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Arabica Robusta

Coal versus Communities in Mozambique: Exposing poor practices by VALE and Rio Tinto - 0 views

www.sarwatch.org/...ces-by-vale-and-rio-tinto.html

adjustment neoliberalism industries neoclassical extractive social stabilization structural mozambique coal

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • This paper by Dr. Claude Kabemba and Camilo Nhancale for the Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW), entitled Coal versus Communities in Mozambique: Exposing poor practices by VALE and Rio Tinto, details many of the problems associated with the massive new coal mines from lack of contractual transparency to preference for expatriate workers and foreign suppliers to the unjust resettlement programme, which sparked protests in early January.
  • Vale reportedly paid US$123 million dollars for the mining rights but the money has never been registered with state agents. If this is correct, Vale’s presence in Mozambique – far from benefiting citizens – is undermining revenue transparency and accountability.
  • Vertical integration is undermining local entrepreneurshipThe two investments have provided a new lease of life to Tete Province. There are new economic activities opening up and an influx of people descending on the town. But beneficial links between the extractive companies and local communities do not really exist.
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  • A Southern Africa Resource Watch (SARW) research team visited three communities resettled by Vale and Rio Tinto – Mualadzi, a Rio Tinto resettlement compound located about 40km from the original Capanga village; Cateme village, a Vale resettlement compound with 720 families from the villages of Chipanga, Mitete, Malabue-Gombe and Bagamoyo; and 25 de Setembro, another Vale resettlement compound housing people from the same four villages. Vale deliberately divided the communities in two with employed villagers moving to 25 de Setembro since it is closer to Moatize and the mine. The unemployed were sent to Cateme, 40 km from the town.
  • Vale has also used the resettlement process to divide communities into those with formal and those with no formal work. The impression that this model gives is that uneducated and unemployed members of a community can be dumped anywhere.
  • Communities fear that if they continue to be relocated in small groups before all the construction work is done, their legitimate demands will never be met. As they have learned from the people who have already been resettled in Cateme and Mualadzi, the companies are reluctant to complete projects once communities have been relocated.  Rio Tinto moved people to Mualadzi before it had finished building key infrastructure such as school and clinics – and they have still not been built.
Arabica Robusta

Memo From Africa - France Stirs Ill Will as It Consorts With Region's Autocrats - NYTim... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...13francophone.html

france africa intervention corruption human rights nytimes

shared by Arabica Robusta on 14 Nov 09 - Cached
brian R liked it
  • The antigovernment demonstrators think France still pulls the strings, and while French officials deny this, their actions often suggest otherwise. In Gabon, where the election of an autocrat’s son dashed hopes for ending 40 years of rule under the Bongo family, Mr. Sarkozy’s man in Africa, Alain Joyandet, showed up at Ali Bongo’s pomp-filled inauguration, telling reporters that Mr. Bongo “must be given time.”
  • recently noted persistent human rights abuses by Cameroon
  • French officials have discouraged scrutiny of African leaders’ corruption, the fruits of which often end up in Paris. A French good-government group’s campaign to expose and recover the “ill-gotten gains” of three of the most notorious leaders — the late Omar Bongo of Gabon, Denis Sassou-Nguesso of the Congo Republic and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea — has been opposed by the prosecutor of the French Republic on the grounds that the group has no standing to sue, and that the facts are “ill defined.”
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  • Transparency International, had set out in detail the leaders’ extensive luxury real-estate holdings in Paris. Last month, an appeals court in Paris agreed with the prosecutors.
  • “People don’t like France because France isn’t helping Africans freely choose their leaders,” said Achille Mbembe, a political scientist and historian at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. “
  • Arabica Robusta on 14 Nov 09
     
    This article can be part of a comparison of US, Chinese and French approaches to Africa, couched in rhetoric of human rights, economic development, and colonialism.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Washington in Africa 2012 - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...84695

international news governance pambazuka world development africa

shared by Arabica Robusta on 13 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends’
  • Sorry, but we recall Washington’s deregulatory support for Wall Street’s market-driven binge, which in 2008-09 contributed to the worst global economic crash in 80 years, resulting in around a million South African job losses. We know that only the wealthy recovered so far, and that in the US, the top 1 percent received 93 percent of all new income since 2009, because the system wasn’t fixed. And who can forget White House hypocrisy when it comes to vast and often illegal US agro-corporate subsidies which continue to thwart African production? And is there any capital city whose political system is more corrupted by corporate (especially banking) campaign contributions than Washington, resulting in such extreme malgovernance that Obama cannot even make an effort to convict a single banker for world-historic economic misdeeds?
  • incorporating the wasting of Africa’s ‘natural capital’ (a silly phrase but one used increasingly by powerbrokers eyeing the ‘Green Economy’). Measuring this loss is something that 10 African leaders agreed to start doing so in May, in the Gabarone Declaration initiated by Botswana president Ian Khama and the NGO Conservation International. The adjustment entails counting the outflow of natural capital (especially non-renewable mineral/petroleum resources) not only as a short-term credit to GDP (via ‘output of goods’ measuring the resources extracted and sold), but also as a long-term debit to the natural capital stocks, as non-renewable resources no longer become available to future generations. Number-crunch the resource depletion, and net wealth declines in Africa as well as the Middle East.
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  • The continent-wide Resource Curse makes the Marikana massacre look like a picnic, and allows us to dismiss Spector’s article as the kind of idle spin-doctoring fluff one gets from the State Department’s US Information Service (his former employer). But that is not a particularly satisfying place to leave matters, for the broader assumptions about the US in Africa also need a rethink, in part because South Africa is hosting the BRICS summit in Durban next March, and we’re being subjected to rhetoric from Pretoria about a ‘new dynamic’ in the emerging market power bloc, supposedly challenging the sole-superpower system of global governance.
  • Thanks to White House patronage, murderous African dictators still retain power until too late, most obviously Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, who is personally worth at least $40 billion (according to an ABC News report) and who was recipient of many billions of dollars in US military aid in the 18 months following Obama’s speech. As Carson’s boss Hillary Clinton remarked in 2009, ‘I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,’
  • Amongst the 40 were Cameroonian dictator Paul Biya, and as his office reported, ‘At the end of the two and half hours that they spent together, most of the African leaders left the dining hall visibly satisfied.’
  • also have some sort of response should they not heed these warnings not to proceed?,’ the official answer was chilling: ‘I think we haven’t telegraphed any response at this point.’ One reason not to annoy Jammeh was the US Central Intelligence Agency’s reliance upon a Banjul airport as a secret destination and refueling site for ‘rendition’ victims, that is, the illegal transfer of suspected terrorists to countries carrying out torture on behalf of Washington.
  • former US National Security Council official John Prendergast’s concern about ‘a vexing policy quandary’ in Washington’s relations with Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda and South Sudan: ‘All of them have served American interests or have a strong US constituency, but all have deeply troubling human rights records.’ (Whether this is a ‘vexing quandary’ or instead best described as a time-honoured tradition is up to the reader to decide.)
  • why launch this latest enterprise of dubious value? Well, when you have created an AfriCom, when you have staffed it with a few thousand personnel, when you have a Special Forces corps numbering 60,000, when you have a vastly expanded CIA Operations Division, and when American strategic thinking is still locked in the auto-pilot mode set in September 2001 – when all these forces are at work, there will be action.’
  • within a few months, that the Central Intelligence Agency was extremely active in Somalia and that mercenaries (such as Bancroft Global Development) were Washington’s hired guns, as Carson admitted to the New York Times, ‘We do not want an American footprint or boot on the ground.’ Hence, according to The Times, drones were used against the Shabab (Al-Qaeda’s allies in Somalia).
  • The 2006 invasion of Somalia by the Ethiopian forces was clearly a proxy war, with AfriCom providing the logistics-allowing a criminal organization like al-Shabab to claim a legitimate reason for its war and brutal terror against the very people both sides claim to be freeing: the poor ordinary Somalis.’
  • On two occasions (1994 and 1996) I worked in the office of a man officially labeled a ‘terrorist’, a South African targeted by the CIA in the early 1960s and only taken off the US State Department’s no-entry ‘terror watch-list’ in July 2008 (!) thanks to a formal Congressional intervention.
  • As WikiLeaks demonstrated, Washington is choc full of pathological hypocrites.
  • Another source of oil disruption in Nigeria of concern to Washington was a civil society case against Shell Oil in May 2012 in which Shell argued it should have no human rights liabilities because of its corporate status, a position that the US rejected when it came to US citizens’ rights to sue. ‘But when the Supreme Court ordered a rehearing in the case, and asked whether human rights lawsuits could be brought when the abuses happened outside the US,’ according to EarthRights International’s Marco Simons, Washington actually sided with Shell. ‘Obama is saying that if a foreign government abuses human rights, we can bomb them, like we did with Libya. But we can't hold anyone accountable in court, because that would threaten international relations.’
  • That means wherever there is socio-ecological, religious and economic pressure, such as Uganda and Somalia, Washington’s instinct is the iron fist, followed by denialism and ‘goo-goo’ good-governance rhetoric. ‘From Carson's presentations two years in a row at the annual African Studies Association meetings, most of us felt we heard the same speeches we heard in the Bush Administration,’ says Wiley.
  • Horn’s evidence is not only that Kony has not been seen for years in Uganda, but that Obama also ‘quietly waived restrictions on military aid to Chad, Yemen, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’ even though their armies all have recent documented records of recruiting child soldiers.
  • Indeed, it is appropriate to ask why backwardness prevails in countries that are only ‘useful’ insofar as they have resources. Of course, oil and minerals are not Washington’s only economic objective. As WikiLeaks revealed after a February 2010 meeting with Ethiopian dictator Meles Zenawi, ‘Carson encouraged Meles to hasten steps to liberalize the telecommunications and banking industries in Ethiopia,’ according to the secret State Department cable. An additional economic objective, also revealed at that meeting, was the destruction of the Kyoto Protocol’s binding cap on greenhouse gas emissions, a project that Obama and the heads of Brazil, China, India and South Africa agreed to in Copenhagen at a UN climate summit in December 2009. As WikiLeaks demonstrated, much diplomacy in subsequent weeks was aimed at achieving buy-in even if that entailed bribery and coercion.
  • with Obama half-Kenyan by ancestry (a factor regularly raised by right-wing commentators who even make ridiculous claims as to the land of his birth), this treatment should not be considered as specifically anti-African; instead, it is best described as pro-corporate. For Washington’s whacking of Africa is not so different than the whacks its rulers give everywhere.
  • further information has become available about former constitutional law professor Obama’s personal role in civilian-killing drone warfare (including US citizen victims), cyberterrorism, warrantless eavesdropping, suppression of civil liberties, lack of transparency and other apparent contradictions. However, do these contradictions represent, as Prendergast put it, a vexing quandary – or instead, a tradition?
  • according to American University professor Sean Flynn, Obama ‘endorsed a set of policy proposals in its trade negotiations with developing countries that is much worse for access to medicine concerns than those of any other past administration.’
  • Africa and so many other examples show how the Obama Administration has become a rotten fusion of the worst instincts within neoliberalism and neoconservatism. I hope that on November 6, he soundly defeats Mitt Romney, who is worse on all counts except the ability to huckster people in Africa that Washington acts in their interests.
  • Last year, citing US national security interests, Obama issued a waiver so as to send more than $200 million in military aid to US-allied regimes in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, South Sudan and Yemen in spite of a 2008 US law prohibiting such funding because of their armies’ recruitment of child soldiers. According to Human Rights Watch’s Jo Becker, ‘The Obama administration has been unwilling to make even small cuts to military assistance to governments exploiting children as soldiers. Children are paying the price for its poor leadership.’
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka - Development post-2015: What role for African diaspora? - 0 views

pambazuka.org/...88301

africa diaspora finance international

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Another bias I must confess to is being heavily influenced by the book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu and James A Robinson in which they advance the thesis that it is a combination of inclusive – as opposed to extractive – political and economic institutions that explains the success or failure of nations. For sure, though widely acclaimed, theirs is a hotly contested thesis, but arguments that more aid is central to the achievement of the MDGs do not stack up: it is hard to correlate aid levels with improvements in education or health.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 23 Jul 13
       
      Moyo argument
  • To be blunt, poor countries need to improve their governance. The problem is that aid and global campaigns have a poor track record of improving governance. It is not just love that money can’t buy, good governance also. There is no escaping that good governance is endogenous.
  • A job opens up the prospect not just of economic security and wellbeing for the employed or self-employed person, it also offers dignity and hope of a better life, even if current conditions are far from ideal. Apart from putting money in the pockets of workers, who can then exercise more choice over their own lives – pay for housing, food, healthcare, school fees, clothing, leisure, and save for a rainy day – jobs are important means to the end of better governance in the places that lack them but need them most of all.
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  • Apart from the moral qualms we should have about rising, high, and stubborn inequality, for regions facing a forthcoming youth surge, the prospect of relegating large numbers of able young people to the economic scrap heap is tantamount to embracing an era of social upheaval and instability. Such young people will be susceptible to the deceptively attractive quick-fixes that extremist movements offer. In an increasingly interconnected world, inequality is a global threat to peace and security.
  • Universal strategies to create jobs – millions and millions of them; reducing inequality; all done in a more transparent, globally interconnected way is the promise of the future. It often amazes me how much time and effort we all spend pontificating about international development. Yet in the last 50 years or more – in living memory – we have witnessed radical peaceful transformations of economies that have lifted millions of people out of poverty and seen emerging economies join the ranks of the richest, most stable developed economies in the world. Development may not be easy but it is not rocket science.
Arabica Robusta

Gecamines Didn't Tell Government of KCC Gertler Deal - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...nment-of-kcc-gertler-deal.html

africa development international news governance industry extractive drcongo

shared by Arabica Robusta on 21 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Gecamines, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s state-owned mining company, didn’t tell the Mines Ministry of a possible sale of its stake in Kamoto Copper Co. to billionaire Dan Gertler, according to a letter from the mines minister.
  • Gecamines has faced criticism from the International Monetary Fund and advocacy groups including London-based Global Witness for selling its assets in a non-transparent process.
  • Gertler, an Israeli who is close friends with Congo’s President Joseph Kabila and has invested in the country for more than 15 years, is worth $3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index.
Arabica Robusta

Pambazuka News - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...48919

development government international mugabe oppression pambazuka panafrican progressive transition zimbabwe

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08 - Cached
  • ZIMBABWE AND THE QUESTION OF IMPERIALISM First, there should be an attempt to clear the landscape of certain obstacles. Zimbabwe was in growing trouble before the sanctions imposed by the governments of Britain and the United States. Still, the attempt to bully a small country’s ruler who was in turn bullying his compatriots draped Robert Mugabe in the role of a hero against imperialism. The attempt encouraged a blundering ruler to stay on course. The ZANU-PF forces and sympathizers have blamed the disastrous economic situation on the sanctions. Yet, the political leaders have accumulated wealth in such a conspicuous manner that their consumption of luxury goods stands out in a country where more than 80 per cent of the eligible workers are unemployed. Millions more Zimbabweans have been rendered as economic refugees in Africa and beyond.
  • Zimbabwe‘s situation has some striking parallels with that of the recent history of Guyana in the Caribbean, where rivalry between anti-colonial forces started long before independence and was only draped in flags at the moment of Uhuru, without serious attempts at a deep resolution of the difficulties. Once in power the Burnham regime did nothing to resolve the ethnic conflict but superimposed on it a parliamentary dictatorship.
  • Of late the western media and certain forces within the United Nations have been reporting the possibility of talks of power sharing, and the arrangement of some form of a transitional authority. While the spirit of these discussions may be guided by the search for social peace, it is urgent that these discussions between the various elements are not carried out behind the backs of the people and do nothing to undermine the political will of the people. But above all there must be an engagement by all to ensure that the elections and its aftermath does not deteriorate into the kind of violence and destruction that was witnessed in Kenya after the elections of December 27, 2007. At all costs, war must be avoided. The present leadership cannot expect to be supported when it terrorizes its own people and unleashes the very same Rhodesian military apparatus (the Joint Operation Command) against the opposition and unarmed civilians.
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  • In 1987 the fusion of ZANU with the Patriotic Front led by Joshua Nkomo was done in such a way that the post-colonial world knew little about it, except that it led to the virtual silencing of the section of the liberation front that had been led by Joshua Nkomo.
  • President Robert Mugabe has been a heroic figure in the continent of Africa, the Diaspora, among African observers and well-wishers. And he would have remained so, if the Pan African world had assisted Zimbabweans with friendly criticism of the government when the flaws began to show. Instead, the whole movement and the international left, including us, remained silent, some longer than others, hoping that such a well-resourced government would correct its own shortcomings. Earlier we had special cause to be partisan to Robert Mugabe, who had extended solidarity to our colleague Walter Rodney when he was being persecuted by the Guyana government.
  • We want to go on record in saying that neither the government of Britain nor the government of the United States has the moral authority to oppose the present government of Zimbabwe. Imperialists and neo- conservatives have their own agenda when imposing sanctions and we are against sanctions in Zimbabwe. Progressive Pan Africanists must remain vigilant so that brutal oppression of the Zimbabwean peoples is not countenanced in the name of anti-imperialism.
  • Robert Mugabe and the ZANU-PF may be against imperialism but this group is not against capitalism or the looting of the assets of the society.
  • Those who support the working peoples of Zimbabwe must insist on transparency in dealing with transnational corporations and the integrity of the ruling personnel in their day-to-day activities. This call for accountability is especially important in so far as though we are opposed to the threat of war coming from ZANU PF we are not encouraged by the policies and posture of the leadership of the MDC. These elements have displayed an amazing level of intellectual subservience to the West and to the ideas of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Zimbabwe needs leaders who place the interest of the working people first. It is proper that all progressives support the Stolen Assets Recovery Initiative of the United Nations so that corrupt leaders cannot stash away funds when the people suffer.
  • Experiences in Guyana, in Kenya and in Zimbabwe have taught us that it is a mistake to adopt western standards of victory as our own. Victory for us must mean reconciliation of divided populations. This in each case may best be approached through widespread national conversation spelling out its purpose. Reconciliation will fail utterly if it is imposed; or allows free rein to corruption, militarism or if it ignores the choices of the people in valid elections.
  • Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08
     
    Victory for us must mean reconciliation of divided populations. Reconciliation will fail utterly if it is imposed; or allows free rein to corruption, militarism or if it ignores the choices of the people in valid elections. We have responsibility as progressives and Pan-Africanists to Zimbabwe.
  • Arabica Robusta on 29 Jun 08
     
    A more nuanced yet still critical view of Mugabe's Zimbabwe. Particularly useful for critically evaluating the original liberation.
Arabica Robusta

Is Bill Gates good for Africa? - 0 views

www.pambazuka.org/...47260

agra billgates development foundation international

shared by Arabica Robusta on 17 Apr 08 - Cached
  • 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.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 17 Apr 08
       
      Important points about localization of development initiatives, the importance of food crops, and sustainable agriculture.
  • 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?
  • 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."
Arabica Robusta

Ghana Oil Bill May Improve Credit Rating, Spur Loans, IMF Says - Businessweek - 0 views

www.businessweek.com/...ating-spur-loans-imf-says.html

petroleum industry development oil international extractive transparency curse resource ghana

shared by Arabica Robusta on 11 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • The law, passed on March 2, allows oil revenue to be used as collateral for loans in a “credit enhancement” program, said Wayne Mitchell, resident representative for the fund, based in Accra, the capital. The risk of default is reduced, which will lower interest rates, he said.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 11 Mar 11
       
      This is a truly questionable development strategy, likely to land Ghana in a speculative debt.
  • A provision to keep 21 percent of the revenue in a stabilization fund for the country to fall on in times of price volatility and a heritage fund with 9 percent of earnings saved for the future is “best practice,” Mitchell said in an earlier interview on March 2.
  • Arabica Robusta on 11 Mar 11
     
    The law, passed on March 2, allows oil revenue to be used as collateral for loans in a "credit enhancement" program, said Wayne Mitchell, resident representative for the fund, based in Accra, the capital. The risk of default is reduced, which will lower interest rates, he said.
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