The Mandela Years in Power » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names - 0 views
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As his health deteriorated over the past six months, many asked the more durable question: how did he change South Africa? Given how unsatisfactory life is for so many in society, the follow-up question is, how much room was there for Mandela to maneuver?
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But it was in this period, alleges former Intelligence Minister Ronnie Kasrils, that “the battle for the soul of the African National Congress was lost to corporate power and influence… We readily accepted that devil’s pact and are damned in the process. It has bequeathed to our country an economy so tied in to the neoliberal global formula and market fundamentalism that there is very little room to alleviate the dire plight of the masses of our people.”
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Nelson Mandela’s South Africa fit a pattern: a series of formerly anti-authoritarian critics of old dictatorships – whether from rightwing or left-wing backgrounds – who transformed into 1980s-90s neoliberal rulers: Alfonsin (Argentina), Aquino (Philippines), Arafat (Palestine), Aristide (Haiti), Bhutto (Pakistan), Chiluba (Zambia), Dae Jung (South Korea), Havel (Czech Republic), Mandela (South Africa), Manley (Jamaica), Megawati (Indonesia), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Museveni (Uganda), Nujoma (Namibia), Obasanjo (Nigeria), Ortega (Nicaragua), Perez (Venezuela), Rawlings (Ghana), Walesa (Poland) and Yeltsin (Russia).
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D+C 05/2008 - Tribune - Aid effectiveness: The myth of NGO superiority - Development an... - 0 views
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In any case, NGO aid is clustered, and NGOs are deepening the divide between so-called donor darlings and aid orphans.
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Recent research suggests that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from donor countries do not provide better targeted or more efficient aid than state-run development agencies. They do not seem to even try to outperform the latter by focussing on the neediest or by working in particularly difficult environments.
Governance for Development in Africa Initiative launched at SOAS - 0 views
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The Centre of African Studies at SOAS has received a tremendous boost with a donation to fund an initiative on Governance for Development in Africa, which will create a dedicated environment to support Africans to study both the legal aspects of governance and the links between economic development and governance.
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Read in context of critical literature on Mo Ibrahim.
Is palm oil a kernel of development for African countries like Liberia? | Environment |... - 0 views
Pambazuka - Pollution: Africa's real resource curse? - 0 views
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Currently, corporations subscribe to the standards of the voluntary International Cyanide Managament Code. Yet one aspect that the code fails to rigorously address is that of closure.
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Kabwe’s rehabilitation is part of the broader Copperbelt Environment Project (CEP), largely funded by the World Bank.
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Describing the Environmental Council of Zambia as ‘very weak’, the CEP revealed that: ‘Existing regulations are seldom enforced. The regulatory dispositions for the mining sector are currently so weak that they do not deter polluters…Identification and monitoring of environmental risks resulting from mining activities is often inadequate.’ Mining corporations operating in Zambia post-1994 were allowed to adhere to the Environmental Management Plan (EMP), taking precedence over national legislation, with little penalties save for on the spot fines of £17 and letters of warning. Like Tanzania, Zambia’s mining contracts remained secretive.
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Pambazuka - Women up in arms - 0 views
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While the Kurds have been fighting for their survival against ISIS in the Syrian/Turkish border town of Kobane, the Zapatistas put down their arms over 20 years ago and have maintained a non-violent struggle since. In both cases, women have fought alongside men against their own collective obliteration while making radical changes in their gender relations. Working towards more equity makes possible more direct democracy in building greater autonomy from the state.[1] In both efforts, there is also a deep connection to land[2] that regards the value of women and the environment as essential to life itself.
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These radical changes in gender relations are occurring in contexts of tremendous violence and war of both high and low intensity. In Kobane, near the Turkish border, Kurds have been upholding a heroic resistance to the ravages of ISIS on the one hand, and the racist and repressive manipulations of the Turkish State on the other. In Chiapas, the Zapatistas have been building their autonomy within the increasing violence of a narco-state that dominates much of the nation, where it is hard to discern the difference between government and drug traffickers.
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Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned in Turkey since 1999. His “Democratic Confederalism” aims to build a new system that works towards the just distribution of resources as well as the conservation of the environment. It seeks to create a society free of sexism, replacing traditional patriarchal societies, religious interpretations, and capitalist merchandising of women. The movement has undertaken an intense societal and educational labor to combat the patriarchal mentalities implanted in women, as a form of submission, and in men, in form of domination.[4]
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Foreign Policy In Focus | Making Peace or Fueling War in Africa - 0 views
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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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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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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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Thabo Mbeki's New Partnership for Africa's Development: Breaking or Shining the Chains ... - 0 views
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NEPAD will be highlighted and endorsed at the G-8 meeting in Alberta, Canada, in June 2002, at the July launch of the African Union in Pretoria, and at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development–with a proposed global “New Deal” modeled on NEPAD–in late August. At such events, protesters who support the cause of global environmental, social, and economic justice will be told, in effect, “Don’t worry, you can go home, because Thabo Mbeki is taking care of globalization’s shortcomings.”
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Mbeki’s approach is consistent with what has been termed compradorism. Mbeki and his main allies have already succumbed to the class (not necessarily personalistic) limitations of post-Independence African nationalism, namely acting in close collaboration with hostile transnational corporate and multilateral forces whose interests stand directly opposed to Mbeki’s South African and African constituencies.
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In its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial country identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West. We need not think that it is jumping ahead; it is in fact beginning at the end. It is already senile before it has come to know the petulance, the fearlessness, or the will to succeed of youth.
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IPS - Filling the Granaries in Burkina Faso | Inter Press Service - 0 views
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New, high-yielding varieties of the staple crop have been developed at the country’s Institute for the Environment and Agricultural Research (INERA) as part of a drive to improve food security in this landlocked West African country.
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Both Kabré and Kaboré were introduced to Bondofa when they became members of Burkina Faso’s National Union of Seed Producers (UNPSB) two years ago. The UNPSB was established in 2006, and coordinates production and marketing activities as well as acting as an interface between its 4,000 members and the government.
U.S. Escalates Military Penetration of Africa | Black Agenda Report - 0 views
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Obama’s “good governance” smokescreen for U.S. neocolonialism is embedded in AFRICOM’s stated mission: “to deter and defeat transnational threats and to provide a security environment conducive to good governance and development." Translation: to bring the so-called war on terror to every corner of the continent and ensure that U.S. corporate interests get favorable treatment from African governments.
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Regime change will never be farther away than a drink at the officers club.
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Americans, no matter how bloody their hands, have always liked to think of themselves as “innocents abroad.” “As far as our mission goes, it’s uncharted territory,” said AFRICOM’s Gen. Hogg.
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Pambazuka - Kleptocratic capitalism: Challenges of the green economy for sustainable Af... - 0 views
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The CDKN consortium includes PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA), SouthSouthNorth, LEAD International and INTRAC. I know some of them well from previous interactions with them. The ODI, for example, advertises itself as an ‘independent think tank on international development and humanitarian issues’. From my knowledge of the ODI (on matters related to development aid, trade and EPA negotiations, for example) I can say without a moment’s hesitation that it is really an arm of British foreign policy. It is the ‘soft arm’ of British imperial diplomacy whose ‘strong arm’ comprises of instruments of force, including sanctions and war.
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The ICs take advantage of these differences in order to ‘divide and dictate’ to the DCs the terms of the climate change negotiations. What makes Africa vulnerable is its dependence on the West for the so-called ‘development aid’ and ‘technical experts’. One significant illustration of this is the manner in which the industrialised West has used money and ‘technical assistance’ as a means of ensuring an outcome at COP-16 in Cancun after they had failed to do so at COP-15. Europe and the US mounted a coordinated offensive to break the ranks of the countries of the South. Some of this was quite overt and open, for example, through the use of ‘development aid’ and other financial incentives. Others were covert and secretive, such as the use of US spy network – exposed, partially, by WikiLeaks (see Pambazuka issue 510, Dec 2010).
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This, in brief, is the first point. Africa is run by a global kleptocratic system, a system which enriches a minute number of economic and power elites in Africa and the global bankocrats and corporatocrats at the one end of the pole while impoverishing the masses of African people at the other. Economists call this ‘rent seeking’, but it is, bereft of linguistic and technical finesse, simply looting.
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Pambazuka - Food crisis in the Sahel: Real problem, false solutions - 0 views
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In addition to the 8 million affected Nigeriens are some 1.6 million Chadians and 500,000 Malians. These statistics are only, however, the visible aspect that institutions and international non-governmental organisations display. They suffer from the limits around reading data on Africa, notably on rural areas and a region of the Sahel in which pastoral traditions and a nomadic lifestyle are a prominent feature.
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n the face of empty granaries, Niger’s people have begun to develop a strategy for survival. ‘In Niger, women cover a desert-like environment in search of anthills in order to dig up and retrieve grains of millet, corn and other crops that the ants have collected,’ tells Charles Bambara, in charge of communications for Oxfam GB in Dakar. In the north of Mali, farmers, keen to allow their livestock to drink, have taken to using the water points actually intended for elephants (in a bid to protect the last pachyderms alive in the country).
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The disorder of the world food crisis in 2008 did not become hazy, and this new peak comes to remind us that, in the Sahel, the crisis results from an endemic problem. This is a problem that, as the thrust of recurrent fever testifies, is more a question of structure than conjuncture, that these are the failings of agricultural policies that impose their own tough realities, and that the recommended solutions are not different from those pushed in the 1980s with the establishing of structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) which sounded the death knell of Africa’s agricultural policies.
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Editorial / Regulars / Home - ICTupdate - 0 views
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Indigenous peoples all over the world are today using technology to record and protect their traditional knowledge and culture. Communities are gathering details on their environments and the available food sources. They are documenting and preserving agricultural methods that have been passed down through centuries. Far from being primitive, these techniques have been tried, tested and developed to perfectly suit local conditions. And it is not only small communities who rely on these traditional means. It is estimated that two thirds of the world’s population depend on food produced by traditional farming methods. It is vitally important then, that this indigenous knowledge is preserved and shared for many generations to come.
Is Bill Gates good for Africa? - 0 views
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AGRA with its super scientists is missing the point. Hunger in Africa is mostly a political and economic disparity problem. To end hunger, political stability, proper distribution of food and land within nations, and less emphasis on cash-crop farming and more on food- crop farming will be more effective, friendlier to the environment and less costly than the super-seeds that will require tons of pesticides - and eventually, cost a lot of money.
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Also take the example of US farm subsidies that result in African farmers losing millions of dollars each year. Oxfam reports that in 2001 Malian cotton farmers lost $ 43 million dollars while US foreign aid was 37.7 million that same year. Why not lobby for fair competition and equal international trade rather than throw more aid and pesticides at the Malian farmers?
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The conclusion here is one that might seem like a paradox of a beggar having choice - AGRA will do more harm than good. Understanding this, the participants committed themselves to, amongst other things, demanding "transparency, and accountability from all Green Revolution institutions and seed, chemical and fertilizer companies."
Institute for Policy Studies: Africa and the Economic Crisis - 0 views
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The current crisis, however, has dictated a more central role for African governments in regulating their economies, preventing capital flight, and creative taxation, so that Africa's resources benefit her people. Africa's focus must be on creating decent jobs by supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises that add productive value to Africa's vast natural resources.
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The current crisis, however, has dictated a more central role for African governments in regulating their economies, preventing capital flight, and creative taxation, so that Africa's resources benefit her people. Africa's focus must be on creating decent jobs by supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises that add productive value to Africa's vast natural resources.
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The current crisis, however, has dictated a more central role for African governments in regulating their economies, preventing capital flight, and creative taxation, so that Africa's resources benefit her people. Africa's focus must be on creating decent jobs by supporting small- and medium-sized enterprises that add productive value to Africa's vast natural resources.
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Pambazuka - Development aid: Enemy of emancipation? - 0 views
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In Africa there have historically been two types of civil society, those that have collaborated with the colonial power and those which have opposed it.
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Are the big NGOs (non-governmental organisations) harmful towards Africa? FIROZE MANJI: Let’s not talk about their motivations, which are often good. The question is not about evaluating their intentions, but rather the actual consequences of their actions. In a political context where people are oppressed, a humanitarian organisation does nothing but soften the situation, rather than addressing the problem.
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I have become anti-development. This wasn’t the case before. Let’s have an analogy: did those enslaved need to develop themselves, or to be free? I think that we need emancipation, not development.
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Toying with the law? Reckless manipulation of the legislature in Museveni's Uganda | op... - 0 views
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Among the many factors impacting on the bill’s fortunes over time, however, its use as a political instrument by various actors at specific moments has been widely acknowledged. Less commented on has been the degree to which this fits in a broader pattern of behaviour in Uganda since the mid-2000s, and the implications of this trend for Uganda’s fragile democracy.
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These issues are explored in a new research article on the politics of lawmaking in Uganda, which examines how the government uses the legislature to make political gestures aimed at outmanoeuvring particular opponents, often stimulating violent urban protest and even more violent government crackdowns in the process.
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The politics of this odious law is further laid bare the more that it is trumpeted as evidence of independence at home while being dismissed as meaningless abroad.
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