Nigeria’s government is to pass new laws to overhaul the country’s oil and gas sector before the end of the year, ramping up the pace of reform in spite of fears among Western majors that the changes could cost billions in profits. Umaru Yar’Adua, the president, hopes the new law will form the foundation for a revival of an industry where attacks on pipelines and constraints on investment have fuelled a growing sense of crisis among energy companies.

Women must be empowered and respected, particularly by men, in the fight against HIV/AIDS, Nafis Sadik, United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific region, has said at a poverty alleviation conference in Beijing, Reuters reports. According to Sadik, lack of respect for women is a primary reason for the spread of the virus.

Published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), this 544-page report highlights the opportunities presented by the world's natural resource base to support development and the objectives of the African Union (AU) and the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD). The report, which is the second in a series of Africa Environment Outlook reports, underscores the need for sustainable livelihoods, and the importance of environmental initiatives in supporting them.

This 32-page report looks at the impact of desertification on women around the world and their role in dealing with the problem. It examines the way in which women in particular are affected by desertification and highlights the role they play in the management of natural resources and drylands, as well as the constraints they face.

There is no greater breach of trust than knowingly taking advantage of those you have taken an oath to protect and to serve. What has been long regarded as baseless reports against members of the Kenya Police has finally been brought to the glaring spotlight of the public eye by the heart wrenching revelations made during the Waki Commission hearings. This concern is the focus of this issue of USAWA.

Joomla! is a Content Management System and is for a start not complicated; Joomla makes it easy for non-technical people to create professional and dynamic websites. Why? Because it has been developed with the masses in mind. You do not need any programming knowledge such as HTML or PHP to use Joomla for web creation. Joomla! is easy to install, simple to manage, and reliable. Using Joomla! is like using a word-processing program.

Since 2003, photographer Abdi Roble and writer Doug Rutledge have been documenting the lives of Somali immigrants in the United States and of the people forced into the vast refugee camps that were set up in Kenya in the wake of the 1991 civil war in Somalia. In The Somali Diaspora, Roble, who immigrated to the United States from Somalia in 1989, and Rutledge trace the journey of a family from the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, home to more than 150,000 Somalis, to new lives in the United States.

The past few months have seen one of the most significant financial crises in North American and European history. The response was just as historic. To stave off regional and global recessions and restore stability and confidence in the market, northern governments are pursuing a massive and unprecedented program of government intervention, nationalizing banks, injecting massive subsidies into ailing institutions and re-regulating their financial sectors.

Kenya has received $144.4 million in credit from the International Development Association for the Transparency and Communications Infrastructure Project (TCIP). Kenya ICT Board chief executive officer, Paul Kukubo, told the media on Friday that part of the funds $7 million (Sh525 million) will subsidise bandwidth costs for local Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) entrepreneurs.

Public examinations, due to start countrywide next Monday, hang in the balance after the Zimbabwe Teachers’ Association (ZIMTA) forwarded some salary demands which have not been met by their employer. The final Zimbabwe Schools Examinations Council (ZIMSEC) examinations for Ordinary and Advanced level were originally supposed to start across the country on Monday this week. Grade 7 pupils write their examinations during the first week of October every year.

C-Change Picks is an e-magazine that is supported by C-Change and implemented by The Communication Initiative and focuses on recent case studies, reports, analyses, and resources on communication for behaviour and social change to address health, environment, and civil society. While the first 3 issues of C-Change Picks have focused primarily on family planning, HIV/AIDS, and malaria, future editions will include information related to the environment and civil society. If you would like to subscribe, please contact [email][email protected]

Djibouti's president has said his country will have to go to war with Eritrea unless the UN acts to resolve growing tension over a border dispute. Djibouti has accused Eritrea of invading its territory and its ambassador to the UN told the BBC that Eritrea had been avoiding mediation.

Mr Mogae, who stepped down in April after two terms in office, said he was honoured and humbled by the award. Botswana is one of Africa’s most stable countries - it has never had a coup and has had regular multi-party elections since independence in 1966. Announcing the prize, ex-UN head Kofi Annan also commended Mr Mogae for his action to tackle the Aids pandemic.

Leaders of the Tripartite Summit from 26 African countries belonging to the three regional economic blocs in the East and southern Africa on Wednesday resolved to merge the blocs into a single regional market. The summit, bringing together leaders of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), have agreed to establish a free trade bloc and a single customs union, stretching from South Africa to Egypt and from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Kenya.

As in US, the wives of Ghanaian presidential candidates are front-and-centre in the on-going electoral campaigns for the December 7 general elections.They are giving interviews, speeches and appearing on newspaper covers, television and websites. This is in contrast to Canada where wives of political leaders in the just ended general elections rarely appeared at the campaign trails.

The detention of two activists from the Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) has been extended until Friday. A bail hearing in the case was held on Tuesday without them being present, after the state alleged that there was no transport available to take them to the court. Jenni Williams and Magodonga Mahlangu were arrested on 16 October and are being held at Bulawayo Remand Prison.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has called for the release of three journalists who have been held by kidnappers in Somalia for almost two months. Canadian Amanda Lindhout, Australian Nigel Brenan and Somali Abdifatah Mohammed Elmi were abducted on August 23 near the Somali capital, Mogadishu. The IFJ is extremely concerned about their safety after reports that their kidnappers threatened to kill Lindhout and Brennan if a $2.5 million (1.8 million Euros) ransom is not paid.

Ugandan rebel forces operating in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) killed six civilians in a deadly attack in the north-eastern village of Bangadi, the United Nations peacekeeping mission to the DRC has reported. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – a notorious militia believed responsible for killing over 200 people, including 159 children, in the DRC since mid-September – looted homes and communal facilities in Bangadi before setting them ablaze on Sunday morning, according to the mission (known as MONUC).

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has confirmed its earlier decision to suspend the trial of a Congolese rebel leader accused of recruiting child soldiers to serve in his militia, but ordered that he remain in detention pending another hearing. In a ruling issued in The Hague, the ICC’s five-member appeals chamber unanimously dismissed an appeal by prosecutors against the trial chamber’s decision in June to stay the proceedings against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo.

Almost 14,000 people in northern Kenya have been displaced by flash floods that occurred last week, and are in need of urgent supplies such as food, shelter and clean water, the United Nations humanitarian wing has reported. Elizabeth Byrs of the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) told reporters in Geneva that at least three people were killed and 6,000 uprooted from their homes in the district of Mandera in north-east Kenya, when the River Daua burst its banks on 14 October.

Leading stakeholders in the Information Communication Technology (ICT) industry are to work together to minimise the standardisation gap between developed and developing countries through the Bridging the Standardisation Gap Fund. This was announced at the Global Standard Symposium at Emperor's Palace in Johannesburg.

The Congolese journalist Emmanuel Pweto, working for Africanews.com and Radio RTGA Kinshasa, has won the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) Award for journalism development in 2008. This award is given by the UNDP on the occasion of International Day for the Fight against Poverty. This day is celebrated each year on October 17

Malawi is said to be struggling to fight the stigma against HIV/AIDS. The Malawi government has managed to effectively respond to HIV/AIDS beyond what activists call average levels, but the country has failed to address human rights issues surrounding the pandemic in that country.

There are understandable concerns that internal corruption at the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe (RBZ) will see desperately needed foreign monetary aid being diverted into different channels – this as a cash boost of millions of US dollars by the United Nations could soon be filtered through the central bank.

A cholera epidemic is spreading quickly in Guinea-Bissau, where campaigning for an upcoming election could put even more people at risk, United Nations agencies said on Friday. Some 12,225 people in the West African state have caught cholera so far this year and 201 have died, raising fears among aid workers that the water-borne disease could resurge on the devastating scale seen in 2005.

The World Bank Africa region has announced the launch of a new blog from its chief economist, Shanta Devarajan. The blog, AfricaCan.org, will serve as an online forum for the sharing of ideas about the continent's development. The objective of the AfricaCan blog is to create a platform for (1) conversation around the issues of sustainable growth and development in Africa, and (2) outreach to help promote analysis and evidence about what is working and what isn't on the continent.

The United States justifies Kosovo's declaration of independence from Serbia. The Russians fiercely oppose it. Washington considers Abkhazia as an integral part of Georgian territory. Moscow recognises it as a sovereign nation. Both major powers have no dispute, however, on the question of Western Sahara's independence from Moroccan control.

The oil interests of Angola, Brazil and Portugal could pave the way for former Spanish colony Equatorial Guinea to become the ninth member of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP) two years from now, despite the country’s poor human rights record.

Young people are susceptible to being used as perpetrators of conflicts and civil disorders, yet they remain the most vulnerable and the most affected in post conflict communities. However, young people are also the greatest resource to achieving reconciliation and reconstruction. This is because of their innovation, energy, enthusiasm and exuberance.

South Africa's ruling ANC party has had its hopes dashed that a corruption case against Jacob Zuma, its presidential hopeful, would be closed. A judge who dismissed charges against the African National Congress leader last month granted prosecutors leave to appeal the ruling on Wednesday.

Reporters Without Borders notes that Lesotho’s only privately-owned radio station, Harvest FM, was allowed to resume broadcasting yesterday after being suspended for three months. The station was forced to close on 21 July as result of a complaint by a police commissioner and a communications ministry official, who accused it of trying “to damage their dignity as individuals.” The country’s telecommunications authority said it failed to comply with broadcasting regulations.

The first group of election observers from southern Africa has arrived in Zambia to observe the presidential elections scheduled for 30 October. At least 25 election observers from Southern African Development Community (SADC) Election Observer Mission (SEOM) had arrived in Lusaka as of 14 October and were dispatched to different provinces with assistance of the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ).

Côte d’Ivoire’s electoral commission on 23 October suspended for two days the long-delayed voter registration operation, throwing into deeper uncertainty the timing of a presidential poll seen as indispensable to restoring stability. The electoral commission said registration was being suspended for technical reasons, but the operation has been fraught with problems.

Climate experts and ministers in West Africa have committed to coordinating national efforts to fight climate change, at the conclusion of an Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) meeting in Benin’s economic capital, Cotonou, on 22 October. Benin’s UN Development Programme representative, Edith Gasana, told participants “no country will be able to handle the struggle alone.”

HIV programmes in Burundi have been struggling to support people affected by the pandemic since the Global Fund to Fight HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis (TB) and Malaria rejected the country's request for funds a year ago. "It has been very hard; we have tried to use our internal resources and prioritise interventions to make sure that we cover the most important activities," Dr Jean Rirangira, the interim executive secretary of the national AIDS control council, CNLS, told IRIN/PlusNews.

Zambia's acting President Rupiah Banda on Friday called for peace and unity ahead of next week's presidential elections, in which he is one of the frontrunners. Banda urged his compatriots to come out in large numbers and cast their votes next Thursday to elect a replacement for president Levy Mwanawasa, who died on August 19 after suffering a stroke.

Attackers murdered an albino girl in Tanzania, where albinos have been targeted by witchdoctors who use their body parts for lucky charms, an official said on Tuesday. Local councillor Joseph Manyara of the western Tanzanian village where the young girl -- a grade three primary school pupil -- was murdered at the weekend said police were hunting the attackers.

The Regional Manager manages and oversees Internews Network media development programs and projects in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is a geographic sub component of the Africa, Middle East, Health and Humanitarian Media Program Management Unit (PMU). Responsibilities for this position include direct line management of the Country Directors, Resident Journalism Advisors and Africa Program Associate (Nairobi-based), direct donor correspondence, as well as donor identification and communication with the Program Vice President and other key staff on development opportunities.

CREAW is a non-governmental, non-partisan, membership organization whose goal is to transform society by empowering women and expanding frontiers for women’s rights and freedoms. CREAW aims at setting standards in upholding human rights and empowering society through civic education, legal advocacy and women’s rights awareness.CREAW is recruiting for the position of Legal Officer. Deadline for application: 31ST October 2008.

A new World Bank report Global Development Finance says developing countries as a whole have so far shown resilience in the face of US-based financial turmoil and soaring energy and food prices, partly because of improved policies, higher investments and technological progress in recent years, says the report. In 2008, growth in China, the rest of East Asia and the Pacific, and other developing regions together will fall from 7.8% to a still-strong 6.5% while their high-income trading partners like the United States slow to between 1 and 2% and import less.

Wellspring Advisors seeks a consultant to undertake a mapping and analysis of Ugandan nongovernmental organizations focused on children’s rights and development. The consultant shall undertake a scoping study that will provide (1) an overview of the field of children’s rights in Uganda, with a focus on the role of nongovernmental organizations; (2) profiles of key Ugandan children’s rights organizations; and (3) grantmaking recommendations, including identification of potential funding strategies as well as specific organizations.

Sokari Erkine reviews the following from the African blogoshphere:

Mama Ethiopia
Wondering the World
What An African Woman Wants
Ore’s Notes
Black Looks
Uganda Scarlett Lion
Helen Zille

In response to : In her new book, "The Shock Doctrine", Naomi Klein provides an excellent analysis of the free-market fundamentalist and corporatist strategies that hobbled newly-independent African governments from the outset, making it impossible for them to deliver "democracy" in any real sense of redistribution and economic justice.

Dear Comrades,

I am still disturbed over how President Kibaki’s and Prime Minister Raila's unpatriotic and selfish hunger for power-at-all-costs can be rewarded by honorary doctorate degrees conferred by the University of Nairobi!

In old England, honorary degrees were awarded to, amongst others, subjects who showed conspicuous merit or who had done extraordinary good service to the state or the university. However, in the politics of honorary degrees it has increasingly become an open secret that honorary degrees are now political goods for trade, as I suspect is the present case.

A degree honoris causa is literally conferred “for the sake of honour”. What honour can Kibaki and Raila possibly claim from the 1200 dead; the 350,000 IDPs and the billions of property pillaged as a result of their self-serving political machinations?

What claim to public honour can Kibaki stake when the Kriegler report confirmed plausible questions over the legitimacy of his presidency; following the scary indictment of the Waki report that post elections killings were planned at the State House and further in light of allegations that neither is Raila innocent for some of the crimes spawning in the post election period?

What honour does the University of Nairobi find in these two acting in characteristic selfishness, when “other forces” (read) Chinkororo, Mungiki, Baghdad boys etc threatened to share or snatch power from their hands, by quickly moving to put out the fire they started through signing the "negative peace accord"?

What honour can Kenyans find in the grand coalition government’s failure to resettle thousands of IDPs who are stuck in IDP camps? What honour can the President and Prime Minister claim from there pussy footing in resolving agenda no. 4 issues: historical injustices, unemployment, land problems, poverty, resource redistribution etc? What honour can the two claim when they have already started flip-flopping in the implementation of Kriegler and Waki reports?

Mr. President and Mr. Prime Minister, Kenyans will give you honorary degrees in any field you want if you can give us a democratic and just constitution; if you can resolve issues of agenda no. 4 in the peace accord; and if you can implement Kriegler and Waki reports to the letter.

I firmly believe Kenya is a civilized country where no institution worth its salt should award such covetous honours as doctorate degrees to anyone for the reckless and barbaric behaviour of engineering fights, killings, rapes, looting, displacements among other evils for selfish ambition; otherwise all of us will begin fantasising about methods of fast tracking ourselves to such honours.

The first honorary degree ever awarded, to Lionel Woodville by Oxford University, made him a doctor of canon law in a blatant bid to win the favour of a powerful man. Is it now sadly the case then that Prof. Magoha likewise awarded the honorary degrees to Kibaki and Raila as negotiation for the renewal of his term as the Vice Chancellor of University of Nairobi?

George Nyongesa
Bunge la Mwananchi

The law has been twice revised since May 2008 but it has become more repressive each time. It is before the rubber stamp parliament and it will for sure be adopted as the Meles Zenawi regime has ordered it should be. The Charities and Societies proclamation that will set up the all powerful and arbitrary Charities and Societies Agency is aimed at banning NGOs working on human rights issues in Ethiopia (women's, children's, disabled person's rights, etc...)

Far-reaching strategic debate is underway about how to respond to the global financial crisis, and indeed how the North's problems can be tied into a broader critique of capitalism.

At minimum, the ongoing chaos offers new ideological space and material justifications for African finance ministries to re-impose exchange controls and re-regulate finance, and to find sources of hard currency not connected to the Bretton Woods Institutions or Western donors.

The 2008 world financial meltdown has its roots in the neoliberal export-model (dominant in Africa since the Berg Report and onset of structural adjustment during the early 1980s) and even more deeply, in thirty-five years of world capitalist stagnation/volatility. As South Centre director (and Ugandan political economist) Yash Tandon put it: ‘The first lesson, surely, is that contrary to mainstream thinking, the market does not have a self-corrective mechanism.‘ Such disequilibration means that Africa receives sometimes too much and often too little in the way of financial flows, and the inexorable result during periods of turbulence is intensely amplified uneven development. Africa has always suffered a disproportionate share of pressure from the world economy, especially in the sphere of debt and financial outflows. But for those African countries that made themselves excessively vulnerable to global financial flows during the neoliberal era, the meltdown had a severe, adverse impact.

In Africa’s largest national economy, for example, South African finance minister Trevor Manuel had presided over steady erosion of exchange controls (with 26 consecutive relaxations from 1995-2008, according to the Reserve Bank) and the emergence of a massive current account deficit: nine percent in 2008, the second worst in the world. The latter was in large part due to a steady outflow of profits and dividends to corporations formerly based at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange but which re-listed in Britain, the USA or Australia during the 1990s (Anglo American, DeBeers, Old Mutual, Didata, Mondi, Liberty Life, BHP Billiton). In the second week of October 2008, South Africa’s stock market crashed 10 percent (on the worst day, shares worth $35 billion went up in smoke) and the currency declined by nine percent, while the second week witnessed a further 10 percent crash. The speculative real estate market had already begun a decline that might yet reach those of other hard-hit property sectors like the US, Denmark and Ireland, because South Africa’s early 2000s housing price rise far outstripped even these casino markets (200 percent from 1997-2004, compared to 60 percent in the US).

On the other hand, the cost of market failure could at least be offset, somewhat, by ideological advance. The main gains so far were in delegitimating the economic liberalisation philosophy adopted during the 1994-2008 governments of Nelson Mandela and Thabo Mbeki (presided over by Manuel). Indeed Mbeki’s dramatic September 2008 departure occurred partly because of substantially worsened inequality and unemployment since 1994, which in turn was responsible for thousands of social protests each year. When a solidarity letter Manuel wrote, resigning from Mbeki’s government on its second-last day, was released to the press (by Mbeki)) on 23 September, the stock and currency markets imposed a $6 billion punishment within an hour. The crash required incoming caretaker president Kgalema Motlanthe to immediately reappoint Manuel with great fanfare.

In the same spirit, Mbeki’s replacement as ruling party president, Jacob Zuma, had visited Davos and paid tribute to Merrill Lynch and Citibank in 2007-08 (ironically the latter two institutions insisted on having their jitters calmed). Zuma assured international financiers that Manuel’s economic policy would not change. Hence the opening of ideological space to contest neoliberalism in practice became a crucial struggle for the trade unions and SA Communist Party, which in mid-October held an Alliance Economic Summit that suggested Manuel make only marginal shifts at the edges of neoliberalism.

However, as the financial meltdown unfolded in the US and Europe, the merits of South Africa’s residual capital controls became clearer. As SA deputy trade minister Rob Davies wrote approvingly in the main Communist journal: ‘Interestingly, The Business Times of 21 September attributed this [safety from contagion] partly to “exchange control”’ which meant ‘there is a healthy degree of trapped liquidity within the financial system.’ Another factor was that many exotic financial products had been banned. As a leading official of the central bank, Brian Kahn, explained:

‘The interbank market is functioning normally and the Reserve Bank has not had to make any special liquidity provision. We have a relatively sophisticated and well-developed banking sector, and the question then is, what has saved us? (This may be tempting fate, so perhaps I should say what has saved us so far?) This all raises the old question whether or not exchange controls work. The conventional wisdom is that they do not, particularly when you need them to work. We seem to have been exception to this rule. It turns out that we were protected to some extent by prudent regulation by the Bank regulators, but more importantly, and perhaps ironically, from controls on capital movements of banks. Despite strong pressure to liberalise exchange controls completely, the Treasury has adopted a policy of gradual relaxation over the years. Controls on non-residents were lifted completely in 1996, but controls on residents, including banks and other institutions, were lifted gradually, mainly through raising limits over time. With respect to banks, there are restrictions in terms of the exchange control act, on the types of assets or asset classes they may get involved in (cross-border). These include leveraged products and certain hedging and derivative instruments. For example banks cannot hedge transactions that are not SA linked. Effectively it meant that our banks could not get involved in the toxic assets floating that others were scrambling into. They would have needed exchange control approval which would not have been granted, as they did not satisfy certain criteria. The regulators were often criticised for being behind the times, while others have argued that they don’t understand the products, but it seems there may be advantages to that! Our banks are finding it more difficult to access foreign funds and we have seen some spikes in overnight foreign exchange rates at times. But generally everything seems ‘normal’ on the banking front… Our insurance companies and institutional investors were also protected to some extent, in that there is a prudential limit on how much they can invest abroad (15 per cent of assets), and the regulator in this instance (the Financial Services Board) places constraints on the types of finds or products they can invest in. (Generally it appears that exotics are excluded). One large South Africa institution, Old Mutual, moved its primary listing to the UK a few years back (when controls were relaxed), and the plc has had fairly significant exposure in the US.’

Demands for deeper exchange controls were made by the South African Communist Party (SACP). And as Riaz Tayob of Third World Network points out, Manuel has been terribly irresponsible in pushing further financial services deregulation through the World Trade Organization (WTO).

As for the rest of Africa, similar opportunities to contest financial system orthodoxy now arise. At this stage, it is practically impossible for staff from the most powerful external force in African economic policy, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), to advise elites with any credibility. The IMF’s October 2006 Global Financial Stability Report, after all, claimed that global bankers had shown ‘resilience through several market corrections, with exceptionally low market volatility.’ Moreover, global economic growth ‘continued to become more balanced, providing a broad underpinning for financial markets.’ Because financial markets always price risk correctly, according to IMF dogma, investors could relax: ‘[D]efault risk in the financial and insurance sectors remains relatively low, and credit derivatives markets do not indicate any particular financial stability concerns.’ The derivatives and in particular mortgage-backed securities ‘have been developed and successfully implemented in U.S. and U.K. markets. They allow global investors to obtain broader credit exposures, while targeting their desired risk-reward trade-off.’ As for the rise of credit default swaps (the $56 trillion house of cards bringing down one bank after the other), the IMF was not worried, because ‘the widening of the credit default swaps spreads [i.e. the pricing in of higher risk] across mature markets was gradual and mild, and spreads remain near historic lows.’

Fast forward to the April 2008 launch of the IMF’s ‘Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa’ study. IMF Africa staffer John Wakeman-Linn’s powerpoint slideshow, ‘Private Capital Flows to Sub-Saharan Africa: Financial Globalization’s Final Frontier?’, concluded that the vast rush of finance is generally good for Africa, but policies would have to be changed – making Africa more vulnerable to the international financial system – in order to take full advantage:

• More transparency and consistency: exchange controls in sub-Saharan Africa complex and difficult to implement.
• Gradual and well-sequenced liberalisation strategy can help limit risks associated with capital inflows.
• Accelerated liberalisation in the face of large inflows may help their monitoring (e.g. Tanzania); selective liberalisation of outflows may help relieve inflation and appreciation pressures, but further work needed on modalities.

The IMF proclaimed the merits of liberalisation and rising financial flows to Africa, especially portfolio funding (i.e., short-term hot money in the forms of stocks, shares and securities issued by companies and government in local currencies but readily convertible). Such ‘hot money’ - speculative positions by private-sector investors – flowed especially into South Africa’s stock exchange, and also to a lesser extent into share markets in Ghana, Kenya, Gabon, Togo, and Seychelles.

However, financial outflows continue apace. An updated report on capital flight by Leonce Ndikumana of the Economic Commission for Africa and James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts shows that thanks to corruption and the demise of most African countries’ exchange controls, the estimated capital flight from 40 sub-Saharan African countries from 1970-2004 was at least $420 billion (in 2004 dollars). The external debt owed by the same countries in 2004 was $227 billion. Using an imputed interest rate to calculate the real impact of flight capital, the accumulated stock rises to $607 billion. According to Ndikumana and Boyce:

‘Adding to the irony of SSA’s position as net creditor is the fact that a substantial fraction of the money that flowed out of the country as capital flight appears to have come to the subcontinent via external borrowing. Part of the proceeds of loans to African governments from official creditors and private banks has been diverted into private pockets – and foreign bank accounts – via bribes, kickbacks, contracts awarded to political cronies at inflated prices, and outright theft. Some African rulers, like Congo’s Mobutu and Nigeria’s Sani Abacha, became famous for such abuses. This phenomenon was not limited to a few rogue regimes. Statistical analysis suggests that across the subcontinent the sheer scale of debt-fueled capital flight has been staggering. For every dollar in external loans to Africa in the 1970-2004 period, roughly 60 cents left as capital flight in the same year. The close year-to-year correlation between flows of borrowing and capital flight suggests that large sums of money entered and exited the region through a financial “revolving door”.’

Where did this leave African debtors in 2008? According to the IMF, the ‘debt sustainability outlook’ of low-income African countries ‘has improved substantially, with 21 out of 34 countries classified on the basis of the Debt Sustainability Framework at a low or moderate risk of debt distress at end-2007.’ Yet the major lesson from the prior quarter-century of debt distress was not the abstract ratios, but instead, the ability to pay the debt in the context of pressing human needs. It was here, according to London-based Jubilee Research, that the Bretton Woods institutions had not accurately assessed the damage done by debt, or the injustice associated with repaying debt inherited from prior undemocratic governments:

‘Current [mid-2008] approaches to debt relief (HIPC and MDRI for poor countries, and Paris and London Club renegotiations for middle income countries) are not solving the problems of Third World indebtedness. HIPC and MDRI are reducing debt burdens but only for a small range of countries and after long delays, and at a high cost in terms of loss of policy space. While non-HIPC poor countries continue to have major debt problems and middle-income country indebtedness continues to grow. The present approach is marred by the involvement of creditors as judge, prosecution and jury in direct conflict with natural justice and by the failure to take into account either the human rights of the people of debtor nations or the moral obscenity of odious debt. It is all too little and too late… Even after the debt relief already granted under HIPC and MDRI, 47 countries need 100% debt cancellation on this basis and a further 34 to 58 need partial cancellation, amounting to $334 to $501 billion in net present value terms, if they are to get to a point where debt service does not seriously affect basic human rights.’

Hence the system of debt peonage remains, and the only prospect for its relief is the weakening of Washington’s power, along with the overhauling of the aid system that is so closely connected to debt (for the richest set of recommendations, see Yash Tandon's work). The Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) conference in September 2008 provided an opportunity to address the problems of donor/financier cross-conditionality, ‘phantom aid’ (including tied aid), corruption, waste, economic distortions and political manipulation, as well as to add the South’s demand for repayment of the North’s ecological debt to the South. But the opportunity was lost, and even mild-mannered NGOs realised they were wasting their time, as a staffer at Civicus, Nastasya Tay, revealed:

‘A colleague from a major international NGO gave an excellent summary of the whole High Level Forum process: “Why should I attend interminably long meetings, to passionately lobby for reform, when countries like the US and Japan are refusing to sign on because of some “language issues” with the AAA? In the end, we will have worked incredibly hard to, if we’re lucky, change a few words. And it’s just another document”.’

Hence, for some African countries, the solution lies in an alternative source of hard currency finance. It is not only China who provides condition-free loans to several of Africa’s most authoritarian regimes. More hopefully, Venezuela is considering a proposal to replace and displace the IMF, as happened in Argentina in 2006, in which case repaying the IMF early or even defaulting would be feasible. In other African countries, progressive social movements have argued for debt repudiation and are concerned about any further financial inflows beyond those required for trade financing of essential inputs. This would also entail inward-oriented light industrialisation oriented to basic needs (and not to luxury goods, a major problem that emerged in Africa’s settler colonial economies during the 1960s-70s).

The crucial ingredient for establishing an alternative African financing strategy from the Left is pressure from below. This means the strengthening, coordination and increased militancy of two kinds of civil society: those forces devoted to the debt relief cause, which have often come from what might be termed an excessively polite, civilised society based in internationally-linked NGOs which rarely if ever used ‘tree shaking’ in order to do ‘jam making’ and; those forces which react via short-term ‘IMF Riots’ against the system, in a manner best understood as uncivilised society. The IMF riots that shook African countries during the 1980s-90s often, unfortunately, rose up in fury and even shook loose some governments’ hold on power. When these, however, contributed to the fall of Kenneth Kaunda in Zambia (one of many examples), the man who replaced him as president in 1991, former trade unionist Frederick Chiluba, imposed even more decisive IMF policies. Most anti-IMF protest simply could not be sustained.

In contrast, the former organisations are increasingly networked, especially in the wake of 2005 activities associated with the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP), which generated (failed) strategies to support the Millennium Developmental Goals partly through white-headband consciousness raising, through appealing to national African elites and through joining a naïve appeal to the G8 Gleneagles meeting. Since then, networks tightened and became more substantive through two Nairobi events: the January 2007 World Social Forum and August 2008 launch of Jubilee South’s Africa network. These networks could return to the cul-de-sac of GCAP’s ‘reformist reforms’ – i.e., to recall Andre Gorz’s phrase, making demands squarely within the logic of the existing neoliberal system and its geopolitical power relations, in a manner that disempowers activists if they gain slight marginal changes.

Or they could embark upon ‘non-reformist reform’ challenges, by identifying sites where the logic of finance can be turned upside down. The most striking case might have been the South African ‘bond boycott’ campaign of the early 1990s, wherein activists in dozens of townships offered each other solidarity when collective refusal to repay housing mortgage bonds was the only logical reaction. This forewarned the 1995-96 ‘El Barzón’ (‘the yoke’) strategy of more than a million Mexicans who were in debt when interest rates soared from 14 to 120 percent over a few days in early 1995: they simply said, ‘can’t pay, won’t pay’. That slogan was also heard in Argentina in early 2002, following the evictions of four presidents in a single week due to popular protest. The ongoing pressure from below compelled the government to default on $140 billion in foreign debt so as to maintain some of the social wage, the largest such default in history.

At the time of writing, a November 2008 summit was called by the G8 in New York, to refashion the world’s financial architecture, likely adding China, India, Brazil and South Africa for legitimacy (and access to substantial dollar reserves). Activists began contemplating whether to ‘Seattle’ the event (shut it down with protest); African social movements and a few patriotic African trade ministers were, after all, not only present but instrumental in preventing the World Trade Organization’s Seattle summit from proceeding nine years earlier. A serious danger for civil society would be to settle for a UN-sponsored event full of reformist reforms. Enormous damage to Southern finances was caused by the 2002 precedent set in Monterrey at the UN Financing for Development conference, which had as key UN advisors Michel Camdessus (former IMF managing director) and Trevor Manuel.

Instead, much more forthright national action can be taken, spurred by far-seeing civil society activists, such as those who demand reparations for apartheid, colonialism, slavery and ‘ecological debt’ owed by the North to the South. Africa needs to re-impose national exchange controls and import controls (especially on luxury goods for the elites), as installed successfully by Malaysia, Chile and Venezuela in recent years.

As commodity prices plunge from their 2002-07 speculation-driven bubble prices, as trade deals with the North are unveiled as clearly disadvantageous and as trade finance becomes difficult as a result of bank mistrust of counterparty debt, and as the hot money portfolio flows dry up and new sources open for hard currency, the argument for what Samir Amin calls ‘delinking’ and Walden Bello terms ‘deglobalisation’ becomes all the more compelling. The evidence above suggests it is already beginning to happen, in no small part thanks to civil society advocacy.

* Patrick Bond is professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies where he directs the .
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/

Highlighting the current lack of an adequate legislative framework around the treatment of asylum seekers in Israel, Anat Ben-Dor describes the Israeli state’s trend towards ‘hot returns’ in its approach to foreign nationals within its borders. Following an initial high court denial of a request for an injunction, the Hotline for Migrant Workers and the Refugee Rights Clinic at Tel Aviv University (TAU) has resumed its calls for the court’s intervention to ensure greater protection of asylum seekers’ rights.

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/403/KNCHR_l.jpgLawrence M. Mute’s presentation draws upon Kenya’s experiences as documented by the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights (KNCHR) in the course of its work monitoring the 2005 Constitutional Referendum and the 2007 General Elections. It explains the basis upon which the national commission is persuaded that it is feasible and legally allowable for hate speech legislation to be enacted in Kenya in a manner that does not violate the constitutional right of Kenyans to the freedom of expression. It outlines the key elements that should be included in hate speech legislation and the manner in which those elements should be framed in order, on one hand, to protect Kenyans against hate speech while, on the other hand, to ensure that their right to express themselves is not undermined.

An excerpt from Francis B. Nyamnjoh’s

It is late into the night. Bobinga Iroko is unable to sleep. He is working on the editorial for the next issue of The Talking Drum. He has deliberately refused to carry the story on homosexuality. His priority remains the strike at the University of Mimbo, which, curiously, hasn’t attracted much coverage from the rest of the national press concentrated in Nyamandem and Sawang. He and The Talking Drum, the formidable odds against them notwithstanding, are determined to crusade along like a lone ranger, until victory day. They believe the sun must not be allowed to set on a good idea.

He is also struggling with an obituary following the sudden death, under very mysterious circumstances, of one of the rare genuine intellectuals at the University of Mimbo. Despised by the authorities as an ‘unbelievably vain, hopelessly incompetent and disestablishmentarian crank,’ and known popularly as ‘Intellectual Warrior’, Dr BP (‘Burning Pen’) was found dead last night at his home, his skull shattered, his brain and genitals missing. In his transition from Burning Pen to Buried Pen, he looked more like the victim of a ritual murder than of a robbery. Dr BP was not afraid to make career-limiting statements, and would rather die than be cowed. He had absolute disdain for those who were neither here nor there in their convictions; those who seemed to say things only to please the way a chameleon would its vicinity. To him, such people were shallow, myopic, spineless irrelevances. A screaming and fearless critic who once described the University of Mimbo as the ‘burial ground for enthusiasm’, Dr BP was writing a commentary titled ‘J’accuse’, when he was smashed to death in mid-sentence.

Dr BP died doing what he has always done: fighting to make a difference and making a difference by fighting. To Bobinga Iroko and The Talking Drum, Dr BP died keeping hope alive in a hopeless situation, adding the weight of his pen to efforts to bring back a bit of dignity to the lives of ordinary Mimbolanders stripped bare by shallow pretence, sterile rhetoric and its radical vocabulary of hate. He died fighting the battles he would want those he leaves behind to keep fighting. In a context where many an intellectual has been silenced by the lure and allure of easy virtue and the sterile politics of reckless impunity, BP was the rare exception who stayed wedded to the ideals of the genuine intellectual, academic freedom and social responsibility.

Bobinga Iroko will always cherish BP’s essays and contributions in the pages of The Talking Drum, which were as clear about what he believed to be wrong with the land of his birth as they were about what he thought it would take to make right those wrongs. It is therefore unfortunate and indeed ironic that BP should pass on in a suspicious death most cruel, and not those excesses his essays and commentaries were meant to bury. And it is equally unfortunate that he should leave the scene just when he was ready to share with the world in person the richness of his experience of a country and a university community where a reluctant government and those whose intellects it has numbed would spare nothing to derail the train of hope and human dignity.

BP epitomized those who refuse to stand by and watch the train of hope and human dignity derailed. He stood for those who would rather fight than run away (wasn’t it Bob Marley who said it all – he who fights and runs away lives to fight another day?). BP the flesh and blood may have died, BP the idea has never been more alive. This can be seen in the determination and resilience by students of the University of Mimbo to keep aglow their ambitions of academic freedom and the quest for betterment in equality, dignity and opportunity for all and sundry.

This, as BP and others who have sacrificed their lives have always claimed, requires a particular calibre of leadership. As BP has stressed ad infinitum, any leader, no matter how good, needs others to compensate for their weaknesses. A good leader is one who encourages others to lead without overly dramatizing the fact of being in charge. He or she is one who surrounds themselves with people of contradictory opinions in order to be forced to think, compare and contrast before reaching a decision.

The way forward for the University of Mimbo and for Mimboland, BP stressed in what none could have imagined was his last commentary in the pages of The Talking Drum, is by recognising that leadership is not about the leader. It is about the enabling environment the leader creates for experts in various walks of life and for all and sundry under him or her to offer leadership. A good leader is one who is able to purge him or herself of the delusion that bosses are necessarily better than the people under them. Modesty is the master key to success in leadership, for a good leader immediately recognises that he or she needs support to lead, and that a leader never leads alone. ‘Leadership is more of a privilege than a right, just as a leader is more of a servant than a master’, BP emphasised, adding that only at the University of Mimbo and in Mimboland did the contrary obtain. ‘With leaders who have neither modesty nor generosity of spirit, who thrive on the argument of force and not the force of argument, institutions dry out and wither, not for lack of talent but for lack of purpose.’ Woe betides the leader who takes decisions without consultation, and who excludes from leadership people who have a lot of talent because he or she is too afraid to be contradicted or to discover that no single individual however gifted has a monopoly of good ideas.

‘It is difficult to advise a leader who is always right,’ argued BP, ‘hence the need to create circumstances where other leaders can be fostered. This starts with inclusion, fairness and opportunity for all and sundry.’ BP ended his commentary with the words: ‘We often get the leaders we deserve by giving myopic individuals the power to silence the creativity and difference that should normally edify and strengthen an institution, a community or a country. The University of Mimbo and the people of Mimboland deserve a better fate than the disgrace lumped on them by the predicament of a mediocrity called leadership.’

* Francis B. Nyamnjoh is associate professor and head of publications and dissemination with the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). Nyamnjoh’s Married But Available (Langaa Publishers, 2008) is available at the both .
* Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at http://www.pambazuka.org/