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Themba Dlamini

Ethekwini Metro Tenders: Closing 07 Feb 2014 - .@Phuzemthonjeni - 0 views

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Ethekwini Metro Tenders: Closing 07 Feb 2014

shared by Themba Dlamini on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Themba Dlamini on 30 Jan 14
     
    Ethekwini Metro Tenders: Closing 07 Feb 2014
Arabica Robusta

The Chia Report: The SDF: Arrogance in Failure - 0 views

www.chiareport.com/...-sdf-arrogance-in-failure.html

cameroon africa development international governance sdf

shared by Arabica Robusta on 19 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • The story of the SDF as a political formation during the last nineteen years of its existence is also a story of deferred dreams, bungled chances, unfulfilled promises and dashed hopes.
  • how can  the SDF leadership - I was asking -   continue  to  exude the kind of near imperial arrogance that Mr. Fru Ndi recently spurted out following  the resignation of Akonteh?
  • As a political organization the SDF has also been considerably weakened by unsound policy decisions made without a proper analysis of the risks and the rewards involved. Two good examples are, first, the decision to call for a boycott of French goods (thus gratuitously seeking confrontation with an influential former colonial power); and second, publicly calling for the disbandment of the corps of Civil Administrators (D.Os, SDOs and Governors) as well as the National Gendarmerie.
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  • Where does a Chairman, on whose watch the SDF has consistently lost an average of 30% of its political fortunes after each election, find the nerve to be so foul-mouthed? Mr. Fru Ndi might have pulled Akonteh from the gutter and paid his rents as he claims, but Akonteh’s commitment and service to the SDF and to Cameroon’s democracy are also unimpeachable.
  • This piece has also been enriched as a result of his experience as a civil administrator with the the CPDM clan, and his experience as a civil Affairs officer with UNMI HAITI.
  • Julio in your piece you said, you sai any serious politician seeking to accede to the pinnacle of power in Cameroon should know by intuition that it is in his best interest to be in the good books of France. WHY?" This is a culture i strongly discourage.Must Cameroon be governed from foriegn boundaries? Fru Ndi like any other Cameroonian with a Democratic mind thought that will be a strategy to reduce French interest in Cameroon.
Arabica Robusta

Sub-Saharan Africa in Global Capitalism by John J. Saul | Monthly Review - 0 views

monthlyreview.org/...an-africa-in-global-capitalism

international development economic development neoliberalism marxism capitalism africa

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • There are two ways of picturing Africa in the context of global capitalism. One is from the point of view of the people living and hoping to improve their lot in sub-Saharan Africa’s forty-eight nation-states with a considerable variety of kinds of “insertion” into the global capitalist economy, and a corresponding range of experiences of development (or the lack of it).6 The other is from the point of view of capital, for which Africa is not so much a system of states, still less a continent of people in need of a better life, as simply a geographic—or geological—terrain, offering this or that opportunity to make money.
  • Growing pressure of population means a constantly expanding landless labor force, partly working for subsistence wages on other people’s land, partly unemployed or underemployed in the cities, sometimes migrating to neighboring countries (e.g., from Burkina Faso to Cote d’Ivoire), living on marginal incomes and with minimal state services, including education and health.
  • The “investment climate” has been made easier, thanks, as we will see, to a decade and a half of aid “conditionality,” and the returns can be spectacular; the rates of return on U.S. direct investments in Africa are, for example, the highest of any region in the world (25.3 percent in 1997).9
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  • Fatefully for Africa, this debt came due, in the 1980s, just as the premises of the dominant players in the development game were changing. The western Keynesian consensus that had sanctioned the agricultural levies, the industrialization dream, the social services sensibility, and the activist state of the immediate post-independence decades—and lent money to support all this—was replaced by “neoliberalism.”
  • States in Africa felt compelled to comply: they were debtors, after all, and, with the decline of the Eastern bloc, were also fast losing whatever limited leverage this alternative source of support had given them.
  • “What has emerged in Accra,” Eboe Hutchful once wrote of the Ghanaian SAP experience, “is a parallel government controlled (if not created) by the international lender agencies…[while] the other side of the external appropriation of policy-making powers is the deliberate de-politicalization that has occurred under the ERP [Economic Reconstruction Programme], and the displacement of popular participation and mobilization by a narrowly-based bureaucratic management.”15
  • For political support, the new leaders had to rely not on urban working classes or middle classes, which mostly barely existed, but on rural notables, whose allegiance they secured through chains of patronage stretching from the ministers’ offices to the villages.
  • There was, of course, another trajectory to African politics—some states which professed to bend the logic of global capitalism in favor of more progressive outcomes: Ghana, Tanzania, and Mozambique, among others.
  • Mozambique and Angola: far too many instances of overweening industrial plans and of forced villagization in the countryside, far too little democratic sensibility towards the complex values and demands of their presumed popular constituencies. Future attempts to develop counter-hegemonic projects in Africa will have to learn lessons from such experiences and also determine how to disentangle, for purposes of popular mobilization, the discredited notion of socialism from this troubled past.
  • Thus Jonathan Barker speaks of the existence, in Africa and beyond, of “thousands of activist groups addressing the issues of conserving jobs and livelihoods, community health, power of women, provision of housing, functioning of local markets, availability of local social services, provision and standard of education, and abusive and damaging working conditions.”35
  • “African peoples have adopted many diverse strategies to challenge, deflect, or avoid bearing the costs of austerity involved and to seek a political alternative to the politicians they hold responsible.”They also document an impressive range of (primarily urban) actors—“lawyers, students, copper miners, organizations of rural women, urban workers and the unemployed, journalists, clergymen and others”—whose direct action in recent years has shaken numerous African governments.36
  • Such resistances—what Célestin Monga refers to as the “collective insubordination” of Africa37—have been one factor driving the renewed saliency of democratic demands on the continent.
  • in Zimbabwe in recent years arguing (alongside other popular organizations) for the formation of a new party to challenge the rancid Mugabe regime from the left: as Patrick Bond writes of this initiative, “What is crucial is that the opposition’s political orientation is potentially both post-nationalist and post-neoliberal, perhaps for the first time in African history.”39
Arabica Robusta

IPS - U.N. Report Links Rwanda to Congolese Violence | Inter Press Service - 0 views

www.ipsnews.net/...s-rwanda-to-congolese-violence

africa development international news governance rwanda security council us intervention

shared by Arabica Robusta on 08 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • The U.S. had been accused by Congolese officials of protecting the Rwandan government by delaying the release of the U.N. report.
  • Victoria Nuland, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said in a statement Saturday that the United States is “deeply concerned about the report’s findings that Rwanda is implicated in the provision of support to Congolese rebel groups.” Nuland said the U.S. had “asked Rwanda to halt and prevent the provision of such support from its territory”.
  • The Rwandan government, which is vying for a seat on the U.N. Security Council, has been quick to deny the allegations in the report that they have supported the rebels. “Of course, Rwanda’s top army leadership in no way would be involved in destroying the peace they have been working very hard to build,” said Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo.
Arabica Robusta

NAI Forum - 0 views

naiforum.org/...rent-africa-optimism-%E2%80%95

africa development international governance industry nordiska

shared by Arabica Robusta on 28 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The prevailing optimism gives no true picture of Africa. Short-term exploitation and large-scale agriculture are neither socially nor environmentally sustainable. Economic and social inequalities are growing on the continent.
  • The current overall African growth rate of about 5 per cent annually is largely based on natural resource exploitation for export, especially of oil, gas and minerals.
  • A growing African elite and middle class in collaboration with foreign allies have also secured benefits for themselves. Therefore, economic inequality is growing rapidly in Africa,  as in Asia.
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  • The weakness of the Afro-optimistic perspective is reinforced by recent research showing that foreign investments  to a large extent are directed towards African agricultural land for the production of energy crops and food for export. Such investments often take place in interaction between foreign and domestic African interests, and with the support of international aid. Such projects are highly mechanized and require little labour. Large-scale agriculture focuses mainly on a single crop, thus undermining biodiversity. Irrigation is necessary but often leads to conflicts with local smallholder farmers, of whom the majority are women. In Africa, smallholders have weak water and land rights, despite their paramount importance of their production for food security – they produce 90 per cent of the food in Africa.
  • This large-scale agriculture uses 75 per cent of the country’s farmland, but contributes only 60 per cent of the gross annual agricultural production. It employs only two people per 100 acres, while small-scale farming provides jobs for 15 people in the same area, accounting for the bulk of food production.
Arabica Robusta

From Racism to Neoliberalism to National Security: AFRICOM and R2P | ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY - 0 views

zeroanthropology.net/...ional-security-africom-and-r2p

us intervention africa development international governance africom waronterror

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • To mask these simple truths, the U.S. and its corporate propaganda services invent counter-realities, scenarios of impending doomsdays filled with super-villains and more armies of darkness than J.R.R. Tolkien could ever imagine. Indeed, nothing is left to the imagination, lest the people’s minds wander into the realm of truth or stumble upon a realization of their own self-interest, which is quite different than the destinies of Wall Street or the Project for a New American Century (updated, Obama’s “humanitarian” version). It is a war of caricatures.
  • Naturally, in order to facilitate all these exits of governments of sovereign states, international law, as we have known it “must go.” In its place is substituted the doctrine of “humanitarian” military intervention or “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), a rehash of the “White Man’s Burden” designed to nullify smaller powers’ rights to national sovereignty at the whim of the superpower.
  • Muammar Gaddafi’s exorcism in Libya energized jihadists all across the northern tier of Africa, as far as northern Nigeria, giving a green light to a French colonial renaissance and further expansion of AFRICOM, the U.S. Africa Command. Only five years after its official inception, AFRICOM reigns supreme on the continent, with ties to the militaries of all but two African countries: the nemesis states Eritrea and Zimbabwe. (They “must go,” eventually.)
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  • U.S. proxies set off inter-communal bloodletting in Rwanda in 1994, a conflagration that served as pretext for Rwandan and Ugandan invasion of the mineral-rich Democratic Republic of Congo and the loss of six million lives – all under the protection, funding and guidance of a succession of U.S. administrations in mock atonement for the much smaller “genocide” in Rwanda.
  • New age Euro-American law holds sway over Africa in the form of the International Criminal Court. The Court’s dockets are reserved for Africans, whose supposed civilizational deficits monopolize the global judiciary’s resources. This, too, is R2P, in robes.
  • However, what we do know about U.S. domestic “terror” spying is enough to dismiss the whole premise for the NSA’s vast algorithmic enterprises. The actual “terrorist” threat on U.S. soil is clearly relatively slight. Otherwise, why would the FBI have to manufacture homegrown jihadists by staging elaborate stings of homeless Black men in Miami who couldn’t put together bus fare to Chicago, much less bomb the Sears tower?
  • So, what are they looking for? Patterns. Patterns of thought and behavior that algorithmically reveal the existence of cohorts of people that might, as a group, or a living network, create problems for the State in the future. People who do not necessarily know each other, but whose patterns of life make them potentially problematic to the rulers, possibly in some future crisis, or some future manufactured crisis. A propensity to dissent, for example. The size of these suspect cohorts, these pattern-based groups, can be as large or small as the defining criteria inputted by the programmer. So, what kind of Americans would the programmers be interested in?
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...49569

africa china copper development extractive industry international katanga

shared by Arabica Robusta on 01 Aug 08 - Cached
  • Corruption DRC: Mining multi-nationals get deal of the century 2008-07-18 http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/corruption/49569 Printer friendly version There is potentially enormous mineral wealth in the DRC province of Katanga. In exchange, investors from all over the world, and especially China, are prepared to offer money and infrastructure to revive the DRC after 15 terrible years of war and invasion. The potential for ecological disaster, social exploitation and corruption is almost limitless. Le Monde diplomatique ----------------------------------------------------- July 2008 MINING MULTINATIONALS GET DEALS OF THE CENTURY Copper colony in Congo There is potentially enormous mineral wealth in the DRC province of Katanga. In exchange, investors from all over the world, and especially China, are prepared to offer money and infrastructure to revive the DRC after 15 terrible years of war and invasion. The potential for ecological disaster, social exploitation and corruption is almost limitless. by Colette Braeckman Lubumbashi is the capital of Katanga, the southernmost state of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Day and night, huge trucks roar through its streets, making for the nearby Zambian border with cargoes of copper and cobalt on their way, via the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, to Asia. Every month new stores open: fast food joints with American names, and shops where the locals stare in wonder at Chinese consumer goods, finally within their reach.
  • Lubumbashi is the capital of Katanga, the southernmost state of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Day and night, huge trucks roar through its streets, making for the nearby Zambian border with cargoes of copper and cobalt on their way, via the Tanzanian port of Dar es Salaam, to Asia. Every month new stores open: fast food joints with American names, and shops where the locals stare in wonder at Chinese consumer goods, finally within their reach.
  • And there is a third, social threat. The small-scale exploitation of mineral deposits is coming to an end as the big multinationals move in, driving out independent miners. Until a few months ago the Étoile mine at Ruashi, a few kilometres outside Lubumbashi, was just an open pit where men worked unprotected. Children scurried through unsupported tunnels, pulling out rocks striated with green copper or yellow cobalt and cramming them into jute sacks. Cave-ins and fatalities were so frequent that the miners had their own mutual insurance scheme to cover hospital or funeral expenses.
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  • The terms granted to private companies associated with Gécamines took the commissioners aback. The investment of external partners was systematically overvalued and that of the Congolese (the value of mineral deposits and existing Gécamines infrastructure) underestimated. Fiscal and para-fiscal concessions (such as 30-year tax exemptions) deprived the state of essential revenues. Mining rights were acquired for purely speculative ends (the partners sold the shares on the stock exchange before even starting work on the ground), while social and environmental clauses were ignored, local skills undervalued, local workers underpaid and concession boundaries extended without authorisation.
  • Unlike western governments, incapable of releasing the credits necessary for the reconstruction of a country four times the size of France, China has been quick to get down to work: several projects have already begun in Katanga, Kivu and Kinshasa, where 250km of roads and 1,000 units of social housing are to be built. The people's hopes are undermined by fears that the arrival of Chinese workers and engineers heralds a new wave of colonisation. The unconcealed displeasure of the West, Belgium especially, could endanger the stability of the government. But the Congolese government is determined to pursue its relationship with China.
Arabica Robusta

Rooi Gevaar | Daily Maverick - 0 views

www.dailymaverick.co.za/...2014-07-04-rooi-gevaar

africa development international governance news industry world south africa

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • Duarte was most direct. “AMCU and the formation of EFF show similar characteristics. The platinum belt has become counter-revolutionary. They are working together to destabilise the ANC government and the country,” she said.
  • The electoral campaign also coincided with serious challenges to the unity of Cosatu, and the emergence of a right-wing, populist demagogic movement, the EFF, posing as left wing.”
  • Nzimande went on to say: “We must also bear in mind the fact that it has always been the intention of imperialism, monopoly capital, and the apartheid regime, to work towards driving a wedge between the national liberation movement and the progressive sections of the organised working class like Cosatu. Also, it has been the intention of these very same enemy forces to particularly drive a wedge between Cosatu and the SACP.”
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  • The ANC and SACP leaders seem believe that Numsa could genuinely disagree with ANC policies and is entitled to go its own way, that the platinum mineworkers are genuinely fed up with their living conditions and that a rebellion was bound to happen, and that the EFF’s strong showing in the election was due to genuine disappointment with the ANC. It would appear that if you find a way to knit up your critics into a neat conspiracy, it then happily excuses you from self-analysis of your role in creating a multiple backlash.
  • The one thing that the EFF, AMCU and Numsa have in common is that they know how to yank the ANC’s chains. The ANC almost always falls into the trap because instead of acting like the party in power, its default position is to behave as if it under attack and a victim of a conspiracy.
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