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Themba Dlamini

Conservation and Small Scale Grower Managers - Phuzemthonjeni.com - 0 views

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    Conservation and Small Scale Grower Managers
Arabica Robusta

NAI Forum - 0 views

  • 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

Corporates aren't the only solution to conflict gold | Guardian Sustainable Business | ... - 0 views

  • CRC has chosen to take a pro-active stance on the issue of conflict minerals and has identified employment of former combatants across towns and villages in eastern DRC as key to reducing or de-escalating the conflict.
  • The OECD conflict minerals process deals with the fruit, not the root of the problem. It has created a set of recommended procedures that only corporate mining companies can afford to follow, rather than address the majority employed by the gold trade, namely the small-scale miners.
  • It remains to be seen if the OECD due diligences on conflict minerals will work, but its clear that currently, it's just another CSR badge that the World Gold Counsel, the London Bullion Market Association and the Responsible Jewellery Council corporate members, can add to their collection.
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  • to truly understand the ASM sector you need to look beneath the obvious of environmental mismanagement, systemic mercury usage and child labour issues to understand the hidden driver of money and survival.
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    "CRC has chosen to take a pro-active stance on the issue of conflict minerals and has identified employment of former combatants across towns and villages in eastern DRC as key to reducing or de-escalating the conflict."
Arabica Robusta

South Africa's untold tragedy of neoliberal apartheid | ROAR Magazine - 0 views

  • All of this became painfully obvious in August last year when militarized police forces violently cracked down on a wildcat miners’ strike in the platinum town of Marikana. In the ensuing bloodbath, the most serious bout of state violence since the Sharpville massacre of 1960 and the end of apartheid in 1994, 34 workers were killed after being peppered with machine gun fire at close range.
  • The story of South Africa over the last 20 years must qualify as one of the most authentic political tragedies of our era. Once upon a time, not very long ago, the country was held up as an example to the world. In 1994, when the apartheid regime finally came to an end and South Africans overwhelmingly elected Mandela as their first democratic President, the world looked to South Africa with a mix of hope and expectation.
  • In this brave new world, Mandela was a former revolutionary turned philosopher-king; an elder of the global village who came to represent not only the suffering and aspirations of black Africans, but also the hopes and desires of Western progressives. Mandela mingled with world leaders, the European royalty and multi-billionaires; he hung out with popstars and sports legends, but he also maintained a close friendship with Fidel Castro and Muammar Khaddafi. Father Madiba, in a way, was above politics. Or was he?
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  • While a couple of pejoratively called “black diamonds” have made it to the top, crafting a small indigenous elite that slowly takes up residence in the old vestiges of white privilege, for the vast majority of South Africans nothing has really changed.
  • Samir Amin once wrote that “the logic of this globalization trend consists in nothing other than that of organizing apartheid on a global scale.” Apartheid here is not meant as a metaphor; it is what a philosopher might call an ontological category of the neoliberal world order. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, “the explosive growth of slums in the last decades … is perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times.”
  • First of all, the ANC decided to take over existing institutions — political and economic institutions that were based on systematic exclusion and massive inequality — and thereby ended up unwittingly reproducing these same oppressive structures with a new elite formation. Secondly, as Lawrence Hamilton explains in his book The Political Philosophy of Needs, the ANC leadership deliberately embraced a particular ideological vision of how to “transform” the country: a vision he refers to as the “political philosophy of rights”, in other words: liberalism. South Africa’s new constitution was the clearest manifestation of this: everything was put to work to secure the rights of individuals to vote and be represented, to own property, and to not be discriminated against in any way. Little attention, however, was given to questions of political participation, genuine popular sovereignty, and the satisfaction of basic human needs.
  • Partly because of the reigning neoliberal ideology of the time, and partly out of fear of reproducing the Zimbabwean experience where Mugabe’s violent land expropriations had led to a white exodus and economic collapse, Mandela and the ANC opted for a gradualist approach that actually ended up turning the ANC into an agent of apartheid itself. Legally, the property rights of white landowners took priority over the human needs of local shackdwellers. Workers’ rights were increasingly hollowed out as the right to unionize gave way to the “right” to be “represented” by a corrupt and ANC co-opted union leadership. The state-oriented approach and the political philosophy of rights thus locked poor South Africans into a logic of representation and top-down decision-making whereby human needs, social autonomy and political participation came to be subordinated to the formation of a new political and corporate elite of former ANC revolutionaries.
  • The so-called Abahlali baseMjondolo, or shackdwellers’ movement, has since spread to Cape Town and Pietermaritzburg.
  • The action was just one more expression of the dawning realization around the world that, in these times of universal deceit, only an insistence on radical autonomy can take the revolution forward.
  • Twenty years after apartheid, the old freedom fighters of the ANC have come to reproduce the same structures of oppression against which they once arose.
  • A local slumdweller, probably somewhere in his thirties, lay dead on the side of the road, his body awkwardly twisted into an impossible position, his eyes still wide open. Some two hundred meters ahead, a car had pulled over on the curb, its driver casually leaning on the vehicle while talking to a policeman. No one had even bothered to cover up the body. This man just lay there like a dead animal — another road kill in endless wave of needlessly extinguished lives.
  • This time, however, the policemen and politicians responsible for the massacre were mostly black and represented the same party that had once led the struggle against racial oppression: the ruling ANC of President Jacob Zuma and the iconic freedom fighter Nelson Mandela.
  • Abahlali stresses its autonomy from state institutions, political parties, businesses and NGOs, and rejects both the ANC and its principal rivals in the opposition, drawing instead on self-organization and direct action to secure improvements in living conditions, to defend communities under threat of eviction, to reclaim urban land for social redistribution, and to democratize society from below.
Arabica Robusta

Who is lying about Newmont's Akyem ''Galamsey'' Mine? | Feature Article 2013-11-22 - 0 views

  • I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country.
  • This time around the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Mines and Energy (one Dr. Kwabena Donkor) expressed shock that Newmont has started mining gold at its Akyem mine even before its mining lease is ratified by parliament. I understand some other MPs have expressed similar worries. Dr. Donkor has consequently described Newmont’s operations at the said mine as illegal, hence the company is engaging in ‘‘galamsey’’ mining activity – a very popular categorization for widespread illegal small scale mining activities in the country.
  • I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country.
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  • This time around the Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Mines and Energy (one Dr. Kwabena Donkor) expressed shock that Newmont has started mining gold at its Akyem mine even before its mining lease is ratified by parliament. I understand some other MPs have expressed similar worries. Dr. Donkor has consequently described Newmont’s operations at the said mine as illegal, hence the company is engaging in ‘‘galamsey’’ mining activity – a very popular categorization for widespread illegal small scale mining activities in the country
  • I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country.
  • I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country.
  • I understand that the President of Ghana Chamber of Mines (one Dr. Tony Aubynn) and an External Affairs and Communications Director at Newmont (one Adiki Ayitevie) have waded into the debate, suggesting that it’s been the practice and Newmont is not doing anything illegal. This is indeed a bad practice and an illegal one. Even though Dr. Aubynn indicated his profound respect for rule of law it is clear that such respect cannot be extended to all laws and some aspects of the constitution in the country. He ough
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
  • Is citizen vigilante still in the country? And can this brouhaha over the legality of Newmont’s Akyem mine be settled in the Supreme Court? May be we should call on one Kwaku Kwarteng (MP for Obuasi) who has recently taken another multinational mining firm (Anglogold Ashanti) to court for usual breaches in the mining sector.
Arabica Robusta

BBC NEWS | Business | Wind of change blows in Tanzania - 0 views

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    According to wind expert Dr Ladislaus Lwambuka, from the University of Dar es Salaam, Africa is now ready for wind power on a commercial scale.
Arabica Robusta

Africa's Unnatural Disaster - 0 views

  • AGRA’s assumptions – and those of the mainstream media – rest on the premise that the Africa’s hunger problem is one of production. While production may be part of the story, it’s far from the complete picture. The heart of the agriculture crisis that Africa and the world are currently experiencing lies in the failed policy paradigm promoted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, institutions that still have enormous control over economic policy in many African countries.
  • The second concession that the 2008 WDR makes to reality (as opposed to market fundamentalist ideology) is an allowance for targeted subsidies.
  • The recommendations of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and the World Bank amount to insanity – recommending more of the same and expecting better results.
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    The strategies of the World Bank and IMF have successfully applied shock doctrine methods to plunder the globe, causing widespread hardship and suffering, for the benefit of the few and creating millions of victims. They are the embodiment of psychopathy on a global scale, and from that perspective, they are not 'failed', but actually a devastating and horrific success.
Arabica Robusta

Foreign Policy In Focus | Making Peace or Fueling War in Africa - 0 views

  • Will de facto U.S. security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa's own urgent security needs?
  • Will de facto U.S. security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa's own urgent security needs?
  • Will de facto U.S. security policy toward the continent focus on anti-terrorism and access to natural resources and prioritize bilateral military relations with African countries? Or will the United States give priority to enhancing multilateral capacity to respond to Africa's own urgent security needs?
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  • crises require not only a continuing emphasis on diplomacy but also resources for peacemaking and peacekeeping. And yet the Bush administration has bequeathed the new president a new military command for Africa (the United States Africa Command, known as AFRICOM). Meanwhile, Washington has starved the United Nations and other multilateral institutions of resources, even while entrusting them with enormous peacekeeping responsibilities.
  • In a briefing for European Command officers in March 2004, Whelan said that the Pentagon's priorities in Africa were to "prevent establishment of/disrupt/destroy terrorist groups; stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction; perform evacuations of U.S. citizens in danger; assure access to strategic resources, lines of communication, and refueling/forward sites"
  • On February 19, 2008, Moeller told an AFRICOM conference that protecting "the free flow of natural resources from Africa to the global market" was one of AFRICOM's "guiding principles," citing "oil disruption," "terrorism," and the "growing influence" of China as major "challenges" to U.S. interests in Africa.
  • Somalia provided a textbook case of the negative results of "aggregating" local threats into an undifferentiated concept of global terrorism. It has left the new Obama administration with what Ken Menkhaus, a leading academic expert on Somalia, called "a policy nightmare."
  • These operations illustrate how strengthening counterinsurgency capacity proves either counterproductive or irrelevant as a response to African security issues, which may include real links to global terrorist networks but are for the most part focused on specific national and local realities. On an international scale, the impact of violent Islamic extremism in North Africa has direct implications in Europe, but its bases are urban communities and the North African Diaspora in Europe, rather than the Sahara-Sahel hinterland.
  • In March 2004, P-3 aircraft from this squadron and reportedly operating from the southern Algerian base at Tamanrasset were deployed to monitor and gather intelligence on the movements of Algerian Salafist guerrillas operating in Chad and to pass on this intelligence to Chadian forces engaged in combat against the guerrillas. In September 2007, an American C-130 "Hercules" cargo plane stationed in Bamako, the capital of Mali, as part of the Flintlock 2007 exercises, was deployed to resupply Malian counter-insurgency units engaged in fighting with Tuareg forces and was hit by Tuareg ground fire. No U.S. personnel were injured and the plane returned safely to the capital, but the incident signaled a significant extension of the U.S. role in counter-insurgency warfare in the region.
  • In the case of Mali, Robert Pringle — a former U.S. ambassador to that country — has noted that the U.S. emphasis on anti-terrorism and radical Islam is out of touch with both the country's history and Malian perceptions of current threats to their own security.
  • The threats cited by U.S. officials to justify AFRICOM aren't imaginary. Global terrorist networks do seek allies and recruits throughout the African continent, with potential impact in the Middle East, Europe, and even North America as well as in Africa. In the Niger Delta, the production of oil has been repeatedly interrupted by attacks by militants of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND). More broadly, insecurity creates a environment vulnerable to piracy and to the drug trade, as well as to motivating potential recruits to extremist political violence. It doesn't follow, however, that such threats can be effectively countered by increased U.S. military engagement, even if the direct involvement of U.S. troops is minimized.
  • Finding the best way forward in responding to crises or to Africa's structural problems, must go beyond the top. Africa's resources for change and for leadership are also found in civil society, among respected retired leaders and other elders, and among professionals working both in governments and in multilateral organizations, including both diplomats and military professionals. The challenge for U.S. policy is to engage actively and productively in responding to crises, bringing U.S. resources to bear without assuming that it is either possible or wise for the United States to dominate.
  • Although he prefaced his list of priorities with a reference to support for ending conflict in Africa and "African solutions to African problems," it's telling that the description of the security priority includes military capacity-building and AFRICOM operations, but no mention at all of diplomacy. Such indications do not give great confidence in any major shift in security strategy. Nevertheless, there are also signals that U.S. officials, including some in the military and intelligence community, do recognize the need to give greater emphasis to diplomacy and development. The initial U.S. welcome to the election of moderate Islamist Sheikh Sharif Ahmed as president of Somalia is potentially an indicator of a new approach to that complex crisis.
  • In contrast to the emphasis on building bilateral U.S. military ties with Africa, being institutionalized in AFRICOM, U.S. security policy toward Africa should instead concentrate on building institutional capacity within the United Nations, as well as coordinating U.S. relationships with African regional institutions with United Nations capacity-building programs.
  • The new president's popularity and the range of domestic and global problems he faces are likely to give the administration a large window of opportunity before disillusionment sets in.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The war on Africa: U.S. imperialism and the world economic crisis - 0 views

  • In the U.S. itself with the advent of Cold War ideology and political repression under McCarthyism, perspectives and political organizing around Africa became a highly contentious arena of struggle. The Council on African Affairs (CAA) and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) during the early 1950s came under fierce attack by the U.S. government and were driven out of existence.
  • Later during the 1960s when the various national liberation movements and independent African states embarked upon the armed struggle as a necessity to fight the U.S. and NATO backed colonial and settler-colonial states in Africa, Pan-Africanist and socialist strategist Kwame Nkrumah identified U.S. imperialism as the major force in the movement for genuine territorial sovereignty on the continent. The U.S., although paying lip service to supporting the anti-colonial movements, sought to stifle and manipulate the national liberation movements for the benefit of Wall Street and the Pentagon.
  • The postponement of these internal crises has apparently run its course. Imperialist war no long delays the impact of the inherent failures of capitalism related to its incapacity to provide housing, jobs, medical services, education and municipal services to the majority of its people. Nonetheless, in its destructive character, imperialism continues on the path of endless war and pursuit of ever-rising rates of profit.
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  • In Somalia, the CIA and AFRICOM have been involved in propping up the Ethiopian occupation and the latter Transitional Federal Government regime since 2006. The African Union Mission to Somalia, AMISOM, is largely a U.S.-controlled military operation which is financed by Washington and provided with political, intelligence and diplomatic cover. Somalia is the source of oil and other strategic interests for imperialism and both the U.S. and NATO have large-scale naval vessels off the coast of the Horn of Africa nation in the Gulf of Aden.
  • The presence of U.S. military and intelligence forces in Africa is designed to bolster the strategic mineral and territorial interests of Wall Street. Africa is now supplying greater amounts of oil, natural gas and other essential minerals to economic interests of the ruling class.
  • The advent of regional blocs such as the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has served to provide the African Union member-states with both economic and political alliances that are outside U.S. and European Union influence. In regard to China, the socialist state has provided direct economic trade and development assistance which is far superior to the traditional relations established by the imperialist countries which enslaved Africans and colonized the continent for centuries.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Socialist China?  Not really.
  • The Africa-South America Summit has held three gatherings, the latest of which was in March, in order to enhance cooperation and to form a bloc against U.S. efforts to undermine anti-imperialist governments in Latin America and developing relations between Africa and non-Western regional entities. Iran has also strengthened its relations with Africa and Latin America causing serious concerns on the part of the U.S.
  • The joining by the Republic of South Africa of the Brazil, Russia, India, China (BRICS) grouping has resulted in new initiatives being discussed including the creation of a development bank as well as independent foreign policy positions on Syria and Iran that are at variance with U.S. imperialism.
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      BRICs.  Goldman Sachs.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - The revolution and the emancipation of women - 0 views

  • Sankara vehemently and publicly denounced odious debt and rallied African political leaders to do the same.
  • What distinguishes Sankara from many other revolutionary leaders was his confidence in the revolutionary capabilities of ordinary human beings. He did not see himself as a messiah or prophet, as he famously said before the United Nations General Assembly in October of 1984. It is worth quoting from Sankara at length, when before the delegation of 159 nations, he said: ‘I make no claim to lay out any doctrines here. I am neither a messiah nor a prophet. I possess no truths. My only aspiration is…to speak on behalf of my people…to speak on behalf of the “great disinherited people of the world”, those who belong to the world so ironically christened the Third World. And to state, though I may not succeed in making them understood, the reasons for our revolt’.
  • Meaningful social transformation cannot endure without the active support and participation of women. While it is true that women have been deeply involved in each of the great social revolutions of human history, their support and participation has historically often gone relatively unacknowledged by movement leaders.
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  • Sankara was somewhat unique as a revolutionary leader - and particularly as a president - in attributing the success of the revolution to the obtainment of gender equality. Sankara said, ‘The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph’.
  • Thomas Sankara, a Burkinabé with military training, had witnessed the student and worker-led uprisings in Madagascar.
  • Blaise Compaoré remains the president of Burkina Faso today and has been implicated in conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, and in arms trafficking and the trafficking of diamonds. There has been no independent investigation into Thomas Sankara’s assassination, despite repeated requests by the judiciary committee of the International Campaign for Justice for Thomas Sankara, a legal group working in the name of the Sankara family. The UN Committee for Human Rights closed Sankara’s record in April of 2008, without conducting an investigation into the crimes.
  • The revolution’s promises are already a reality for men. But for women, they are still merely a rumor. And yet the authenticity and the future of our revolution depend on women. Nothing definitive or lasting can be accomplished in our country as long as a crucial part of ourselves is kept in this condition of subjugation - a condition imposed…by various systems of exploitation.
  • He locates the roots of African women’s oppression in the historical processes of European colonialism and the unequal social relations of capitalism and capital exploitation. Most importantly, he stressed the importance of women’s equal mobilisation. He urges Burkinabé women into revolutionary action, not as passive victims but as respected, equal partners in the revolution and wellbeing of the nation. He acknowledges the central space of African women in African society and demanded that other Burkinabé men do the same.
  • In an interview with the Cameroonian anticolonial historian Mongo Beti, he said, ‘We are fighting for the equality of men and women - not a mechanical, mathematical equality but making women the equal of men before the law and especially in relation to wage labor. The emancipation of women requires their education and their gaining economic power. In this way, labor on an equal footing with men on all levels, having the same responsibilities and the same rights and obligations…’.
  • He criticised the oppressive gendered nature of the capitalist system, where women (particularly women with children to support) make an ideal labour force because the need to support their families renders them malleable and controllable to exploitative labour practices.
  • US-backed militarisation of Africa takes a couple of different forms.
  • First, it means an increase in troops on the ground. US Special Ops and US military personnel have been deployed in the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Mauritania, South Sudan, and (potentially) Nigeria.
  • Second, US military personnel conduct training sequences with African militaries.
  • Third, the US military funds social science research into African society, culture and politics. This takes various forms, one of which is the use of SCRATs (or Sociocultural Advisory Teams) for the purposes of preparing US military personnel for deployment and missions.
  • A strong military structure paves the way for the resource plunder and large scale dispossessions that are seen in neoliberal states in the so-called Global South. In this system, the state ensures profit for class elites (both international and domestic) by guaranteeing the super-exploitation of labour and the dispossession of millions of people of their lands and livelihoods for resource extraction at serious costs to local ecology, health and wellbeing. This guarantee can only be made through an increased militarism that stifles political mobilisation.
  • Thomas Sankara and the August Revolution of 1983 tells us another story. They provide a different way of thinking about social organisation. Sankara understood that capitalism is dependent upon the unequal deployment of and distribution of power, particularly state power. But, as he showed us, the state is not unalterable. The state is a complex system of human relationships that are maintained through violent power/coercion and persuasion. And what Sankara did was work to bring the state apparatus down to the level of the people, so to speak.
  • The image of my daughter’s grandfather entering his home and collapsing onto the sofa, holding his face in his hands and crying emerges in my head each time I think of Sankara. This image of a middle aged Cameroonian man, Jacque Ndewa, thousands of miles away, who had never travelled to Burkina Faso, crying quietly on his sofa. This is the resonance that Sankara had, across the African continent and among disenfranchised and dispossessed people everywhere.
Arabica Robusta

Mandela's legacy: a man of many parts | CODESRIA - 0 views

  • Dismantling of the Apartheid in the 1990s was one of the great events of the turbulent 20th century, even though the manner of its dismantling was deeply marred by the fact that the critical negotiations which made it possible came in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. And, in a significant coincidence, those negotiations on the issue of South African settler colonialism ran parallel to those other negotiations, on the Israeli settler colonialism, which led to the Oslo Accords.
  • That’s just about right: “using them.” The ANC was a conservative force when Mandela first joined and even after the radical turn that Mandela and his close associates introduced into its politics, it remained a small party based primarily in the frustrated black middle class. Origins of the alliance with the communists were purely pragmatic. As Charles Longford was to write after Mandela’s death: As an insignificant political force, removed from the black working classes and the poor, ANC stood little chance of generating any meaningful political pressure that might affect change. They needed the black majority. That is why they turned to the South African Communist Party.
  • Only in the American scheme of things is it possible to bestow upon someone the highest honours that the US can give to anyone but also keep the same person on the list of “terrorists”—just in case!
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  • Thanks to the progress towards reconciliation during those negotiations, he was released from prison in 1990, a framework for the protection of white interests in wealth and property was put in place, the whole system of racist laws was abolished, democratic elections were held, and Mandela assumed the Presidency of South Africa in May 1994.
  • On 11th July 2013, John Pilger published a piece on his interview with Mandela after ANC had taken hold of power, had abandoned the black working classes and the poor to their fate, and was launched upon a wave of brisk privatizations and deregulations, which led, among other things, to fabulous enrichment of the new ANC elite, Mandela’s close associates and cabinet ministers in particular. Pilger reports that when he said to Mandela that it was all contrary to what he had said in 1990, the latter shrugged him off with the remark “for this country, privatization is the fundamental policy.” Not only that! Mandela was frequently seen in the company of the most corrupt of his ministers even after he relinquished power and in fact supported Zuma’s bid for the Presidency; in power, Zuma, a former communist leader, acting very much like the Russian oligarchs bred by Yeltsin.
  • The white ruling elite had prepared for such outcomes with great deliberation. It had methodically nurtured a new Black entrepreneurial and professional class through loans, subsidies etc, whose interests predictably came into conflict with those of the black working classes ad the poor who were the mass base of the anti-Apartheid struggle in all its aspects.
  • White South African mining magnates, billionaires and businessmen were meanwhile meeting the exiled leaders of the ANC, such as Mbeki, in European capitals, to offer deals and hammer out the economic structure of post-Apartheid South Africa; a favourite meeting place was a majestic mansion, Mells Park House, near Bath, in England. The IMF backed up the effort with the offer of a loan in 1993 and US-trained ANC economists were soon to huddle together with World Bank officials to map out detailed blueprints for a neoliberal, crony-capitalist future. Those leaders of the ANC who had spent long years in neighbouring countries like Zimbabwe and Zambia had internalised the corrupt ways and authoritarian personality traits typical of the elites in those countries.
  • Ronnie Kasrils—member of the national executive committee of the ANC from 1987-2007 and, concurrently a member of the central committee of the CPSA from December 1986 to 2007—published a damning and self-damning piece on this subject in The Guardian of 24 June 2013, entitled “How the ANC’s Faustian pact sold out South Africa’s poor.” Kasrils would know.
  • What I call our Faustian moment came when we took an IMF loan on the eve of our first democratic election. . . Doubt had come to reign supreme: we believed, wrongly, that there was no other option; that we had to be cautious, since by 1991 our once powerful ally, the Soviet Union, bankrupted by the arms race, had collapsed. Inexcusably, we had lost faith in the ability of our own revolutionary masses to overcome all obstacles. . . by late 1993 big business strategies – hatched in 1991 at the mining mogul Harry Oppenheimer’s Johannesburg residence – were crystallising in secret late-night discussions at the Development Bank of South Africa. Present were South Africa’s mineral and energy leaders, the bosses of US and British companies with a presence in South Africa – and young ANC economists schooled in western economics. They were reporting to Mandela. An ANC-Communist party leadership eager to assume political office (myself no less than others) readily accepted this devil’s pact, only to be damned in the process.
  • When Mandela first joined the ANC it was an ineffectual, conservative platform meant to plead for minor concessions from the whites-only regime. He and his close comrades—Sisulu, Tambo and others—turned it into a fighting outfit for radical demands of racial equality.
  • His oration in Havana on that occasion was quite the equal of the oration that another great African revolutionary, Amilcar Cabral, had delivered in that same city.
  • It is difficult to say why he knowingly settled for a neoliberal dispensation in the course of reaching a settlement for the dismantling of the political and legal structures of the Apartheid regime.
  • There is probably some truth to each of these propositions. The tragedy of it all is that it was during the presidency of one of the most inspiring figures of our time that racial apartheid in South Africa was replaced by a class apartheid so severe that perhaps a majority of the blacks are now worse off today than ever before, relative not only to the white property-owners but also those privileged black ones who have amassed fabulous fortunes since the apartheid state structures were undone. It all became very much worse under Mbeki and Zuma but the foundations were laid earlier, in the process of the negotiations and then in those early years of the democratic republic when Mandela was at the helm of affairs.
  • Freed from ceremonies of state, Mandela recovered in roughly the last decade of his life that moral grandeur which had been his throughout his life until he started making all those compromises as negotiator and then as first President of the Republic. The stirring farewell the people of South Africa gave him was well deserved, and a more sober assessment of his life, his achievements and his shortcomings can now begin. There are in any case ample resources in his legacy for a new generation to invoke his name yet again as they set out to fight for a better South Africa.
  • His political career began in the 1940s, with demands for quite modest reform that fell far short of racial equality but sought to protect the professional and entrepreneurial interests of the black middle class.
  • For all the years when he was the acknowledged supreme leader of the anti-Apartheid movement, even through all those twenty-seven prison years, western governments and media corporations routinely called him a “terrorist,” “communist,” “dangerous Marxist revolutionary” etc. However, once he started negotiations with the white regime during the 1980s, though still from inside the prison, those same governments and corporations took to bestowing more and more international stature upon him. Those negotiations were held in the specific backdrop of the Tripartite Accord that was reached between Cuba, Angola ad South Africa built upon undertakings whereby 50,000 Cuban soldiers withdrew from Angola in exchange for the indepedence of Namibia and South Africa’s commitment to stop the over and covert wars that were destabilizing neighbouring countries. It took another year and two months of negotiations after that agreement for Mandela to be released.
  • Thatcher and Reagan—not to speak of the New York Times—used to refer to Mandela as a “terrorist” well into the 1980s.
  • Thus, while some of the key leaders were physically safe either in prison or in exile, at varying distances from the scenes of fighting, some of the most heroic and promising leaders were killed in battle or fell to assassins’ bullets, most notably Chris Hani, an illustrious communist and the key leader of the armed struggle. His assassination in 1993, on the eve of the accord between Mandela and de Klark, was a key event because, with an incorruptable revolutionary temper and with influence and charisma second only to Mandela’s own, Hani was expected to lead the struggle against the kind of South Africa that emerged after those accords.
  • he relevant fact is that French capital re-entered Algeria on an increasingly elaborate scale while government of the FLN kept degenerating into a spectacularly corrupt and authoritarian bureaucracy, which is what it is to this day.
  • Typical among those companions of Mandela was Cyril Ramaphosa, a former mine workers’ union leader, a deputy president of the ANC (and presidential contender), who became a billionaire board member of the corporation that owns the Marikana mine where South African police shot down 34 striking Black miners in cold blood, in August, 2012. Mandela himself was not corrupt in that sense but favours that wealthy businessmen did to him in such matters as building of his post-retirement home are well enough known.
  • Equally disastrous was the disarray in communist ranks in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. Mandela might or might not have been a member of the CPSA, but we do know that Mbeki and Zuma—the second and third presidents of South Africa whose corruptions became the stuff of legend— were high-ranking members in the party’s executive bodies. Not only that. In precisely the period following the dismantling of Apartheid, when South Africa needed massive construction of public housing for the black working classes and the poor who had been condemned to segregated housing in the shanty town—for the very people, in other words, who had actually made the revolution—the privatization of housing was supervised by none other than Joe Slovo, the chair of the CPSA and famous leader of the armed struggle, who was now looking to the World Bank for advice.
  • The first phase of Mandela’s political activism before he was sent to prison, in 1962, was the time of high tide for socialist, anti-colonial and generally revolutionary movements all across the globe, so that an alliance between nationalists and communists was by no means odd or exceptional. It was during that time that socialist revolutions swept through China and Cuba; the two great European empires, the British and the French, were dissolved; revolutionary wars broke out in Korea, Vietnam, Algeria and elsewhere; the Non-Aligned movement arose as a significant force in global affairs. Liberation was the watchword of the times and Mandela was at the time ideologically comfortable in that world. By the time he came out of incarceration in 1990, the Chinese counterrevolution had been in power for over a decade; the Soviet Union was in the process of fragmentation; European social democracy was succumbing to neoliberalism; Arab secular nationalism had been defeated; and radical nationalist regimes across Asia and Africa had become mere caricatures of themselves.
  • This universalist belief was there not only in the moment of his triumph during the 1990s but from the earliest days of his victimization by the apartheid regime. Facing the death penalty during the Rivonia Trial, he spoke eloquently of the Equality he envisaged as normative moral value for all humanity at the end of his speech in court, on 20the April 1964
  • Mercifully, Mandela himself had a sense of wry humour about it. When John Pilger, the well-known journalist, asked him about this elevation to sainthood, Mandela replied: “That’s not the job I applied for.”
  • Mandela received the Order of Lenin in 1990, the last recipient before the dismemberment of the Soviet Union, and the US began showering honours on him that same year. Is there any significance to this historical coincidence? Or, we may recall that Mandela relinquished the Presidency in 1999 and, only two years later, in 2001, George Soros was to tell the Davos Economic Forum, "South Africa is in the hands of international capital." When, precisely, did post-Apartheir South Africa fall into those hands: after 1999? Or before?
  • Subsequent trajectory of South Africa seems to have been profoundly shaped by the fact that most of the ANC leaders, some of whom were also important members of the SACP (Mbeke was member of the central committee; Jacob Zuma joined in 1963 and was elected to the Politburo in 1989), spent virtually the whole period of the revolutionary struggle either in prison (such as Mandela and Sisulu) or in exile (most of the others).
  • In this respect, the situation in South Africa was somewhat reminiscent of the Algerian Revolution. Leaders like Ben Bella (the first post-revolutionary President) were captured early and came out of prison with unsullied reputations of legendary proportion; they could negotiate away anything and yet be held in highest esteem. Other men, like Boumedienne (the 2nd President, who replaced Ben Bella), stayed put in neighbouring Tunisia and rose to political power after the French withdrawal on the strength of the Army of the Exterior that had remained in tact, in command of men and materials, while those who fought the bitterest battles on Algerian soil were largely decimated.
  • In Algeria, the famous Tripoli Program was promulgated virtually at the end of the war of Independence, in June 1962, in the very last meeting of the leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN) before the factional conflicts of that summer broke out. The program was chiefly the work of Redha Malek, Mohamed Bedjaoui, and Mohamed Benyahia, and proposed a "socialist option" for Algeria’s development. It envisioned the nationalization of foreign interests, the inauguration of agricultural cooperatives and an industrial economy largely in the state sector. The program viewed the recently signed Evian Accords with France as neocolonialist because the accords guaranteed the French colons their full property rights and included an article which stated that "Algeria concedes to France the use of certain air bases, terrains, sites and military installations which are necessary to it."
  • All that was more or less written into the kind of transition that was made when the key apartheid structures were abolished. The agreement which ended apartheid and established majority rule based on universal suffrage also allowed whites to keep the best land, the mines, manufacturing plants, and financial institutions, and to export vast quantities of their wealth without restriction.
  • Mandela was an amalgam of moral courage and universalist convictions in his social vision, and of increasingly capitalist, even neoliberal convictions in matters of political economy as well as a peculiarly advanced toleration for the corruption of his colleagues.
  • he became more a symbol of that resistance than an active leader or combatant in the field of battle, and then came out of prison only when a negotiated settlement was at hand. However, three things need to be added immediately. First, not even that long period of incarceration could dent, let alone kill, his indomitable spirit. His resolve remained the same, as did his commitment to humanist value beyond racial or personal hatreds. Second, his stature was such that when a final settlement was to be made, none other—not the senior leaders in exile, nor leaders and commanders stationed in neighboring countries—could be the final negotiator with the opposing apartheid regime. Mandela alone retained that authority to represent Black South Africa as a whole. Transition to post-Apartheid peace would come with his consent, or peace would not come. This unrivalled authority of course implies a unique responsibility for what followed. Third, in his generous acknowledgement of those who had actively supported the people of South Africa he was fearless, and impervious to the effect his open expressions of gratitude would have on his enemies.
  • As Fanon memorably said: the historical phase of the national bourgeoisie is a useless phase. Much worse than useless, we may now add after far greater accumulation of horrors than what Fanon might have imagined.
  • A South African communist told me in the late 1990s while Mandela was president: “we now run the economy they own.” In state policy, the neoliberal turn that had been initiated by the apartheid regime in its latter years was to be extended greatly under ANC rule.
Arabica Robusta

Zimbabwe, South Africa, and the Power Politics of Bourgeois Democracy - Monthly Review - 0 views

  • the workers would be just as badly treated by the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu). With his misleading tendency to “talk left, act right,” Mugabe gave the impression to some observers that his project was genuinely anti-imperialist and capable of empowering the millions of landless rural Zimbabweans for whom he claimed to act.
  • Standards of living had crashed during the 1990s, the state withdrew—or priced at prohibitive levels—many social services, and the economy deindustrialized. State and private sector corruption were rife. In response, various urban labor and social movements—trade unions, human rights advocates, ghetto residents’ groups, militant students, church and Jubilee anti-debt campaigners, women’s organizations, community health workers, and many others—began to offer opposition.
  • But very quickly, what had begun as a working-class party resisting Mugabe’s neoliberalism, malgovernance, and repressive state control was hijacked by international geopolitical forces, domestic (white) business and farming interests, and the black petite bourgeoisie.
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  • Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force. And yet notwithstanding the resurgence of populist rhetoric and a few material concessions from the state, poor and working people saw their incomes—and even their ability to gain access to the staple food, maize—under unprecedented threat by the time of the recent (March 9–10, 2002) presidential election.
  • Geopolitical pressure on Mugabe is mediated primarily through these suspect sources. But for all the Western hypocrisy, the Mugabe victory was nonetheless the product of brutal force. And the division between the observer missions did not break down cleanly along North-South, national, racial, or class lines.
  • One government stands ready and anxious to mediate an elite solution to the Zimbabwe crisis, if one can be found: South Africa. The same government has positioned itself as the main third world arbiter of globalization, in arenas such as trade, finance, aid, sustainable development, racism, non-aligned politics, and many others.
  • In 1976, Rhodesian prime minister Ian Smith was summoned to meet South African premier John Vorster and U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger in Pretoria. In an uncomfortable encounter, Smith was told that his dream of delaying black majority rule in Zimbabwe for “a thousand years” was over. Accommodation with the liberation movements would be necessary, both for the sake of the West’s legitimacy in the struggle against the Soviet Union and simply because Smith’s position—defending legalized racial domination by a quarter of a million white settlers over more than six million indigenous black people, of whom fifty thousand were in the process of taking up arms, at a time of unprecedented economic crisis—was untenable. Smith resisted the inevitable with a mix of ineffectual concessions and heightened repression, but the power that South Africa held over imports and exports was decisive. Simultaneously, guerrilla war intensified and Smith could no longer count on Pretoria’s military backing. Three years after the ultimatum from Vorster and Kissinger, Smith and his conservative black allies were forced to the Lancaster House negotiating table in London, where Zimbabwe was born. Thanks to what Smith termed “the great betrayal” by South Africa and Britain, Zanu and its allies laid down their arms and swept the first democratic election in February 1980. A quarter of a century after that fateful meeting in Pretoria, an analogous moment reappeared in the relations between Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, thirteen million black Zimbabweans suffer under the rule of an undemocratic, exploitative elite and of a repressive state machinery serving the class interests of a few tens of thousands of well-connected bureaucrats, military, and paramilitary leaders. And this is in the context of unprecedented economic crisis. In South Africa, meanwhile, it is not difficult to posit a similar trajectory of material decline, ruling-party political illegitimacy, and ascendant opposition, as the rand crashed by more than 50 percent over a two-year period and trade union critiques of neoliberal policies harden.
  • Mugabe’s “huge social spending spree” was, in reality, a brief two-year period of rising education and health expenditures, followed by systematic cutbacks and deprivation under IMF and World Bank guidance. The needs of trade unionists were as little respected as were those of any other sector of society.
  • To misread Zimbabwe’s situation so blatantly and self-servingly was not new in Pretoria. As another example that gets to the heart of the exhausted nationalist contradiction, consider the case of former ANC Land Minister Derek Hanekom, who also used Zimbabwe as a whipping boy beginning in 1997. At that stage, land hunger was causing organic land invasions (not war-veteran induced) and farmworker strikes in several areas of rural Zimbabwe. In November, of that year, Mugabe announced that the Land Designation Act would finally be implemented. For South Africa, the specter of large-scale land reform in Zimbabwe would have been terrible for investor confidence at a time when Mbeki’s own Washington-centric structural adjustment program—the misnamed Growth, Employment, and Redistribution strategy—was already failing noticeably.
  • around February 2000, two options emerged: hunker down and mindlessly defend the Zanu government against its critics; or move into a “constructive engagement” mode that might serve as the basis for an “honest broker” role on some future deal-making occasion. A third option—active support Zimbabwe’s social-justice movements, so as to ensure Mugabe authorized genuinely free and fair elections—presumably did not warrant attention; no doubt for fear that the last bullet would inspire South African trade unionists to do the same, and in the near future.
  • Vorster, Kissinger, and ultimately the British managers of Zimbabwe’s transition together hoped for a typical neocolonial solution, in which property rights would be the foundation of a new constitution, willing-seller/willing-buyer land policy would allow rural social relations to be undisturbed, and nationalization of productive economic activity would be kept to a minimum. A black government would, moreover, have greater capacity to quell labor unrest, strikes, and other challenges to law and order.
  • The romance of Southern African liberation struggles made it logical for radical activists across the world to intensify pressure first for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies Angola and Mozambique (1975), then the former British colony Zimbabwe (1980), then Namibia (1990), and finally South Africa (1994). That kind of solidarity was colony specific. Something more universal has subsequently emerged: North-South unity of progressive activists fighting a common scourge, international neoliberalism. What is most needed, in this new context, is a set of processes that help identify and implement popular solidarity.
  • At the fore of those who would repel both the kleptocratic elite and the generalized economic crisis associated with globalization are progressive civil society groups.
  • what lessons does this confusing period in Zimbabwe’s post-independence experience provide to other third world progressive social forces? The appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of strengthened state sovereignty as a short–medium term objective. Instead, aligned simultaneously with international popular struggle against Washington and transnational corporate headquarters, the goal must be the rekindling of nation state sovereignty, but under fundamentally different assumptions about power relations and development objectives than during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only be changed sufficiently if the masses of oppressed people contest those comprador forces who run virtually all their nation states. To do so will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist political program, grounded in post-neoliberal economic formulations.
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    Once he had permitted and nurtured the land invasions in the wake of the shocking February 2000 defeat, Mugabe came to rely upon the war veterans and their followers as a paramilitary force.
Arabica Robusta

"Ten Theses on New Developmentalism" - 0 views

  • Economic development is a structural process of utilizing all available domestic resources to provide the maximum environmentally sustainable rate of capital accumulation building on incorporation of technical progress.
  • Markets are the major locus of this process, but the state has a strategic role in providing the appropriate institutional framework to support this structural process.
  • seizes global opportunities i.e. global economies of scale and multiple sources of technological learning, mitigates barriers to innovation created by excessively strong intellectual property regimes, assures financial stability, and creates investment opportunities to private entrepreneurs.
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  • The tendency to cyclical overvaluation of the exchange rate in developing countries has been due to both the excessive reliance on external savings in the form of foreign capital flows and the Dutch disease in the context of excessively open capital markets and lack of appropriate regulation.
  • Dutch disease impedes other tradable industries from prospering.  It does so by creating a wedge between the "current account equilibrium exchange rate" (the exchange rate that balances the current account) and the "industrial equilibrium exchange rate" -- the exchange rate that allows tradable industries to be competitive utilizing state-of-the-art technology.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - Ghana: Why the North Matters - 0 views

  • With the introduction of structural adjustment, projects and activities depending on the government were scaled down. While the idea of privatisation could somehow work in the South, as there was an elite and foreign companies to take over these activities, such conditions did not apply in the North. The factories ground one by one to a halt. Commercial farms went into receivership. Employment and income collapsed. The market players, who were to exploit the opportunities afforded by the withdrawal of the government, simply were not ready for it. Whatever economic elite had started to develop either sank back into obscurity or joined their brethren in the south.
  • The distribution of HIPC funding tells a similar story. The Highly Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative was an attempt by the World Bank and IMF to reduce the debt burden of the world poorest countries. One of the first major policy initiatives of the new NPP government when it attained power in 2001 was to apply for HIPC status. A special account was opened, whereby the money which otherwise would have been used for debt re-payment would be channelled to special spending targeted at the poor. But once again the reality was different. While the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy 2003-2005 planned that almost half of the HIPC funds would be used in northern Ghana, in reality this was only 17 %, just about one third of what was planned! The remaining 83 % of the projects went to southern Ghana, for which only 52 % had been planned.
  • National policies, ostensibly designed so as not to favour specific parts of the country, end up disadvantaging the North. The Ghana School Feeding Programme (GSFP) was originally conceived as a programme focusing on ‘Hunger Hotspots’, and was therefore targeted at the North. For obvious political reasons, the government decided instead to make it a national policy benefiting all districts equally. But with programme management using its discretionary powers, individual districts were able to lobby for additional schools. Inevitably, such districts were politically well connected and close to the physical and political centre. With as end result that Greater Accra, Ashanti and Brong Ahafo Regions receive a whopping 70 % of the total funding for school feeding (leaving the other 7 Regions to fight over the remaining 30 % of the funds). The three northern Regions, home to 30 % of the total poor in Ghana, receive a paltry 7 % of the funding!
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  • It cannot be denied that northern Ghana has recorded considerable progress since independence.
  •  
    Unequal and uneven development inherited from British colonialism by present day Ghana continues to divide the North from the South. For Samuel Zan Akologo and Rinus van Klinken "Sierra Leone, Cote d'Ivoire, Liberia and Togo are gory reminders" should serve as warning to the Ghanian leadership that it must change course.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

  • 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.
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