from 6th to 17th November 2006.

Leaders of around 150,000 Arabs in Niger say they will fight moves to expel them to Chad in the courts. Niger's government has ordered the Arabs, known as Mahamid, to leave the country accusing them of wrongdoing, including theft and rape. A Mahamid spokesman told the BBC the move was politically motivated and that they had been given five days to leave.

Following historical general elections in Sweden in the last week of September that brought the centre-right "Alliance for Sweden" to power, the new Prime Minister, Mr Fredrik Reinfeldt, announced his Cabinet on Friday, October 6, a day after he was elected by Parliament.

As presidential rivals Joseph Kabila and Jean-Pierre Bemba prepare for an electoral run-off in the Congo on Sunday (29 October 2006), the two international forces in charge of security during the polls, say they are ready to quell any violence that erupts. So far though, violent incidents between supporters of the two have been isolated.

The numbers of rape and attempted rape cases since independence to 2005, have more than doubled, making it the most serious form of crime currently being committed in Namibia, the Legal Assistance Centre (LAC) has said. Statistics taken from research the LAC is conducting on the 'Implementation of the Combating of Rape Act and Combating of Domestic Violence Act' indicate that rape cases recorded in 1991, which were 564, increased to 854 in 2000 and went up to 1 184 in 2005.

Heavily armed Ethiopian troops are reported to have reached the town of Balanbale in Galgadud region overnight in a presence of armed militias led by col. Abdi Qeybdid one of ousted warlords member of the defeated counter terrorism alliance by the Union of the Islamic courts.

Get your friends jobs and earn a mint. That is the idea behind a new South African recruitment website, employmint.co.za, which launched this week. Taking advantage of Web 2.0 features and using an innovative business model, the site offers a reward for people who successfully refer a candidate for the job.

About 160km from its source on the northern slopes of Mount Kenya, the great River Ngiro was just ankle deep on Friday (20 October 2006) as nomadic farmers walked through waters that have become the focus of conflict. Kenya's second-largest river is a life-sustaining resource for these farmers, but it also sustains big business for flower farms supplying United Kingdom supermarkets.

Guinea worm, also known as "the fiery serpent", is contracted by drinking water contaminated with microscopic water fleas carrying larvae. Global efforts to eradicate the waterborne parasite have seen the number of cases fall from an estimated 3,5-million in 1986 to 10 674 reported cases last year, according to the Carter Centre.

The UNITWIN directory, now in its fifth edition, is now available online. It is an important networking tool for one of UNESCO’s major education networks. UNITWIN is the abbreviation for the UNIVERSITY TWINNING and networking scheme.

A new scientific report due to be presented at a climate change conference in Nairobi next month, warns that global warming is set to make severe drought across Africa even worse than had been predicted. According to extracts from the report produced by the UK’s Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, whole swathes of East Africa could be affected by chronic water shortages in the future, making the drought that afflicted the Rift Valley and other parts of East Africa last year a regular occurrence.

What Kenyans believed all along is now official. The Kenya government has admitted sinking over Ksh600 million ($8.2 million) into commissions of inquiry over the past three years, commissions whose findings never see the light of the day.